We drove over to Nordstrom’s in the University District and I bought Suz some new threads and then took her to a hair salon where she got this chic haircut, and she was looking so good that I almost regretted it, ’cause if those wacked-out freaks at the hospital weren’t hitting on her before they would be now. It was starting to get dark and time to head back when Susan spots the Space Needle from I-5—she’s never been there, so I took her to the top and she wandered outside to the observation deck, where the wind was a walking razor blade at five hundred and eighteen feet, but Susan is grooving on the lights of Seattle and with her homemade lobotomy doesn’t experience pain in quite the way a normal person does, and I want her to have a little fun, but I’m freezing out there, especially my thumb, which ached. I didn’t want to pop back inside in the sheltered part and leave her out there, though, because she might want to pitch herself over the side. I mean, they’ve got safety nets, but what if she’s still got some vestige of a death wish? We had dinner in the revolving dining room, and people were looking at us funny because of Susan’s eating habits, which deteriorate when you live in a nuthouse, but we got through that and went back to my place to watch TV, and after that I was glad to go to sleep—but I couldn’t sleep because of my thumb. I was thinking I still hadn’t cashed in the script for the pain pills when Susan comes into my bedroom naked and sits down on the edge of the bed.

“Ever since I’ve been shot, I feel like those animals in the zoo. I want to set them free,” she says, in a remarkable display of insight, since that scar in her frontal lobes has got more steel bars than all the prisons of the world, and, as a rule, folks with frontal-lobe damage don’t have much insight. I get her to put on her pajamas, and I remember what it used to be like when she stayed at home—you always had to have someone watching her—and I wished I had gotten her back to the hospital that very night, because she was up prowling, and suddenly all my good feelings of the past few days were gone. I felt crappy, but I had to stay vigilant while my baby sister was tripping around the house with this bullet-induced, jocular euphoria.