The Tetradome Run

by Spencer Baum

  I missed the deadline to register for freshman orientation. Had I not missed that deadline, I would have been in a regular orientation rather than the make-up session for everyone who missed.

  Had I not been in the make-up session, I wouldn’t have met her.

  She sat next to me in the front row of the lecture hall on the first day of the make-up session. Right away, I noticed an air about her, a confidence that suggested she had her shit together. I think I was drawn to her because she was a reminder that I was in college now and my peers were adults.

  She smelled like roses. Later I’d learn that she made her own perfumes. She wore a T-shirt with a sunflower on it. And sandals that showed off her toenails. Her toenails were painted in yellow and black stripes, like little bumblebees.

  I could have ignored all of this.

  I could have kept my big mouth shut.

  But I liked that she had a unifying theme to her outfit. Flowery perfume, flowery shirt, little bees for toes.

  She seemed like someone I might like to have as a friend, and I was excited at the prospect of new friends and new beginnings. I was starting college. Isn’t everyone excited about new beginnings when they start college?

  “I like your toenails,” I said.

  Before she answered, she wiggled her toes.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  And then it happened. The personal historical accident that forever altered my course. The little moment of nothing that, in time, would turn into a giant something.

  The girl put out her hand and said, “My name’s Sunday, but everyone calls me Sunny.”

  CHAPTER 7

  They took Jenna to a production studio where she had to sit for an interview with Chad Holiday. They told her the interview would air during pregame before the Semifinal race.

  Chad asked her if she was ready to confess to the crime for which she was convicted. She said no. Then he asked her about her brother, hammered her about the death of her brother, the suicide of her brother, until she cried for the cameras.

  The next day they made her return to training.

  There were 144 contestants in training before the Qualifier. Now there were 36. The difference in volume between this week’s training sessions and last was itself a powerful motivator to run. The emptiness of the room, the memory of the bustle of activity now gone, was a reminder that the next race would kill even more of them.

  Jenna knew their names now. She knew how to categorize them. In her mind, she sorted the 36 Semifinalists into groups.

  One group, the saddest group, might be called “Dead Meat.”

  Ian was in this group. A man with a broad chest and a youthful face, Ian had come out of the Qualifier with a bum ankle that was certain to kill him in the Semis.

  Wes too was Dead Meat. A muscle-headed beefcake, Wes was someone who probably owned his former prison yard, but was barely hanging on now that the slowest competitors were already dead. On the obstacle courses, success was a balance between speed, stamina, and strength, and Wes had heft that made him slow.

  Merlin, one of the older men in the group, had seemed strong when there were 144 contestants, but seemed slow and weak now that there were 36. Quincy too.

  Federico—a weak upper body made some obstacles impossible for him to conquer.

  Kitaran—the guy was good at the start of the day, but slow as molasses by the end.

  Robin...well, Robin was a strange one. She had the physique of a runner, and some days she did fine. One time she finished a training run in second place. Other times, though, she showed up to training with the energy of a sloth and a death-might-be-better-than-this attitude.

  One notch above the “Dead Meat” group was a collection of contestants Jenna thought of as, “Quiet But Dangerous.” This group, which included Harold, Victoria, Amos, and Jurrigan, and might well have included Jenna too (in the eyes of her competitors), rarely won the obstacle runs, but never lost.

  Jenna was certain that some of the Quiet But Dangerous would make it out of the Semis, as would most of the group she thought of as, “Cocky Alpha Dogs Who Want to Intimidate Us.”

  Solomon, Malcolm, Jordan, Marlo, and Evan. These were the alphas. These were the men who, in another life, might have been athletes. Men who were tragic stories of incredible potential that got crushed in a system that sent far too many young men to jail.

  Nathan Cavanaugh, too, was in this group, even though he wasn’t as brash as the others. Nathan Cavanaugh, the only criminal in the bunch whose celebrity rivaled Jenna’s, had a sinewy collection of tightly woven muscles beneath his infamous blanket of tattoos.

