The sun was blinding. It wasn’t especially warm, forties maybe, with a breeze, but the sun seemed intolerable, blazing down on him as if it were mid-July instead of mid-March. Just inside the door of the drugstore was a rack of sunglasses, a miniature oblong mirror set in it at eye level. The first pair he tried on—Ray-Bans, with metal frames and teardrop lenses—made him look vaguely insectoid, and clearly that wouldn’t do. Plus, even under the weak illumination of the fluorescent lights, he could see that they made no provision for light coming in from the sides, only the front. Wraparounds, that’s what he needed. And the next pair he tried on—Polaroids, black plastic, all black—made the world go away. He wore them up to the counter to pay. And when he stepped outside, out on the street with its rush of bicyclists and pedestrians and the metallic glint of the passing cars, the sun really wasn’t a problem anymore.

Chapter 6

6.

He stayed home that weekend, though Tim was holding the usual Saturday night session—just two days after the graduation party, as they were all calling it now—and he spent most of it catching up on his work. If he felt any guilt about Thursday night it was only because he hadn’t exactly been forthcoming with Joanie, giving her a blow-by-blow account of the faculty meeting and all the high drama it involved, yes, but glossing over the details of its aftermath at Tim’s, particularly—and most damningly—the fact that he’d taken the drug without her, the new drug, the one that was remaking him even now. He told her about the martinis and the pizza and how vital it had been for him to be there because the whole future of the project was at stake and by extension his place in it and the first stirrings of an idea that had come to him for a psilocybin study that might fall somewhere between Tim’s prison work and Walter Pahnke’s upcoming experiment with the divinity students. Saturday night they ate macaroni and cheese and watched Gunsmoke together and on Sunday afternoon they took a picnic lunch to the park and he played catch with Corey, who, though his loyalties lay with the Yankees still, was skyrocketing with excitement over the upcoming baseball season and the prospect of seeing the Red Sox at Fenway. All he could talk about was Frank Malzone and Carl Yastrzemski and how they were going to smash homer after homer and really challenge the Yankees—and wasn’t that something, Dad, wasn’t it?