Before the Journey
A story by Matt Zandstra
This story first aired on the Termination Line podcast in August 2023. It was narrated by the great Michael Maloney.
Shelley arrived every day at a hospital in a strange town to watch them pack Cair down into a box. With each visit, she found him a little diminished. The equipment around him grew new struts, tubes, wires, screens as if he was a vessel hooked up for overhaul or decommissioning. She came for the late afternoon visiting hour always optimistic that her energy -- her presence in the world -- would anchor him. But she felt him pull away from her -- calmly and without regret -- an implacable tidal force at work that neither of them acknowledged.
It was a time of low ebb for the hospital. Shifts were yet to change and a worn mood possessed the place. Work continued--work never stopped--but it seemed to Shelley a vaguely dreamlike dance, only loosely connected to purpose.
They had moved him into his own room. "Look at this!" she said when she found it at last.
"I know." He seemed smaller than he should under the jungle of wires and tubes. "I'm a VIP."
"You sure are," she said. But she thought he looked more like a product -- a thing of some passing value.
She produced the deck of cards.
Cair grinned, and, for a moment, he grew back, filling the space around him again. "I'm pretty busy," he said."I can only spare a moment."
"We'd better play fast then." She dealt and settled back to examine her hand.
Cair added three cards to the pile one by one but ruined his triumph with a wince of pain.
"Are you OK?" she said, half-standing.
"I'm," he shook his head. "I'm fine. It's almost done with now. And I'll see you on the other side."
"Yes. Before long." She made a mask of her face and selected her run. She played a seven, an eight and a nine of hearts. She felt his eyes on her as she picked up new cards.
They played on for a while. On a screen above the bed, she watched a progress bar inch across its marked territory. She wondered absently what it was measuring. What would happen when it reached the end? She placed a queen on the pile. "Cair, I--" she said. But he had slipped into sleep, spilling a splay of cards out over the coverlet. His breathing was shallow and noisy. She gathered the scatter from around his slack hand, snaking her own between several tubes.
The bar closed the gap at last and paused, poised over its success. The screen wiped it back to zero and the process began again.
#
She had been lost in the long middle sag of her shift at the Stack and Track warehouse and not yet in sight of relief when she saw the poster in the break room. YOU NEED THIS, the headline told her. It sat above a grid of four pictures: a starry night, coconut-laden trees, two sets of maniacally smiling people; all propped up by a line of bold type. It was this that naturally demanded her attention: a dollar sign and a number so large that she lost herself in the zeros. Then there was an address, a date, and the promise of free food. It was a scam, of course. There was no way she'd go... to the Remington on Shoreline at seven that evening. No way at all.
#
She must have fitted right in at the hotel because as soon as she cleared the sliding doors a clerk nodded at a free-standing sign -- WELCOME TO MINING FUTURES -- placed in front of a conference room door. She nodded and slipped in.
A balding man with deep-socketed very blue eyes stood at the head of the room and raised his arms like a prophet offering a blessing. "Or maybe your life is this big," he said. He brought his hands together and clasped them. "I know mine was. In some way it still is. But there is a gift for the future. And I have already redeemed it."
Oh my lord, she thought, it's a cult. But then he opened his hands and triggered a new slide: that cash figure again. The presentation paused and they all basked in the glow of those zeros.
"Well," said a blonde dude two seats along from her. "That would do it." Several people around him nodded. She nodded too.
"And what's the catch?" the prophet continued. "The catch is this. You and I -- we -- get to pay it forward. We get to hand it on. To our loved ones. To the causes that matter. To this planet." As he spoke the slides cycled through stock photographs -- happy families, smiling food bank volunteers, a child looking upwards in wonder. "I need you to understand. The money is not the opportunity. It is only a marker of your worth. Of the difference you can make in this world. And beyond it."
She reached the refreshments table in the first wave. The tuna mayonnaise sandwiches looked promising. She accepted a bottle of water from the blonde comedian, who had beaten almost everyone to the free food without seeming to try. As he opened it she said, "So? Are you convinced?"
He thought about this. "It's a lot of money."
It was a lot of money. "Is it real?"
"That's the question. Are you signing up to find out?"
She looked around the room. At least half the attendees were dressed in the kind of daywear that might also be nightwear. There was a resigned and hucksterish air to the event. She selected a sandwich. "Definitely not," she said.
#
But if not that, then what?
On her day off she visited her mother. She trailed the Mining Futures dollar amount behind her like a thought bubble in a cartoon. The apartment was a thin-walled balconied affair with Woodland Grove signed jauntily on its gable wall in looping metalwork.
