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By Root 276 0

if you can fill a trash can with spring water and stash all batteries and flashlights in a “go bag,” she is concerned. The coming blast will change her mind. In Game Theory, a professor in sandals and an Izod polo sits cross-legged on the end of the desk. He has weirdly hairy calves, where your own father’s are moon-bald. He explains the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Nash Equilibrium, and payoff matrixes. You perch in the front row and make charts you only half understand. Before long, this professor, the master of scenarios and self-interest, becomes a kind of father figure, since your own father doesn’t get games—he likes only the Indy 500 and Flight Simulator, in which you can’t even shoot things. You wear your own Izod polo shirts in secret allegiance. You learn that everything is economics—every choice a matter of incentives and rewards. You think that you’ve never really made any choice, of any consequence, but it’s about time. On the drive home, you tell your mom (in barely veiled terms) about your crush on the prof. This is, in a way, the choice. You are thirteen.

She asks, “If he’s so smart, why is he teaching at a community college?”

You can’t answer. But your zeal is fervent and true. When the grades come in, you receive two A+s. Never again will you feel such a sense of achievement. You write, on beloved graph paper, a winsome letter to the professor, confessing your deep like. He never writes back.

In retrospect, it’s predictable that Survivor would hook you. It is everything you’d studied that leafy Jersey summer, but playing out like a devilish Gilligan’s Island or a tropical And Then There Were None, the Agatha Christie novel you once adored as a book on tape: Ten murderers get invited to an island off the coast of England and are killed, one by one, by an unseen murderer. Of course no one dies on Survivor, but getting voted off the island is a kind of fame-death, a flame-out for millennial culture: proof that your persona doesn’t “work.”

It seems, too, that that long-ago professor has made his way to Pulau Tiga. While Rudy and Sean and Kelly scrape coconut pulp and stare like zombies at the fire, Richard Hatch is the gamer, a schemer gone to seed, and his video diaries teem with private significance. Hatch is creating Survivor’s subtext and you want in. By studying the credit sequence of the show, you discover Survivor’s tell: On the day of the marooning Hatch was clean-shaven, but the opening credits clearly show him with an almost-full beard—easily weeks of growth. He would last. (The producers have since learned to shoot all the character intro montages on the first day.) And while the culture rallies against the easy villain, you find yourself improbably, involuntarily, swept away. You don’t even have a thing for bad boys. By this point you’re out of the closet and fairly well adjusted, with a favorite bar, a bottle of massage oil, and one or two cool shirts. Yes, you are a little bit of a player, and a player should be above a television fixation. And yet, there he is, on Wednesday nights, bare-ass naked on the shore, and all you can think about is what’s behind the pixilated smear of decency.

Look, you always had a thing for Poseidon, for the Norse gods in the monster manual. And Hatch is Poseidon, burly and unashamed. The one that could spear fish. The one with the dolphin tattoo, which suggests both tribal edge and New Age cuddle-fests. You study him closer than you have ever studied anything on television. You con CBS for videotapes of all the episodes and watch them twice. You find the e-mail address for Hatch’s consulting business in Rhode Island and gin up an excuse to write him. You know by now how this will end, the zero sum of an unanswered letter. Still, still…

A friend of a friend is traveling the world, working as a producer on a new television show, a “Survivor killer.” A race around the world, with two-person teams. That’s enough for you to convince your best friend, Josh, to make an audition tape. In the park next to your Brooklyn apartment, you sail down the granite stairs in bread