Destination
by Annie R. Lin
"Wherever you are going, you are there." The slogan of International Transport, Inc, beamed brightly in stenciled foil from the wall of the Boston-bound cabin.
Drowsy but determined, Walter Bolen squinted at the sign and tried not to fall asleep. He found it easier to stay awake when he had something to stare at, and in the cramped, windowless travel compartment-economy class, but cheap-the gleaming sign was the only thing he could ponder. Years before the invention of the Transporter and the abolishment of personal vehicles, a teenaged Walter, unshaven and unflinching, took his first and only train ride. The train, an anachronism even then, took its time: through its plate glass windows, Walter wondered at the world gliding past him and realized, as he moved slowly through space and time, the meaning of the phrase "passing time." Walter had passed his time on the train staring at other passengers who, in turn, stared back at him, out the window, or down at their shoes. The train had been so full of space and people that Walter did not know where to look. But in the travel compartment, he had nowhere to look, so he read and reread the sign. Its guarantee took on a tone of authority.
"You are there."
Almost. Two minutes had already passed since the Transporter left Detroit, and the calm woman on the loudspeaker would announce his destination any minute now. Walter pressed his forehead against one of the plastic walls, and fingered the coin in his pocket, his fare for the Transporter. It was unthinkable, really, that a coin could whisk him away to the places he had always dreamed of-New York, Cairo, Paris, anywhere in the world-in an instant.If a postcard were worth a thousand words, thought Walter, then a city should be worth ten thousand. But the researchers at International Transport, Inc., believed otherwise. Bolstered by research funds from fifty-four nations, they shaped the infrastructure for the first multinational transportation project, the project of the future. The end product, the Transporter, sealed people into neat, individual compartments, like pills, and shipped them across countries, continents, and oceans. After settlements over prices and places, major cities were worth the price of a single coin, sometimes with a free postcard thrown in.
The interior of the travel compartment reminded Walter of his doctor's office, except that it was cleaner. Clean places made Walter feel sterile and sleepy. The last thing Walter saw before each treatment was his doctor's white lab coat, so crisp and clean that he had to close his eyes, lose consciousness, and awaken half a day later with dullness in his temples and a cure in his veins. Another treatment: this time his doctor had injected him with the serum of a plant that grew only on a tiny island in South America. Walter had never been to South America, yet in this way, it became a part of him. Sometimes he dreamed of steaming swamps, screeching birds, and creeping vines; and when he awoke, he thought he was there. South America was cheap and easy: it cost only one, or maybe two coins on the Transporter.
"Wherever you are going, you are there."
Walter could change his mind at the next destination. He could swing into South America. He could stop at every tiny island in the continent and search every forest glade for a blade of grass that might cure him. But he was neither going nor already there. He really could go anywhere, but it would be as easy, painless, and useless as the doctor's shot: he would probably die. Places meant nothing more to Walter than the names of destinations, called out calmly over a Transporter loudspeaker. But in his youth, when cities were not so cheap, the names had been special. There was something stunning about the concept that every point on the planet was unique, yet never the same. It was Walter's introduction to the idea of infinity, and every place name-Allendahi, Zimbabwe, or County Cork-proved his theory. He spent his afternoons in the public library, marveling over place names on a National Geographic map. He stared out the four classroom windows at school and imagined seeing a different city in each one. He watched nature shows and formed the vague idea that places in the world had something to do with the environment. He thumbed to the dictionary definition of environment-"that place which surrounds its inhabitants"-and built his faith in the world around that definition. This faith made Walter yearn to travel. He longed to inhabit every name on the map, to be surrounded by the fullness of a landscape whispered secretly in the syllables of its name. He wanted to see what made each place unique. Most of all, he wanted the impossible: to see the concrete evidence of infinity by treading finite ground. He thought he could experience infinity by visiting every place in the world.
But the world was finite. Definitions shifted: no longer could the environment surround its inhabitants. Instead, the environment was now surrounded-flooded by people, it even failed to stun scientists, who carefully measured its ebb and flow. The world was now a list of destinations, small and large, that had taken the researchers over thirty years to compile and program into every single Transporter unit in the world. These names held no magic; they all cost and looked the same. Walter could go wherever he wanted now, move himself to any point on a map, and it made him sad. In the doctor's office, he felt old and choked up, as though the world were a peach pit he had managed to swallow put could not spit out. When he stared out the window, he wondered what it would be like to die: to stay in the same place and never move again.
Walter was not an old man yet, but he felt like one the day the doctor told him about the disease. It was passing through his blood, the doctor said, as though Walter's blood were a railroad track for malignant cells to trace as they coursed through his tissues, veins, and arteries. They moved for the sake of motion; for the sake of travelling through his blood; for the sake of going where no Transporter had ever transported. The cells seemed to have no destination, and indeed, an X-ray showed him that wherever they were going, they were already there-they were everywhere. Unlike the Transporter passengers, who shuttled meaninglessly from destination to destination, the cancer moved with meaning. It meant to kill Walter.
Time passed slowly as Walter thought of his cells, as the cells passed through Walter, and as Walter passed out.
Destinations used to mean so much to Walter who, as a child, had saved nickels and quarters and spent Sundays crouched behind bushes, waiting for the train to come. He balanced coins on the track and ran for cover when he heard the rumbling. As the train barreled past, it stirred the leaves of the trees and a longing in him he could neither describe nor understand. Afterward, Walter searched the grooves of the flattened coin for traces of the places the train had been, for hints of the places it would be going. The coins never gave away their destination secrets, but he always kept them.
Walter didn't know where he was going, but wherever it was, he was already there.