Fiona’s Reviews > The Sisters Brothers > Status Update

I was not an efficient killer. I was not and had never been and would never be. Charlie had been able to make use of my temper was all; he had manipulated me, exploited my personality, just as a man prods a rooster before a cockfight. I thought, How many times have I pulled my pistol on a stranger and fired a bullet into his body, my heart a mad drum of outrage, for the lone reason that he was firing at Charlie,

‘Yesterday I saw a man leap from the roof of the Orient Hotel, laughing all the way to the ground, upon which he fairly exploded. He was drunk they say, but I had seen him sober shortly before this. There is a feeling here, which if it gets you, will envemon your very centre. It is a madness of possibilities. That leaping man’s final act was the embodiment of the collective mind of San Francisco.

In the morning it was raining—constant, cold drops that turned the roads to muddy soup. Charlie was stomach-sick from the brandy, and I visited the chemist’s for a nausea remedy. I was given a scentless, robin’s-egg-blue powder which I mixed into his coffee. I did not know the tinture’s ingredients, only that it got him out of bed and onto Nimble, and that it made him alert to the point of distraction.