The Last One (3 page)

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.

She scans her surroundings as she breaks the tree line and emerges into an open field. She sees a man waiting at the center of the field.

Beyond the man, across the field, Air Force steps into the sunlight.

For their military selection, the producers wanted a classic, and the man they chose is just that: close-cropped blond hair that glitters in the sun, sharp blue eyes, a strong chin perpetually thrust forth. Air Force is wearing jeans and a long-sleeved tee, but he walks as though in formal dress. Boardlike posture makes him appear taller than his five feet eight inches. His navy-blue bandana—a shade darker than official Air Force blue—is knotted around his belt at his left hip.

Air Force will be touted as a pilot, but his portrayal will include a careful omission. No mention will be made of
what
he pilots. Fighter jets, most viewers will assume—which is what they’re meant to assume. Air Force is not a fighter pilot. When he flies, he moves cargo: tanks and ammunition; batteries and metal coils; magazines and candy bars to stock the shelves of the shopping malls the United States is kind enough to erect for her deployed men and women. He’s a lean, year-round Santa Claus, bearing care packages from dear Aunt Sally. In an organization where fighter pilots are deities and bomber pilots fly the sun itself, his is a largely thankless job.

Air Force and Asian Chick meet at the center of the field, nod a greeting, and stand before the man waiting for them there. The host. He will not be featured until he speaks, and he will not speak until all twelve contestants have gathered.

Tracker slips from the trees behind the host. Rancher appears to the east, and with him a tall thirtysomething red-haired white man with a lime-green bandana. Soon contestants are appearing from all sides. A white woman in her late twenties with light hair and glasses, a sky-blue bandana around her wrist. A middle-aged black man, a white man barely out of his teens, an Asian man who could pass as a minor but is really twenty-six. A mid-thirties white man, and a Hispanic woman whose age is irrelevant because she’s young enough and her breasts are huge and real. Each has a uniquely colored bandana visible on his or her person. Last to appear is Waitress, who is surprised to find so many people already in the field. She bites her bottom lip, and Air Force feels a throb of attraction.

“Welcome,” says the host, a thirty-eight-year-old B-list celebrity who hopes to revive his career—or at least pay off his gambling debt. He’s nondescriptly handsome, with brown hair and eyes. His nose has been described in several prominent blogs as “Roman,” and he pretends to know what this means. The host is dressed in outdoor clothing, and any shot of him speaking will include his upper chest, where a sponsor is proudly declared. “Welcome,” he says again, in a deeper, excessively masculine voice, and he decides that when they record the real greeting, this is the voice he will use. “Welcome to The Woods.”

A soft buzzing sound catches the attention of the contestants; Air Force is the first to turn around. “Holy shit,” he says, an uncommon slip and the first profanity to be censored. The others turn. Behind the group, a five-foot-wide drone with a camera lens at its center hovers at eye level. Cue an additional smattering of awed profanities and a muttered “Cool” from the light-haired woman.

The drone zips silently up into the sky. After only a few seconds it’s far enough, quiet enough, to be nearly invisible.

“Where did it go?” whispers Waitress. By the time she finishes the question Tracker is the only one who can still distinguish the drone from clouds and sky.

“One of the
many
eyes that will be watching you,” the host informs the group. His voice is rich with implication, though the truth is there’s only the one drone and since the contestants will be under tree cover most of the time, it’s being used primarily for establishing shots.