The Last One(62)
Exorcist throws up his hands and retreats to his meager bedding. The others eat their meal in silence. The segment will end with a series of short confessionals.
Carpenter Chick, heavily edited: “He deserved it.”
Banker: “He just took a nap while the rest of us set up camp. I feel a little bad about it, but why should we carry his weight? Besides, it wasn’t my call. I didn’t win the rice. I was thankful to be getting any myself.”
Waitress: “He’s been needling me for two straight days, and then he steals my food? No f-ing way. I hope he starves.”
Exorcist: “Every society needs its pariahs; the fact that this is a small society doesn’t change that.” He runs a hand through his greasy red hair, stoking the flames. The second episode of In the Dark will end here, with his promise: “They want me to be their villain? Fine. I’ll be their villain.”
15.
Birch Street was a respite—from external nightmares, if not from those spun by my own subconscious. This means only that my next Challenge is pending. As Brennan and I leave the house, leave the neighborhood lined with streets named after trees, I wonder if they’re waiting for some signal from Brennan. Maybe there’s a landmark we’re supposed to reach.
Mid-morning, we reach it: a neighborhood manipulated in a manner I haven’t seen before. It’s not abandoned—it’s destroyed. Windows are broken, signs bowled over. What I initially think is a very out-of-place boulder resolves into a car smashed against a brick wall. I feel my spine curl and I keep my eyes wide as we pass. What I do see of the car makes me think of high school, when the antidrug club got the local fire department to stage a drunk-driving accident using a wrecked van. Volunteers covered themselves with cornstarch blood and screamed from inside the van as the Jaws of Life gnashed toward them. I remember my friend David crawling from the van’s front door, stumbling to his feet, and then weaving toward the firemen. The front-seat passenger, Laura Rankle, “died.” She was nicer than the average popular girl, and David’s screams as she was pulled, limp, from the vehicle were deeply unsettling. Repeatedly I told myself it wasn’t real. It didn’t help. I did my best to hide my tears from my classmates, only later noticing that most were hiding tears of their own. My dad knew about the stunt; I remember him asking about it at dinner that night. Before I could answer, my mom chimed in with something about how she believed—how she knew—that it would save someone’s life, and that the van had crashed precisely for this purpose. I had been about to say how powerful the experience was, but after her comment I just shrugged and dubbed it overdramatic.
A few blocks after the smashed car there’s a pileup. The color at the center is distinctive; I don’t need to know the shape to see it’s a school bus. A school bus and a handful of smaller vehicles. As we get close I see a charred prop hanging out the front door of a blackened sedan. For a moment I imagine it has Laura Rankle’s face—not the gaunt, defeated face she grew into after she got pregnant and the baby’s father abandoned her, but the face she had as a girl.
“Mae?” says Brennan. “What’s wrong?”
It’s an absurd question, designed to get me talking. I almost tell him to shut up, and then I think that if I give them a good story, maybe they’ll leave me alone. Maybe if I talk the Challenge will end. So I tell him. I tell him all about Laura Rankle and David Moreau. About fake blood and twisted metal, the awful amalgamation of pretend tragedy and the remnants of the real thing. “Afterward, when one of the firemen helped Laura out of the ambulance and she was smiling this nervous smile and she was fine—it was surreal,” I say. We take a short detour around an overturned shopping cart and I continue, “It felt real enough to give me this sense of what if that was hard to shake.”
I look at Brennan. “Weird,” he says.
The first fully true thing I’ve told him, and all he can say is “Weird.” I suppose that’s what I get for treating him like a person instead of the prop that he is. My own fault.
Maybe it’s my eyesight, but even though we’re getting close to the bus, it still seems very distant. As I walk toward it, I find I don’t care about the bus. I don’t care about what’s inside the bus. Because this isn’t my world. This isn’t real.
When I was growing up, my teachers and guidance counselor talked about “the real world” as if it were a distinct existence, something separate from school. Same thing in college, though I was living on my own in a city of eight million people. I never understood that. What is the real world if it’s not the world one exists in? How is being a child less real than being an adult? I remember prepping dinner one night of group camp: Amy working the tip of her knife into a rabbit’s naked shoulder, separating the limb. The care she took, the time, dividing the meat equally among our cooking pots. “I thought it would be different here,” she said. “I thought…” Her hesitation, I thought it was because her knife struck bone. “But turns out it’s no less fucked up than the real world.” This didn’t seem like such a strange thing to say, then. Those Challenges had frames: beginnings and endings that were easy to identify, a man shouting “Go!” and “Stop!” I miss that. Now it’s like everything is fake and real at the same time. The world in which I move is constructed, manipulated and deceptive, but then there’s that plane, and the trees, and squirrels. Rain. My maybe-late period. Things too big and too small to control, contributing and conflicting all at once. This empty world they’ve made is filled with contradiction.