John Hawks - The Traveler

“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.

“Travelers have gone outside our world and then they’ve come back,” Martin said. “They have a different way of looking at everything.”

“Because they’ve been outside this prison we live in, Travelers can see things clearly,” Antonio said. “That’s why the Tabula are scared of them. They want us to believe that the Vast Machine is the only true reality.”

“At first, the Traveler didn’t say very much,” Rebecca said. “But when you were with him it felt like he could look inside your heart.”

“I took off work for three days,” Martin said. “Rebecca and I just talked to him, trying to explain how we had ended up in this situation. After the three days were over, the Traveler checked into a motel in downtown Houston. Every night, he would come out to the house and we started to invite some of our friends over.”

“I was the contractor who built the new bedroom in the Greenwalds’ house,” Antonio said. “When Martin called me, I thought he wanted me to meet some kind of preacher. I went over there one night and that’s when I met the Traveler. There were a lot of people in the living room and I was hiding in the corner. The Traveler looked at me for about two seconds and it changed my life. It felt like I had finally met someone who truly understood all my problems.”

“We learned about Travelers much later,” Joan said. “Martin contacted other people through the Internet and found out about the secret Web sites. The crucial thing to know is that every Traveler is different. They come from different religions and cultures. Most of them only visit one or two realms. When they return to this world, they have different interpretations of their experiences.”

“Our Traveler had visited the Second Realm of the hungry ghosts,” Martin explained. “What he saw there made him realize why people are desperate to feed the hunger in their souls. They keep looking for new objects and experiences that can only satisfy them for a short time.”

“The Vast Machine keeps us dissatisfied and frightened,” Antonio said. “It’s just another way to make us obedient. I gradually realized that all these things I was buying weren’t making me any happier. My kids were having problems at school. My wife and I were talking about a divorce. Sometimes I would wake up at three o’clock in the morning and just lie there, thinking about what I owed on my credit cards.”

“The Traveler made us feel that we weren’t trapped,” Rebecca said. “He looked at all of us-just a group of ordinary people-and helped us see how to make a better life. He made us realize what we could do on our own.”

Martin nodded slowly. “Our friends talked to their friends and, after about a week, we had a dozen families coming to our house every night. Twenty-three days after he arrived, the Traveler said goodbye and went away.”

“After he left, four families stopped coming to the meetings,” Antonio said. “Without his power, they couldn’t break away from their old habits. Then some other people went on the Internet and found out about Travelers and how dangerous it was to oppose the Vast Machine. Another month went by and we were down to five families. That was the core of people who wanted to change their lives.”

“We didn’t want to live in a sterile world, but we didn’t want to give up three hundred years of technology,” Martin explained. “What was best for our group was a mixture of high tech and low tech. It’s sort of a ‘Third Way.’ So we pooled our money, bought this land, and came out here. The first year was incredibly difficult. It was hard to set up the wind turbines so that we’d have our own independent power source. But Antonio was great. He figured it all out and got the generators working.”

“By that time we were down to four families,” Rebecca said. “Martin talked us into building the community center first. Using satellite phones, we were able to go online. Now we give technical support for the customers of three different companies. That’s the main source of the community income.”

“All the adults at New Harmony have to work six hours a day, five days a week,” Martin explained. “You can work at the community center, help at the school or in the greenhouses. We produce about a third of our food-our eggs and vegetables-and buy the rest. There’s no crime in our community. We don’t have mortgages or credit card debts. And we have the ultimate luxury: a great deal of free time.”

“So what do you do with that time?” Maya asked.

Joan put down her glass. “I go hiking with my daughter. She knows all the trails around here. Some of the teenagers are teaching me how to hang glide.”

“I make furniture,” Antonio said. “It’s like a work of art, only you can sit on it. I made this table for Martin.”

“I’m learning how to play the cello,” Rebecca said. “My teacher is in Barcelona. Using a computer cam, he can watch and listen to me play.”

“I spend my time communicating with other people on the Internet,” Martin said. “Several of these new friends have come to live at New Harmony. We’re now up to twenty-one families.”