The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  There’s still an official review of scoring, he said, but you did very well, young lady. Very, very well.

  How well? she’d asked.

  Well enough to write your own ticket, he told her.

  Like most tickets, it came with the usual list of requirements and restrictions, but write it she did. To Atlantic Zone. Full vestment. Admission to the Point, commission to the Corps of Engineers, minimum of eight years of service with the hope, said her recruiter, that she’d love the work well enough to keep with it after her required term was up. She did. Love it, and keep with it. She met her husband, Andy’s father, at an officers’ ball. Served twenty-five years, retired at the rank of lieutenant colonel, still young enough to launch a second career in the private sector and amass a small fortune as an executive for the Valley Corporation. The military had given her everything. It became a religion to her. (Though, a devout Presbyterian, she would have called this claim blasphemy.) She was a strict parent, occasionally distant, always busy. But kind. Loving, in her way—it was never that Andy didn’t feel loved. What he found himself rejecting wasn’t his mother, the person she had been to him, specifically, but everything she admired and trusted and believed in. Her smarts had gotten her out of Gulf, but she wasn’t smart enough, somehow, to understand that the system was broken, something must be fundamentally wrong, that the price of her escape was twelve years of indentured servitude. She saw only her own success story. By the time Andy was sixteen—the age of his mother’s miracle—he oscillated in his attitude toward her between tender pity and outright disgust. He started frequenting anarchist web feeds. After a year or so of dedicated commenting, he was invited into private, encrypted feeds that he hadn’t, still more child than adult, even guessed existed.

  So began his divided life. There was the Andy who existed virtually, as Sonofascist90823—the real Andy, he thought. He didn’t know what he was rebelling against, exactly. He only knew that he didn’t buy into his mother and her story of virtue rewarded. The guys on the feeds supplied him with some targets for his derision: capitalism, precious mineral mining, tablets, the space program, academia, synthetic marijuana, some strains of feminism (but only the ones that tried to hold men down in order to advance women), organized religion. Others. The encrypted feeds were more sophisticated. Rants were honed into arguments. Ideas into plans. Andy acted, twice during his freshman year at State, as a digital launderer/courier. For what purpose he wasn’t entirely sure—this was by design—but his actions both times preceded big news stories about large-scale hacks on SmartMart credit holders and an alt-sexuality social feed, De Gustibus.

  Offline, he was only Andy: disappointing son, lackluster communications major, dateless, depressive. The depression, so far as Andy could tell, wasn’t a consequence of his disillusionment, or a cause of it, so much as its mate. He had walked arm in arm with them both as far back as he could remember. When the depression was at its most manageable, he was merely—merely?—upset with the state of the world. Angry at what he couldn’t change. His gut churned with desire for the way things ought to be, his pulse raced as he stabbed out comments in forums. But every so often, for weeks, months at a time, his dissatisfactions coalesced into an impenetrable fog, so that even his anger seemed pointless and small. These fogs had happened enough times that he recognized, from somewhere outside himself, the pattern. He could, for a while, tell himself: This will pass. This isn’t you. This is some stew of chemicals and hormones in your brain, translating stimulus into despair, and if you take these meds or do this exercise or spend this amount of time a day out in the sunshine, the recipe will change, and you’ll see clearly again. Wait for it. Just a little longer.

  The more spells he endured, the harder this became: Believing his reasonable self. Believing that his reasonable self was even reasonable. There was a very cheesy, very old movie Andy saw when he was a boy, They Live, and it was about this guy who had a pair of sunglasses that allowed him to see that all of these perfectly normal-looking people around him were actually skeleton-faced aliens controlling human minds. In the depths, Andy realized that this was his world: only in his depression did he see clearly, and there were indeed skulls behind every normal-looking face. Not because they were aliens or evil. Because they were doomed. Everyone was doomed. And nothing awaited you on the other side.

