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computer, which was on the low coffee table in the living room. Half a dozen books were spread around on the couch and table. She picked up a paper notebook and scribbled something down, not looking up when I came into the room.
    â€œWith you in a minute,” she said.
    â€œWant a beer?”
    â€œGot tea.”
    I followed my nose into the kitchen. She’d put last night’s soup on a back burner overnight, and the smell made me ravenous. It wasn’t even eleven, though. Popped a beer and sat down at the kitchen table with a magazine and a 100-calorie bag of pretzels.
    The bag had sixteen pretzels in it. A penny’s worth of food and a dime’s worth of plastic for half a dollar. But the principle was valid; if I had a regular box of pretzels I’d keep at them till I could see the bottom. Leave a few so I technically wouldn’t have eaten the whole box.
    Hunter would swallow the box whole. Cardboard, plastic, good roughage.
    How often does he eat, anyhow? Big predators like lions kill a big animal, gorge themselves, and sleep. Maybe he should do something like that. But what do big ocean predators do? I think sharks have to keep moving. Do killer whales and porpoises sleep after they eat, floating in the waves? I’d look it up when Kit got off the machine.
    My own computer was being random, files disappearing and reappearing. So it was resting until the VA check came. The guy at the Apple Store said I’d need a rebuilt hard drive, which would suck up about a third of the check. But the uncertainty was driving me batfuck. So I was a madman writing about a lunatic on a mentally deficient machine. There’s a recipe for a best seller.
    So what’s the appetite of a hugely fat person really like? Myrna the Mountain must’ve been well over three hundred pounds, fattest girl at GHS, but nobody ever saw her eat anything but salad. She said she had “fat genes,” which generated obvious jokes.
    Maybe when she wasn’t eating lettuce she went after hikers on deserted trails.
    Kit came in and opened the refrigerator. “How come you put the bike carrier on?”
    â€œHad some time to kill.” And it would save me 4.2 miles, biking from my place to here and back. It would make a difference, 48 miles instead of 52. Don’t want to overdo it. “How often do you think a four-hundred-pound person would eat?”
    She brought out a soda water and a pie pan with one wedge left. Key lime with whipped cream topping, graham cracker crust.
    She laughed. “You should see your face—you, too, could be a four-hundred-pound guy! Split it with you?”
    â€œI’ll pass.” Try not to drool.
    â€œMaybe he’d eat all the time. If he ate like three huge meals a day, it would put stress on his digestive system. Didn’t we used to be foragers?”
    â€œSpeak for yourself.”
    â€œYou know what I mean, humans . . . roots and berries, nibble all the time?
    â€œYeah, but we’re set up to be omnivores,” I said. “If you kill a large animal, you can’t just eat a nibble at a time. It would spoil.”
    â€œWild animals don’t mind a little rot. Remember that grizzly bear.” We’d taken a helicopter ride over Yellowstone, and saw a bear that the pilot said had been eating on the same moose for weeks. He said that if we were on the ground, the smell would knock us over. She took a bite. “Yum . . . rotten moose pie. Maybe key lime.”
    â€œI guess this guy doesn’t live on human flesh. He’d have to be killing people left and right.”
    â€œWell, I don’t know,” she said, stacking lunch meat and cheese. “He weighs four hundred pounds and looks like a creature from outer space. Maybe he doesn’t just walk into a Hy-Vee and buy a side of beef. Maybe he
does
have to eat people.”
    â€œOr farm animals,” I said. “That wouldn’t draw as much