He paused, glanced round the room at the expectant faces, couples holding hands, the shimmer of the cocktail glasses catching the light, everything ticking down to the moment of release, then added, “The questionnaires, please, as usual. And I’d appreciate your reports within the next forty-eight hours or so.” Another pause, the grin holding steady as if to say everything’s just fine, copacetic, and enjoy the trip. “While your impressions are still fresh, entendu?”

If to this point everything had been familiar, right down to Tim’s showing him the pill bottle and even the cardboard box it came in—DELYSID (LSD 25), it read across the label, PHYSICIAN’S SAMPLE, and below it, in capital letters, POISON—nothing beyond that felt even remotely recognizable. The lights dimmed. Tim switched the record to some sort of repetitive Indian music—a raga, somebody said—which was nothing but a nagging presence that went on nagging for what seemed an eternity, and then the drug began to come on, rolling through him like waves mounting successively along an infinite beach. Joanie was there and then she wasn’t, vanished into her own world. Things began to move, but in no delicate way, not the way it’d been the last time, but violently, in screaming ribbons of color, all of it slicing at him till everything visible was sucked down inside him in a free fall that would not and could not end. There was no sex. No touching. No bodies. He was all mind and his mind was a very rough customer, pounding his consciousness into submission, stingy with the glory, stingier with the heights, showing only what he’d suppressed all his life for the very good and excellent reason that to see it, know it, feel it in his innermost being, would destroy him. Images slammed down like heavy sashes shutting one after the other only to open up on the next and the next after that, control a joke, personality a hoax and schizophrenia the only realistic outcome because they didn’t call these drugs psychotomimetics for nothing, did they? Of course, of course. He was losing his mind and what other result could he have expected?