Her mother opened the door and beamed at her. "I brought three new teas from work," she said.
Shelley kissed her. As usual, she worked to shake off the uneasy sense that she had fallen into a mistake. The pictures, the bureau, the sideboard were all the wrong size. They did not fit well. This pasteboard starter apartment seemed to her more like a configuration than a place to live. These objects belonged to the old A-frame house which had somehow never left her. Long gone, it lingered anyway: its oiled wood fragrance, dust caught in beamed light, the cascade of garden, the boiled-candy green of its sunlit trees.
She removed her shoes and followed through to the kitchen. "These floors are a big ticket item," the super had said when he showed them around -- though they were only veneer. Her mother lived in fear of marking them.
Shelley took up her spot at the table. "Are you alright?" she said.
"I'm tired is all," her mother said from the counter. "I've picked up some shifts at Laurel's on pay and pack." That meant she now had three jobs. "The editing is drying up and the students are back so the cafe doesn't have the work."
"That's tough," said Shelley, who had been about to broach the subject of a loan.
"Oh you know. It is what it is." But it was to have been her mother and father in their house with their neighbourhood barbecues and their reading group; their European holidays. It was never supposed to be working three jobs and minding somebody else's big ticket item. "What about you? How are you?"
"Oh me," said Shelley, as if that were nothing. "You know. I have some options in mind."
#
The first test took place on a Sunday morning at a college building in an unravelled part of town. She accepted a handwritten name badge at the entrance and ventured in alone to find classroom 441.
A stern woman in her fifties stood speaking at the head of the class. Shelley grimaced an apology and slipped in to a seat on the back row.
"I don't know what you've been told," the woman said, "but this is not a formality. Most of you will not make it onto this program."
There were about forty now-chastened candidates in the room -- including several from the hotel presentation. Shelley exchanged a quick grin with the blonde wise-ass and examined the tablet on the table. It presented a single statement: I enjoy solitude. A slider ran from a negative zero to a positive five.
"You may start now," said the invigilator. "Provide as many responses as you can."
Shelley had once liked to be alone--had craved it, really. Recently, though, she had found herself increasingly isolated in her thoughts. In marriage, she had fallen out of practice at friendship and... As she considered this, she grew gradually aware that people around her were already frantically sliding and tapping. She left the slider neutral and submitted. The next proposition was, Money finds those who deserve it. She sighed.
As she clicked through statement after statement she considered setting the slider at random. My employer has my best interests at heart. But they probably had a test to detect that. I own my time. She'd probably be rejected for bad faith -- or at least for incompetent bad faith. There is no such thing as a good lie. Though maybe bad faith was expected. Exhausted already by all this second guessing, she gradually skewed her answers towards honesty. I would like to outlive all my friends. She frowned.
#
Afterwards, some of the candidates met up at a Starbucks round the corner from the college. If she left this world, Shelley thought, and somehow retained a sliver of consciousness she would miss the shushing hiss of frothers, the brave pastries waiting under glass.
At the table, the candidates compared notes. "Well what the fuck was that?" said a woman named Rosie who was older than Shelley by ten years or so.
"Looking for good little cult members, maybe?" said the surfer. His badge informed them he was named Cair.
"I'm not sure they mind about what we answered," Shelley said. "Maybe it's whether all the parts of your story fit together in a non-crazy way."
"I'm fucked then," said Rosie, laughing. "I changed my mind every second."
"Let's face it," said Cair pleasantly. "We're all fucked. That's why we're here."
#
And so it went. They fell through ten sets of tests. The group lost about half its number and was combined with three others. This meant travelling further to larger venues. By then, Shelley was earning enough from expenses to match her pay at the warehouse.
The assessments themselves became more intensive and personal. Shelley spent three hours talking to a psychologist who asked her inevitably about her childhood and her relationships. The man made a note and nodded at everything she said, as if she had confirmed a suspicion each time. Shortly after that, the medical tests began.
"I tell you, it's a scam," said Cair cheerfully. "We just have to find the angle."
This was after they had submitted to another scan and given up yet another armful of blood. Shelley had waited for for two and a half hours in a clinic reception area watching rain hurl itself against the window. The waiting was the worst part, she thought. By comparison the procedures were brisk and efficient.
#
One day, Shelley kissed Cair. The air between them had been charged with it for weeks. She wasn't sure where it had come from. He was, she had been telling herself, not the type she went for. He was too open -- he smiled too easily. She liked hard edges, something to glance off, something to discover. But then, when he was close she found herself humming with current and when he was elsewhere she discovered a need to conjure him somehow. So he slipped into her sentences, that sly bastard. In the end it was kiss him and get him out of her system or go mad.
