“Of course, that does mean I’ve got to fuck every woman who comes into the house because they fixate on me—and the drug, of course. I’m the source of the drug—and the fuck too.” He grinned, rolled his eyes. “What we have to do in the name of science, huh, Fitz?”

What could he say? He was having private time with the icon himself, the young Turk of psychology, the man who’d admitted him to the inner circle, and if he was still cautious, still unsure of his direction or what it all meant, he couldn’t help feeling the privilege of the moment—the prestige—and he grinned back and said something fatuous like, “Yeah, oh, yeah, I hear you.”

They were both grinning now, as if it were a ritual, and they both held their grins for what seemed a beat too long, a beat that began to make him uncomfortable all over again, until Tim asked, out of nowhere, “You know the term ‘entheogen’?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“From the Greek, meaning ‘generating the divine within.’ Éntheos, full of the god, inspired, possessed, plus genésthal, to come into being. That’s what we’re talking about here. We’re empiricists, we’re rational, we’re scientists, Fitz, but psilocybin—and LSD, Fitz, LSD—is opening up parts of the brain nobody even dreamed existed. This is where religion came from, mystical cults, the Eleusinian mysteries—tripping, that’s all it is. Did you see the Light?”

“No.”

“You believe in God?”

“No.”

“Me either. But I believe in something—call it brain chemistry. And you know what, Fitz?”

“What?”

“Next time we’ll up the dose.”

Yes, Tim was unorthodox, but that was the whole attraction, wasn’t it? How could you be an iconoclast without tipping over statues, stepping on toes, holding office hours whenever you damn well please? “Yeah,” he said, in answer to Joanie’s question or assertion or whatever it was meant to be, “of course he is, but most profs barely give their students the time of day and he truly goes out of his way, he does. But I really don’t have to defend him, do I? You saw him, you met him, you tell me.”

She dropped her chin and gave him a sidelong look, a jet of smoke issuing from her nostrils and her eyes catching the light of the neon sign so that they seemed to glow from deep inside her skull. “Did you talk to his girlfriend? Brenda?”

“Not really.”

“If you ask me, she doesn’t have a whole lot up here,” tapping a finger to one temple. “But Fanchon’s nice. Ken too. And smart, both of them.”

“Our kind of people?”