My sister and I are both, in our own ways, like children. When she saw the coat, she ran for it. She picked it up and oohed and aahed over it, turning it this way and that. She showed it to me, and started talking quickly about how much it might be worth. I got embarrassed by how loudly she was talking, and I thought picking a coat up off the ground might be stealing.

I was in Seattle to see her; she said she would tell me about what it was like to be homeless. When we got back to where I was staying, she went through the pockets and shouted when she emptied the first one and found an iPod. She put it on the table; she danced and was so happy. And the she showed me what she found in the second pocket, holding it out almost as if it were someone's nudie mag. And that's when I got scared and  acted like a child, because she was holding a heroin needle.

The needle was inside some kind of plastic, and the sharp part of it was cased in plastic, and there was blood inside the case. There was also a vial of clear liquid. Neither of us knew what it was, but someone later told her it was probably heroin.

We got into a big argument, with her on the side of keeping the coat, and me on the side of throwing it away and hiding. She won because she is the older sister, and because she made me laugh by saying, "Don't act like it's all garbage! Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!"

It was a red wool coat with a pattern on it, and she said it was probably quite expensive.

My sister took many pills. She had a special pill cutter, because she was trying to reduce the number of pills she was taking. If she made a mistake while tapering, she could die. She was on Klonopin, a powerful benzodiazepine. According to my sister, no one should be on it for longer than two weeks. She had been on it for more than a year. She was severely depressed, with bipolar disorder.

She had also been anorexic. Around Christmas last year, she went down to ninety pounds. When Christmas came, she didn't return Minnesota to spend it with us, because she was close to being involuntarily committed.

Klonopin withdrawal is said by some to be worse than the withdrawal off heroin. If you do it wrong, you can have seizures. The so-called doctor who gave it to my sister kept upping the dosage, because she took so many anti-depressants that she went into a mania. During the mania, she declared bankruptcy, became homeless, moved into a van, drove to Canada, was nearly arrested by Canadian border police, went on a crime spree, and sent hard-core pornography to my wife over Facebook.

Realizing that she had a problem, she tried to quit the medicine, but nearly had a seizure, and ended up in the hospital. My parents, worried sick, insisted that she was faking it, and wanted her to get a job. She would not.

She was in Seattle, a city with a strikingly visible population of homeless people. One out of three of them are mentally ill, which is strikingly visible too. Lately though, rents are skyrocketing, and people are being priced out of their neighborhoods.

There was a whole section of North Seattle that was being torn down and built up again. In the middle it is the headquarters of Amazon. At lunchtime, all of the workers of Amazon came down out of the buildings and ate at food trucks and noodle restaurants and talked on their cell phones about deals and talked to each other about rent prices. All around the Amazon area, there were signs with messages about condos and places to live with phone numbers for qualified buyers to call.

I was too nervous to talk to the Amazon people, so I walked around there and eavesdropped on their conversations. I heard one lady telling a man that she moved to Seattle from Pennsylvania, leaving her boyfriend behind. She said they realized that they never spoke to each other, they just worked all the time. Even after they got home, they would just stare at their screens, so they realized it would be better to just live in separate states. I thought that was so odd, but the man agreed. He said that he and his wife had reached the exact same conclusion.

Outside the Amazon headquarters was a covered wooden stand with two people giving out free bananas. When I asked them what they were doing, they said, "It's a PR thing." I asked what the message was, and they told me about the good features of the banana, and that it kind of looked like an Amazon logo.

All over Seattle, there were big white signs that said "Proposed Land Use Action." The signs were there to tell the city that a building was about to be smashed, and a new building was coming in, so don't complain. They had a big paragraph of text about the features of the new building, and then they typically listed a meeting where citizens could complain about it.

Almost everyone in this area, if he or she was talking on a cell phone, was talking aggressively about a work related matter. They were saying things like "Tell them I don't give a fuck."

Almost any resident of Seattle will say that these are the people are driving up rents and changing the character of the city. They are wandering into Seattle in high numbers from everywhere, taking big salaries, and moving into the high-rent condos that are being built on top of the ruins of the previous city. They are patronizing boutique stores.

My sister hates these people. She calls them Amazombies.

When we were in high school, my sister was nearly killed by a drunk driver. The driver hit her as she was crossing the street, and she had to be put into a temporary coma. Before she was hit by a car, she was a straight-A student, and had gotten a scholarship to go to Pomona. She turned it down, though, because she thought everyone there was rich and spoiled, and because Los Angeles didn't have enough trees.

After the accident, she had to have plates put into her legs in order to be stitched back together. Even though they never found the driver who hit her, she was given $250,000 through insurance. 

My sister lived about fifteen lives over the next ten years. She was a mountain climber in Nepal, a backpacker in India. She joined hare krishnas and toured Europe. Then she became a rock-climber boat person in Thailand. Then she went to Australia and lived for a while with some guy that painted houses. Then the money ran out.

She went back to Seattle, where she had lived before, and sort of worked a few odd jobs, but before long she became anorexic and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She got a doctor to give her all kinds of pills, and then she started paying rent on a credit card.

My sister got her van for free from a friend. She parked it in the parking lot of a rock climbing gym, near some other van people. When she spoke about it, she tried to sound excited, like we were kids and she invented some game for us to play.

The front of the van had two seats and one working seatbelt. The brakes didn’t work. In the back, there was a pressboard table, built by the previous owner. The table was covered in food, basic first aid supplies, clothes, a helmet, and a book. The bed was a wooden palette with no mattress, covered in a blanket.

My sister insisted that the van lifestyle is a major trend. She said she knew a rich man, a bitcoin multi-millionaire who lived in a van. He couldn’t stand modern society, she said. He was so rich that when a homeless man beat him at ping pong, he went out and bought the world's best ping pong paddle to get a tactical advantage. It even had its own case, she said, and it improved his game. He had a hundred million dollars, she said. He hired his own raw vegan chef, and spent four thousand dollars a month on supplements. He was a transhumanist.

Two of the doors on the van did not open. My sister found some insulation and taped to its walls. The heater wouldn’t run if the door was shut, because it would kill her. She said that at night, it was lonely in there. In the well of one of the doors was a water bottle, which was the bottle she peed in, which she said was hard for a girl.

Inside her van, she had three stuffed animals. She has always loved stuffed animals, as long as I’ve known her.