He had a room in a shared house and it all played out easily. Except that, afterwards, she found that she was not over him after all.
"Well," she said. "That happened."
Cair reached over her for his phone. "I think I'd like it to happen again, don't you?"
"I think so," she said and was surprised to mean it.
#
Mining Futures had acquired a building on what had once been a tech company's headquarters -- back before they all fled the Bay Area for higher ground. It had since been sold off piecemeal and had taken on an atomised unkempt air. It was so close to the flood zone that the warning signs were up everywhere. DANGER TOXIC WATER.
It was to be their fourteenth test. They met in the old dining hall. To Shelley's surprise, the beaming prophet stood on a low podium and welcomed them with his hands raised.
"Well," he said when they were all settled. He gazed around the room. "There will be no assessments today. You are now part of our family. You are joining the Mining Futures journey. We have come a long way." He gestured at a small screen and a projection of stars appeared. "But we have so much farther to go."
There was much additional talk of journeys, and futures, and teams, and momentum, and hope, and lots of other stuff that Shelley tuned out. It reminded her of all the times she'd been forced into church as a child. No matter how hard she tried, she could never remember much of what they said beyond the generalities of God and Jesus and loving people. Perhaps she was just damned and incapable of hearing The Word.
One thing was certain, the prophet did not mention The Money -- which, she was pretty sure, was what everyone in the room was really waiting for. That was left for the invigilator from their first test who took her turn next -- as unsmiling and severe as ever.
"This is no longer a part-time process. Please study your contracts. There are two. The first concerns your training. Throughout this period, you will be engaged as an at-will employee of Mining Futures. You can quit and we can fire you. It happens. The second contract covers your advance. This will be released to you immediately upon signing. Your signature will not absolutely commit you to the full tour. You may change your mind at any time before you engage in travel." She paused. "On the strict condition that you return the advance in full. Do you understand?" She looked severely around the room. Shelley followed her gaze. Her new colleagues were no more impressive as inductees than they had been as candidates, she thought.
"But the cheque doesn't lie," said Cair later, beaming at her.
"That's the trap, though, isn't it? Spend any of the money and they've got you."
"Well that's not unreasonable, is it?"
"They could have released the money to us afterwards. Offering it now -- it's a trick."
They were walking along by the salt marsh behind the campus and Shelley imagined a life without herons and pelicans. Without the smell of wild fennel.
"Let me get this straight," Cair said. "You're angry with them for giving you more money than most people could earn in five lifetimes?"
"I'm not angry. I'm wary. I'm suspicious. Once you've used more than a little, you can't change your mind. They've got you."
"I don't want to change my mind!" For the first time since she'd known him, Cair sounded frustrated, even angry. "I have people I love. People I can help. This is what I can do for them. I can do that now!"
They walked on in silence. The sun sank in a sky thrown open.
She signed both contracts, of course. But she put the vast sum in a new account and resolved not to touch it. Every now and then, she'd log in just to look at the number, marvelling at all those zeros--so many that it barely seemed to matter if you skipped one or two in either direction.
#
The training began. For an entire week, they analysed the brand values of Mining Futures. These were, it turned out, loyalty, exploration, investment. Each of those words spawned its own small lexicon of virtues. The trainees broke out into small groups to discuss aspects of this constellation.
After that, four Brand Ambassadors were appointed for special training. These, Shelley understood, were to become the new prophets of recruitment. She was relieved that neither she nor Cair were in that number. If they were going to do this, it would be as ordinary grunt angels and not heralds.
#
If the early training resembled a sales course, in later weeks it came to seem more like a long and complex illness. They did, at least, get to see the world -- or at least clinics in Germany, England, and Poland, as well as three in The States.
They became used to waiting rooms and thin cotton sheets; backless hospital gowns, bed pans, woozy woozy pre-op drugs. On several occasions she awoke to find that she no longer quite belonged in her body. Then she was forced to acclimatise to her own poor fit, like an awkwardly capped tooth or a pair of pinching boots.
#
They entered a new phase, travelling mainly for sessions across the States. The inductees were distributed across several towns. Never in exciting cities, mind you. It was San Jose, not San Francisco; Boulder City not Las Vegas. Some of the West Coast trainees travelled in style now that they were fabulously wealthy. Much to Cair's bemusement, Shelley insisted on taking the budget company-funded flight -- or, sometimes, driving. The road trips reminded her pleasantly of childhood vacations.
"Look, I'll pay. We could go business," said Cair.
