The Traveler

Past the age of thirteen, the children were guided by a teacher in the community center, but their instructors were from all over the world-mostly university graduate students who taught on the Internet. Several colleges had offered full scholarships to a girl who had graduated last year from the New Harmony school. They were impressed by a student who had studied calculus and could translate Molière’s plays, but was also capable of digging a water well and fixing a broken diesel engine.

“What’s the biggest problem here?” Gabriel asked.

“There’s always something, but then we deal with it,” Rebecca explained. “For example, most homes have at least one fireplace, but the smoke used to hang over the valley. Children were coughing. You could barely see the sky. So we met and decided that no one could have a wood fire unless a blue flag was flying at the community center.”

“And are you all religious?” Maya asked.

“I’m a Christian,” Antonio said. “Martin and Rebecca are Jewish. Joan is a Buddhist. We’ve got a whole spectrum of beliefs here, but our spiritual life is a private matter.”

Rebecca glanced at her husband. “All of us were living in the Vast Machine. But everything began to change when Martin’s car broke down on the freeway.”

“I guess that was the starting point,” Martin said. “Eight years ago, I was living in Houston, working as a real estate consultant for wealthy families that owned commercial property. We had two houses and three cars and-”

“He was miserable,” Rebecca said. “When he came home from work, he’d go down to the basement with a bottle of scotch and watch old movies until he fell asleep on the couch.”

Martin shook his head. “Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality. I probably would have trudged down the same road for the rest of my life, but then something happened. I took a business trip to Virginia and it was an awful experience. My new clients were like greedy children without any sense of responsibility. At one point in the meeting, I suggested that they give one percent of their yearly income to charities in their community and they complained that I wasn’t tough enough to deal with their investments.

“Everything got worse after that. There were hundreds of police officers at the Washington airport because of some kind of special alert. I got searched twice passing through security and then I saw a man have a heart attack in the waiting lounge. My plane was delayed six hours. I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things that I didn’t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.

“When I got back to Houston, it was about 110 degrees with 90 percent humidity. Halfway home, my car broke down on the freeway. No one stopped, of course. No one wanted to help me. I remember getting out of the car and looking up at the sky. It was a dirty brown color because of all the pollution. Trash everywhere. The noise of the traffic surrounding me. I realized that there was no reason to worry about hell in the afterlife because we’ve already created hell on earth.

“And that’s when it happened. This pickup truck stopped behind my car and a man got out. He was about my age, wearing jeans and a work shirt, and he was carrying an old ceramic cup-no handle-like something you’d use for the tea ceremony in Japan. He walked up to me and he didn’t introduce himself or ask about my car. He looked in my eyes and I felt like he knew me, that he understood what I was feeling at that moment. Then he offered me the cup and said ‘Here’s some water. You must be thirsty.’

“I drank the water and it was cold and it tasted good. The man pulled up the hood of my car, tinkered with the engine, and got it going in a few minutes. Now, normally, I would have just given this man some money and been on my way, but that didn’t feel right, so I asked him home for dinner. Twenty minutes later, we got back to my house.”

Rebecca shook her head and smiled. “I thought that Martin had gone out of his mind. He met a man on the freeway, and now this stranger is eating dinner with our family. My first thought was that he was a homeless person. Maybe a criminal. When we finished eating, he cleared the dishes and started washing them while Martin put the children to bed. The stranger asked me about my life and, for some reason, I began telling him everything. How unhappy I was. How I was worried about my husband and my children. How I had to take pills to go to sleep at night.”

“Our guest was a Traveler,” Martin said, looking straight across the table at Gabriel and Maya. “I don’t know how much you know about their power.”

“I’d like to hear anything you can tell me,” Gabriel said.