Salt In The System - A Short Story

 SALT IN THE SYSTEM 

- Shreya Nikil

By the time the clocks in Terminal 3 struck midnight, Tara had stopped needing the screen to tell her who mattered. She could look down the length of the queue and sort them before they even reached the counter, the way a jeweller can tell glass from stone without lifting either to the light.

It had not always been this easy. In her first months, discretion had felt like a burden she carried carelessly, likely to drop it on the wrong foot. Now it had become a habit that she doesn’t even catch herself doing, unnoticed. She told herself this was simply competence. Airlines rewarded competence.

 

The particular trouble, the thing she would only admit to herself much later, began on an ordinary Tuesday with an ordinary man who never actually appeared on any of her flights.

She had invented him without meaning to. It happened during a delay when she found herself needing some private measure against which to weigh her decisions, since the airline's own measures felt too thin to hold the weight of an actual person's face. She pictured a man in the plastic chairs near Gate 12 who was tired, patient, someone who would never ask her for anything and would therefore never be disappointed by what she gave. She began, without quite deciding to, imagining what he would think of each choice she made. Whether he would nod. Whether he would look away.

It was a private thing, harmless in the way an idle superstition is harmless. She did not mention it to anyone, not even to Renu, who worked the counter beside hers and complained daily about the influencers who tagged the airline in exchange for legroom. Tara kept her invented witness folded somewhere behind her ribs, taken out only in the moments when the upgrade list blinked open and the real weighing began.

But witnesses, even imagined ones, have a way of asking to be consulted more often than intended.

She noticed it first with small things. A colleague asked to swap a shift, and Tara found herself hesitating, running the request past the version of the man in her head before answering, as though his good opinion were now a resource she had to manage alongside her leave days and her rent. A friend from university messaged asking to catch up, and Tara caught herself ranking the invitation the way she ranked economy passengers that is against her time, her fatigue, what she stood to gain from an evening spent that way and she pictured him watching her type the reply, waiting to see if she would choose the friend or the excuse.

She laughed about it once, alone in her flat, because it seemed absurd to explain even to herself. A man she had never met, who did not exist beyond the shape she had given him one slow night at work, was somehow present at her kitchen table while she decided whether to lend her sister money. He had opinions now. He had preferences. She had built him to be undemanding and patient, and yet he had begun, without her permission, to expect things of her.

It was her mother who noticed first, though she did not know what she was noticing. "You've become so careful," she said one Sunday, watching Tara weigh whether to invite her cousin's family to dinner against the cost of a weekend spent hosting. "You used to just say yes to people." Tara laughed it off, but that night she lay awake trying to remember the last time she had made a decision about another person without first running some silent calculation, without first checking how it would look to someone who was not, technically, real.

 

At work, the real man from the plastic chairs had long since flown on to wherever he was going and never returned to her counter but the version she carried had grown sturdier than the memory that spawned him. He had opinions about the influencer, whom Tara still upgraded with a small twist of guilt she had learned to swallow quickly. He had opinions about her supervisor's talk of high-value accounts. Increasingly, he had opinions about people who had nothing to do with the airline at all, about how she spoke to the boy who delivered her groceries, about whether she looked up from her phone to thank him, about the small daily arithmetic of who deserved her attention and who could be filed under later.

She began to understand that she was no longer imagining him so much as consulting him, the way one consults a rule one has forgotten writing. He had stopped being a comfort and become something closer to a supervisor of his own, standing just behind her shoulder in every room she entered, tallying her the way she tallied loyalty tiers.

 

One evening, walking home past the terminal's outer glass, she caught her own reflection moving alongside the planes taxiing behind it, and for a moment she thought she saw him in it too. She stopped on the pavement long enough for a stranger to glance at her.

She wondered, standing there, when exactly the thing she had made up to keep herself honest had turned into the very system she had been trying to resist. She had wanted a witness to make her kinder instead she had built herself a second judge, and it had begun keeping a surveillance on her.

It took her another fortnight to say any of it aloud, and even then she said it badly, sitting across from a counsellor the clinic had assigned her almost at random, fumbling to explain that she had built a person out of a stranger and could no longer tell where his judgement ended and her own began. The counsellor did not find it as strange as Tara expected. People make judges out of all sorts of things, she said, a parent's disappointment, a teacher's old remark, a god. The trouble is never the ledger. It is forgetting that you are the one holding the pen. Tara turned this over for weeks afterward, at the counter and off it, trying to catch the exact moment each day when she reached for his opinion instead of her own, and slowly, the reaching became less automatic.

 

She did not quit, in the end, though she thought about it more than once during that stretch, standing in front of the upgrade list with her finger hovering the way it always had. What she gave up instead was the private audience she had built for herself.

She still saw the man from the plastic chairs sometimes, in memory rather than presence, but she stopped consulting him before speaking to her sister, before answering a friend, before deciding who among a queue of ordinary people deserved to be looked at properly rather than sorted. The system on her screen still ran on points and tiers and things no policy would ever admit to weighing. But the second system, the one she had carried home each night and set at her own table, she began, carefully, to dismantle.

It was slower work than she expected, and she was never entirely sure she'd finished it, but for the first time in a long while she made a decision about her cousin's visit, and then another about the boy who delivered her groceries, without once checking how they would look to someone who had never been real to begin with.