The martini—and he was going to have one only, just one—loosened him up so that after a while he began to feel elastic on his feet, almost as if he wanted to dance, though he hated dancing. Dancing wasn’t his cup of tea. It was for show-offs and he most definitely was not a show-off. Somebody changed the record to Miles’s Kind of Blue, the antithesis of Ferguson, and he found himself nodding his head to the beat while Fanchon chattered on about what a saint Tim was because he was offering them the room gratis and how now they would finally be able to make ends meet (“Is that how you say: ‘ends meet’? Or is it ‘meet ends’?”). He liked her attention, liked her lips, liked the way her eyes searched his, and he felt his insecurity falling away, only to be replaced by, what—impatience?

He glanced at Joanie, who was apparently spellbound by the celebrity in the room, the man who at that moment lifted the bottle and refreshed her glass, and then at Tim, who’d been joined now by Charlie and Charlie’s girlfriend, the redhead, and he kept thinking it was like the last time all over again, a party, an excuse for a party, and where was the science in that? But then immediately he felt like a hypocrite, because what was he doing here himself? Was it really the science that attracted him? The need to kiss up to his professor? The high? The sex? The sex was what it had been about last time, hadn’t it? His mind—and Joanie’s too—had expanded into regions they’d never even dreamed had existed, sure, but in the end their trip had come down to the most elemental act there is, the act shared by all animals, whether their consciousness was expanded or not or for that matter whether they could be said to have a consciousness at all. A term came to his lips unaccountably, the name of a flatworm he’d studied in biology lab a thousand years ago: Platyhelminthes. Now there was a consciousness. He said it aloud—“Platyhelminthes”—and Fanchon, looking puzzled, said, “What?”

What? Yes, that was the question. He stood there a moment swaying on his feet and blinking his eyes as if he’d been gassed. He seemed to have another martini in his hand, delivered to him by who? Suzie, the fourteen-year-old who was morphing into an adult and slipping unobtrusively through the room like the hired help, a tray of glasses cradled in her arms. But he had to talk to Tim, didn’t he? Or show himself? Or—but then the music died and Tim was clapping his hands for attention and it was just like the last time and here was Joanie coming to his side and Fanchon crossing the room to her husband.