Soon thereafter, Tim discovered that Hollingshead was all but indigent and invited him to stay in the rented house on Homer Street, along with Hollingshead’s wife and child (who left, permanently, ten days later), and if Tim had been content to this point with his psilocybin research and reluctant to move beyond it—especially with a drug that was two to three thousand times more potent—Hollingshead eventually wore him down. Hollingshead had mixed the entire gram of Sandoz LSD with distilled water and confectioners’ sugar in a sixteen-ounce mayonnaise jar, enough for five thousand doses, which he’d brought with him when he moved up from New York, and one night—after his wife and child had left and Tim’s own children, Suzie and Jackie, were in bed—he produced the jar. And a spoon. Tim watched him dig the spoon into the sweet paste, then lick it clean, and then Tim took the spoon and dipped it in the jar and within the hour fell under the grip of the most powerful mind-altering substance humankind had ever devised. He said later of that first trip that it was like hopping down from the seat of a buggy and climbing onto an Atlas rocket. Psilocybin was a toy compared to it. And really, there was no coming back, not once you’d been there.

That was the scenario. That was what Hollingshead was doing there in the office that night and the reason he was there every night, because if Fitz had imprinted on Tim—gosling and goose—then Tim had imprinted on Hollingshead. Of course, Fitz didn’t know how much of this was true or not as he came down the hallway, just the lineaments of the story and what he could glean from the hints Tim kept dropping about the new possibilities out there, the need to graduate from psilocybin, as he kept putting it, mysteriously, and sometimes not so mysteriously. He was feeling uncertain of himself and his status and beyond that the whole course of his studies and his degree and his plans for the future because now more than ever Tim was the key to it all and Tim could shift his allegiance, stall him, drop him, and while he told himself he was reading too much into a random moment on the steps of the library, he felt he needed a little clarity all the same.

Don’t press, he’d counseled himself on the way over in the car, be casual, but his intention was to bring himself back into Tim’s orbit and if possible steer the conversation around to Saturday night and the next session at Tim’s house. (Tim’s and Hollingshead’s, that is, because whether he was paying rent or not, which Fitz doubted, it was Hollingshead’s house now too.)