  He tried committing suicide for the first time when he was nineteen. The old slit-wrist trick. Found by his roommate, a guy who couldn’t stand Andy enough to share a meal with him at the student union but was willing to tie off Andy’s wrists with one of his own close-at-hand oxford dress shirts, probably so he could put it on his résumé: Once saved life of my waste-of-life roommate. His mother cried at his bedside. What did I do? What can I do? Tell me, Andy. He stared ahead. He didn’t have an answer for either question.

  Dropped out of school. Waited tables, worked on a landscaping crew, and, for thirteen very bad months, clocked the midnight shift at a rendering plant. Even considered enlisting, but the suicide attempt was on his record, as well as a hospitalization for alcohol poisoning, and so that was out, not that he’d have actually gone through with it. Probably not.

  The second suicide attempt, he was twenty-four. The old handful-of-pills trick. Washed it down with a liter of vodka. Swallowed, sent his on-and-off (currently off) girlfriend a text, Good by, and she called an ambulance. Got there in the nick of time, pumped his stomach, etc. Embarrassing, Andy thought, to have drunkenly misspelled your suicide note. If only you could die of embarrassment, as the saying went. The other methods weren’t working for him.

  He was transferred from the hospital to a private psychiatric center, bills sent to his mother. The days were long and dull. He could barely sleep, and so the nights were even longer and duller. He was denied access to a tablet; his doctor felt that web addiction was one of his sources of depression, a trigger for his obsessive thoughts. Andy stared at a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle—“Thatch-Roof Cottage in Winter,” read the box—and resolved, whenever he got out of here, that he’d ride a bus down to the Bottoms, buy a gun, and take a more decisive way out. No more of this namby-pamby, cry-for-help stuff.

  Cheered by this promise to himself, he settled into life at the clinic. He knew from past experience how to play it. Couldn’t be too chipper, too eager. Dr. Benik would see right through him. He started coming to Morning Group. Didn’t speak, didn’t respond to the therapist’s questions about his goals for the day, but he listened to the others, even nodded a few times. A week in, he mentioned to his counselor that he thought the new dosage might be helping. He finished the thatch-roof cottage in winter—well, not quite, eight of the pieces were missing, but the box was empty, and he let one of the staff members, Hakim, see him surveying his work with a little smile on his face before he began to take the puzzle apart for the next user.

  “You won’t be letting people see your masterpiece?” Hakim asked. He had materialized to Andy’s left.

  “Nah,” Andy said. “It was a bust. Pieces missing. I’m going to ask my mother to send me a new puzzle. Or maybe some art paper and oil pastels. I used to like working with those. You know the kind I’m talking about?”

  “Indeed I do,” said Hakim. “In fact, I think I could scrounge up something tonight, if you’re not too particular about the quality.”

  “I’m wearing pajamas at four o’clock. I’m not too particular about anything.” Andy smiled as he said this.

  “Let me see what I can do,” Hakim said.

  The challenge of pretending to get better really was making Andy feel a bit better.

  Hakim, it turned out, was as good as his word. He got Andy the promised oil pastels, some decent-weight drawing paper, a sketch pad, some charcoals. Andy set to his first drawing with something a bit like real enthusiasm. In the days that followed, Hakim came around, watched him, asked questions, seemed genuinely interested—not just fake, patronizing-interested—in what Andy was doin
g.

  “Those mountains,” Hakim said, motioning to the page. Andy had decimated what was left of the Prussian blue to shadow the hills in the foreground, and now he was adding a layer of dark green, smudging together the colors with his forefinger as he went. “You’ve been there?”

  Andy shook his head. “Just seen pictures. Why?”

  “Oh, only curious about why you’re drawing them.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” Andy said. He didn’t elaborate. He was disappointed that Hakim was going to psychoanalyze him or whatever. He’d given him more credit than that.

  “I only ask,” Hakim said, “because I have. Been there. You capture them well.”

