For a moment, everything seemed to shift on him, the scotch inflaming his veins and fogging his head, and he looked down at his glass, which was empty, or all but empty, just the thinnest disk of amber liquid hugging the bottom of it. He didn’t know quite what to make of what Tim had just said so he repeated the phrase, stupidly, and that was all right because this was a Socratic dialogue he was engaged in here and Tim—despite the hour and the circumstances—was still in his classroom, still teaching.

“I’m talking imprinting, Fitz. Just like Konrad Lorenz and his goslings. I told you this drug was a tool, did I not? The most powerful tool psychology has ever been able to lay its hands on, if people would only open their eyes to it.” He tapped his cigarette over the empty bottle. “I’m the goose and you’re the gosling, just like Lorenz when he took the mother away and hatched the chicks into a world in which it wasn’t beaks and paddle feet and feathers that made a mother but white hair and a white beard and a belly full of what, Wiener schnitzel? That’s what this drug does, instantaneously—it wipes away all the games and roles and bullshit society’s imprinted you with, tabula rasa, and starts you out all over again, newborn. You’re a baby, Fitz. An infant. My infant.”

Tim let the notion hang there a moment. The deserted building, dense in its stillness, crepitated with the smallest noises, the forcing of heated water into the radiators, the hum of the fluorescent lights in the hall, an undefined ticking as of a clock hidden in a drawer somewhere—or maybe it was the sound of their own blood trickling through the resilient valves of their hearts. “You imprint on the one who gives you new life, gives you the drug for the first time”—he poked his breastbone, as if making a joke of it—“which in my case was Crazy Juana, the curandera down in Cuernavaca summer before last. But the point is, all of you—Ken, Fanchon, Charlie, the whole in-group—are opened up to your own inner selves now and not what society imposed on you. And if I’m the mother goose, so much the better. Or the male goose, what do you call it?”

“Gander?”

“Right, the gander. I’m the gander. Honk, honk.” Tim’s glass was empty too, a state of affairs that seemed to take him by surprise. He lifted it to his lips and rapped it with one long finger to get the last drop to descend, then he set it down on the desktop, took a drag off his cigarette, and stared into the null frame of the window as if it opened on a view only he could see. Was he drunk, was that it?