“Ha!” he said, spinning away from her like a dancer, as excited as she’d ever seen him. “We’ve already been down that road, as I told you—all that would happen is that the stiffs over in Pharmacology would dose a couple of dogs and the dogs’ pupils would dilate and their body temperature rise and they’d pace back and forth in their cages, but dogs can’t talk, dogs can’t tell us about the kind of psychoactive properties this compound might have, does have, I’m sure of it.”

“You’re no guinea pig,” she said, because she wouldn’t give it up. Ergot was dangerous. She’d looked it up in the library because she wanted to be informed, wanted to learn, and what she learned frightened her all the more. It poisoned whole villages in the olden days when people consumed it in their bread, the fungus ground up into flour along with the grain it infested, and no one suspecting the truth of the matter. It caused convulsions, diarrhea, paresthesia, and worse, mania, psychosis, dry gangrene that made your nose, ears, fingers and toes shrivel and drop off.

“But I am,” he insisted. “I am. And you’re going to be my witness.”

The noon hour came and went. She didn’t go home for lunch, but instead sat outside in the sun and nibbled at the sandwich her mother had made her that morning. Everything around her was buzzing with activity, people from the shops and offices picnicking on park benches or spreading blankets on strips of grass, bees at the flowers, birds in the trees, pigeons rising up and fluttering down again like windborne leaves. She wasn’t hungry but she forced herself to eat, trying not to think about what lay ahead—which was nothing really, she kept telling herself, because ergot was only toxic in much higher and repeated doses, so that the photo she’d seen of the gnarled decaying feet of a peasant afflicted with ergotism was the end result of continued ingestion—bread, daily bread. She took a bite of her sandwich, then turned it over in her hand and examined it, the neat semicircle her teeth had made, crumbs, the pink of the ham, the yellow of the cheese. The sun warmed her face. Her mind drifted. She chewed. Swallowed. Watched a cloud in the shape of a scythe slice across the face of the sun and melt away.