He had class all day Monday and didn’t have a chance to see Tim till the following day, which shouldn’t have been a problem, but somehow was. The need to see him, the compulsion, nagged at him from the moment he woke clear-eyed Sunday morning till he mounted the stairs to Tim’s office at half-past seven on Tuesday night after a dinner of meat loaf, instant mashed potatoes and canned string beans at the kitchen table that made him feel bloated and out of sorts and anything but transcendent. Why he needed so badly to see Tim he couldn’t have said, other than that he wanted to rehash the experience in the way people do when they’ve been profoundly moved by some event in their lives—and he had been moved. At least he thought he had. He’d seen things, visions, rippling visions shot through with color and movement, and they never stopped, even when he was deep inside Joanie, deeper than he’d ever thought it was possible to go.

They’d both filled out the questionnaire at Tim’s while they were waiting for the drug to take effect (How many people are present? How many are taking the drug? How many times have you taken this or similar drugs? How good do you feel about taking the drug today?), but it was standard psychological survey stuff that couldn’t even begin to prepare them for the intensity of what was to come. No, the key here was the report Tim required from all subjects of what was officially known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The idea was to individuate the experiences of as wide a sample as possible and then look for correspondences that would lead to the development of a method that could eventually be used in treatment. This was the rationale. This was why Sandoz was offering the drug gratis to qualified researchers around the country. This was why he’d taken his wife to Tim’s house, why he’d written up his impressions in a narrative that ran to six single-spaced pages, and why it seemed so vital to get it to Tim as soon as he possibly could.