  Andy stopped and gave Hakim his full attention. “Really? You have?”

  “I have,” said Hakim.

  “What for?”

  “I worked at the infirmary for V&M Logging for six years.”

  “No shit.”

  “No shit.”

  Andy set his crayon back to paper and bore down. “Guess you were glad to get this gig and get out of there, huh.”

  “It wasn’t such a bad gig,” said Hakim. The word “gig” sounded funny in his mouth, like something new he was trying. “The money was good. The food was excellent. Pretty scenery, lots of quiet. I read many books. If I’d had a companion, I could have stayed there indefinitely. There aren’t many women in a logging camp, though.”

  Andy huffed. “That’s a recommendation, far as I’m concerned.”

  Hakim smiled big, revealing very straight, square teeth. “I suppose it can be. Though you miss them. Women. Not even just for the—well, you know.”

  Andy was charmed by Hakim’s delicacy. He laughed. “The fucking? You can say it to me, Hakim. I’m not that fragile.”

  “I don’t think you’re fragile,” Hakim said.

  “You’re the only one.”

  Hakim shrugged. “May I be honest? What you say is unimaginative. Egotistical. As if we’re all in agreement about Andy. The world had reached a verdict on Andy.” He mimed striking a gavel. “Fragile. Send in the next case.”

  “That’s all well and good,” Andy said. “I like what you’re doing. It’s very tough-love of you. But the world—enough of it—decided I needed to be here. Whether I want to be or not.” He tossed the dark green roughly back into its plastic tray and pawed around for a lighter hue.

  Hakim, who was sitting across the commons-room table from Andy, leaned back in his chair and rested his crossed hands on the tabletop. “Fair enough.”

  “Being in here makes you egotistical,” Andy said. “It makes you feel like everyone’s watching and judging you. Because they are. You are. You’re like the rest of them. Don’t get me wrong. I like you. In the real world, I’d go have a beer with you. In here, though . . .” He trailed off.

  “You wouldn’t have a beer with me,” Hakim said.

  Andy laughed again. “Well, I will if you’re offering.”

  Hakim smiled his brilliant smile again. “I can offer you soda pop.”

  “Soda pop! Hot damn. I’ll pass, H.”

  He leaned forward, smile tightening. “I can offer you a purpose, Sonofascist90823.”

  What Andy would remember most clearly about this moment, later, was how Hakim pronounced his screenname: So-No Fascist. He’d been embarrassed, for them both, at the butchering of his cleverness.

  He stopped the movement of his crayon. Tried to steady his breathing.

  “My intent isn’t to alarm you,” Hakim said.

  “Who said I was alarmed?” He carved at a smudged line with his thumbnail. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  At the edge of his vision, Hakim’s hands shifted position—left on top of right, ring finger winking gold. He had huge hands, pale fingernails that had been smoothly and evenly clipped. A snail of scar tissue slivered across a knuckle.

  “Ah,” Hakim said. “I know how this dance goes. How about this? I talk, and you indulge me for a moment. Then I’ll walk away and leave you alone. Sound OK?”

  Andy kept coloring.

  “Yes. OK. First of all, what I’m saying here? All of the risk is mine. None of it is yours. And the risk for me is significant.” He tapped the gold band with his thick forefinger. “You could ruin me. I am about to give you the ammunition to ruin me, if that’s what you want.”

  Andy chanced a quick glance at Hakim’s face. It was a handsome face of indeterminate age. He could be thirty or fifty, though something in the eyes seemed to place him on the older end of that spectrum.

  “No one in this hospital knows about So-No Fascist. No one here wants to know. And if they did know, they would only be required to report you to the authorities if they thought you planned to cause harm to another person. So-No Fascist has never talked of harming people.”

  Well, that wasn’t precisely true. There had been talk, in one forum, about—hypothetically, that was all, as a kind of intellectual exercise—the possible rewards of assassinating the president.

