The crimson witch

mail-two hundred and eighty-five dollars. He had proceeded immediately to the bank where he had converted the slip of paper into many slips of paper with more immediate value. And he had set out with seventy-five of it to purchase thirty red caps of PBT from the furtive, dark-haired, dark-eyed little man who sold the stuff from a corner table in the Cariolis Bar and Grill on the edge of town. They had gone through the usual set of signals for a purchase. Jake had entered and bought a drink first, standing with it at the bar. Finally, after the proper amount of time, he had crossed the crowded establishment and had drawn up a chair at the dark man's table, saying, “Anyone sitting here?”
        “No,” the little man said.
        “It's a bad scene when you haven't any friends,” Jake had said, following the established ritual.
        “I guess so.”
        “You have friends?”
        “I do.”
        “But you seem to be alone.”
        “My friends are in my pockets.”
        That was the key line. There was only one more to go, and that one was his again: “Can I take a few of your friends home with me? ”
        And then the dealing began. The little man always asked seventy-five cents more than the going price per cap, and it had become part of the tradition that the buyer had to bargain down to two dollars and fifty cents before he would sell anything. This might partially have been because the dark man was masochistic enough to enjoy being forced to sell lower than he wanted, but it was also and chiefly a safeguard. A narcotics agent might learn the passwords well enough to fake a potential buyer, but it was doubtful he would understand the necessity for bargaining that the dark man demanded. The narcotics agent would offer, in his haste, to purchase the caps at the stated three and a quarter. Then the dark man, realizing he did not have a hip but a square on his hands, would innocently contend that he had no idea what the agent was talking about.
        Jake followed the ritual and bought thirty of the capsules, the largest purchase he had ever made.
        “You have friends you're buying for?” the dark man wondered.
        He nodded, took the capsules, handed over the money, and left the bar, heading for John the Avenger's apartment.
        John, Leona, and Jennie were waiting for him.
        He spread the red caps out on the Persian rug that covered the beaten floor, running his fingers through them as Midas might run his ringers through new gold. They sat yoga fashion on the floor, ringing the gleaming pile of caps.
        “You going to send up the whole student body?” John the Avenger asked.
        Then he briefly stated his plan. The highest he had ever heard that anyone had gone was six caps. He planned to go up on twenty.
        “Twenty,” John the Avenger had whispered.
        “Twenty.”
        “Man, that could be suicide.”
        “Nah, I'll pass out first.”
        “You don't know.”
        “Twenty,” he had said, suddenly growing stubborn.
        Suicide or not, he would try it. His father had kept him chained through his childhood, had forced adulthood on him long before it was due. Now that he had gained his freedom at last, much of the boyish behavior that had previously been denied release was surging to the surface to taint matters of the utmost seriousness. He would take all twenty, despite the danger, just as a young boy might accept the challenge to eat poison ivy.
        First, however, they shared. John and Leona and Jennie each popped two caps. Jake took four. They sat cross-legged, staring at one another, swooning as the acid pulled them into interior mindways and opened vistas into their own Ids where they acted out their most depraved fantasies, into their superegos where they acted out their most idealistic dreams. Leona was already unbuttoning her blouse, freeing herself from the encumbering clothes, struggling with the zipper on her jeans. John and Jennie clung to each other, swaying…
        And Jake set about taking the rest of the capsules…
        He went deeper…
        Felt the tugging and pulling of the minute things of the world, the rides of the air…
        Down…
        In…
        The grain in the wooden floor throbbed about him like a river, coursing at the edges of the Persian rug, burbling, splashing, rushing madly around and around the island of patterns. Then the weave of the carpet itself was