The odd thing is, he never craved vegetables, not once. Vegetables or fruit. Not over the entire course of the year. He never craved beer either, since he drank vodka. What he did notice was that the pounds melted off. Why shouldn't they? He did the math. If he ate two pounds of meat per day—first of all, most of beef is water, and then your body turns on itself for the carbs. In fact, he could not do the math accurately, neither mental math nor figures drawn on paper, but his body could do the math, and the body calculated three pounds weekly, though after six months, he knew, something would have to give. You could only go so low. You could only lose so much weight. But he never craved anything but more meat. New York Strip. Beef tenderloin. Boneless short ribs. He looked at the outline of the cow at butcher shops, where the animal had been dissected into a map, noting every possible cut. He lined his finger across the outline as if he were planning his next vacation.

His love life improved. His muscles leaned. His skinny shorts fit again. Thigh gap, gone since puberty, returned like magic. Experts both offline and on, learned and unlearned, warned him of dangers lurking in the absence of vegetables, specifically fiber. Yeah, well, the body only needed fiber when you gunked it up with all kinds of bullshit, he thought and said. He told this to a man selling obviously stolen filet mignon outside the French Quarter. The man didn't care. Why should he? It all made sense. Meat was the biological quotient of all matter consumed and processed. If you wanted diversity in nutrients, then diversify your animals. Eventually, you covered all your bases, and so he began to crave other species. For lean protein, you worke your way from beef, to bison, then venison and elk. He craved every fish. Alligator. Duck. Crayfish. Quail. He read about canned elephant in Africa, and the thought gave him shingles of euphoria. He never uttered these words aloud, but silently he sympathized with the tribes in the Congo who feasted on gorilla meat. The nutrients those monsters must pack into those striated fibers, in the tender morsels of their metacarpals, the rippled flanks loaded with so much iron, trace elements and high-density protein. And naturally, if you were at war, just like the ancients, you found your enemy, slaughtered your adversaries in public, ate their hearts to instill fear, and—for what else—for the strength to survive—the edge. You stripped those skeletons clean while the enemy cowered under the fear of cannibalism and sacrifice. He kept these thoughts to himself, for certain. No doubt. But he knew that day was coming. By his count, he knew five people independent of each other who owned survival backpacks, each equipped for immediate survival and the establishment of a new civilization. Maybe he'd get one. Water filters, a tarp, waterproof matches, seeds, a hatchet for chopping wood and hacking through the pandemonium. Absolutely, that day was coming. Crazy versus crazy. Crazy red versus crazy blue. Crazy everybody, and eyes bugged out from screen time and nerves shattered by dings and robo-calls. Everything ready to pop.

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