But Shelley just shook her head. "Let's just drive," she said. "It will be fun."
And, mostly, it was. She loved the rolling, majestic relentlessness of the country -- the way that it defied the highway and the farms and billboards and always won -- punching through in tracts of mountains and wild places that went on and on and wanted to kill you in gloriously neglectful ways.
At night, in their latest shitty hotel room, Cair laboured over his sheet of names and numbers. He annotated, made a garden of arrows, scored out and adjusted the sums. Then, after a few days, he rewrote the list neatly and began the process again.
"Who's that?" said Shelley, stabbing at one of the names -- Mark Hampton -- more or less at random.
"High School," said Cair. "He had my back when I needed the help. He's in prison somewhere in Texas right now."
#
A thousand trainees attended an all hands in Fresno and it was a kind of festival -- only without the music, joy or freedom. It was probably more like a dental convention for people cosplaying dentists. Or whatever it was they were pretending to be.
There, again, was the lounge prophet. He seemed smaller on the more substantial stage of the conference hall. He welcomed them with his sad messiah gesture and then punched the air. "You hear people talk about the future," he said, "About preparing for it. But for most of them, almost all of them, the future will offer only defeat. We're different. All of us. We will conquer the future."
And never come back, Shelley thought. All of us lost and motherless. But she cheered along with the crowd.
"See you on the other side!" people called to one another as the meeting broke up.
Afterwards, they drank beers and ate wings at a procession of sports bars. It was not Shelley's scene at all -- but the thought of never sitting in a room filled with screens showing medication ads and men throwing balls on neon green grass filled her with sorrow. She felt like an exile before she had even left. Cair was on good form -- talking to everyone, feverish with excitement. Occasionally he reached for her hand, gave it a squeeze. She squeezed back -- but it felt like a lie.
They all got uproariously drunk. Shelley had vaguely despised everyone she met on the program apart from Cair -- perhaps because they all reminded her too much of herself -- but that night she felt the full glow of camaraderie. Later, she and Cair made giggly fumbling love, which was the best bad sex you could get.
In the morning, with the sun too strong on their headaches, they drank good coffee and watched the world they planned to leave bustle by them. "We have weeks before the call ups begin," Cair said. "Let's just keep moving."
#
They stayed on the road for another month. It had become a habit. They did not talk about the future and Shelley almost succeeding in convincing herself that this was their life now. Roads and motels and tourist traps. They visited the Mystery Spot, Yellowstone, Muir Woods. It seemed to her, increasingly, that the Mining Futures project was just a complicated crime -- a Ponzi scheme that had accidentally paid out for them. Perhaps they would all end up in prison. Perhaps that was the journey they'd all been cheering. It would not be such a bad trade off, she thought.
Cair had finally completed his list. He had instructed the bank to generate a little stack of yellow receipts. He placed each of these in its own envelope alongside a handwritten postcard.
"Are you trusting all that to the mail?" Shelley said.
"They'll get the money anyway. But, you know, paper makes it feel real. What about you? How are you going to help your mother out."
Shelley shrugged. "I'll get to it," she said.
Cair raised his eyebrows. They were running out of time.
#
It was absolutely clear to Shelley as she approached her mother's apartment block what she had to say. Her thoughts returned again to childhood -- the old house, the world as playground, her father. Always her father. That bark of a laugh. No-one had taken it all from her -- it had fallen away bit by bit -- but her mother had officiated at each loss. She had made them pack. She had thrown away the surplus furniture -- surplus people. It was not fair, but how else could a child think? Even a grown up child.
She imagined Cair now as she turned into the pathway and looked up at the balconied block. "Grow up," he said.
"I am," she said. That's the point. "Time to live my life -- with you. Or at least a fair facsimile of you."
She had expected a deep reaction from her mother after such a long silence. Joy perhaps, or anger. Probably some mixture of both. "Well," her mother said.
"Well," said Shelley, feeling that already she had embarked on an argument. It was just a matter now of choosing a battleground. Any one would do.
"You moved," her mother said.
That had been an age ago. "Yes. Remember I told you about the job?"
"You said you had... something. A plan?"
"Well it meant I had to move. I had to travel for it."
"Did you get my mails?" Her mother was working the levers of the kitchen automatically. Once, back in the A-frame house, she had bought a ridiculously over-complicated coffee machine. Somehow, it had survived all the moves. She steadied herself on the counter.
"Are you alright?"
Her mother nodded. "I've taken on a bunch of double shifts."
"Well, I've been thinking about that."
"About my shifts?"
"About all the work. This place."
