—
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.
“Because they’re there and we can,” said the girl. So they ate those blueberries as well.
The book went on to describe two other incidents of this kind among the tribe, each increasing in degree. A carpenter decided to cut down two trees instead of one, because “more is better than less, and because I can.” A hunter killed two rabbits, though he was only hungry enough to eat one, because perhaps the extra meat would come in handy later on. When later came and the hunter wasn’t in the mood for rabbit, he left the poor, discarded creature’s body lying in the dirt, untouched. “I could kill it and so I did,” the hunter said. “And there are plenty more rabbits where that one came from.”
But then the forest, which had been so plentiful and yielding of its resources to the tribespeople, grew stingy and unaccommodating. The clear stream water turned bitter and sat uneasily on the stomach. The blueberries shriveled on the bush. The trees refused to yield to the ax, and the rabbits, when shot and skinned, offered up only the thinnest slivers of meat, which the starving children fought over brutally. There was at this point in the book a two-page illustration that more than once gave Edie nightmares: half a dozen children, three boys and three girls, each grabbing for a share of a shriveled leg of rabbit, mouths contorted with hunger and rage. Drool dangled from exposed teeth; a fork’s tines skewered a grabbing hand.
The children were very, very wicked was the only line of description.
The once-happy tribespeople, withered by hunger and twisted with cold because they could no longer build shelter, or burn wood in their fires, became panicked, and they started waging war on one another, diminishing their numbers. One among them, an elderly woman who remembered the light of their earlier glory, fled in the night to seek out the shaman who lived on top of the mountain. If anyone could explain to the tribespeople what had set them on this path to ruin, it was he.
The shaman told her that the hunter, in killing and discarding the second rabbit, had earned the curse of its spirit. That curse—Yeye ambaye ni zinazotumiwa teketezwa, “He who consumes is consumed”—was carried out for the spirit by a demon, Vimelea, who could only be cast out of the human realm if the surviving tribespeople would withdraw back to their village, salt the earth in a perimeter around it, and vow only to venture into the woods when the greatest necessity required it.
Some of the tribe agreed to the shaman’s plan; others dismissed it as folly. And so half the group returned with the old woman and the shaman to the village, and the shaman walked out from the village center until its central spire was barely visible. Then, ever keeping the village center just in sight on his left, he began his slow procession to mark the perimeter, laying down the line of salt and chanting the ceremonial words, Sisi hutumia tu kile tunachotaka, “We consume only what we need.” When, many, many hours later, the ends of the Salt Line joined to make a circle, he rested. It was done.
The curse, for those within the village, was lifted. They grew healthy and plump once more, and their numbers increased, but never so much that they were forced to live outside the perimeter, or to take from the surrounding forest two things when one would suffice. Those who had not believed the shaman, however, continued to be subsumed by Vimelea’s curse. Some tried, when no other option was left to them, to return to the village—but the salt that kept the demon out also kept them out, for the demon was inside them now, and all that was left for them was death.
In the forest, the water ran sweet, and the blueberries and rabbits came back in abundance. The last of the cursed tribespeople eventually disappeared, and their punishment was to live on eternally not as human spirits, but as tiny, crawling, bloodthirsty things, the lowest of the forest’s low. Because they still carried within them a piece of the demon Vimelea, they would forever try, whenever one of their former tribespeople entered the forest, to steal back some of the life force they had lost the day they mocked the shaman. In this way, the villagers were reminded of the dangers of taking the forest for granted, and they never ventured long or far away from home. And they lived, safe within the Salt Line, happily ever after.
—
The Shaman and the Salt Line, whose pseudonymous author and illustrator, B. A. Trist, never made a public appearance, outraged everybody. The fundamentalist Christians complained that it advocated paganism. The atheists were angry that it subscribed to biblical, Noah and the Flood–style distinctions between good and evil. The liberals were bothered by the implication that inner Zoners were somehow morally superior to the unfortunate souls who were on the wrong side of the Salt Line in the zoned America’s first dark days, and the conservatives disliked the book’s Marxist “each according to his need” subtext, which was indoctrinating children as young as five into socialism. The environmentalists claimed that it painted a too-pretty picture of zone policy toward natural resources, given that outer-zone contract corporations such as Environ and the Valley Corporation continued to rely on poor labor sources, mostly from the Gulf and Midwest Zones, for logging, mining, drilling, manufacturing, and large-scale cattle factory operations, no longer answerable to most pre-zone regulatory policies. The academics critiqued its lazy (and inaccurate) appropriation of the Swahili language. And yet, despite these arguments—perhaps because of them—the book became ubiquitous. Every library had it, every elementary school classroom. If you went into your doctor’s office and perused the low-built, brightly painted children’s table, it would be there beside the Tabkins and the abacus and the pedestal with plastic rings of diminishing size. Most children, even Gulf children like Edie, owned it, and those children grew up with the notion of a literal line of salt before they were later told, by parents and schoolteachers, that the “Salt Line” protecting most zone perimeters were actually borders where, during the eradication, controlled chemical burnings had taken place, and so the earth was “salted” in the symbolic sense of having been purified, rendered uninhabitable. Then, over the course of a decade, the Wall was erected, and the TerraVibra soon followed, emanating its pulse fifty kilometers eastward, a layer of protection that no other zone, even New England, could boast.
