The Last One Read online

  Water is my priority. I’ve been walking for hours, I think. My shadow is much longer now than when I left the shop. I’ve passed a few houses, but no more stores and nothing marked with blue. I can still smell the prop.

  As I walk I try to step on my shadow knees. It’s impossible but also a distraction. Such a distraction that I don’t notice the mailbox until I’ve nearly passed it. It’s shaped like a trout, the house number fashioned with wooden scales of all colors. Beside the mailbox is the mouth of a long driveway, which twists away through white oaks and the occasional birch tree. I can’t see the house that must exist at the driveway’s end.

  I don’t want to go. I haven’t entered a house since a handful of sky-blue balloons led me to a cabin that was blue inside, so much blue. Dusky light and a teddy bear, watching.

  I can’t do it.

  You need water. They won’t use the same trick twice.

  I start up the driveway. Each step comes heavy and my foot keeps catching. My shadow is at my right, scaling and leaping from wooded trunks as I pass, as nimble as I am awkward.

  Soon I see a monstrous Tudor in dire need of a new coat of its off-white paint. The house slumps into an overgrown lawn, the kind of building that as a child I would have play-believed was haunted. A red SUV is parked outside, blocking my view of the front door. After so long on my feet the SUV seems an otherworldly entity. They said no driving and it’s not blue, but it’s here and maybe that means something. I walk slowly toward the SUV, and by extension the house. Maybe they’ve placed a case of water in the back of the vehicle. Then I won’t have to go inside. The SUV is splattered with dried mud, the splashed pattern insisting on the substance’s former liquidity. Even dry, it’s not dirt but mud. It looks like an inkblot test, but I can’t see any images.

  Chip chip chip, I hear. Chippy chip.

  My ember bird is back. I cock my head to judge the bird’s direction and in doing so notice another sound: the gentle burble of running water. Relief engulfs me; I don’t have to go inside. The mailbox was meant only to lead me to the stream. I should have heard it on my own, but I’m so tired, so thirsty. I needed the bird to bring my focus back from sight to sound. I turn around and follow the sound of flowing water. The bird calls again and I mouth Thank you. My split lip stings.

  As I backtrack to find the brook, I think of my mother. She too would think I was meant to find the mailbox, but to her the guiding hand wouldn’t be a producer’s. I imagine her sitting in her living room, enfolded in a haze of cigarette smoke. I imagine her watching, interpreting my every success as affirmation and my every disappointment as a lesson. Co-opting my experiences as her own, as she has always done. Because I wouldn’t exist without her, and for her that’s always been enough.

  I think too of my father, next door at the bakery, charming tourists with free samples and country wit while he tries to forget his tobacco-scented wife of thirty-one years. I wonder if he too watches me.

  Then I see the brook, a measly, exquisite thing just east of the driveway. My attention snaps to and my insides rock with relief. I long to cup my hands and bring the cold wet to my lips. Instead, I finish the warm liquid in my Nalgene—half a cup, maybe. I probably should have drunk it earlier; people have died of dehydration while conserving water. But that’s in hotter climates, the kinds of places where the sun strips a person’s skin. Not here.

  After drinking I follow the brook downstream, so I’ll spot any troubling debris, dead animals or the like. I don’t want to get sick again. I shuffle along for about ten minutes, putting more and more distance between myself and the house. Soon I find a clearing with a huge fallen tree at its edge, about twenty feet from the water, and I release myself to habit, clearing a circle of ground and collecting wood. What I gather, I sort into four piles. The leftmost contains anything thinner than a pencil, the rightmost anything thicker than my wrist. When I have enough to last a few hours, I pick up some dried curls of birch bark, shred them into tinder, and place them on a solid piece of bark.

  I unclip a carabiner from a belt loop on my left hip. My fire starter slides along the silver metal and into my hand, which is sunburnt and crusted with dirt. The fire starter looks a bit like a key and a USB drive threaded together onto an orange cord; that’s what I thought when it fell into my possession through a combination of skill and chance after the first Challenge. This was back on Day One, when I could always spot the camera and it was all exciting, even the boring parts.

