The Traveler

GABRIEL LIVED IN a house in the western part of Los Angeles that was fifteen feet away from the San Diego Freeway. At night a white river of headlights flowed north through the Sepulveda Pass while a parallel river of brake lights led south to the beach cities and Mexico. After Gabriel’s landlord, Mr. Varosian, found seventeen adults and five children living in his house, he had them all deported back to El Salvador, then placed an ad for “one tenant only, no exceptions.” He assumed that Gabriel was involved in something illegal-an after-hours club or the sale of stolen car parts. Mr. Varosian didn’t care about car parts, but he did have a few rules. “No guns. No drug cookers. No cats.”

Gabriel could hear a constant rushing sound as cars and trucks and buses headed south. Every morning he would walk over to the chain-link fence that surrounded the back of his property to see what the freeway had left along its shore. People were constantly throwing things out of their car windows: fast-food wrappers and newspapers, a plastic Barbie doll with teased hair, several cell phones, a wedge of goat cheese with a bite taken out of it, used condoms, gardening tools, and a plastic cremation urn filled with blackened teeth and ashes.

Gang graffiti was sprayed on the detached garage and the front lawn was dotted with weeds, but Gabriel never touched the exterior of the house. It was a disguise, like the rags worn by the lost princes. The previous summer, he had bought a bumper sticker from a religious group at a swap meet that announced “We Are Damned for Eternity Except for the Blood of Our Savior.” Gabriel cut off everything but “Damned for Eternity” and slapped the sticker on the front door. When real estate agents and door-to-door salesmen avoided the house, he felt like he had won a small victory.

The inside of the house was clean and pleasant. Every morning, when the sun was at a certain angle, the rooms were filled with light. His mother said that plants cleansed the air and gave you positive thoughts, so he had more than thirty plants in the house, hanging from the ceiling or growing in pots on the floor. Gabriel slept on a futon in one of the bedrooms and kept all of his belongings in a few canvas duffel bags. His kempo helmet and armor were placed on a special frame next to the rack that held a bamboo shinai sword and the old Japanese sword left by his father. If he woke up during the night and opened his eyes, it looked like a samurai warrior was guarding him while he slept.

The second bedroom was empty except for several hundred books piled in stacks against the wall. Instead of getting a library card and searching for a particular book, Gabriel read any book that happened to find him. Several of his customers gave him books when they had finished them, and he would pick up discarded books in waiting rooms or on the shoulder of the freeway. There were mass-market paperbacks with lurid covers, technical reports about metal alloys, and three water-stained Dickens novels.

Gabriel didn’t belong to a club or a political party. His strongest belief was that he should continue to live off the Grid. In the dictionary, a grid was defined as a network of evenly spaced horizontal and vertical lines that could be used for locating a particular object or point. If you looked at modern civilization in a certain way, it seemed like every commercial enterprise or government program was part of an enormous grid. The different lines and squares could track you down and fix your location; they could find out almost everything about you.

The grid was comprised of straight lines on a flat plain, but it was still possible to live a secret life. You could take a job in the underground economy or keep moving so fast that the lines would never fix your exact location. Gabriel didn’t have a bank account or a credit card. He used his real first name but had a false last name on his driver’s license. Although he carried two cell phones, one for personal business and one for work, they were both billed to his brother’s real estate company.

Gabriel’s only connection to the Grid was on a desk in the living room. A year ago, Michael had given him a home computer and arranged for a hookup to a DSL line. Going on the Internet enabled Gabriel to download trance musik from Germany, hypnotic loops of sound produced by DJs affiliated with a mysterious group called Die Neunen Primitiven. The music helped him go to sleep when he returned to the house for the night. As he closed his eyes, he heard a woman singing: Lotus eaters lost in New Babylon. Lonely pilgrim find your way home.

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