  “Your mother,” Hakim said. “She—”

  “Wears combat boots? I’ve heard that one before.” Jesus, Hakim really was a cliché if he thought getting Andy to talk about his mother was going to crack him.

  Hakim laughed his hearty laugh. “Well, yes, Andy, I suppose she did. I was going to ask about that. She was recruited out of Gulf Zone for the military? This is correct?”

  “This is correct,” he said, mimicking Hakim’s funny intonations.

  “What you could think of this,” Hakim said, “is that you scored well on a test. And I’m a recruiter. Here to offer an opportunity.”

  “I never took any test.”

  “You can’t sign up for this test.” Hakim leaned forward. He had not whispered in all this time; he seemed to have a knack for pitching his voice just low enough to blend into the mild racket of midday in the rec room. “You’ve been watched, as you say. Noticed. But this isn’t bad. There are people who appreciate your ideas, your perspective. People who could help you do more than think about these things, who need you to do more than think about these things.”

  “What things?” Andy said. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Let me try this another way,” said Hakim. “What are you doing after you get out of here?”

  Andy shrugged.

  “Job?”

  “No.” He’d quit the rendering plant three weeks before his little exit attempt. Had been living on his meager savings, the proceeds from selling an old tablet and easy chair, and credit.

  “You still have an apartment? Place to live?”

  This Andy couldn’t even bear to answer. His mother had told him that he’d be staying with her. That’s how she put it, last time she visited: “You’ll stay with me and Dad. Until you get back up on your feet.” An order disguised as a kindness.

  Hakim, registering that Andy wouldn’t fill the silence, said: “You have a woman? Friends?”

  Now he was just being cruel. If Hakim knew that Andy was Sonofascist90823, he’d surely glanced at the visitors log and seen that Andy had received only two callers, his mother and father. “Tons of them,” Andy said. “Women and friends.” He lifted his arms, palms to the ceiling, and swiveled in his chair, face falsely alight, as if basking in his bounty. “You’re never alone if you’re at Brightwater Healing Services.”

  Hakim accepted this patiently. “But you won’t be here much longer. Two, three weeks.”

  Andy traded crayons, pressed down again. “That’s my understanding.”

  “Are you glad?”

  “To leave? Sure,” Andy said.

  “Because out there is better than in here?”

  This was an interesting question. One Andy hadn’t quite posed to himself. Was it? Better? “Out” was a direction, a change. Like being born. And therefore was s
omething to anticipate.

  “Out” was where the guns were.

  “Out” was where an out was.

  “It’s no worse,” Andy said finally.

  “Here is a thing for you to think over,” Hakim said. “If the best you can say about ‘out there’ is that it’s no worse than ‘in here,’ perhaps you are a man with nothing to lose.”

  “Oh, OK,” Andy said. “I see what test I passed. We must be a real select bunch. The cream of the crop. I can’t wait to hear what my great purpose is. Does it involve some kind of wired vest and a trench coat?”

  “Far from it,” said Hakim. “What I’m asking of you is scarier. It would require you to live your life.”

  Andy laughed through a quaking sensation that had rooted in his midsection.

  Hakim tapped the page on the table—the shadowed mountains. “You could go here.”

  “I thought you said I’d have to live my life.”

  “There’s life to be lived out there,” Hakim said. “There’s a life for you out there. The doctors tell you your problem is here.” Hakim tapped his temple. “That what you feel is abnormal, and you must take a drug to fix it. They’re wrong. What’s wrong with you isn’t here.” The temple again. “It’s here.” He swirled his finger vaguely, indicating—well, the world.

  “No offense, but you seem to be in the wrong line of work.”

  “I’m in the perfect line of work,” Hakim said. “There are ill people in here. People who don’t understand reality and make themselves miserable, thinking they are fat, they are dying of diseases, they are persecuted. We help them. Or at the very least, we keep them from hurting others or themselves. I know the difference between them and you.”