by T. C. Boyle
“Oh, really?” She glanced beyond him into the front room to make sure Corey wasn’t listening. “The way you handled it the first time? There won’t be any women there, will there?”
“No. All men.”
She was right there now, right at his elbow, and he didn’t want to look up at her or prolong this or get into a wrangle over nothing—he’d already made up his mind. It was his profession, his obligation, and when you came down to it, what business was it of hers?
“All men,” she said, and gave a low growl of a laugh. “Great,” she said. “And so who are you going to screw then?”
As it turned out, they skipped the Saturday session—he’d made a promise to Corey, and he and Joanie took him to the movies, as promised. He was tied up all day Monday, as usual, and didn’t have a chance to see Tim and offer up an explanation, which he felt he owed him—especially after their talk the previous week. And while he wasn’t avoiding Tim, or not exactly, it wasn’t till Tuesday evening that he finally ran into him, and not on campus but on the Square. It was half-past five, he was on his way home, juggling his briefcase and an armful of books and trying to remember what Joanie had asked him to pick up at the store, when he spotted Tim, Dick and Hollingshead coming up the sidewalk toward him. They were all three wearing dark glasses, though it was overcast, and from all appearances having an animated discussion. Dick seemed especially wrought up, throwing out his hands and twisting his torso jerkily, first to make a point to Tim, then Hollingshead, then going back to Tim again. The minute Fitz saw them, he felt intimidated, felt guilty, and he almost ducked into the nearest doorway, but then he told himself he was being ridiculous.
In the next moment they were on him and he almost thought they were going to pass him by without even noticing, but Dick snapped his head around and said something to the other two and they all pulled up short. Tim, in overcoat and scarf, slid the glasses down the bridge of his nose and peered at him out of enormous black pupils. “Oh, Fitz,” he said finally to the accompaniment of the blatting exhaust of somebody’s Spitfire careening down the street, “is that you?” To Hollingshead he said, “Look, it’s Fitz,” and then, turning back to him, “what a surprise, I mean, fancy meeting you here. On Harvard Square. Imagine that.”
He was high, or drunk, or both. All three of them were. “I’m sorry about Saturday,” Fitz said, “but it was, you know, a family obligation really, and I—”
Tim waved him off. “The deep blue sea, Fitz, the deep blue sea.”
And then Alpert, all the blood gone to the visible portion of his face beneath the sunglasses, focused on him. Rangy, tall, his crew cut severer than Tim’s, he was two years younger than Fitz and already a professor. Which just made everything all that much harder. “You are aware of the meeting on the fifteenth, aren’t you? Day after tomorrow?”
Hollingshead turned to Tim and intoned, “Beware the ides of March, Caesar.”
The moment hung there, pregnant with the evening and the pigeons and a snatch of the hit of the week—Bop shoo-op, a bop bop shoo-op—drifting to them from the open window of a passing car, before Fitz could bring himself to ask, “What meeting?”
“Psych Department. Thursday, four P.M.—you be there, because believe me we need all the reinforcements we can get.”
“They’re going to crucify Tim, Agni immolate.” Hollingshead’s grin was a ragged tear across the bottom portion of his face.
“Kellard,” Tim muttered. “Rooney. Mortenson. And all the rest of them too, all the dinosaurs who teach word for word from the notes they took as students from the professors who dictated them from their own student notes going all the way back to the Middle Ages.” Mugging, he put his palms together as if in prayer and raised his face to the sky. “Mea culpa. Lord have mercy on my soul.”
“They’re putting us on trial,” Dick said. “The whole project. And why? Because of jealousy, that’s why. Because of fear of the new, because—”
Hollingshead cut him off. “Do not go forth today; call it my fear,” he said in a thin falsetto plaint, at the same time reaching up to pull Tim’s palms apart, and then, as if this were the original gesture, high comedy, the commencement of the farce, the three of them broke down in laughter.
5.