  After a few quick strikes, the tinder begins to smoke. Gently, I scoop it into my hand and blow, eliciting first more smoke and finally tiny flames. I quickly clip the fire starter back onto my belt loop, then, using both hands, place the tinder in the center of my clearing. As I add more tinder the flames grow and smoke saturates my nostrils. I feed the flames the smallest branches, then larger. Within minutes the fire is full, strong, though it probably doesn’t look very impressive on camera. The flames are only about a foot high, but that is all I need—not a signal fire, just heat.

  I pull my stainless-steel cup from my pack. It’s dented and slightly charred, but still solid. After filling it with water, I place it close to the fire. While I wait for the water to heat I force myself to eat a fingerful of peanut butter. After not eating for so long, I’d have thought even my least favorite food would be ambrosial, but it’s disgusting, thick and salty, and it sticks to the roof of my mouth. I prod the gummy mass with my dry tongue, thinking I must look as ridiculous as a dog. I should have pretended an allergy on the application; then they would have needed to leave me something else. Or maybe I wouldn’t have been selected at all. My brain is too tight to consider the implications of not being chosen, where I would be right now.

  Finally, the water boils. I give any microbes a few minutes to die, then use my ragged jacket sleeve as a potholder and pull the cup from the flame. Once the bubbles die down, I pour the boiled water into one of my Nalgenes, filling it about a third of the way.

  The second batch heats more quickly. Into the Nalgene the water goes, and after a third round of boiling the bottle is full. I tighten its cap, then jam it into the muddy bottom of the stream, so that the cold water flows over the plastic almost to the rim. The blue bandana drifts with the current. By the time I’ve filled the second bottle, the first is nearly cold. I fill the cup and place it to boil yet again, then drink four ounces from the cooled bottle, washing peanut-butter residue down my throat. I wait a few minutes, drink four more ounces. In these short, spaced bursts I finish the bottle. The cup is boiling again and I can feel the membranes of my brain rehydrating. My headache retreats. All this work is probably unnecessary; the stream is clear and quick. Odds are the water’s safe, but I took that bet once before and lost.

  As I pour the latest batch of water into my bottle, I realize that I haven’t built my shelter yet, and the sky is clouded as though for rain. Fading light tells me I don’t have long. I push myself to my feet, wincing against the tightness in my hips. I collect five heavy branches from the woods and brace these against the leeward side of the fallen tree, longest to shortest, creating a triangular frame just wide enough to slip into. I pull a black garbage bag from my pack—a parting gift from Tyler, unexpected but appreciated—and spread it over the frame. As I scoop up armfuls of dead leaves and pile them atop the plastic bag, I think of the priorities of survival.

  The rules of three. A bad attitude can kill you in three seconds; asphyxiation can kill you in three minutes; exposure in three hours; dehydration in three days; and starvation in three weeks—or is it three months? Regardless, starvation is the least of my concerns. As weak as I feel, it hasn’t been that long since I ate. Six or seven days at most, and that’s generous. As for exposure, even if it rains tonight it won’t be cold enough to kill me. Even without a shelter, I’d be wet and miserable but probably not in danger.

  But I don’t want to be wet and miserable, and no matter the extravagance of their budget they can’t have placed cameras in a shelter that didn’
t exist before I built it. I keep scooping armfuls of leaves, and when a wolf spider the size of a quarter skitters up my sleeve I flinch. The sharp movement makes my head feel too light, partially detached. The spider clings to my biceps. I flick it away with my opposite hand and watch it bounce into the leaf litter beside the debris hut. It skitters inside and I find it hard to care; they’re only mildly venomous. I keep collecting duff and soon have a foot-deep layer atop my debris hut, and even more inside as padding.

