John Hawks - The Traveler

AT SUNSET, SHE rummaged through her travel bag and found a blue tank top and an ankle-length cotton skirt. When she looked in the mirror, she was pleased to see how ordinary she looked-just like any young woman Gabriel might have known in Los Angeles. Then she pulled up the skirt and strapped the two knives onto her legs. The other weapons were hidden under the quilt that covered the bed.

She came out into the living room and found Gabriel standing in the shadows. He was peering through a crack in the curtains. “Someone is hiding in the bushes about twenty yards up the hill,” he said. “They’re watching the house.”

“It’s probably Antonio Cardenas or one of his friends.”

“So what are we supposed to do about it?”

“Nothing. Let’s go find a yellow house.”

Maya tried to look relaxed as they walked back down the road, but she couldn’t be sure if someone was following them. The air was still warm and the pine trees seemed to have captured little patches of darkness. A large yellow house was near one of the bridges. Oil lamps glowed from the roof patio and they heard people talking.

They entered the house and found eight children of different ages eating dinner at a long table. A short woman with frizzy red hair was working in the kitchen. She wore a denim skirt and a T-shirt with the cartoon image of a surveillance camera and a red bar slashed across it. This was a resistance symbol against the Vast Machine. Maya had seen the symbol on the floor of a Berlin dance club and spray-painted on a wall in the Malasaña district of Madrid.

Still holding her spoon, the woman stepped forward to greet them. “I’m Rebecca Greenwald. Welcome to our home.”

Gabriel smiled and gestured to the children. “You got a lot of kids here.”

“Only two of them are ours. Antonio’s three children are eating with us plus Joan’s daughter, Alice, plus two friends from other families. The children in this community are constantly eating dinner at someone else’s house. After the first year, we had to make a rule: the child has to tell at least two adults by four o’clock in the afternoon. I mean, that’s the rule, but it can get a little frantic. Last week, we were making road bricks so we had seven muddy kids here plus three teenage boys who eat double. I cooked a lot of spaghetti.”

“Is Martin…?”

“My husband is up on the roof patio with the others. Just climb the stairs. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

They walked through the dining room to a walled-in garden. As they climbed the outer staircase to the roof, Maya heard voices arguing.

“Don’t forget about the children in this community, Martin. We’ve got to protect our children.”

“I’m thinking about kids growing up all over the world. They’re taught fear and greed and hatred by the Vast Machine…”

The conversation stopped the moment Maya and Gabriel appeared. A wooden table had been placed on the roof patio and lit with vegetable-oil lamps. Martin, Antonio, and Joan sat around the table drinking wine.

“Welcome again,” Martin said. “Sit down. Please.”

Maya made a quick assessment of the logical direction of an attack and sat next to Joan Chen. From that position, she could see whoever was coming up the staircase. Martin bustled around them, making sure they had silverware and pouring two glasses of wine from a bottle with no label.

“This is a Merlot that we buy directly from a winery,” he explained. “When we were first thinking about New Harmony, Rebecca asked me what my vision was and I said that I wanted to drink a decent glass of wine in the evening with good friends.”

“Sounds like a modest goal,” Gabriel said.

Martin smiled and sat down. “Yes, but even a small wish like that has implications. It means a community with free time, a group with enough income to buy the Merlot, and a general desire to enjoy the small pleasures of life.” He smiled and raised his glass. “In this context, a glass of wine becomes a revolutionary statement.”

Maya knew nothing about wine, but it had a pleasant taste that reminded her of cherries. A light breeze came down the canyon and the flames on the three lamp wicks fluttered slightly. Thousands of stars were above them in the clear desert sky.

“I want to apologize to both of you for the inhospitable welcome,” Martin said. “And I also want to apologize to Antonio. I mentioned you at the council meeting, but we never voted. I didn’t think you’d arrive so soon.”

“Just tell us where the Pathfinder is,” Maya said, “and we’ll leave right now.”

“Maybe the Pathfinder doesn’t exist,” Antonio growled. “And maybe you’re spies sent by the Tabula.”

“This afternoon, you were angry that she was a Harlequin,” Martin said. “And now you’re accusing her of being a spy.”

“Anything’s possible.”

Martin smiled as his wife came up the staircase carrying a tray of food. “Even if they are spies, they’re our guests and they deserve a good meal. I say, eat first. Let’s talk on a full stomach.”

Platters and bowls of food were passed around the table. Salad. Lasagna. A crusty wheat bread cooked in the community oven. As they ate dinner, the four members of New Harmony began to relax and talk freely about their responsibilities. A water pipe was leaking. One of the trucks needed an oil change. A convoy was going to San Lucas in a few days and they needed to leave very early because one of the teenagers was taking a college entrance exam.

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.