Edie had long ago known better than to expect a literal line of salt, or even a less literal band of earth that had been treated with salt; the internet feeds had shown her plenty of grim pictures of long reaches of black earth, places where the old paved roads had boiled and run in bubbling eddies, at some point cooling and freezing in strange, almost beautiful formations. Andy himself had warned them, during one of the training sessions, that the first few outer-zone kilom
eters were “not pretty to look at.”
But the sight meeting her gaze as far as she could make out from her window was not merely burned, empty earth, as she had expected. The world just past the Wall was a wasteland of garbage—a seemingly endless mountain of trash that emitted a sulfurous odor that she realized now she had been smelling for kilometers and attributing in the back of her mind to the bus, which ran on one of the new biofuels. A couple of bulldozers trundled sluggishly across the surface, pushing the pile of trash ever upward, away from the wall, so that it peaked perhaps a couple of kilometers off, at a ridge that blocked out the sight of anything that lay beyond it.
“I know this looks bad,” Andy said from his position at the head of the bus.
“That’s a fucking understatement!” an angry male voice called from behind Edie.
Jesse, tight as a guitar string beside her, sunk clutching fingers into her forearm but didn’t speak. A panicked din rose in the bus, and another male voice, Lee Flannigan, it sounded like, called, “Turn this thing around! This was not disclosed!”
Andy murmured something to the driver, and the bus slowed to a stop. He stood stoically, hand raised as if he were a student waiting for the teacher to call on him. After a moment, the conversation ebbed.
“I’m going to talk briefly. If you don’t like what I say, we can turn around, but I warn you that you’ll have to go straight into Quarantine 2 for a week, regardless. So: May I speak?”
He received a surly silence in reply.
“What you see outside your windows lasts for another four-point-eight kilometers, and it stops as suddenly as it began. Your Outer Limits Excursion tour is exactly what you were promised it would be. There’s a lot of beauty to experience if you’ll trust me for just a little bit longer.”
“Why didn’t you just tell us it would be like this?” Marta asked.
“Honestly? Because this is unprecedented,” Andy said. “Our usual route through the Wall along the old Blue Ridge Parkway corridor has been closed by the Atlantic Zone Department of Border Security for maintenance, and we don’t know when the gate will reopen. We were, as of a week ago, granted permission to pass through this service entrance along the old I-40 corridor, which is normally only used for outer-zone contractors.”
“Why?” Edie found herself asking.
Andy gave her a surprised look. “Why, what?”
“Why did they bother giving you permission? Why not just make you cancel the excursion and refund us our money?” She felt a flutter of embarrassment at her automatic use of the word “our”; she wondered if Jesse had noticed and, if he did, what he thought.
“Well, a couple of reasons. One is that two million credits had already been invested into this excursion by some of the zone’s most influential and prominent citizens, and it’s bad economics to interfere with a transaction of that scale, especially on the basis of what amounts to a trifling technical issue.”
“Trifling,” Mickey Worthington said. “You call this trifling.”
“I do,” Andy said. “What you’re looking at is no secret. Congress passed legislation over thirteen years ago OK’ing the use of the outer-zone perimeter for waste disposal. This”—he thumbed out the window—“is nothing more than what you’re producing. Your garbage collector hauls it off in a truck once a week. You knew it was going somewhere.”
“It’s just a shock,” Wes Feingold said. “The scale of it.” He had a hand over his nose and mouth. “The smell.”
“It’s an efficient solution to an ongoing problem,” Andy said, “which is maintaining a perimeter that resists miner tick infiltration as well as border crossings by outer Zoners and zone refugees, mostly from Gulf. When this area was left empty, it required regular chemical treatment to prevent reforestation. Zone waste does the same job. The landfill ends up becoming a habitat for certain animals, of course, especially rodents, but many researchers argue that controlled habitats are as efficient a way to operate as eradicating the habitats entirely. And for whatever reason, the miner ticks seem not to like the rats very much. There’s a science team stationed just south of here trying to figure out why that is—what we can learn from the rats.”
What we can learn from the rats, Edie thought. Jesse would probably want to write that into a song later.
