Page 40 of The Compound

Thirteen

Now that we were no longer obligated to sleep next to someone, we scattered farther still across the compound.

I saw Becca very rarely, perhaps once every couple of days.

Tom kept mostly to the gray room. Though I saw little of them, their presence was like wasps buzzing at the corner of my vision: I couldn’t relax until they were gone.

Once or twice I complained to Sam that I wished that they would just leave, and he looked bemused.

“Don’t you reckon they’re thinking the same about us? ” he said.

One day, not long after Candice had left, Sam and I were walking along the southern side of the grounds. The barrier between the desert and our land was still intact there, and I liked to think that lent an air of civility to the area.

“What are you thinking about?” Sam askedme.

I had been thinking of my mother, which had then made me recall a girl named Trish from a long-ago season of the show.

Everyone loved Trish: she was a fantastic dancer and would sometimes get the other residents to put on performances in the evenings to keep them all occupied.

She was funny, too, and liked to play pranks on the boys.

After maybe three months in the compound she became increasingly withdrawn, until it got to the point where she spent her days crying, not leaving the bedroom and not speaking to others.

Usually, in a case such as that, the big screen would frequently suggest banishments, hoping to get rid of the “problem” resident.

But none of the residents wanted to vote her out, and those watching at home didn’t want her to go either.

Even though she was a wreck, she had once been the undeniable star of the show: there are some people who are so compulsively watchable that you feel yourself surrender some small bit of your personality to them.

I remember how I used to try to copy her easy laugh, the delighted boom ofit.

To try to remedy the situation, Trish was offered a previously unheard-of reward on her little screen: a phone call with anyone she wanted.

She called her sister and spoke to her for hours.

She cried again when she had to give the phone back, but afterward she was much more composed; she participated in tasks and interacted with the others.

She tried to be fun and engaging again, but you could see the strain, and it didn’t make for good viewing. She was gone a week later.

I wondered what it would take for me to be offered a call with my mother.

We didn’t even get on, but I found myself thinking about it constantly, how I would give anything to speak to her, even for just a few minutes.

But Trish had been given the opportunity to restore herself because she had previously been vivacious and interesting.

There was no former glory for me to return to. I was now as I always had been.

“Just thinking about my mother,” I said.

Sam stopped me abruptly. He put his hand to his face in astonishment. “I forgot. We can talk about our personal lives now.”

I smiled at him. The change in rules wasn’t particularly interesting to me. I knew Sam well enough. “Anything I should know?”

We walked in silence for a few moments. “I’d prefer to tell you on the outside,” he said, surprisingme.

“Oh,” I said. We kept our pace slow. I saw him glance at me. “So it’s bad.”

“No, nothing bad. I just think it’ll be easier to be real when we’re out.”

“What do you mean ‘real’? Like you’re not being real with me now?”

“No, I mean—I don’t know.”

“You should know, Sam.”

“I’m being real with you, Lily. But, up to a point.”

“Up to a point ?”

“You know what I mean. It’s not possible to be completely real in here.”

It was almost word for word what Ryan had said to me. It confused me no less when Sam said it. Of course, the situation was unique, but did we not feel as deeply here as on the outside? The situation was constructed, a production—but were we not real?

“So you’ve been faking how you feel about me?”

“No, Lily, no. But, this—the way we communicate, the way we got to know each other—that hasn’t been real. I didn’t know what your second name was for a month. And now that we can talk without punishment, I don’t know if I want to. I want to talk on the outside, when we’re not on display.”

I never even thought about the viewers anymore.

Obviously, I knew in some distant way that they were there, watching.

When you were beautiful, really beautiful, you moved through your day with an exquisite self-consciousness.

Now that I didn’t put an effort in, and wore my dressing gown every day, that feeling was dulled.

It seemed absurd, in a way, that people could be watchingme.

“It’ll be easier to talk when the others are gone,” I said.

We walked on in silence for a brief while.

I could almost feel him thinking deeply.

Sam was the type to turn over conversations in his mind, to consider things from different perspectives.

