But things are basically looking up when I get Suz back to the hospital. As luck has it, I meet an Indian psychiatrist who spent fifteen years in Kampala, Uganda—he was one of the three shrinks in the whole country—and I ask him how Big Daddy Idi Amin is doing. Apparently, he’s doing fine, living in Saudi Arabia with paresis or something, and the next thing you know the doc is telling me he’s going to review Susan’s case file, which means he’s going to put her in a better ward and look out for her, and that’s a load off my mind. Before I go, Suz and I take a little stroll around the spacious hospital grounds—it’s a tranquil place. I can’t help thinking that if Brother Bogue fires me—though I’m determined to behave myself after my latest mishap—I could come here and take Haldol and lithium, watch color TV, and drool. Whatever happened to that deal where you just went off to the hospital for a “little rest,” with no stigma attached? Maybe all I need is some rest.

Susan still has those Jehovah’s Witnesses on her mind. As we sit on a bench, she pulls one of their booklets out of her coat and shows me scenes of cornucopias filled with fruit and bounty, rainbows, and vividly colored vistas of a heaven on earth. Vistas that I’ve seen in a way, however paradoxically, in these awful Third World places, and I’m thinking, Let them that have eyes see; and let them that have ears hear—that’s how it is, and I start telling Suz about Africa, maybe someday I can take her there, and she gets excited and asks me what it’s like. Can you see lions?