Free The Man Who Quit Money by Mark Sundeen

today’s date. One thing is certain: none of us wants to stop eating. I, for one, haven’t tasted any mold.
    “Today couldn’t be later than the twenty-seventh,” Phil says.
    “Yeah,” Suelo says, lying back on his bed, propped against a slab of stone. He kicks off his boots and reaches for a second piece of chicken. “I’m sure it’s fine.”
    .  .  .
    O NE EVENING IN 2006, watching the sunset from the rock benches in front of his cave, Suelo decided to eat a cactus. He had been eating prickly pear for years, and he didn’t see why a little barrel cactus would be any different. Besides, he had never heard of any cactus being poisonous. Not in North America, anyway. It went against evolutionary logic. The cactus’s needles already protected it from predators: why, biologically, would it need toxins?
    Suelo bent down and unearthed the cactus with a pocketknife. He skinned it, careful to shear all the needles, and slurped the whole thing like a kiwi fruit, just like he used to do when hopping trains across the desert, to stay hydrated.
    Night was falling. Suelo basked in the warm evening air.
    Then his heart started pounding. Faster and faster. His skin got hot. He felt like he was being lowered into a vat of boiling water. The burn spread up his calves to his thighs, over his hips and belly, rising up his neck until his entire head was on fire. His heart thumped. It couldn’t take this.
    I’m going to have a heart attack,
Suelo thought.
    The nearest hospital was a two-hour walk. He could hardly sit up. He crawled into his cave and lay there.
    It wasn’t like he was some clueless rookie out here in the wilderness. He had survived in these canyons for a decade. He couldn’t believe this was happening. He had always talked, in the abstract, about how when it was time for him to go, he’d just lie down and die like a coyote, and surrender his earthly body back to the food chain. But he really didn’t want to die just yet. And although he was not a sentimental man, he thought about his parents, a hundred miles away in Colorado. They loved him despite all he’d rejected of their beliefs. Already they’d lost one son, Rick, taken by a brain tumor at age forty-one. It was for their sake as much as anyone’s that he scribbled his good-bye, which in his memory went something like this:
    Well, life has been good, rich and full. I died happy. Don’t worry about me. We all die. I ate some poison cactus. I love everybody.
    How long would it take someone to find his body? He had plenty of friends in town, but they never came looking for him. Daniel arrived in town when he arrived, he left when he left.Nobody really knew where he was. When would someone start to miss him? And who would find him first? Probably the ravens, and then the coyotes. Or maybe the ringtail. The ringtails loved to eat meat.
    So really there was some justice. Ever since he’d given up money, certain people had called him a freeloader, a parasite. (As one comment-thread malapropist put it: “Do you Believe you are smooching off others?”) They demanded to know what he was giving back. To which Suelo asked, Who says you need to give something back? What does a raven give? What does a barnacle give, or a coyote? In his view, every living thing gave plenty, merely by existing. But from a strictly materialistic view, his critics had an excellent point. A raven contributes nothing, except of course his own corpse, which will feed some other being. Now Suelo was dying, and he offered his body to the ravens, the coyotes, the ringtails, the mice, the ants.
    Through the night he writhed and spat and prepared for death. Hours slipped away, but he was not aware of their passing. He knew only that he hadn’t died—yet. And then, as the canyon rim appeared in silhouette against the gray sky of morning, he felt a swelling in his gut. Suelo hadn’t vomited in twenty years, since battling dysentery in Ecuador, where he’d trained himself to plug all his