I guess. And empty. I didn't think anyone lived here."
The man glanced across the room, as if noticing its bareness for the first time. In profile, he was even more gorgeous, with his five-o'clock shadow and his perfectly shaped nose and his full, slightly parted lips. Entering the house had woken Nate's senses but what he experienced now was of a different order, as if the whole physical world had been made exact, sharpened by the knife of desire.
"I suppose I could use some furniture," he said, finishing his drink and setting it down on the counter.
"I think it's kind of cool the way it is."
"Yeah? Why's that?"
"I don't know. It feels open, I guess. Like you could do anything you wanted to."
"What's your name?"
"Nate."
"What are you, a high-school student?"
"I'm a senior. I graduate in a few weeks."
"Well, Nate, I've got stuff to do, so I think it's time for you to leave."
Pointing the way out, he followed Nate from the kitchen.
"You're not going to call the police?"
"Frankly, I don't have the time."
As the man held the front door open, Nate could see the electric orange of the streetlamps flickering on up along on the road. If he left now, like this, with nothing more said, how would he ever get back here?
He hesitated on the threshold a moment. Then he blurted out, "I could help you."
"What do you mean?"
"If you needed to know stuff. About Ms. Graves. About her lawsuit."
The man's lips parted, and he smiled for the first time, a look of conjecture playing across his face.
"Interesting," he said. "And why would you do that?"
For all his effort, Nate couldn't stop the blood from filling his cheeks now.
"I don't know," he said. "Just because."
For another long moment, the man was silent.
"Sure," he said, finally. "Why not? I'm usually home about ten thirty. Try knocking next time."
NATE JOGGED the half mile to Jason's house and arrived in a sweat.
"Where the hell have you been?" Emily shouted over the sound of the voice booming from the stereo in Jason's room. She lay on the unmade bed, leafing through a copy of Harper's.
"Sorry. I got held up."
The evening here was still getting under way. Jason sat at his desk, parceling out whitish-brown stalks and heads into small glass bowls. In the corner, Hal, who'd apparently taken the liberty of showering, sat lounging in Jason's blue terry-cloth bathrobe, an unlit cigarette in one hand, an empty pack of matches in the other.
"You know," Hal said, "I was thinking - "
"Quiet!" Jason insisted. "It's almost over."
Obediently, they all listened to the voice on the speakers as it swerved back and forth between reasoned calm and a kind of prophetic verve. A professor, it sounded like, a researcher on some very extended leave.
"So you see," the voice continued, "the entirety of human history has been acted out in the light of the traumatic severing of our connection into the mother goddess, the planetary matrix of organic wholeness that was the centerpiece of the psychedelic experience back in the high Paleolithic. In other words, the world of hallucination and vision that psilocybin carries you into is not your private unconscious or the architecture of your neural programming, but it is in fact a kind of intellecti, a king of being, a kind of Gaian mind. Once you sever from this matrix of meaning, what James Joyce called 'the mama matrix most mysterious,' once you sever yourself from this, all you have is rationalism, ego, male dominance to guide you, and that's what's led us into the nightmarish labyrinth of technical civilization, all the ills of modernity. We must import into straight society almost as a Trojan horse the idea that these psychedelic compounds and plants are not aberrational, they are not pathological, they are not some minor subset of the human possibility that only freaks and weirdos get involved with but rather the catalyst that called forth humanness from animal nature. That's the call I'm making."
The audience applauded as the volume of the recording faded out.
"Where the fuck do you get this stuff?" Emily asked.
"Interesting," Hal allowed. "If nothing else, it's a good highbrow excuse to get wasted."
"That's not the point. We're not 'getting wasted.' This isn't a party."
"Sure," Hal said. "We're widening the lens."
"Exactly," Jason said, rising from the desk to pass them each their dish. "We're taking what he calls the 'heroic dose.' The dose where you can't be scared anymore because there's no ego left to be frightened."
The shrooms had a stringy,