It was one of the qualities I liked most about him, and one of the things that made me feel inadequate.

I lived in constant fear that he’d find out how shallow I was, how little time I spent considering the ways of the world.

“Lily,” he said suddenly. “I’ve been putting this off. I don’t know why. I really don’t. But I think we should go. Today. Let’s just pack our bags and go.”

I tried not to react. “Don’t be ridiculous, Sam—why would we leave now?”

“Because it’s all fucking—fake! How can you go on living like this? Pretending that everything is okay?”

“Isn’t that what we were doing before, on the outside?”

“But on the outside it was real! It mattered what we did—we weren’t just…entertainment! There’s no point,” he said. “No point in being here.”

I didn’t want to say it out loud: the prizes. “We’ve almost won,” I said.

“Won what? What is there here that you want?”

“Look, I know you think that I’m being superficial—but the better we do here, the easier things will be on the outside.

We’ll have more prizes, more opportunities, more fame…

” I paused, trying to decide how much I wanted to admit to.

“But even besides that, why would you want to go back to that, what we had before?”

I could see that my words hadn’t fully landed with him. He didn’t get it. He was silent again, for a long time. We were walking very slowly now.

“Ask me something,” I said. “It’ll make it easier.”

I thought he wasn’t going to say anything, and we’d remain locked in silence for the evening. But he said, “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“No,” I said. “I’m an only child. What about you?”

“I had two brothers. They’re both dead.”

He still wasn’t looking at me. In the sky, birds idly circled.

“I’m so sorry, Sam. What happened?”

“They died in the war,” he said. “My father was a veteran, and when the war broke out, he encouraged us to enlist. My brothers died within a year, two months apart. My father still wanted me to join up, even after we’d buried them both.

I wouldn’t. We fought about it—we never agreed on politics—and eventually I moved to a different city, and we cut ties.

I got a job that I had thought that I wanted, and I met new people, and explored a new place, but I was terribly, horribly lonely.

I hated my life, but I didn’t know how to fix it. It felt like it was out of my hands.”

I looked at him. Wasn’t that how I felt, too?

“I didn’t want to go home, but I hated where I was. I went back and forth constantly in my head between the two places, until it felt like I was nowhere at all.”

“What did you decide to do?”

“I came here,” he said.

“Oh,” I said.

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Why did you decide to do it?”

“Why? Because everyone wants to do it, and I got the chance.”

“And?”

I knew that this was my opportunity to make Sam understand, to try to get him to stay. I struggled for words, struggled with the enormity ofit.

“I wanted to be here because…there’s nothing else for me.

I’ve tried that life—meaningless job, no money, feeling tired all the time— and I’m not going to get anything from any of that.

It won’t bring me any happiness. I got a gold necklace in here—look at it.

Real gold! Just from talking to you! Do you know how long I’d have to work to earn something like that?

And who wants to work anyway? If you make it to the end here, you can have whatever you want, and you don’t have to deal with all the other bullshit…

I don’t have any real talent. I’m pretty, but not the prettiest. I’m not smart.

I’ll never have a better opportunity than this. ”

I scanned his face to see if he understood. My heart was beating so hard it bordered on being painful. He was facing away, toward the desert.

“You got a reward for talking to me?”

“A long time ago.”

“When? Which conversation?”

I felt a sort of heaviness settle over me. All of my inadequacies were rushing to the surface, all of my faults that I had tried to hide were now being revealed. “Near the beginning. When I tried to guess your job, and we argued.”

He nodded. When he turned, his face was grave.

“What are we doing here anymore?”

“You mean—us?”

“No, not ‘us’ as in our relationship. I mean why are we still here? Why are we still living here?”

“We’re waiting for the others to go.”

“Do you really think Tom will go?” I knew that Tom wouldn’t give up easily, but that was a problem I could deal with later.

“If we left, things would be different with us. I’d never see you.

” I didn’t like to draw his attention to our life outside, where he would surely realize that it made no sense for us to be together.

Here we were limited by the circumstances the producers placed us in.

There, I was limited by my own lack of ability, my lack of drive and general feeling of apathy.