The Psilocybin Project had been an ongoing feature of the Center for Research in Personality since shortly after Tim inaugurated it on his return from Mexico two years earlier, and in that time he and Dick Alpert had collected data from more than four hundred subjects, including not just students and faculty, but also poets, intellectuals and musicians like Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Maynard Ferguson and Charlie Mingus. And he’d originated the Concord Prison Project, in which he took his researchers (Ken Sensabaugh, Charlie Millhouse and Rick Roberts among them) into the prison to conduct psilocybin sessions behind bars with the goal of re-imprinting habitual offenders and reducing recidivism once they were released. It was a radical idea and it paid off, at least as far as prison officials and the inmates were concerned, but Tim hadn’t yet written up the results, let alone published them, though the project had concluded before Fitz had even enrolled. That was one strike against him. That and the rumors surrounding the sessions at the house on Homer Street, which, Fitz had to admit, could have been more rigorous and maybe just a hair less festive, though in truth the research was a work in progress since there’d never been anything like it before. There were no precedents to draw from, no previous studies, and Tim, like any pioneer, was creating a new methodology as he went along. Set and setting. The fireplace, the music, the aura of safety, harmony, mutual support. And, really, what else were you supposed to do—dose people in sanitized white rooms while psychologists in lab coats hovered over them with clipboards? That would defeat the whole purpose.
Even worse, from the point of view of his colleagues, Tim had charisma to burn, which the rest of them most definitely lacked (“dour lab rats,” Tim called them, “paper shufflers and pea counters”), and there was a whole contingent that resented him for it. Not to mention the fact that his classes were oversubscribed while the numbers in their own courses steadily dropped. No surprise then that they were out for his blood.
The meeting that Thursday took a while to get under way because additional chairs had to be brought into the room, and Fitz, who was there with Ken, Fanchon and Charlie to lend support, was surprised to see how many people had shown up for what under normal circumstances would have been the usual dull hour featuring one prof after another droning on about the finer points of departmental business. He tried to do a quick head count but gave up when he reached fifty, distracted by Fanchon, who was squeezed in beside him, exuding her sweet vanilla scent and something else too, something more private, a whiff of perspiration from under her arms and between her legs. She was talking in a throaty confidential whisper, giving a running commentary on the professors in the enemy camp, which, as it turned out, was practically all of them. “That one. The one in the suit that is the color of a dog’s turd? He is Kellard, no? Look at him, his eyes, just look at his eyes—he is clearly what do you say, repressed? A”—and here she leaned into him and dropped her voice—“a limp dick, no?”
It was ten past the hour by the time Professor McClelland, who as chair of the Center had been responsible for hiring Tim two years back, called the meeting to order. Tim was sitting in the front row, one leg casually crossed at the knee, Dick beside him. Dick looked grim, as if he expected a fight; Tim was nonchalant, turning round in his seat to greet people with a smile or an abbreviated wave. The minute hand of the wall clock shifted forward. A pair of professors ducked in the door at the last moment. Conversation fell off.
Professor Kellard was the first to take the floor. He was in his thirties, a lecturer in social psychology, and while Fitz had yet to study with him, he was currently taking Foundations in Clinical Psychology from the man seated to the right of him, Professor Lewiston. Lewiston was older—old, actually—and so soft-spoken hi
s lectures were all but inaudible unless you were in one of the front two rows, where Fitz always made a point of sitting. As he watched him now, Fanchon murmuring, “Look at that vieillard, how do say, that graybeard, and who does he think he’s fooling?,” he was recalling the meeting he’d had with him a month or so back, at the professor’s invitation. “Mr. Loney,” he’d said, coming up to him after class one day, “why not drop by my office for a cup of tea? Let’s say, Tuesday afternoon? So we can become better acquainted?”
It was a kindness on his professor’s part, one he extended to all his new students, and Fitz had been touched by it. The tea was lukewarm, the cream turning and the sugar bowl so fissured and encrusted with residue it wouldn’t have been out of place in a museum, but they wound up talking for nearly an hour, which essentially involved Fitz telling the older man his life story, or at least the salient points—Joanie, Corey, working as a school psychologist to pay the bills, earning his master’s at night and finally coming here to fulfill his ambition of completing a Ph.D. and teaching at the college level. At some point Lewiston had asked how he was getting on with his other professors and he’d said, “Fine,” and then, after a moment of silence, Lewiston—softly, so softly—asked, “And Professor Leary? You’re getting on well with him?”