  Nathan’s infamy—he was, according to some opinion polls, the most hated man in America—made him a pariah in the training center, but his ruthlessness on the practice course earned him respect. It was fair to say that everyone in the complex feared Nathan Cavanaugh, not only for what he had done, but for how he carried himself. Nathan’s searing green eyes perpetually held the distant gaze of a murderer.

  Or rather, a mass murderer. As far as Jenna knew, no one in the Semifinal group had come to prison with a body count as large as Nathan’s.

  They trained on Obstacle Course 3, the military course, on Thursday. They did sprints and bodyweight training on Friday. On Saturday they did time trials on Obstacle Courses 4 and 5.

  Obstacle Course 5, which ended with a brutal two-story climbing rope, was Jenna’s least favorite of all the courses.

  On Monday morning, a week removed from the Qualifier, guards led all thirty-six contestants to a part of the complex they had never been to before. Through a narrow hallway, across an outdoor courtyard, the guards took them to a steel door marked “Obstacle Course 7” where Margo, the head trainer at the complex, was waiting for them.

  “Come on, come on, get in close so you can hear,” Margo said.

  Margo was a middle-aged woman with long hair, a loud voice, and a penchant for coachly clichés and colorful nicknames.

  Jenna, a head shorter than many of her competitors, was quick to work her way to the front of the crowd so she could see.

  “Can everyone hear me?” Margo yelled.

  It was the kind of question that was sure to get a snarky reply in a traditional prison, but in the Tetradome complex, where employees had clickers hanging round their necks and prisoners had tiny zappers implanted in their spines, the question got modest, respectful utters of ascent.

  “If you can’t hear me, get someplace where you can,” Margo said. “I’ve got a spiel to give this morning, and I never give a spiel more than once.”

  Margo smiled, amused at her use of the word “spiel.” None of the prisoners smiled back.

  “Everyone’s so serious this morning,” Margo said. “That’s good. You need to be serious. Those of you who have watched the show know that everything changes now that the qualifying races are over. Your first run in the Tetradome was a simple weeding out process. We got rid of the slow and the weak. But now it gets interesting. Now being fast and strong won’t be enough to get you to the next round. On Sunday night, when you hit the Semifinal course, it will be unlike anything you’ve seen before. The producers want you competent and competitive on the live course, so we’re doing a simulation today. When I open the door behind me, you will see an entirely new kind of course, one that mimics the structure of the course you’ll run in the Semifinals.”

  Jenna started shifting her weight back and forth from one foot to the other, warming up her legs.

  “Some parts of this new training course will be familiar to you,” Margo went on. “There are walls to climb, pedestals to jump over, and water pits for those of you unfortunate enough to take a tumble. But this new course is fundamentally different than the others we have used to train you, because the live course you’ll face on Sunday is fundamentally different too. I’m going to send all of you onto the training course at once. The first twelve to make it to the end get to go back to the cellblocks unscathed. The rest of you get a jolt from my cl
icker to remind you what’s at stake on Sunday.”

  Robin was standing next to Jenna. She shivered when Margo mentioned her clicker.

  “When you get on the course you’ll find six doors and six keys,” Margo said. “I don’t need to tell you which keys work with which doors. You’ll figure it out.”

  Margo pulled a keycard out of her pocket.

  “I’m about to open the door,” she said. “When I do, I want you to walk into the room in an orderly fashion and take a good look at the course. We’ll start the race after everyone’s inside.”

  CHAPTER 8

  My Last Purple Hippo Ice Cream Latte

  Excerpted from A Victim of Circumstance: The Memoir of Jenna Duvall

  My compliment on her bumblebee toenails opened the door and Sunny came all the way through. Sunny and I sat next to each other for every session of Orientation, and when Orientation was over, Sunny asked if I wanted to go “get a coffee or something.”

  I said yes, and suggested a place just down the street.

  Umberto’s on Harvard Drive, a staple in the Albuquerque of my childhood, home of the Purple Hippo Ice Cream Latte.

