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.