The Wanders

The job in the North was a good job for what it was. I was not excited about it, but I was satisfied because it would take me away from the city where I had lived with Paul, and where every drugstore and bar and credit center was heavy with the memory of him.

The job wasn’t high-ranking or well-paid, and the main question the hiring manager asked me was, “Are you okay with travel?”

Everybody in the company split time between at least two district offices, sometimes thousands of miles apart. Mine would be Fairbanks and Sitka, a small city on the Gulf of Alaska. I’d commute between the two every day.

“I love traveling,” I said.

The truth was that I hadn’t traveled much—when I was with Paul I’d had one of the rare remaining jobs that was based in a single city—but I’d never been nervous about teleporting the way some people are. Paul used to say that it seemed immoral, how you could get from one place to another so easily, without even walking. And some people were scared of it, like flying—you could get hypnotherapy to make you more comfortable with the idea. But all the early skeptics now said teleporting was safe. One of them even did commercials for a teleporter company, talking about how he’d come around.

And I’d always liked the ritual of it: taking off my clothes in the little cubicle, loading them with my bag into the luggage bin, lying down in the chamber itself, and letting the lid close over me, snug and cool as a layer of water. I didn’t even mind the warnings that came over the intercom, that although no human had ever been seriously injured, we should know and accept that our bodies would be disassembled and reassembled somewhere else. We would be identical in every respect, but anyone with a religious or other objection should press the call button to be released from the teleportation chamber immediately. I never objected. Everyone always said you couldn’t feel it, but I swear there was always a moment when I could sense my body coming apart, when for a