Page 11 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

Things I have done incorrectly today: the tarp, the boughs, the amount of water I drank, the amount of water I did not drink, the fire, which I did not build, and the fish, which I did not catch, and the pot, which I filled from the creek at a spot below where the trail crosses it, and which he took from me, and emptied, and refilled forty yards upstream without a single word of commentary.

That is a bad session.

The rain finds the seam of my rain shell at the shoulder, which is where all rain shells fail, and starts a cold line down my collarbone. My socks went wet at hour two and they are going to stay wet for twenty days.

Eight feet away, Ghorlan lies on his back with his boots out past the eave in the rain, because he does not fit under the tarp lengthwise, and he has arranged himself so that the part of him getting wet is the part with boots on it. He has been asleep since roughly four minutes after he lay down.

Big people sleep like that. Nine years at tables taught me that the ones who sleep like that are the ones who never had to guess whether the room was safe.

Here is what I have learned today and I would like it carved somewhere.

Lying about competence does not produce competence.

I read four forums. I ran thirty hours of video. I could pass a written exam on cordage and I could not put a roof over my own head, and the gap between the two turns out to be the entire thing. Every bit of it is in the hands. The hands do not care what you have read.

At tables it worked because at tables the lie was the product. Here the lie is a check I wrote against an account that does not exist, and the mountain is going to cash it every single day for three weeks, in front of a camera, at four in the morning, in the rain.

I do not sleep. I do a thing adjacent to sleeping.

Morning is gray on gray. Ghorlan is up before there is light to be up in, and there is a fire going, and water boiling in the dented pot, and he hands me the pot lid with two inches of hot water in it and says, "Drink that first. Before anything."

"It's water."

"It is warm. You are going to spend all day making heat. Start with some you did not have to make."

I drink it. It is the best thing that has ever happened to me. It goes down and lands somewhere behind my sternum and spreads out sideways, and my shoulders come down off my ears for the first time since the shuttle, and I make a sound that I would very much like back.

Ghorlan turns a split of cedar over in the coals and says nothing at all about the sound.

At eight, Neve comes up the hill.

She has a folding stool now, and a small waterproof case, and Bear behind her with the rig. She sets up eleven feet from the tarp, angles a bounce board that does nothing whatsoever in this light, and holds up a card.

FIRST CONFESSIONAL. SIT ON THE ROCK. LOOK AT ME, NOT THE LENS.

I sit on the rock.

The rock is cold. My rain shell has stopped being a rain shell and is now a wet shirt with ambitions. Somewhere down the hill there is a stream making the specific noise of a stream, and Bear's red light comes on, and Neve pulls a card from the middle of the stack.

She holds it up at chest height, the way she does, and she holds it steady, and she looks at me over the top edge of it with a face that has been carefully emptied out.

The card says:

Describe how it feels to be carried.

And the whole thing arrives at once.

It arrives the way a light comes on in a room you have been standing in for an hour.

There is no version of this where I get to be a competitor. They did not cast me as a competitor. They cast a five foot four poker player with brand new orange gear and a good story about an elk, and they put her with the largest contestant in the history of the format, and then they wrote her one card before day two was finished, and the card is not a question. The card is a script.

Somebody drafted that. Somebody typed it, and read it back, and liked it enough to laminate it.

Day two, that thing goes out to four million people. That night, four million people vote. Day three, whatever they voted arrives on this mountain in the form of a pot or the absence of one.

I am not in a survival competition. I am in a story, the story has already been written, and the story has teeth and a delivery schedule.

Rain runs off the edge of the card.