“My first thought was to go over there.” He barked a sharp laugh. “Yeah, me. The big man. I was going to confront them. Then I thought, well, maybe I’ll just sit outside the hotel and see what I see. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I won’t even see them leave together.
“Then—I don’t even remember how it happened—I booked this trip. I just did it before I could even decide to do it, if that makes any sense. I had to get away from her, and I had to get away from the feeds. I was going to do something I’d regret if I didn’t.”
“That’s quite a story,” Marta said sincerely.
Well, it was a story. Some of the story. Not all of it.
“She said I had a tablet instead of a heart,” Wes blurted out, voice thick with feeling, and that was when he heard muffled snickering in the seat one back and over from theirs.
Then there was a tiny, cheerful strumming sound. A ukulele, Wes thought, accompanied suddenly by a pleasant, raspy tenor:
That girl sure was a habit
I stalked her on my tablet
She was everything I need
So I feasted on her feed
Till I was bloated as a tick
And sure she sucked his dick
I just wish there was a Stamp
What could rid me of that tramp
A female voice hissed sharply, “Stop being an asshole, Jesse.”
Wes stood, bracing himself with a hand against the back of his seat, in time to watch as Jesse Haggard finished his little ditty with a twangy riff on “Shave and a Haircut,” biting his bottom lip comically for the last two notes. He was slumped, knees tucked up against the seatback in front of him, ukulele resting on his chest, and he opened his eyes, which had been pinched tight with affected earnestness, and grinned at Wes. “Good stuff, my man. Good stuff.”
His girlfriend, Edie, looked stricken. “Oh, Wes. Please ignore him. He has a weird sense of humor.”
Wes’s mouth got very dry. He swallowed, blinking stupidly, and gripped the seat harder, afraid that his knees were about to turn to liquid. Edie’s expression of embarrassed pity was harder to bear than the song had been. For three weeks now he had been noticing her, admiring her, and wondering why she’d paired off with someone like Jesse “Burger Blitz” Haggard, who couldn’t even do a chin-up in the weight room without manfully grunting a plea for attention. The Timothys of the world, the Jesses—what did women see in them?
“Don’t go and do something you’ll regret now,” Jesse said.
Every eye on the bus was on Wes. Marta grabbed his forearm, tried to pull him back into the seat. “Ignore him,” she said. “He’s a child.” Andy, sensing some tension in the group, started back the middle aisle toward them, but then the bus hit a bump in the road, and he and Wes both swayed. There was another vibration now, strong enough to make Wes’s teeth clank together, and Wes realized that the road had gotten rough and textured the way it did close to shoulders, so you knew if you were about to go into a ditch. The travelers turned their attention to the windows, craning their necks for a view of what lay ahead—Wes, too—and when Marta leaned against him and said, “What is it?” he replied, hoarsely, “It’s the Wall.”
“Back in your seats, folks,” Andy said. “We’ve reached the Salt Line.”
Four
Arguing with your boyfriend was bad, Edie thought. Arguing with your buddy, whose side you would not be able to leave for the next three weeks, was worse.
“Just lighten up,” Jesse said. He was picking the same four-or five-note sequence out on his ukulele, barely brushing his thumb across the strings so that the sound wouldn’t travel far. It was driving Edie nuts, especially since she was trying to concentrate on what was happening outside the bus. “If you can’t have a sense of humor about yourself, you’re fucked at life.”
“You don’t have a sense of humor about yourself,” Edie hissed. “At all.” The bus driver had restarted the engine, and a guard in an armor-reinforced, helmeted microsuit was waving them forward. She felt nauseated, and she didn’t know how much of the sensation to attribute to her mortification, how much to the rhythmic churning of the air around the Wall, how much to her fear. Right now, the split seemed to be about even.
“That’s not true.” Strumly strum strum strummmm.
“It is,” Edie said. “You moped for two days when the guys in the band laughed at your eyeliner.”
Strumly strum strum. He’d pinched his eyes closed again, ignoring her.
“And at least you know those guys. You have a rapport with them. Why on earth you’d want to start this trip out with bad blood between you and a virtual stranger is beyond me. With everything else to be worried about.” She shook her head with irritated wonder. The bus darkened momentarily as they passed under the structure of the gate and guard station, the view just outside her window only a seamed concrete wall punctuated by intermittent flashing red lights before the bus was again flooded with hazy daylight. She had opened her mouth to say something else, something about how nice Wes seemed and how randomly cruel Jesse’s actions were, when the words turned to dust in her mouth. She made a strangled sound of horror, and the muted strumming of the ukulele stopped.
“Oh my God,” someone behind her said.
—
There was a popular but controversial picture book that kids Edie’s and Jesse’s age had been raised on called The Shaman and the Salt Line. Like so many stories meant for children, it was very grim, even frightening, but in a way that only increased its deep and abstract appeal, so that as a young girl Edie found herself reading it over and over again until the binding of the book finally fell apart and her mother had to duct-tape it. (They also had a tablet version with animations of the drawings, but those animations never had the same horrific fascination of the static, color-saturated illustrations of the print version, with its freeze-frames of faces contorted with anguish, terror, fury, and joy.)
The book began by describing a tribe of happy, carefree people who enjoyed the pleasures of both village and forest. “They were so full of love for one another,” the author wrote, “that their numbers doubled and then tripled, and soon their little houses could not hold them.” So the members of the tribe expanded their numbers deeper into the woods.
One day, a boy and a girl stopped their play to rest.
“I’m hungry,” the girl said.
“Then I’ll gather us some blueberries to eat,” said the boy.
They ate until their bellies were pleasantly full, but then the girl noticed there were still blueberries left on the bushes. “We should eat those, too,” she said.
“Why?” her friend asked.