The Buddy System
by Charles C. Cole
Out of the mouths of babes and half-toasted narcissists: I was bragging over beers at a Portland bar to a married, extroverted acquaintance how I really appreciated my alone time. To which, he — Raymond by name — said, “Dude, you don’t know what alone time is.” Then he proceeded to tell me about his great-grandfather’s hunting cabin tucked in the deep Maine woods. He dared me to spend a week there, in luxurious solitary confinement.
“You’ll probably go a little crazy,” he said. “When members of my family venture there, the strict rule we follow, passed down generation to generation, is the buddy system, ‘for safety and sanity.’ But you’re not family, so have at it. Just don’t burn the place down.”
I was single with lots of vacation time to use, so I jumped. I agreed to leave my phone in my car. Yes, the place was uncomfortably quiet and isolated. Let’s put it this way: Raymond’s family had a summer camp with exclusive access to a 3-hour long walking trail that led to a pond with a chained old-fashioned aluminum canoe. Then you paddled to a small island.
The camp had a couple of doorless, unfurnished bedrooms, a loft and a rustic wooden table and some chairs, with a fireplace. No electricity or running water. There was a manual water pump just outside to the left and an outhouse in back to the right. The kitchenette had metal plates, cups and silverware enough for six.
The first dusk, I lay on the small dock and listened to water ripple below me. There wasn’t even a loon. A thunderstorm would have been welcome. I missed my Internet-based electronic white noise, which I use when writing at home. I missed my beer. Without any entertainment or lamps, I collapsed begrudgingly into my bedroll as nightfall presented itself.
In the morning, I ate a couple of power bars, which was all I’d packed besides instant oatmeal. I went for a quick dip — mostly standing up to my chest and appreciating my surroundings — and slowly started writing, long-hand, some science fiction story that took place in the far future with lots of cool technology. Ironic, because the closest thing to technology around me was a “church key” can opener, invented a hundred years before.
After an early lunch, I paddled to a much-lauded day-hike footpath. Raymond’s only advice: “Don’t leave the trail.” No reason given, nor did I ask. I kid you not; at times the trees on the sides of the trail were so dense that I couldn’t have squeezed between them.
At one sweaty point, I spotted a boulder about the size of a semi-trailer maybe 100 feet into the woods. It might as well have been a food-vending truck, such was the draw. I left the trail to see if I could climb it and get a better view. There was no way up, but I found an interesting cave-like opening on one side. I poked my head in, leaning my left shoulder against the wall, but I had no light to explore further. An unseen bug jabbed my arm, so I yelped like a timid city slicker and shook it off, retreating to the cabin.
Back at the island, I lay in the water to soak my “burning” wound. With early dusk, I was back in my bedroll. Without electric lights, the day got a whole lot shorter. At one point, I woke up clammy and moved the flimsy kitchen table against the front door. I don’t know what I was expecting. A band of invading pirate racoons?
In the morning, my upper left arm was swollen and pink, but the burning and itching had stopped. After soaking myself in the cool water, my remedy for everything, I went back to my story. I was starting a chapter where this astronaut crash-lands in some godforsaken wilderness and has to survive on wits alone. Write what you know.
That evening, I woke from a nightmare, literally drenched in my own sweat. In the morning, I opened my bedroll and threw it over a bush in the sun to dry. I ached like a junky going cold turkey for my phone, my laptop, my car. The bite, if that’s what it was, looked like a big red, semi-transparent wart. Without empirical evidence, I was nonetheless convinced there was a living larva gestating under my skin.
After tossing and turning through the night, I woke up exhausted. The first thing I did was step outside and explore the wound. I had seen a large, lethal-looking knife in a kitchen drawer but, to my surprise, I kind of appreciated the unexpected company. I had someone to talk to, to complain to, to team up with.
“If you don’t cost me a limb, you can stay, for now,” I remember saying. “I’ll call you Buddy.” I was dying for company. I gently prodded my presumed subcutaneous visitor. I sacrificed one of my t-shirts into strips and tied it loosely around the top of my arm to dissuade Buddy from going further up. Somehow, though weird in retrospect, I thought: I could sacrifice an arm, but no more.
At night, in the dark, when I didn’t have to look at it, I told Buddy my life story, including my struggles in college and the heightened drama around my ex-wife. It was probably a blessing that I had no light to examine the thing obsessively. In the morning, my wound was bigger and harder. My skin felt taut around it. I considered cutting along the base to get the thing out, then flapping the wound closed and wrapping it up. Extreme, yes, but not compared to my primal urge to bite it open.
I was hoping, in due time, Buddy would exit on his own, impatient with his tiny cell and eager to enjoy the world. In the morning, I was so freaking hot, I went into the pond and lay down with just my face out of the water. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a sizzle as my hot body met the cold water. It could have been my imagination, but Buddy didn’t tolerate the cold and started pulsing.
“Dude,” I said, “I need my body back. Hatch already, will you?”
When my left wrist and fingers started to tingle that afternoon, I made up my mind. I assembled a big fire in the fireplace (mostly one-handed) and held the knife near the flames. When it got almost too hot to hold, I carefully — with one eye tightly closed — sliced along my arm. Thank God, the knife was as sharp as it looked, and the incision didn’t take much pressure.
The thing, Buddy, a gray-black tadpole shadow in gelatinous goo, wiggled when it was exposed. The tissue was white all around it. Lightheaded and breathing hard, I heated the knife again and dug under Buddy and flipped him out onto the wooden floor. He crawled toward the dark of the nearest bedroom, leaving a trail of goo. I should have chased after him, but I heated the knife one more time and lay it flat over my wound, hopefully cauterizing the tissues. The casual surgery was a surprisingly bloodless affair.
At that point, I became exhausted. Maybe I was in shock. I climbed the ladder to the loft and took a nap, worried Buddy might return to find a new way to enter my body. When I woke, it was nearly dusk. My left arm felt like a dead weight. I figured I only had so much time before infection took over, so I headed home, grateful to a slight wind pushing me along.
On the opposite shore, I collapsed on the ground. And that’s where Raymond found me in the morning. He prodded me with his boot.
“Dude, tell me you’re not dead,” he said.
“Why are you here?”
“I told my parents. My mother lost it, threatened to disown me. How could I let you come alone? What did you do to your arm?”
“I may have dripped blood on the cabin floor,” I said.
“Not the first time.”
“Maybe first time for human blood,” I said.
“Not even close,” he said. “Let’s get you looked at.” He had a small gas-powered trail vehicle that looked like the child of a Jeep and a golf cart. Civilization couldn’t come fast enough.
About a month later, with my arm much better considering what we’d been through, we met again at our bar. Did I mention his family owned it?
“Tell me again, why did you leave the trail?” he asked.
“The boulder called to me. I didn’t have a choice.”
“As good a reason as any,” he said. “By the way, how was your alone time? Was it what you expected?”
“Too extreme by half,” I admitted. “I started a story, but then I got distracted by the quiet. That’s all it took. It was unnatural. It was like I had to fill the time with some over-the-top excitement to make up for it.”
“Which you did, masterfully,” he said, leaning forward to clink my glass.
And that’s how I learned the hard way that there’s “alone time” and there’s “out-of-your-mind alone time.”
Copyright © 2026 by Charles C. Cole
