The door of the small market hangs cracked and crooked in the frame. I step through warily, knowing I’m not the first to seek sustenance here. Just inside the entrance, a carton of eggs is overturned. The sulfurous innards of a dozen Humpty Dumptys cake the floor, long since past possible reassembly. The rest of the shop has not fared much better than the eggs. The shelves are mostly empty and several displays have been toppled. I note the camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling without making eye contact with the lens, and when I step forward a ghastly stench rushes me. I smell the rotten produce, the spoiled dairy in the open, unpowered coolers. I notice another smell too, one I do my best to ignore as I begin my search.
Between two aisles, a bag of corn chips has spilled onto the floor. A footprint has reduced much of the pile to crumbs. A large footprint with a pronounced heel. A work boot, I think. It belongs to one of the men—not Cooper, who claims not to have worn boots in years. Julio, perhaps. I crouch and pick up one of the corn chips. If it’s fresh, I’ll know he was here recently. I crush the chip between my fingers. It’s stale. It tells me nothing.
I consider eating the chip. I haven’t eaten since the cabin, since before I was sick, and that was days ago, maybe a week, I don’t know. I’m so hungry I can’t feel it anymore. I’m so hungry I can’t fully control my legs. I keep surprising myself by tripping over rocks and roots. I see them and I try to step over them, I think I am stepping over them, but then my toe catches and I stumble.
I think of the camera, of my husband watching me scavenge corn chips off a country market floor. It’s not worth it. They must have left me something else. I drop the chip and heave myself upright. The motion makes my head swim. I pause, regaining equilibrium, then walk by the produce stand. Dozens of rotted bananas and deflated brown orbs—apples?—watch me pass. I know hunger now, and it angers me that they’ve allowed so much to go to waste for the sake of atmosphere.
Finally, a glint under a bottom shelf. I ease to my hands and knees; the compass hanging from a string around my neck falls down and taps the floor. I tuck the compass between my shirt and sports bra, noticing as I do that the dot of sky-blue paint at its bottom edge has been rubbed nearly to nonexistence. I’m so tired I have to remind myself that this isn’t significant; all it means is that the intern assigned the job was given cheap paint. I lean down farther. Under the shelf is a jar of peanut butter. A small crack trickles from beneath the lid to disappear behind the label, just above the O in ORGANIC. I run my finger over the mark in the glass but can’t feel the break. Of course they left me peanut butter; I hate peanut butter. I slip the jar into my pack.
The shop’s standing coolers are empty, save for a few cans of beer, which I don’t take. I’d hoped for water. One of my Nalgenes is empty and the second sloshes at my side only a quarter full. Maybe some of the others got here before me; they remembered to boil all their water and didn’t lose days vomiting alone in the woods. Whoever left that footprint—Julio or Elliot or the geeky Asian kid whose name I can’t remember—got the quality goods, and this is what it means to be last: a cracked jar of peanut butter.
The only area of the shop I haven’t searched is behind the register. I know what’s waiting for me there. The smell I don’t admit smelling: spoiled meat and animal excrement, a hint of formaldehyde. The smell they want me to think is human death.
I pull my shirt over my nose and approach the cash register. Their prop is where I expect it to be, faceup on the floor behind the counter. They’ve dressed this one in a flannel shirt and cargo pants. Breathing through my shirt, I step behind the counter and over the prop. The motion disturbs a collection of flies that buzz up toward me. I feel their feet, their wings, their antennae twitching against my skin. My pulse quickens and my breath seeps upward, fogging the bottom edges of my glasses.
Just another Challenge. That’s all this is.
I see a bag of trail mix on the floor. I grab it and retreat, through the flies, over the prop. Out the cracked and crooked door, which mocks my exit with applause.
“Fuck you,” I whisper, hands on knees, eyes closed. They will have to censor this, but fuck them too. Cursing isn’t against the rules.
I feel the wind but can’t smell the woods. All I smell is the prop’s stench. The first one didn’t smell so bad, but it was fresh. This one and the one I found in the cabin, they’re supposed to seem older, I think. I blow my nose roughly into the breeze, but I know it will be hours before the odor leaves me. I can’t eat until it does, no matter how badly my body needs calories. I need to move on, to get some distance between me and here. Find water. I tell myself this, but it’s a different thought that’s sticking—the cabin and their second prop. The doll swathed in blue. This phase’s first true Challenge has become a gelatinous memory that stains my awareness, always.
Don’t think about it, I tell myself. The command is futile. For several more minutes I hear the doll’s cries in the wind. And then—enough—I unfurl and add the bag of trail mix to my black backpack. I shoulder the pack and clean my glasses with the hem of the microfiber long-sleeved tee I wear under my jacket.
Then I do what I’ve done nearly every day since Wallaby left: I walk and I watch for Clues. Wallaby, because none of the cameramen would tell us their names and his early-morning appearances reminded me of a camping trip I took in Australia years ago. My second day out, I woke in a national park by Jervis Bay to find a gray-brown swamp wallaby sitting in the grass, staring at me. No more than five feet between us. I’d slept with my contact lenses in; my eyes itched, but I could see the light stripe of fur across the wallaby’s cheek clearly. He was beautiful. The look I received in return for my awe felt appraising and imposing, but also entirely impersonal: a camera’s lens.
The analogy is imperfect, of course. The human Wallaby isn’t nearly as handsome as the marsupial, and a nearby camper waking up and shouting “Kangaroo!” wouldn’t send him hopping away. But Wallaby was always the first to arrive, the first to aim his camera at my face and not say good morning. And when they left us at the group camp it was he who reappeared just long enough to extract each desired confessional. Dependable as the sunrise until the third day of this Solo Challenge, when the sun rose without him, traversed the sky without him, set without him—and I thought, It was bound to happen eventually. The contract said we’d be on our own for long stretches, monitored remotely. I was prepared for this, looking forward to it, even—being watched and judged discreetly instead of overtly. Now I’d be thrilled to hear Wallaby come tromping through the woods.
I’m so tired of being alone.