Contours of Darkness by Marco Vassi

Cynthia were soon, like everyone else, nodding and smiling to the people they came to recognise through daily contact. On the third day they were approached by a grey-haired woman who confided that she was delighted to see nice young people moving in, for she was sick of students and blacks and girls with brassieres and men with beards.
    But the tension of their own lives kept them from involvement with others, and the diversity of types precluded the establishment of any single dominant scene they could get into. It was Conrad who had come closest to entering their balance of exclusivity, one day helping Aaron to carry boxes of books up the flight of stairs, staying to talk, offering grass to smoke, receiving an invitation to dinner. They had accepted him as a good omen, a harbinger of the changes they were hoping for. But after a few weeks, when his influence started to affect their lives, they saw that he had a different meaning for them than they had at first suspected. For Cynthia he became a key to the freedom she had been only dimly able to conceive of, while Aaron understood that the slight young man with the angelic face posed a serious threat to the tenuous grip on conventional stability he had come to manage since his return from Egypt.
    'What do I do now?' Aaron asked after swallowing the capsule. Cynthia looked at him as though he had just slashed his wrists. In her mind, LSD was still a thing of mythic proportions.
    'The best thing is to lie and listen to music,' Conrad answered without hesitation. He had offered the drug spontaneously, but only after Aaron took it did he realise that he had been working for this moment for many months. 'These two must be part of my karass,' he thought. 'There's no other way to explain why I'm getting this much involved with them.' He watched Aaron for any signs of regret, and to his satisfaction, saw none. 'The acid won't hit for at least a half hour,' he went on, 'and it's good to be relaxed when it comes on.'
    'And you're going to be my guide,' said Aaron, shaking his head, speaking half to himself. 'It's strange. I don't really trust you.'
    'I'm just here to see that you don't panic and do something silly, that's all. It's your trip. And any shit you want to lay on me, just go ahead. When I gave you that tab of acid, I took on your karma for the next twelve hours. For me that's a sacred deed.'
    Aaron stood up slowly. He looked at the two of them, his eyes questioning first one and then the other. 'I feel very much alone,' he said.
    That's what it's all about,' Conrad told him. 'Go ahead, I'll be there in a while. I want to talk to her about what's going to happen.' He paused. 'She's real, too.'
    Aaron began to get angry, and suddenly it didn't matter any more. At that moment he was truly most absorbed in his inner state, and actually didn't care what Cynthia and Conrad did together. It occurred to him that having Cynthia interested in another man was in many ways a blessing; it relieved him of having to be the only source from which she derived all her male energy. In a moment of relief he saw that her taking Conrad as a lover was a liberation for all of them. The jealousy and fear of loss which would assail him later were covered by the initial burst of insight. He smiled. 'I've been thinking about taking acid for a year. I can't believe I've actually done it.'
    'Wait, man,' Conrad answered. 'In a couple of hours you won't believe anything of what you now think is so important.'
    Aaron turned and went into the next room, ostentatiously swinging the door shut behind him. Cynthia half rose from her seat, following an impulse to go with him, but Conrad reached over and held her shoulder. 'Let him be,' he said, 'let him stand by himself.'
    She sat down. 'I'm frightened,' she said.
    Conrad fished into his pocket and pulled out a piece of hashish wrapped in tinfoil and a small brass pipe. 'What's the worst that can happen?' he said. 'He may find out he doesn't really want to be