"Yeah," Perry said. "Lots of that down here. Some of them are the paramilitary wing of the AARP, old trailer-home retirees who've run out of money and just set up camp here. Some are b.u.ms and junkies, some are runaways. It's not as bad as it looks -- they're pretty comfy in there. We bring 'em furniture and other good pickings that show up at the junkyard. The homeless with the wherewithal to build shantytowns, they haven't gone all animal like the shopping cart people and the scary beachcombers." He waved across the malarial ditch to an old man in a pair of pressed khaki shorts and a crisp Bermuda shirt. "Hey Francis!" he called. The old man waved back. "We'll have some IHOP for you 'bout an hour!" The old man ticked a salute off his creased forehead.

"Francis is a good guy. Used to be an aeros.p.a.ce engineer if you can believe it. Wife had medical problems and he went bust taking care of her. When she died, he ended up here in his double-wide and never left. Kind of the unofficial mayor of this little patch."

Suzanne stared after Francis. He had a bit of a gimpy leg, a limp she could spot even from here. Beside her, Lester was puffing. No one was comfortable walking in Florida, it seemed.

It took another half hour to reach the IHOP, the International House of Pancakes, which sat opposite a mini-mall with only one still-breathing store, a place that advertised 99-cent t-shirts, which struck Suzanne as profoundly depressing. There was a junkie out front of 99-Cent Tees, a woman with a leathery tan and a tiny tank-top and shorts that made her look a little like a Tenderloin hooker, but not with that rat's-nest hair, not even in the 'Loin. She wobbled uncertainly across the parking lot to them.

"Excuse me," she said, with an improbable Valley Girl accent. "Excuse me? I'm hoping to get something to eat, it's for my kid, she's nursing, gotta keep my strength up." Her naked arms and legs were badly tracked out, and Suzanne had a horrified realization that among the stains on her tank-top were a pair of spreading pools of breast milk, dampening old white, crusted patches over her sagging b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "For my baby. A dollar would help, a dollar."

There were homeless like this in San Francisco, too. In San Jose as well, she supposed, but she didn't know where they hid. But something about this woman, cracked out and tracked out, it freaked her out. She dug into her purse and got out a five dollar bill and handed it to the homeless woman. The woman smiled a snaggletoothed stumpy grin and reached for it, then, abruptly, grabbed hold of Suzanne's wrist. Her grip was damp and weak.

"Don't you f.u.c.king look at me like that. You're not better than me, b.i.t.c.h!" Suzanne tugged free and stepped back quickly. "That's right, run away! b.i.t.c.h! f.u.c.k you! Enjoy your lunch!"

She was shaking. Perry and Lester closed ranks around her. Lester moved to confront the homeless woman.

"The f.u.c.k you want lard a.s.s? You wanna f.u.c.k with me? I got a knife, you know, cut your ears off and feed 'em to ya."

Lester c.o.c.ked his head like the RCA Victor dog. He towered over the skinny junkie, and was five or six times wider than her.

"You all right?" he said gently.

"Oh yeah, I'm just fine," she said. "Why, you looking for a party?"

He laughed. "You're joking -- I'd crush you!"

She laughed too, a less crazy, more relaxed sound. Lester's voice was a low, soothing rumble. "I don't think my friend thinks she's any better than you. I think she just wanted to help you out."

The junkie flicked her eyes back and forth. "Listen can you spare a dollar for my baby?"

"I think she just wanted to help you. Can I get you some lunch?"

"f.u.c.kers won't let me in -- won't let me use the toilet even. It's not humane. Don't want to go in the bushes. Not dignified to go in the bushes."

"That's true," he said. "What if I get you some take out, you got a shady place you could eat it? Nursing's hungry work."

The junkie c.o.c.ked her head. Then she laughed. "Yeah, OK, yeah. Sure -- thanks, thanks a lot!"

Lester motioned her over to the menu in the IHOP window and waited with her while she picked out a helping of caramel-apple waffles, sausage links, fried eggs, hash browns, coffee, orange juice and a chocolate malted. "Is that all?" he said, laughing, laughing, both of them laughing, all of them laughing at the incredible, outrageous meal.

They went in and waited by the podium. The greeter, a black guy with corn-rows, nodded at Lester and Perry like an old friend. "Hey Tony,"

Lester said. "Can you get us a go-bag with some take-out for the lady outside before we sit down?" He recited the astounding order.

Tony shook his head and ducked it. "OK, be right up," he said. "You want to sit while you're waiting?"

"We'll wait here, thanks," Lester said. "Don't want her to think we're bailing on her." He turned and waved at her.

"She's mean, you know -- be careful."

"Thanks, Tony," Lester said.

Suzanne marveled at Lester's equanimity. Nothing got his goat. The doggie bag arrived. "I put some extra napkins and a couple of wet-naps in there," Tony said, handing it to him.

"Great!" Lester said. "You guys sit down, I'll be back in a second."

Perry motioned for Suzanne to follow him to a booth. He laughed. "Lester's a good guy," he said. "The best guy I know, you know?"

"How do you know him?" she asked, taking out her notepad.

