THE SURVIVALIST

Every Friday night it was a routine for Reid to go to the supermarket, stock up on food, go home and cook schizophrenic and undisciplined meals with no sense of restraint. If he wanted to roast 3 turkeys, he would roast 3 turkeys, and what was left on Sunday night would be dumped into the trash. Leftover cakes, stews, roasts, soups would all be wasted by Monday's arrival. It was therapeutic, Reid felt, to cook and cook to one's content. Alone, or with an imaginary dining table with 10 witty guests enjoying themselves. It didn't matter. So Reid cooked, and ate, and felt a good measure of love for himself. "Consolation cooking for the lonely," he once called it. These days he referred to the ritual quite simply as "me time". It was 7pm on the last Friday of October when he had first seen the program. He had turned on the television to fill the silence as he prepped a mirepoix. The show boasted no original concept, but there was something askew about it that sucked him in. A man was surviving out in the desert, foraging for scorpions and water. His nights were spent resting near a small fire and playing a small harmonica. At first, he addressed the camera, and outlined his strategy for surviving alone in the desert. But as time had passed, he had grown weary and pessimistic, and barely addressed the camera at all. It was at this point that Reid began paying attention. There were no commercial breaks or tricks of editing. There was no narrative structure, or even a reference point for a beginning or an end. There was only the solitude and hunger. Eventually, the man's hair grew longer, and his clothes grew dirtier and more tattered. The camera continued rolling, but there were some spells where the footage seemed to be fast forwarding, as the man rocked back and forth, growing more and more grizzled within a matter of minutes. Reid checked the network guide and scoured the web for any information on the show. He called the cable company and they told him that channel 934 did not exist. Strange, he thought, and resumed stirring his venison stew. By midnight on Saturday, most of the stew was gone, and Reid had begun cooking a pot roast. The television had remained on all day and night, and the man withered and hummed and rocked and shivered and crawled and scavenged and whimpered and prayed and drank and slept and defecated and scavenged some more. Then finally, on Sunday night, as Reid had been dumping the contents of his pyrex tray down the food disposal, he heard someone calling his name. When he turned around it was the uncouth man in the television. He had been leaning against a rock for most of the evening, humming to himself, but now he was on all fours and was crawling toward the camera. "Reid," he said softly. He had the voice of an owl, with a depth as cold and infinite as the desert night. "Reid," he said, and looked directly through the screen to Reid himself. "Are you still there?" he asked. "Are you still watching? Are you surviving? Are you happy?"