“Well, yes,” he’d said, “but I haven’t—I mean, he’s my adviser, but I haven’t actually taken a course with him yet, though in the fall I intend to, or hope to.”
“But”—and Lewiston’s gaze never left his face—“you are part of the Psilocybin Project, or so I hear?”
“Well, not officially, but I, well, I suppose so—”
“Tell me,” the professor said, folding his hands under his chin and leaning into the desk on both elbows, “because I’m curious about the new techniques—just what do these ‘sessions’ entail?”
Now, as Kellard rose to speak, Fitz saw his professor slip him a page of handwritten notes, and he understood in that moment that he was no friend of Tim’s. Not that Fitz had given up much—he’d been circumspect, emphasizing the positive aspects of the research, trying not to let his bias show and consciously avoiding any talk of the oneness of being or hallucinations or the subject of sex and heightened gratification—but he couldn’t bring himself to be anything less than forthcoming either, detailing the dosage, the duration, the setting, strictly the facts, and yet he saw now how even those same facts could be manipulated by someone who was an enemy of the project. As Professor Kellard clearly was.
“This meeting has been a long time coming,” Kellard began, brandishing the sheaf of notes in his right hand. “For several months now I’ve been disturbed by reports of what I can only call improprieties in the conduct of Professors Leary and Alpert’s research project, which definitely merit looking into.” He paused, brought the notes to his face, then dropped them to the desk as if they were contaminated.
“What am I to make of coming into my morning class—at nine A.M.—and seeing a full one-third of the students wearing dark glasses?” Kellard asked, raising his head to sweep his gaze over the room. “Is this salutary? Is this conducive to learning? Well, I think not. In fact, I think that these students, under the influence of Dr. Leary, have been up all hours—at his house on Homer Street in Newton Center—conducting psilocybin ‘sessions’ with very little control or scientific rigor. And not, for the most part, on a randomized sample of subjects, but on themselves. Repeatedly.” He let out a grating laugh. “The sad fact is there are twice as many researchers as there are subjects and that these drugs—dangerous drugs, prescribed only for experimental use under controlled circumstances—are being abused, over and over, by the same coterie—cult, if you will—of grad students under the auspices of Professors Leary and Alpert.”
Dick rose to object, but the chair—Professor McClelland—gently admonished him. “Professor Kellard has the floor, Dick,” he said. “Your turn will come.”
“Furthermore,” Kellard went on, “the whole program has an anti-intellectual bent, valuing pure experience over any sort of collection and interpretation of data, so that it has, in essence, become a quasi-religious sect bearing little resemblance to any form of scientific inquiry I’ve ever heard of. Even worse, students are being pressured to take these drugs—which have been shown in study after study to have potentially adverse effects on vulnerable subjects—as a condition of their acceptance into the program in the first place.”
“But this is not true,” Fanchon said, her voice rising above a whisper so that several people turned round to give her hostile looks. Three of them Fitz recognized as grad students who were most definitely not part of the inner circle and another as an assistant professor who sat very comfortably beside them, as if they were part of a team. They were no doubt wondering just who Fanchon was and what she was doing here at a department meeting with her pouffed-out hair, hoop earrings and tremulous bangs, and by extension what relation she bore to Fitz and Ken, who sat on either side of her. Ken leaned in to hush her and she shook her head defiantly. “You tell me to hush?” she threw back at him under her breath. “When it is all lies? Like, like . . . McCarthyism!”
This last caused more heads to turn and Professor Kellard himself to pause and look up to see what the disturbance was before McClelland rapped his knuckles lightly on his desk and intoned, “Go on, Herb, you have the floor . . .”
