I go out with Tasha again on my day off, and the headaches abate. I assume this is an illusory correlation, but then I go back to work, and they sneak back, and we go out, and they go away. Wherever we go, we eat for free; Tasha just seems to know people in all these back-alley holes in the wall where we end up. After we eat, we walk in Gasworks Park or along the water, or we'll go straight to the shore and eat, throwing all our leavings in the Sound.

We have some very weird conversations about my mugging. She asks me to describe it a couple of times, asking me where I was hit, where I was stabbed, where the mugger's hands were when. When she asks me what the pen looked like, I say something like "For fuck's sake" and tell her to drop it. She does, but then she starts talking about biology. I learn that an inflammatory response can transiently reduce the efficacy of the blood-brain barrier; I learn that there are things called neurotropic viruses, which can transport themselves across nerve cell synapses. I barely listen, but John gets visibly twitchy when she starts talking about it, so I smile and nod enough to keep her talking.