Walter wasn’t in his motorcycle regalia—he was wearing a blazer and button-down shirt like anybody else. He looked like a student. He was a student, Fitz reminded himself. Walter didn’t bother getting up. “Thanks for coming,” he said, and that only deepened the mystery—why was Walter thanking him when it was Tim who’d asked him to come?

“No problem,” Fitz said. He was going to say “My pleasure,” but whether or not it was a pleasure depended on exactly what the expectations were here. And of course there was the complicating factor of Walter having witnessed his moment of crisis the other night, whether he’d viewed it with medical sangfroid or felt compelled to ply his hypodermic or not.

“Well, listen,” Tim said, “I’ll leave it to you two,” then he lifted his coat from the hook and slipped out the door and down the hallway.

When his footsteps were no longer audible, Fitz, still standing there in the middle of the room, looked to Walter. “So what’s this all about?”

In that moment and that light, Walter bore an uncanny resemblance to Maynard Ferguson, same haircut, same features, same eyes even, and Fitz found that somehow unsettling, though why he couldn’t have said. Walter glanced up. “An experiment,” he said, leaning back in the chair so that his cuffs rode up to expose the tops of his shoes—desert boots, and why was everybody wearing desert boots? “But why don’t you have a seat?” He gestured to Tim’s chair, and feeling awkward, Fitz obliged. “This’ll only take a minute.”

Walter was younger than he was and already an M.D., which gave him a gravitas none of the other grad students could begin to match. And the way he was lounging there, legs outstretched, as if this were his office and Fitz the petitioner, only seemed to emphasize the gulf between them. “Good,” Fitz said, “because I really—”

“We’re all busy, I know that,” Walter said, waving away the objection. “And I appreciate this, Fitz, I do—but yours was one of the first names Tim brought up, along with Ken’s and Charlie’s. And Dick’s, of course. And there’s no obligation, none at all—”

“Okay, okay,” he said, impatient suddenly. “Just tell me what you want.”

Walter held his gaze, let a beat go by—he wasn’t going to be rushed. “What I want, what I’m asking, is for you—all of you—to act as guides in a psilocybin experiment I’m putting together for my thesis in the Divinity School; you know I’m not in the Psych Department, right?”

Fitz nodded.