  I lay a few fallen branches with splayed fingers of leaves atop the structure to hold it all in place and then turn around to see the fire is barely more than coals. I’m all out of sync tonight. It’s the house, I think. I’m still spooked. As I crack off small sticks and feed them to the coals, I glance back at my shelter. It’s a low, rambleshack-looking mess with twigs sprouting up from all sides at every angle. I remember how carefully, how slowly, I used to construct my shelters. I wanted them to be as pretty as Cooper’s and Amy’s. Now all I care about is functionality, though, truth be told, the debris huts all look about the same—except for the big one we built together before Amy left. That was a beauty, topped with branches interwoven like thatch and large enough for all of us, though Randy slept off on his own.

  I drink a few more ounces of water and sit beside my resuscitated fire. The sun has departed and the moon is shy. The flames flicker, a smudge on my right lens lending them a starburst sheen.

  Time for another night alone.

  2.

  The premiere’s opening shot will be of Tracker beside a river. He is dressed in black and his skin is dark, the tone of tilled earth. He has spent years cultivating the aura of a great cat, and he now exudes without effort a feline sense of power and grace. His face is relaxed, but his eyes watch the water intensely, as though hunting something in the current. There is a slight curl to Tracker’s posture that will cause viewers to think he’s about to pounce—on what?—and then Tracker blinks toward the sky and it suddenly seems equally likely that he will find a patch of sunlight in which to nap.

  Tracker is considering his options: attempt to cross here or search for a better spot farther upstream. He’s confident in his ability to leap stone to stone across the twenty-foot-wide river, which is swift but not deep, but there is one rock that troubles him. He thinks he can see it shifting in the current’s force. Tracker does not like to get wet, but he admires the transformative powers of water, and it is with admiration that he smiles.

  Viewers will project their own justification onto this smile. Those who do not like Tracker for reasons of race or bearing—they’ve seen nothing of him yet other than his standing here, so their dislike can be only bias—will think cockiness. A particularly strident off-site producer will see this shot and think with glee: He looks evil.

  Tracker is not evil, and his confidence is well deserved. He has overcome challenges far more ominous than a quick, shallow river, and much more natural than what waits for him on the far side of the river: the first constructed Challenge.

  Across the river is also where Tracker will meet his eleven competitors for the first time. He knows there will be teamwork required, but he doesn’t want to think of the others as anything but competitors. He said as much in a pre-competition confessional, along with much else, but as the strongest contestant he will not be not allowed a sympathetic motive. Tracker’s because does not make the cut, and the clip inserted into this shot will be of him steely eyed before a white wall, saying only, “I’m not here for the experience. I’m here to win.”

  His strategy is simple: Be better than the others.

  Tracker lingers; the shot travels over the rushing current and through thickly leafed branches to where Waitress stares at a compass. She is dressed in black yoga pants and a neon-green sports bra that sets off the red hair falling in loose curls past her shoulders. A violet bandana is tied around her neck like a scarf. She’s nearly six feet tall and slender. Her waist is miniscule—“It’s remarkable her guts fit inside,” a troll will scoff online. Her face is long and pale, her complexion smoothed by a thick layer of SPF-20 foundation. Her eye shadow matches her bra, and glitters.

  Waitress does not have to cross the river, she only has to use the compass to find her way through the woods. For her, this is a challenge, and the shot conveys as much: Waitress stands, her curls framing her face as she turns in a circle and studies the unfamiliar tool. She bites her bottom lip, partly because she’s confused and partly because she thinks that doing so makes her look sexy.

  “Is the red or the white end north?” she asks. She’s been told to narrate her thoughts, and she will do this. Often.

  Waitress’s secret, one viewers will not be told, is that she never submitted an application. She was recruited. The men in charge wanted an attractive but essentially useless woman, a redhead if possible, since they already had chosen two brunettes and a blonde—not platinum blond, but blond enough, the kind of hair that would lighten in the sun. Yes, they thought; a beautiful redhead would round out the cast.

  “Okay,” says Waitress. “The red end is pointier. That has to be north.” She turns in a circle, biting her lip again. The needle settles at N. “And I need to go…southeast.” And though the points of the compass are clearly labeled before her, she says in a singsong voice, “Never eat shredded wheat.”