Kellard snatched up his notes as if he were going to quote aloud from them, then set them aside again. “I know of at least one case,” he said, “in which a student of mine—one of a handful of holdouts who continue to stand for their rights and refuse to legitimize the taking of drugs for any purpose, let alone as an academic requirement—was finally pressured into participating and wound up having a psychotic episode, a real crisis, and believe me, no matter what anyone tells you there is no medical supervision here whatsoever.”
A second professor—Mortenson, another of Tim’s enemies—rose to say that he’d spent the morning in the medical library reviewing the published research into psilocybin studies, none of which had been generated by the Harvard Psilocybin Project, incidentally, and found that there were grave concerns about administering the drug outside of a controlled medical setting. He had his own sheaf of notes and he waved it like a gauntlet in Tim’s direction. “In fact, there is evidence here of several cases of disorientation continuing for weeks after a single dose of these substances, of subjects being admitted to emergency rooms, of psychotic reactions in apparently normal people and increased suicidal ideation. You are not a medical doctor, Professor Leary, we’re all aware of that here, and so I ask you how you can in good conscience administer these drugs without medical supervision or, as far as I can see, even an awareness of these medical issues?”
It was a no-win situation and Tim just had to sit there and take it. Fitz felt his stomach sink. He couldn’t have explained what it was or exactly how it had come about or what it meant, but at that moment, more deeply than ever, he felt a bond with Tim, with Ken and Charlie and Fanchon and all the rest of the crowd he’d shared the experience with—Joanie, of course, even Maynard Ferguson—a bond that excluded everyone else in the room. They were wrong, he saw that clearly. They were misguided and shortsighted and protective of their own little fiefdoms no matter the cost in terms of academic freedom or the advancement of knowledge, and what was supposed to have been an equitable airing of concerns had turned into an all-out assault on the new, on Tim and Dick and by extension on himself too.
When Mortenson was finished, he sat heavily, slapping his notes down on the desk and pointing a shaking finger at Tim. “I’d be interested to know, Professor Leary, just what you have to say for yourself.”
All the while Tim had been sitting there looking unconcerned, as if all this was to be expected and there was no way he was going to play the penitent’s role for them or have his knuckles rapped or conform in any way to their expectations—these people, all of them, were squares, after all, the unenlightened, the uninitiated,
and he, alone among them, was in possession of the truth. His smile was florid, his shoulders square, his tie perfectly knotted. He was about to respond when Dick rose beside him and in a voice so choked with outrage he could barely get the words out, blurted, “I can’t believe what I’m hearing here. Let me remind you, Professor Mortenson—and you too, Herb—that this is not an inquisition, that we are all colleagues and there is nothing more or less at stake here than the issue of academic freedom itself. We’re not answerable to you. We’re conducting research about which you, as can plainly be seen, have little or no knowledge, dynamic research that’s at the forefront of the field today, and we—I—very much resent the tone of these proceedings.” His glasses flashed under the glare of the overhead lights. “So much so that I think you owe us an apology—no, I demand an apology.”
The room fell silent. Everyone looked to McClelland, but before he could even so much as clear his throat, Tim was on his feet. “Thank you,” he said, scanning the room and smiling broadly, at the same time putting a restraining hand on Dick’s arm so that Dick, his face flushed, sank back into his seat and the tension eased. “And thank you, Herb, for your input, and you too, Lloyd”—nodding at Mortenson—“but I do have to say that your fears are unfounded. I admit mistakes have been made, but we are feeling our way here in the research—let me remind you that this is a pioneering study—and I’m confident we are well on our way to ironing out the kinks.”
It was a revelation to see Tim in action, how he so quickly and fluidly took control of the situation and changed the whole tenor of the meeting. He was conciliatory and respectful but at the same time he stood his ground, reasserting the vital significance of the research and citing the dramatic success of the prison project, in which the recidivism rate was less than 25 percent among the sample he’d worked with as compared to something in the vicinity of 70 percent among the general prison population. He talked for ten minutes, persuasive, charismatic, charming, and if he’d left it there, Fitz felt, he would have won the day, but then he made a fatal misstep.