“It’s good environmental policy, and it’s good politics. In twenty years, this waste wall will extend along the western front of Atlantic Zone, a distance of almost sixteen hundred kilometers. The methane emissions are already helping to power the TerraVibra, which has resulted in considerable energy savings. I mean, listen. We’re one of the most advantageously positioned zones in the country, with the Appalachian Mountains to our front and the ocean to our back.” An ugly, almost angry expression flashed across his features, so quickly that Edie wondered if anyone else had seen it. “Other zones are not in such good shape.”
“They’re building fortifications,” Wendy Tanaka said.
“Something like that,” said Andy. “At any rate, this is one of the other reasons the excursion wasn’t canceled. The folks controlling the Wall are banking that you’ll like what you see, even if you don’t really like what you see, if that makes any sense.”
The murmuring now was more measured and subdued. Andy waited it out with patient aplomb.
“So what do you think?” he asked. “Do we keep going forward? Do you want to see what you pained and trained for?”
“Is this an all-or-nothing proposition?” Berto asked. “We all go or none of us?”
“Of course not,” said Andy. “This is a recreational excursion. It won’t be recreational if anyone is forced one way or the other. Though I will say that you of course have to be accompanied by your buddy, or able to pair off with a new buddy. And we need at least six travelers per guide, so if there’s less interest than that, my going forward becomes unfeasible. I like you all”—he smiled in a wry way, eyebrows raised—“but even I don’t operate purely out of the goodness of my heart. I’m sure you understand.”
“And refunds?” Lee Flannigan asked.
“The trip itself hasn’t changed. There are no promises in the contract about what your view on the bus ride in will be. But I imagine that OLE will be willing to work with you after Quarantine, training, and transportation fees have been subtracted from your total. I can’t say an amount with any surety, but my guess would be at least half.”
Edie, sneaking a sidelong look at Jesse, felt a surge of hope. He had removed his clutching hand from her forearm only to lock on to his own knee, and his complexion was grayish, as if he might be sick. They had been arguing already, which did not bode well for their ability to make it happily through three stressful, difficult weeks. OLE was already changing the terms on them, in a way that might not yet add up to much but could later, if the company was this willing to withhold information and play fast and loose with what they had implicitly, if not explicitly, promised. All signs pointed to leaving, and she remembered what Andy had told her that day in the weight room: You take off and let that dipshit have his little adventure, and maybe you’ll even still be together on the other side of this. If you go, I guarantee you won’t be.
She leaned over and whispered into Jesse’s ear, “Hey. Let’s just leave. OK? I don’t feel good about this.”
His eyebrows drew down in affront, but she could tell that she was saying what a part of him was yearning to hear. The trick would be to make him feel like he was quitting for her—acting out of a gentlemanly regard for her delicate feminine sensibility—and not out of his own fears. Frame it so he’d have a story to tell later on: You should have seen this mountain of garbage . . . Not what they told us to expect . . . Edie was a mess . . . I didn’t know if she’d be able to handle it.
“I’m really scared,” she said, and she was, but she hated herself a little. The calculated warble in her voice.
“Well, I don’t kno
w. Maybe. It’s a lot of money to lose.”
“We’re on a bus full of lawyers,” she said. “They wouldn’t dare not refund you most of it, maybe all of it. And you,” she added in a burst of inspiration, “have maybe the biggest profile of all of these people. If you threatened to publish something to your feed about how they treated us, what we saw out here . . .”
“It would be a big story.” He was nodding.
“Let’s just go,” she pleaded. “OK?”
“Well,” Jesse said. “If you’re—”
That was when Wes Feingold called out loudly, “I’m still in.”
“And your buddy?” Andy asked.
“Still in,” said Marta.
Jesse’s face contorted. He was almost ugly. Edie remembered his derision when Wes Feingold had run out of the gymnasium to throw up that first day, his subsequent dismissal of Pocketz. His mean song, she understood now, was a punishment for what Jesse perceived as Wes’s two greatest insults: his power and influence on the one hand, power and influence that exceeded his own; and Wes’s weakness on the other.
“Jesse,” she warned, but his hand had already shot up, and he said, before Andy could even call on him, “We’re going. Edie and I are going.”
Andy looked at her. “Edie,” he said. There was a pleading in his eyes. “Is that true?”
It had been easy these last ten months for her to deny, to herself and anyone else who insinuated it, that she was a groupie, that she had gone after Jesse Haggard, and stayed with him, because he was a well-known pop singer. She knew the truth of what they’d been through together, the ways he had supported her when another guy would have gone running. She knew something about his secret, kind heart, his vulnerability and longing to be loved. His fame, to her, was his greatest liability as a partner.
But even as she nodded her assent to Andy now, agreeing to see this through, she wondered. She had believed it love, but could it be love if Jesse was willing to disregard her own desires so completely?
The Salt Line Page 8