  I ordered a Purple Hippo that day. I used to always order the Purple Hippo at Umberto’s. I never once felt self-conscious about my love of the Purple Hippo at Umberto’s until that first visit with Sunny. Why would I? It’s just a colorful ice cream coffee drink.

  But somehow, Sunny made me feel childish for ordering it. And here’s the thing—it wasn’t aggressive or even overt, what Sunny did. She didn’t say anything at all about my choice of beverage.

  She just wasn’t interested in it.

  Sunny’s skills of manipulation, of persuasion, are unmatched in anyone I’ve ever met. In the case of the Purple Hippo drink it was the way she reacted when I asked if she wanted to try it. “Okay, sure,” she said, and then, after a sip, “Not for me but thanks for letting me have a taste.”

  And that was it. My first new friend in college was entirely unaffected by my five-dollar colorful coffee drink. More than unaffected. Unimpressed. Disinterested. In the way I might expect a serious professional grown-up to be disinterested in a colorful ice cream coffee.

  Sunny drank a cappuccino that day. In time, Sunny’s drinks would become my drinks. In time, Sunny’s opinions would become my opinions.

  We didn’t talk about the Redemption Act or The Tetradome Run on that first visit to Umberto’s. We had a much more pedestrian, get-to-know-each-other conversation, the kind that’s easy to have when you’re a freshman in college and questions of identity are easily answered by talking about your major.

  Within weeks we would be talking deeply about politics, religion, philosophy, sex, and everything else.

  Skip ahead a few days with me. Now it’s Friday night. Albuquerque Jazz Orchestra is giving a free concert in a park near campus. Lots of Hillerman students are there. Deborah, Anthony, Danielle…Blue Brigaders all, though I didn’t know that at first. Sunny introduced me to them, and then she said, “Jenna’s cool, she gets it.”

  Finding this to be a curious sentence, I said, “Gets what?”

  And Sunny said, “The Redemption Act. You’re one of the good guys.”

  I’ll pause here to tell you that before college I wasn’t a political animal at all. Before college I was that girl—you probably had one in your high school too—who was so into her own things she had no interest in pop culture or politics. To me, The Redemption Act was a distant concept, something to talk about in a history class and then forget about in favor of more immediate concerns. Sure, I caught glimpses of people’s political arguments on Facebook, but only as I was scrolling past. I’d been to a Tetradome Run watch party too, during senior year, but Rudy was at that party, and we ducked off to a bedroom together before the race even started.

  And if you asked me in those days for my opinion on The Tetradome Run, well…it’s complicated.

  Did I like the show? No, I can say with certainty that I didn’t. Too violent for my tastes. Too sensational.

  But there had to be some order in society, didn’t there? Some punishment for criminals? Like the show or not, there was no denying that violent criminals needed to be punished, and that violent crime in America had plummeted since the passage of The Redemption Act.

  Will you freak out if I tell you this kind of law and order argument was my Grandma’s position on the show? Will you freak out if I tell you that Jenna Duvall, the Albuquerque Assassin, grew up in a pro-domer household?

  Not strongly pro-domer. Not like we were activists or something. We didn’t really talk about the Redemption Act, but I knew full well what Grandma believed. What mom believed too.

  Life before The Redemption Act was chaos. I can hear Grandma saying those words. My grandma, like your grandma, grew up in America as it was before the Redemption Act. My grandma viewed the America of her youth as a broken, lawless society on the edge of collapse.

  If I was being truthful about who I was that night at the park, I would have said something to Sunny and her friends that, at least partially, defended my grandmother’s views. A sentence that began with the words, I don’t know, or, I haven’t really thought much about it, but there are two sides to every story…

  But were Grandma’s opinions really my opinions? This is why it’s so hard, isn’t it? This is why college can be such a mindfuck. You spend 18 years as a kid under the purview of your elders and then, all of a sudden, you’re surrounded by a dozen would-be adults who are asking you to state an opinion that will quickly become a claim on your whole identity.