"He was the sysadmin at a company that was making three-d printers, and I was a tech at a company that was buying them, and the products didn't work, and I spent a lot of time on the phone with him troubleshooting them. We'd get together in our off-hours and hack around with neat little workbench projects, stuff we'd come up with at work. When both companies went under, we got a bunch of their equipment at bankruptcy auctions. Lester's uncle owned the junkyard and he offered us s.p.a.ce to set up our workshops and the rest is history."

Lester joined them again. He was laughing. "She is *funny*," he said. "Kept hefting the sack and saying, 'Christ what those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds put on a plate, no wonder this country's so G.o.dd.a.m.ned fat!'" Perry laughed, too. Suzanne chuckled nervously and looked away.

He slid into the booth next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. "It's OK. I'm a guy who weighs nearly 400 pounds. I know I'm a big, fat guy. If I was sensitive about it, I couldn't last ten minutes. I'm not proud of being as big as I am, but I'm not ashamed either. I'm OK with it."

"You wouldn't lose weight if you could?"

"Sure, why not? But I've concluded it's not an option anymore. I was always a fat kid, and so I never got good at sports, never got that habit. Now I've got this huge deficit when I sit down to exercise, because I'm lugging around all this lard. Can't run more than a few steps. Walking's about it. Couldn't join a pick-up game of baseball or get out on the tennis court. I never learned to cook, either, though I suppose I could. But mostly I eat out, and I try to order sensibly, but just look at the c.r.a.p they feed us at the places we can get to -- there aren't any health food restaurants in the strip malls. Look at this menu," he said, tapping a p.o.r.nographic glossy picture of a stack of glistening waffles oozing with some kind of high-fructose lube. "Caramel pancakes with whipped cream, maple syrup and canned strawberries. When I was a kid, we called that *candy*. These people will sell you an eight dollar, 18 ounce plate of candy with a side of sausage, eggs, biscuits, bacon and a pint of orange juice. Even if you order this stuff and eat a third of it, a quarter of it, that's probably too much, and when you've got a lot of food in front of you, it's pretty hard to know when to stop."

"Sure, will-power. Will-power *nothing*. The thing is, when three quarters of America are obese, when half are dangerously obese, like me, years off our lives from all the fat -- that tells you that this isn't a will-power problem. We didn't get less willful in the last fifty years. Might as well say that all those people who died of the plague lacked the will-power to keep their houses free of rats. Fat isn't moral, it's *epidemiological*. There are a small number of people, a tiny minority, whose genes are short-circuited in a way that makes them less p.r.o.ne to retaining nutrients. That's a maladaptive trait through most of human history -- burning unnecessary calories when you've got to chase down an antelope to get more, that's no way to live long enough to pa.s.s on your genes! So you and Perry over here with your little skinny selves, able to pack away transfats and high-fructose corn-syrup and a pound of candy for breakfast at the IHOP, you're not doing this on will-power -- you're doing it by expressing the somatotype of a recessive, counter-survival gene.

"Would I like to be thinner? Sure. But I'm not gonna let the fact that I'm genetically better suited to famine than feast get to me. Speaking of, let's eat. Tony, c'mere, buddy. I want a plate of candy!" He was smiling, and brave, and at that moment, Suzanne thought that she could get a crush on this guy, this big, smart, talented, funny, lovable guy. Then reality snapped back and she saw him as he was, s.e.xless, lumpy, almost grotesque. The overlay of his, what, his *inner beauty*

on that exterior, it disoriented her. She looked back over her notes.

"So, you say that there's a third coming out to work with you?"

"To *live* with us," Perry said. "That's part of the deal. Geek houses, like in the old college days. We're going to be a power-trio: two geeks and a suit, lean and mean. The suit's name is Tjan, and he's Singaporean by way of London by way of Ithaca, where Kettlebelly found him. We've talked on the phone a couple times and he's moving down next week."

"He's moving down without ever having met you?"

"Yeah, that's the way it goes. It's like the army or something for us: once you're in you get dispatched here or there. It was in the contract. We already had a place down here with room for Tjan, so we put some fresh linen on the guest-bed and laid in an extra toothbrush."

"It's a little nervous-making," Lester said. "Perry and I get along great, but I haven't had such good luck with business-types. It's not that I'm some kind of idealist who doesn't get the need to make money, but they can be so condescending, you know?"

Suzanne nodded. "That's a two-way street, you know. 'Suits' don't like being talked down to by engineers."

Lester raised a hand. "Guilty as charged."

"So what're you planning to do for the rest of the week?" It was Wednesday, and she'd counted on getting this part of the story by Sat.u.r.day, but here she was going to have to wait, clearly, until this Tjan arrived.

"Same stuff as we always do. We build crazy stuff out of junk, sell it to collectors, and have fun. We could go to the Thunderbird Drive In tonight if you want, it's a real cla.s.sic, flea-market by day and drive in by night, practically the last one standing."

Perry cut in. "Or we could go to South Beach and get a good meal, if that's more your speed."

"Naw," Suzanne said. "Drive in sounds great, especially if it's such a dying breed. Better get a visit in while there's still time."

They tried to treat her but she wouldn't let them. She never let anyone buy her so much as a cup of coffee. It was an old journalism-school drill, and she was practically the only scribbler she knew who hewed to it: some of the wh.o.r.es on the Silicon Valley papers took in free computers, trips, even spa days! -- but she had never wavered.