  She begins walking due south, then mutters the mnemonic again and angles herself to the right. After a few steps, she stops. “Wait,” she says. She looks at the compass, lets the needle settle, then turns left. Finally, she walks in the correct direction. She laughs a little and says, “This isn’t so hard.”

  Waitress knows she is unlikely to win, but she’s not here to win. She’s here to make an impression—on the producers, on the viewers, on anyone. Yes, she’s a full-time server at a tapas restaurant, but she starred in a candy commercial when she was six and considers herself an actress first, a model second, and a waitress third. Walking among the trees, she has a thought she will not speak: This is bound to be her big break.

  Back at the river, Tracker decides the rock is a relatively minor hazard, and that the known obstacle is better than the unknown. He springs. The editor will slow the footage, as though this were a nature documentary and Tracker the great cat he secretly thinks he inhabited in a previous life. Viewers will see the length and power of his stride. They will see—a few would have noticed already, but a close-up will demand the attention of the rest—his odd but recognizable footwear, their yellow logo a tiny mid-foot scream of color on the otherwise dark expanse of him. They will see his individually sheathed toes gripping stone. They will note his balance and speed, the control Tracker has over his movement, and some of them will think, I should get a pair of those. But Tracker’s footwear is only an accent on his control, which is beautifully expressed as he leaps from stone to stone, passing above churning water. His body seems longer in motion than it did while still, and in this too he is catlike.

  The ball of his right foot lands upon the unsteady stone, which rocks forward. This is an important moment. If Tracker falls, he will become one character. If he flows onward untroubled, he will become another. The casting process has finished, but only officially.

  Tracker splays his arms for balance—revealing a red bandana worn braceletlike around his right wrist—and experiences a rare moment of less than total grace; he wobbles. Then he follows the motion of the rock, and he’s gone, onto the next foothold, which is steady. Seconds later, he’s across, breathing with moderate exertion, dry from his clean-shaven scalp to his individualized toes, dry everywhere save for a slight dampness in his armpits, which viewers cannot see. He adjusts the straps of his sleek, nearly empty black backpack and then continues into the forest, toward the Challenge.

  The wobble will be edited out. Tracker has been cast as impervious, unstoppable.

  Meanwhile, Waitress stumbles over a protruding root and drops her compass. She bends from the waist to retrieve it, and gravity grants her cleavage—just as
Waitress intended.

  Two ends of a spectrum converge.

  Between these extremes, Rancher wears a cowboy hat that looks nearly as weathered as his craggy, stubbled face, and he saunters with ease through the woods. He wears his black-and-yellow bandana in true cowboy fashion, around his neck, ready to be yanked over his mouth and nose should a dust storm arise. He is a thousand miles from his speckled Appaloosa, but riding spurs jut from his leather-bound heels. The spurs are an offering to the camera, given to Rancher by the on-site producer. Upon accepting them, Rancher flicked one to rotation. A dull edge, but an edge nonetheless. Useful, perhaps, he thought. He was also given a striped poncho to wear, but this he refused. “What’s next?” he asked. “You want me to carry around a stack of corn tortillas and a chili pepper?”

  Rancher’s ancestors were once categorized as mestizo and largely dismissed by the powers-that-be. His grandfather crossed the border in the night and found work shoveling manure and milking cows at a family-owned ranch. Years later, he married the boss’s daughter, who inherited the business. Their light-skinned son married a dark-skinned seamstress from Mexico City. Rancher’s skin is the lightly toasted hue that resulted from that union. He is fifty-seven, and his shaggy chin-length hair is as sharply black and white as his beliefs about good and evil.

  There are no obstacles between Rancher and the Challenge. Competency—or lack thereof—is not his defining feature. It is his proud, cowboy stride that is on display. His character is established in seconds.

  Asian Chick is less easy to peg. She is dressed in khaki work pants and a blue plaid shirt. Her hair is long and straight, bound in a simple tar-black ponytail accented by a neon-yellow bandana, which is tied like a headband with the knot tucked away at the nape of her neck. Asian Chick wears only the makeup that was forced on her: slicks of eyeliner that further elongate her long eyes, and a smear of sparkling pink lipstick.