"What's wrong with this place? You want a dribble of milk or the whole cow?"
Her father's joke. "The cow please. Zapped."
They settled at the table. Life over coffee. What would drinking be like where she was going? Would she even need food? A decade without hunger. "Listen," Shelley said.
"I'm just glad you're back, that's all," her mother said.
"It's just -- you can't carry on like this. We can't."
"Everyone always thinks that at the time. But carry on we do. Until we don't. And there's this, isn't there?" She indicated the coffee, the table -- the two of them sharing the moment.
It seemed like wreckage to Shelley -- a coffee machine, a bureau, a kitchen table, each other.
"I dreamed of you last night," her mother said. "Only it was you as a child. Remember I used to take you to Safeway -- all strapped up in your stroller?"
A vague memory of wriggling against constraints. A glimpse of sky as the car door opened. Cart corrals.
"Well, there we were. Back again. I took you in to the fresh section and you were whining about candy and toys the way you did. You were a whiner. I turned to the apples and turned back... And you were gone." She took a sip of coffee.
"And...?"
"And nothing. It was a dream not a story. You were gone and I could not find you. I ran through the aisles -- and they went on and on... but I knew I'd lost you. I knew it. I could feel it in my chest -- like drowning. I was calling and calling your name."
"Was I dead?"
"It was a dream, Shelley. I don't know. I'm just -- I'm just glad to see you now. It feels like you came back after all."
They watched slow torture clouds boiling along through the window. "I have cookies," Shelley's mother said.
Later, as Shelley prepared to leave, her mother said, "What did you want to say?"
"To say?"
"You said you'd been thinking about something. Like you had something to say."
Shelley wrinkled her eyes as if thinking. "Oh. Right. No. No it's gone. Can't have been important."
#
They were sitting in a slumped plastic-coated coffee shop watching the sun set over the highway and Shelley was thinking they should consider changing coasts. She traced routes in her mind, lacing up cities. Cair's phone buzzed. Or maybe they should stop somewhere and rent an apartment, she thought. That seemed too hard a conversation to have, though. So she said, "I've been thinking about New England."
"No," said Cair. He was looking at his phone, his brow furrowed. "I'm afraid not."
"Before it gets cold. For the leaves."
He turned the phone's screen to her. She caught the words, Report for processing. "I have to go to the hospital," he said. "They've called for me."
#
The hospital was a different place in the morning. It had an early day shift briskness to it that had been missing the night before. The cleaning apparatus had been cleared away and civilian staffers, people in suits and wearing name badges mingled with workers in scrubs and white coats. She had made up her mind. She would speak to him. She would explain the impossibility of both leaving and staying. Measure out the hierarchy of need. The impossibility of abandoning her mother alone in that store, forever lost.
She was so wrapped up in all of this that she missed a turning and ended up standing in a ward of elderly men. They regarded her incuriously. How resigned they seemed. How oblivious. She retraced her steps and turned where she should have turned before -- at the set of oxygen cylinders. And--
She stopped and stared stupidly at the neatly made up bed. It seemed undressed without the machine gantries and the fuzz of wiring, without the kernel that had been Cair.
#
"They took him," said the ward sister.
"I can see that. When? How could that happen without me?"
The woman sighed and consulted a tablet. "I won't be sorry to see the back of you people. Some of us have to live here."
And suddenly the solidity melted away and sound rushed in hard, coming up close in a waterfall traffic roar. Shelley reached out for something to grip onto -- but her hands met nothing.
"He left some effects for you," the nurse said. She slid a buff envelope across the counter.
Shelley made it outside and stood beside the sliding doors fish-gasping at cold fall air, digging her fingers into the mortar between bricks. She walked for a while as her heart rate subsided. That is how she came to be standing in a street around the side of the hospital's sprawl when a large automatic gate slid open to reveal orderlies stacking aluminium caskets into the open maw of a waiting truck. Each one shone a solitary green light.
#
In the cafeteria, she opened the envelope.
She recognised the playing cards at once. But there was also a yellow trust slip that represented enough money to see both her and her mother safe for years. She stared at it. There was no postcard. There had been no need for one. Cair had given her the solution. She could stay and live a decent life if she wanted. She could both keep her world and live in it like a human being. And that should be enough. Except, she knew, he would look for her on the other side.
Somewhere behind her the coffee machine hissed. Her phone buzzed and shuddered. Someone called out "Hey, Trace!"
Report for processing, said the message on her screen. It provided an address. A hospital halfway across the country.
Probably, her mother was starting a shift right now, straightening her hair, checking the pastries on the counter.
In his casket, Cair was waiting.
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