  Fucking politics. I can imagine some of you reading this now, some of you antidomers who, whatever else you think of me, have always admired that I’m on the right side of history regarding the Redemption Act. Does it make you antidomers angry that I’m hesitant to condemn my grandma’s pro-domer views?

  Because, let me tell you, Grandma’s views on public execution were just the tip of the iceberg.

  What if I told you my grandma’s views on gay marriage were downright Jurassic, but she’s still my hero? Or that my grandma, who grew up and spent most of her life in an ultra-white Colorado mining town, was absolutely flummoxed by multiracial Albuquerque, and still I admire her? Does it upset you when I say Grandma could be downright fearful of people who didn’t look like the tightknit white Baptist community of her youth, and still I love her to pieces and think she’s the most amazing person I’ve ever met?

  Is it possible for a person to be in favor of The Redemption Act, public execution, and The Tetradome Run, and still be a good person?

  I think it is. I think it has to be. Every year hundreds of millions tune into that god-forsaken show. Yes, there are bad people who watch The Tetradome Run, but there are also people who love their children, who take care of their neighbors, who give to charity, who volunteer at the food bank, who give blankets to the homeless (Grandma did all of these). Is The Tetradome Run an ethically repugnant ritual that appeals to the baser parts of human nature? Yes, I believe it is. Does it demonstrate a weakness of character when you give in and indulge your primal desire to watch that horrid spectacle? Yes, I believe it does.

  But here’s the thing: The Tetradome Run isn’t the only horrid spectacle that speaks so profoundly to our inner barbarian that we can’t help but watch. Cable news does it too. So do the doom loops on Twitter. Some of this is Rudy talking now, and I haven’t even gotten to Rudy in this memoir yet—there’s so much to write and so little time to write it! But Rudy’s voice can be my voice here, because God dammit he was right when he talked about mass media. Rudy said the reason mass media became a giant outrage machine is because we humans love to be outraged. We want to condemn our political enemies as evil, we want to gang up into huge shaming mobs that move effortlessly from one target to another, and we want to watch the bad guys get torn to shreds on live television. Whenever Rudy saw me getting too tight with the Blue Brigade, he’d remind me that outrage is a seductive, highly addictive drug tha
t our screens deliver to us in unlimited doses. He’d tell me The Tetradome Run is worthy of condemnation, but maybe not of ceaseless, life-consuming rage.

  The life-consuming part was Rudy’s big problem with the Blue Brigade, and the more removed I get from my Brigade days, the more I see that Rudy was right. In the Blue Brigade, we told ourselves we were tireless advocates for justice, but really we were outrage-addicted rich kids who needed villains to fight.

  You can make a lot of meaning in an otherwise meaningless life if you find some good villains to fight.

  That night at the park, I should have spoken my truth to Sunny. She told her friends that I got it, and even then, I knew that to get it meant to name The Redemption Act as pure evil.

  To validate the holy war Sunny and her friends were already fighting.

  I should have spoken to Sunny about the Redemption Act and The Tetradome Run with all the reflection and nuance I tried to give you in the previous pages.

  But I didn’t.

  “Yeah, the Redemption Act sucks,” I said.

  “Totally,” Danielle agreed.

  “It’s evil,” said Anthony.

  “Glad to know you’re one of the good guys,” said Deborah.

  “Damn straight,” said Sunny. “Jenna is beautiful inside and out.”

  And so it went. We had established a pattern. To make Sunny happy, I would deny who I was. I would drink unsweetened espresso concoctions at Umberto’s and I would be a hardcore antidomer who fought The Tetradome Run with the dedication of a zealot. I would make some tweaks to the Jenna I had always been in order to be the Jenna that Sunny wanted me to be.

  CHAPTER 9

  The training course was divided into six sections, each separated from the others with a brightly-colored door.

  A green door separated ascending pedestals from the ropes course. At the end of the ropes, contestants had to climb a series of platforms and pass through a blue door. On the other side of the blue door was a sequence of climbing walls, and then a red door leading to the next obstacle.