The Last One(17)

Night drifts over the campsites. All are exhausted to varying degrees, but Waitress is the most exhausted. She’s been shivering for hours, even with her thin Lycra jacket zipped over her sports bra. She curls by the fire, not comfortable enough with her teammates to share body heat. “It’s warmer in here,” says Zoo, wrapped in her fleece jacket. Waitress shakes her head. A cameraman watches her, recording her discomfort and wishing he could lend her his much-warmer coat. When Waitress shifts her back to the fire, he nearly calls out a warning about her hair, but she tugs it over her shoulder without prompting. Waitress is unsettled. She wishes the cameraman would either say something or leave. She knows she should talk, not to him, but to her teammates or at least to herself, but she’s too cold, too tired. The night deepens. The cameraman’s shift ends. He retreats to the production team’s much more elaborate camp at a second field a quarter mile south. There they have tents and grills. Coolers stuffed with meat and milk and beer. Mosquito netting. The cameramen assigned to the other two teams also retire. Mounted cameras are left to watch the contestants.

These cameras don’t care that Waitress is cold, or that Air Force’s ankle is throbbing. They record Rancher crawling from his shelter to take a piss, and Waitress’s endless shivering, but they miss more than they record. They miss Banker offering Biology his puffy jacket as a pillow, and his face relaxing into relief at her polite refusal. They miss Zoo, Engineer, and Carpenter Chick exchanging their backgrounds in bedtime-story whispers. They miss Exorcist’s lips framing an honest prayer as he lies tucked into the corner of his team’s lean-to.

Mostly, they record dying flames.





5.


The sky trembles. My first thought is that it’s a camera drone, crashing, and this is something I want to see. I look up, raising an arm to block out the sun. Instead of a drone come undone, I see an airplane plowing through the high blue to leave a wispy white trail. It takes me a moment to process the sight, the sound, the sensation of having my small human presence overwhelmed so completely. This is the first time I’ve noticed a plane since taping began. I don’t know if this is because I wasn’t paying attention or because they weren’t around to notice.

Either way, this is important—it means they can’t control every aspect of my surroundings. A small assurance, but it inhabits me like a revelation. I feel my insularity retreating. For the first time in too long, I am not the but a. Just one person among many. I think of the men and women above me. The plane is huge; there must be hundreds of passengers seated up there beneath nubby air vents, napping, reading, watching movies on their iPads. One or two crying, perhaps, frightened by the enormity of the journey they’re embarking on.

I stand still, neck craned, until the airplane is out of sight, its contrail dispersing. I hope someone up there is going home. That there is at least one person in that plane who knows unselfish love and is returning to it.

The next few hours are easier than what came before, except that I’m wretched with hunger. I reach a brook a few hours before sunset and decide to make camp early to try to catch some protein. The pieces of the figure-four deadfall I carved during group camp are in my pack, and now that I have something other than pinecones to use as bait it might actually work.

I take the trio of sticks and set them under a tall tree. It takes me a minute to figure out which stick goes where, then I align the notches, balancing and steadying. Once I can keep the trap in its distinctive angular pattern by pinching the top nexus, I smear the end of the bait stick with peanut butter and lean a heavy log over the top to take the place of my hand. It’s a precarious piece of work, but it’s meant to be, and it holds.

I boil water in batches and build my shelter, glancing regularly toward the trap. The bait lies in the log’s shadow, untouched. The woods grow dim and I’m sitting at the fire, waiting, trying not to think the thoughts that come most readily. I hate it. I need to keep busy, so I decide to carve a second trap. I salvage appropriate-sized sticks—each about a half inch thick and a foot long—and start carving. It’s only four notches and two sharpened points, but they have to be aligned perfectly. Carving takes me longer than I’d like—the knife I was issued is so dull at this point I wouldn’t trust it to slice cold butter. By the time I’m done, my hands are aching, my fingers blistered. I drop the sticks at the base of a tree and head to the brook to collect a long flat stone to use as the trap’s weight.

I take off my boots and socks and wade in. Pebbles massage my feet, a small pain. As I pry up the rock, I think that I could never do all this if it wasn’t part of the show. This adventure I asked for, it’s not what I was expecting, not what I wanted. I thought I would feel empowered, but I’m only exhausted.

I heave the stone upright. It’s too heavy to lift, so I drag it out of the water and to the tree. The stone leaves a six-inch-wide trail through my camp. I remember a driveway much wider twisting through the woods, leading from a mailbox choked by blue balloons to a cabin with more balloons by the door. The cabin itself was blue too, maybe, I’m not sure. Maybe it just had blue trim. And there were so many balloons; every time I remember I remember more. The balloons weren’t all: a bottle in the sink, a handful of wrapped packages on the table. All blue. Even the bedroom light felt blue when I found him—found it.

I didn’t quit then. I didn’t quit when I got sick afterward, days of shivering and feeding the fire, boiling water constantly because I was losing fluids and I didn’t boil the tap water in the cabin and that must be what made me sick. Vomit and diarrhea, feeling so cold, endlessly cold.