Item #8

I don't remember what everyone was chanting, but I know they were chanting something. It happened suddenly, amidst the chaos that is Judgment Day/Mother's Day. Everyone somehow knew that someone was doing something that needed to be watched. An ad hoc ring of people formed around someone - who? I can only see dark hair. Then he stands on a chair. It's Phil. Phil, a leader of the Max Palevsky Scav team and a kid I vaguely knew from high school. In college, we'd gotten to know each other better, and I had discovered him to be a future politician, as I then thought I was, complete with a built-in repressor, which closes one's mouth before saying something stupid, pushes one away from potentially scandalous situations, and screens every interaction for future consequences.

What was Phil doing, standing on a chair on Judgment Day, smiling for the crowd? There was a judge by his feet, holding a clipboard, which meant that he was judging some item. Phil was about to complete an item. He held up his hand, and in it a small blob of beige and sickly-white.

"What is that?" I asked whoever was next to me.

"A twinkie."

"A twinkie? What's he doing with a twinkie?"

"It's the umbilical cord, item #8."

I looked at the person who was speaking, a person I didn't know. I doubt it was hard to read my expression of shock, and they soon answered my unasked question: "Yeah," they said, "he's eating his own umbilical cord."

The chanting continued. Phil seemed to be relishing the attention. The only way to go through with it, I guess, to get high on the crowd. He would later blame it on lack of sleep, on still being hungover from the huge Scav party on Friday night, two days before. The twinkie was raised even higher, and then he tilted his head up opened his mouth, dropped the capsule of sugar into his mouth and swallowed. Some time later, he told me that he hadn't tasted the twinkie, but not the small piece of preserved human tissue that was hidden within the goo.

Max people cheered. Everyone else gagged.

***

"What?" Virtually the entire team had asked the same question upon hearing item #8. The people who didn't ask it were laughing. The first thing after getting the list is reading the list, and we sit everyone down and go item by item, reading it aloud so that everyone is made to hear every item at least once. Item 8: "A teammember’s umbilical chord, to be eaten by that teammember. [96 points]"

A brief discussion started: did people keep that kind of thing? A few people confirmed, yes, it was done. People saved it, kept it in a jar somewhere. Who would do that? "I don't know," the confirmers each said, "but people do it." Still, no one would admit to the existence of their omphalic tissue in some nasty jar in their parents room perhaps. Or on the mantel? It was always "people do it", never "my mom did it".

We moved on shortly, but throughout the Hunt, we tried to find some way to pull #8 off. Now, 96 points, by itself doesn't mean anything; there is no consistent scale for how many points are possible if all the items are completed perfectly. Indeed, many items are lambda points, or some other unpronounceable symbol, with that symbol itself inserted into a square-root sign, or placed over some irrational (in the mathematical sense) number like pi. But that year, my first year doing Scav, 96 points was significant, but not huge. Not a deal breaker to be sure. I believe the winning score was over 10,000, to give you an idea. So we weren't really worried when Judgment came upon us and we had nothing for the item.

But, on the other hand, we didn't attract a crowd like Phil had.