That might have had something to do with it, the way Tim had dismissed him, and whether Tim was distracted or not or whether it was a slight or just an oversight or any one of ten other excuses a psychologist might have been able to console himself with, the next night he presented himself at Tim’s office, if only by way of clearing the air. It was past eight by the time he was able to get there (after helping Joanie with the dishes and reading Corey a chapter of Jules Verne), and at that hour the building was deserted, his footsteps echoing in the stairwell as if he were alone in a mine shaft. He heard laughter as he came down the hallway, thinking some of the others must be there, the ongoing party in progress, scotch whiskey, Tim the impresario. But there was no party. Only Hollingshead, perched atop the filing cabinet like some gaunt carrion bird, and what was that all about?

There were rumors, of course, and they had to do with imprinting as much as anything else. Word had it that Hollingshead was the one who’d introduced Tim to LSD back in the fall, after Hollingshead, who’d held a hazily defined position in New York as part of some sort of cultural exchange, came to visit on the pretext of an introduction through a professor at Cambridge, who, as it turned out, had nothing to do with psychology or psilocybin research and had died a year before the date under the letterhead. Oblivious, Tim invited him to lunch at the faculty club, where the Englishman waxed enthusiastic over Tim’s research into the clinical uses of psilocybin, at the same time delivering a pointed message as to the infinitely more profound reach of LSD, to which he could personally attest. Apparently—and this was to become confirmed among the cognoscenti of the inner circle as time went on—Hollingshead had convinced an M.D. acquaintance to get him a full gram of LSD from Sandoz Laboratories, synthesized by Albert Hofmann himself, for use in medical research. As it turned out, there was no research, apart from Hollingshead’s own self-experiments, which, from all appearances, had put him out on the far burning edge of transformative experience.