And I tell her, “Yeah, baby, you’ll see lions, giraffes, zebras, monkeys, and parrots, and the Pygmies.” And she really wants to see Pygmies. So I tell her about a Pygmy chief who likes to trade monkey meat for tobacco, T-shirts, candy, and trinkets, and about how one time when I went manic and took to the bush I stayed with this tribe, and went on a hunt with them, and we found a honeycomb in the forest; one of the hunters climbed up the tree to knock it down, oblivious of all the bees that were biting him. There were about five of us in the party and maybe ten pounds of honey and we ate all of it on the spot, didn’t save an ounce, because we had the munchies from smoking dope. I don’t tell Suz how it feels to take an airplane to New York, wait four hours for a flight to London, spend six hours in a transient lounge, and then hop on a nine-hour flight to Nairobi, clear customs, and ride on the back of a feed truck driven by a kamikaze African over potholes, through thick red dust, mosquitoes, black flies, tsetse flies, or about river blindness, bone-break fever, bilharziasis, dumdum fever, tropical ulcers, AIDS, leprosy, etc. To go through all that to save somebody’s life and maybe have them spit in your eye for the favor—I don’t tell her about it, the way you don’t tell a little kid that Santa Claus is a fabrication. And anyhow if I had eyes and could see, and ears and could hear—it very well might be the Garden of Eden. I mean, I can fuck up a wet dream with my attitude. I don’t tell her that lions don’t eat straw, never have, and so she’s happy. And it’s a nice moment for me, too, in a funny-ass way. I’m beginning to feel that with her I might find another little island of stability.

Another hospital visit: winter has given way to spring and the cherry blossoms are out. In two weeks it’s gone from ten below to sixty-five, my Elavil and lithium are kicking in, and I’m feeling fine, calm, feeling pretty good. (I’m ready to go back and rumble in the jungle, yeah! Sha-lah la-la-la-lah.) Susan tells me she had a prophetic dream. She’s unusually focused and articulate. She tells me she dreamed the two of us were driving around Heaven in a blue ’67 Dodge.

“A ’67 Dodge. Baby, what were we, the losers of Heaven?”

“Maybe, but it didn’t really matter because we were there and we were happy.”

“What were the other people like? Who was there? Was Arthur Schopenhauer there?”