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 something 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.”
“And what’s that?”
“You do understand reality and make yourself miserable.”
Andy found himself grinding his thumbnail between his teeth.
“I don’t think there’s any nobility in misery,” Hakim said. “There’s certainly no nobility in suicide. I was once like you. I saw the world and grieved. I didn’t see any reason for it. For existing. So much pain and so little point. Yet I had a life! This was a fact. It would one day end. This was also a fact. And I could end it whenever I wished. This was my reassurance. ‘I can always end it tomorrow,’ I told myself. And then I discovered something.”
“Oh, hell,” Andy said. “This is where you start talking about Jesus, isn’t it?”
“Ha! No, this isn’t. Weeding, Andy. This is where I start talking about weeding.”
“Weeding.”
“Yes, my friend. This was when I lived at the logging camp. There was a large garden on the premises and helping with it gave me something to do. When I despaired, I weeded. I lost myself in the physical process, the repetition. I pulled and pulled, and one day I pulled myself out of my sadness.”
“So that’s my purpose,” Andy said. “Weeding.”
“There are all sorts of ways to weed,” Hakim said.
And that was the beginning of things. Each day he could opt to not yet take his own life. Pull a weed. First one, then another. There was always another. Do this instead of thinking and maybe, eventually, the thinking wouldn’t hurt so much. Hakim was right about one thing: Andy had nothing to lose.
Hakim made some calls. Upon his release, Andy started working for a man named Jude, who owned a franchise location of Southern Farm Supply Co. The store, it turned out, was a front for several kinds of criminal activity, most of it connected to out-of-zone smuggling. Jude received several shipments a week of fertilizer, mulch, and topsoil. One in every half dozen or so of these shipments included extra cargo: recreational drugs, mostly, but also random illegal goods from other zones and countries. Once Andy was tasked with unearthing a hundred boxes of Kawaii sneakers from a mound of compost. Another time it was boxes of Lil Bums Diapers, sizes newborn and one. Once he pried the lid off a crate to find a dazed, light-blind woman and two children, a flashlight, a bucket of eye-wateringly ammoniac urine, and a few empty gallon jugs of what he assumed had been water. “See if she and the kids want something from the vending machine,” Jude had said. “And throw that piss bucket in the Dumpster.”
He’d been working at the store six weeks when Hakim came by to check on him. “The time has come,” he said, “if you’re ready.”
“Ready for what, exactly?” Andy asked.