I worked at it for half an hour or so with the deep concentration you acquire when you use the Stanislavsky method. Then I gave up. "The M.E. is wrong, Lou," I said. "It doesn't feel right." Lou turned around from the window. He'd stood there all that time without once coughing or scratching or doing anything else that might have distracted me. "He knows his business, Mark." "But he doesn't know old people." "What is it you don't get?" he prompted, helping me dig my way through a characterization like the trained Stanislavskian he was--and still would have been if he hadn't gotten so sick of the insecurity of acting that he'd become a cop. "Can't money be more important to a psychotic than eating?" "Sure," I agreed. "Up to a point. Undereating, yes. Actual starvation, no." "Why not?" "You and the M.E. think it's easy to starve to death. It isn't. Not when you can buy day-old bread at the bakeries, soup bones for about a nickel a pound, wilted vegetables that groceries are glad to get rid of. Anybody who's willing to eat that stuff can stay alive on nearly nothing a day. Nearly nothing, Lou, and hunger is a damned potent instinct. I can understand hating to spend even those few cents. I can't see going without food altogether." * * * * * He took out a cigarette; he hadn't until then because he didn't want to interrupt my concentration. "Maybe they get too weak to go out after old bread and meat bones and wilted vegetables." "It still doesn't figure." I got up off the shaky chair, my joints now really stiff from sitting in it. "Do you know how long it takes to die of starvation?" "That depends on age, health, amount of activity--" "Nuts!" I said. "It would take weeks!" "So it takes weeks. Where's the problem--if there is one?" I lit the pipe I'd learned to smoke instead of cigarettes--old men seem to use pipes more than anything else, though maybe it'll be different in the next generation. More cigarette smokers now, you see, and they'd stick to the habit unless the doctor ordered them to cut it out. "Did you ever try starving for weeks, Lou?" I asked. "No. Did you?" "In a way. All these cases you've been taking me on for the last couple of years--I've tried to be them. But let's say it's possible to die of starvation when you have thousands of dollars put away. Let's say you don't think of scrounging off food stores or working out a way of freeloading or hitting soup lines. Let's say you stay in your room and slowly starve to death." He slowly picked a fleck of tobacco off his lip and flicked it away, his sharp black eyes poking holes in the situation I'd built up for him. But he wasn't ready to say anything yet. "There's charity," I went on, "relief--except for those who have their dough in banks, where it can be checked on--old age pension, panhandling, cadging off neighbors." He said, "We know these cases are hermits. They don't make contact with anybody."