The Caregiver’s Lottery

A young man trades months for mercy and discovers the cost was never denominated in money.

(An ongoing fictional series about the world that forgot about children. More chapters here.)

The auditorium smelled of diluted lemon and fresh copy paper. The lemon scene was purposeful; the paper scent was not.

Forty participants sat spaced at agency-approved distances, as if societal endings were contagious and compliance the antiseptic. A banner hung at the front in a starkly serifed bureaucratic font that pretended not to be a loud voice: Continuity Corps — The Caregiver’s Lottery. Below it, a slogan read: “Trade months for years!” Whose months and whose years, the sign declined to say.

Jonah Reyes, twenty-six, with a degree in political science and $68,414.32 in debt, held his packet as if it were a rare passport. He delivered groceries by day and apologies by night to relatives who had expected more. When the Corps launched—volunteer months of eldercare in exchange for debt forgiveness—he applied with the quiet superstition of one who has learned that hope tarnishes faster than copper.

They drew his number.

They sent a badge and an email stamped WELCOME TO SERVICE. Orientation was mandatory. He arrived on time because punctuality was a habit (out of necessity), almost a faith.

The kit included a gait belt, a pocket notebook, and a laminated sheet titled Preventing Bedsores; Mitigating Despair. A nurse named Martha demonstrated how to move a body without humiliating it. A man in a navy suit explained how math was a proxy for mercy: For every 160 hours of approved service, $2,500 would be forgiven from qualifying principal. The figures had the clean sound of policy in a vacuum.

They practiced greetings: “Good morning, Mr. Novak, I’m Jonah, I’m here to help with your morning routine.” They learned how to stand—straight back, bent knees—“The body is a machine that respects angles,” Martha said. It was true and unkind at once.

Jonah was assigned to Block C, a corridor of rooms smelling faintly of disinfectant and boiled vegetables. His ledger listed three names: Lidia Novak (84), Thomas Cole (79), Deirdre Price (73). The surnames came like old acquaintances from a forgotten novel—Cole, a retired loan officer; Price, once a financial-aid administrator. He had met them before, indirectly, across signatures.

“Start with Ms. Novak,” the nurse advised. “She’ll tell you what she needs and a little more. You’ll like her.”

He did.

Lidia had run a lathe in her youth, and her sentences held tolerances. The first morning she looked him over and handed him the remote as if passing a wrench. “Don’t look like a deer,” she said. “Look like a man who knows the difference between hot and warm, and say I’m here like you mean it.”

They developed a rhythm: curtains, dressings, the small engineering of comfort. “Did you ever have children?” he asked. “I made parts,” she said. “For men who went under mountains and made cities live. My son called once from Stuttgart, asked for a recipe, didn’t write it down. That was my child.”

When Jonah passed Thomas Cole in the day room, the old man regarded him with the civility of an auditor. “Do we know each other?” he asked.

“I think you processed a loan for me, or, I’m not sure.” Jonah said.

“Then I failed you,” Cole replied. When he reopened his eyes, he asked politely for water—room temperature, no ice. “I’m certain I shouldn’t have approved that.”

That was unkind and also, true.

Jonah fetched it and wondered—shamefully, curiously—if the man’s death might lighten a ledger somewhere. He knew better. Debts in this world died only when the algorithms forgot their passwords.

He wrote the thought in his notebook as if confession could be sanitized by ink. “I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this.”

Deirdre Price recognized him almost immediately. “Jonah. Martin. Reyes,” she said with bureaucratic precision. “We met, didn’t we? I told you to invest in yourself.”

“You told me the interest rate was very competitive,” he said gently.

“I did,” she replied. “Then I went home and put my head on a cold kitchen table so no one would see me.”

The block ran on its own arithmetic: 6.5 hours, $101.56 credited; 21 hours, $335.94; 103.5 hours, $1,654.69. Debt shrank like an ice block licked clean—heroic, boring, perishable.

At night he joined the floor’s informal congregation—Martha and two volunteers drinking weak tea beside a supply cart. “You cannot be the last person to hold everyone’s hand,” she told them. “But you will be the last person for someone. Do that job well.”

The moment arrived quietly. Lidia’s breath turned into a saw. The pulse oximeter kept time for unbelievers. She asked for her radio; he found a station playing the decade of her hands.

“My hair,” she said. “Make me look like work.” He combed it, pinned it, said she looked “like a woman who was always on time.” He admired that at least.

She laughed once and then stopped, the way the living stop when the next job is someone else’s.

Procedure took over. Call the nurse. Close the door. Record the time. Stay. Wash. Wait. The floor’s custom was a single bell kept near the linen shelves. Jonah rang it once; another nurse answered in another wing. The sound was small enough to not wake the tenants, but loud enough to be true.

His phone buzzed an hour later: You have earned service credit for this episode of care. The phrase had a cleanliness that mocked the tears he kept at bay.

He sat beside the bed and thought of value—the word that had made him sign every loan, the word that made policy men sleep. Lidia had made real things: her hands had turned raw ore into motion, and the world still moved because of it. There was no column for that.

The block adjusted to her absence like a limb to amputation. Thomas Cole mistook Jonah for his son; Deirdre Price folded towels with him and confessed that her famous advice had been a lie. “It should have been, We don’t have the courage to make the world cheaper, so we’ll make your future more expensive.” She laughed, unexpectedly young, and took his hand.

The app recorded hours. The system praised consistency. The confetti animation felt obscene. He ignored it and went back to Block C, where Martha taught him how to fold a fitted sheet without despairing of geometry.

After sixty days, the app asked whether he wished to extend. Yes, No, Remind Me Later. He stared as if the screen were scripture. He pressed Yes. Not for the money; the math was faithful but insufficient. He had found the hidden integer—the exchange of time for meaning, the strange grafting of the young onto the old.

It was not math. It was gardening or weeding—he couldn’t decide.

His mother called to ask if he was “becoming a nurse now.” He told her he was becoming useful. She cried in the small, practical way mothers do when the world briefly seems repairable.

The service for the departed filled the common room with names, no speeches. Martha, reading from her notes, offered a benediction disguised as instruction: “May your beds be made, your hair lie correctly, your mornings find you, your hours be spent and not wasted.”

Jonah walked home afterward. His debt was smaller; his ledger, somehow, heavier. In his pocket were a notebook, a pen, and two of Lidia’s hairpins he had forgotten to return. He pinned them to his corkboard like artifacts—tokens of a currency older than money.

He passed the school that had lost its bell. The brackets were still visible. He imagined hanging a smaller bell beneath the ghost of the old one and ringing it once, the way they did in Block C—not to dramatize, only to count.

Numbers mattered. They described what people permitted and what society had lost.

He arrived the next morning on time. Thomas Cole would want water. Deirdre Price would want the truth told twice—softly, then straight. Someone would need the lift and the hands that had learned angles. The Corps would mark the hours and credit the ledger.

What Jonah had learned would not fit there.

Care is a ledger that refunds the living with the right to begin again. Let’s hope he does.