“You scared the shit out me!” Jessica exclaimed, standing over the man while her friend Arnold helped him up from the floor. The man had recently arrived with Jessica at Arnold’s home in Albuquerque, NM, where the two hoped to see Arnold, and other of Jessica’s friends display their work in a show that would be held in downtown, but the man seemed to react negatively to drinking wine with Jessica the night before.
“Your eyes were white and you were shaking, do you have seizures?” Jessica asks perplexed. She knows what seizures look like and she would have made an attempt to keep the man from swallowing his tongue, but his fit was new to her. His limbs jerked sharply, unnaturally, like a person possessed in movies she’d seen before.
The man has no explanation and decides to use Jessica’s.
“Should we take him to a hospital,” Arnold asks, “do you feel OK?”
“I’m fine, I feel so much better than when we got here,” the man explains. “Can I get water though?”
The man stands at Arnold’s sink downing and refilling cup after cup. The dry heat of NM was threatening to prune him and his lips are perpetually chapped. He finally sees NM through Arnold’s kitchen window, though; when he’d driven in with Jessica, the pain in his head made it impossible for him to see and appreciate anything. But from Arnold’s window he sees NM as the beautiful antithesis of everything he had left behind. The man had thought that maybe the dessert was not the best place for him considering his affinity for the green of trees and grass, but he gained an appreciation for the clear horizon that sometimes featured the bluish forms of mountains far off, and the trees that did grow were green, just not as tall and full, and the sidewalks weren’t lined with grass but with gravel or rocks. The palette is different in NM and he loves it, even the light blue of the sky seems a different shade than the NC sky though it was just the grouping of colors underneath it that changed its mood from crisp and superior, to a sort of mirth that was lighter and more liberated. The man feels free, like there is space to open himself wide and let go of everything that made him sad and regretful.
“You sure you alright? It was so scary seeing you like that,” Jessica says as she approaches him from behind.
The man never takes his gaze from the scene through the window and he answer her sincerely, “I feel amazing right now,” and without much thought, he turns and grabs Jessica to kiss her. The two enjoy a passionate embrace.
Just then, Arnold’s wife Naomi comes into the kitchen for an update on the man’s condition.
“I heard the commotion but I was working on some finishing touches. Everything OK?”
The man and Jessica smile together, “its never been better,” the man says.
Dr. Thomas Eakran has a secret; he is an alien from outer space who traveled to Earth on a mission to evaluate the species native to the planet to see if the Earth warrants inclusion into the Interstellar Panel of planets that creates and records laws and legal precedents for planets under its purview; but keep in mind that this is happening on the other side of the universe, far away from Earth technology. Eakran has other secrets, like that he only has two fingers that he disguises with prosthetics, he is not technically male because he posses both male and female reproductive parts, he is a big fan of the NC box turtle, and he has a beacon that lights up to tell him the location of technologies from his home planet. Today, Eakran is on a plane to the state of NM, determined to locate the source of a mysterious signal that is supposedly coming from technology native to his planet, but Eakran had not lost anything and as far as he knew he is the only one of his kind anywhere near this sector of space. He decided to take an airplane rather than his pod traveler because he had never seen the state before and he figured he could take some time from work to really immerse himself in the local human culture. Another secret about Eakran, when he came to Earth he had nefarious intentions of feasting on human brains and conducting experiments, but since his arrival he’s been surprised by his own capacity to care for the well being of the humans and he was resistant to use them as guinea pigs. And he rather enjoyed the Earth, with its many land masses and populations spread out across them; on his planet, there is only one habitable continent. Now he is off on an Earth adventure to discover the source of the mysterious beacon signal (that started just as the man was convulsing on the kitchen floor in Albuquerque), and he feels like a bona fide Earth explorer or detective like his favorite TV detectives (his favorite are the guys from the show Psych). The beacon device that Eakran has is similar to a smartphone and works by pinging other technologies from Eakran’s planet and it can receive error messages that sometimes emanate from gadgets to notify the owner of a malfunction. The message on his beacon means nothing to him, but he has a nagging suspicion that it should. It is not in English, but when translated it says something like “DRK. MATR. MAN. REBOOT SUCCESS.” Eakran is stumped but the beacon will lead him directly to the source.
In downtown Albuquerque, the man and Jessica enjoy the art show. There is free wine that the man avoids and when the show is over, he sits with Jessica, Arnold and Naomi outside at a restaurant. Naomi and Arnold ask the man about his trip so far and he tells them what he hoped to gain from the whole thing.
“I’m a young guy and I wanted to go out and prove to myself that I can handle life on my own. And I wanted to see the pacific coast.” The man wonders how long NM will keep him and he knows that he is in no rush to leave.
“We should go,” Jessica says, “I got the time to drive with you out there.”
“But I like it here,” the man says looking around him at the size of Albuquerque that is just right for his sensibilities. He loves the way the grasshoppers crowd the sidewalk in the high, brown grasses and when someone walks through, it sends a flurry of grasshoppers jumping in all directions. And he loved that it got much cooler at night and he finally stopped sweating after a day under the sun with little to no shade to retreat under.
“We can come back, but don’t you want to see the coast? We can drive straight to Phoenix, AZ sleep there, then be in Long Beach, CA in three days tops.” Jessica seems to be pumping herself up the more she thinks about it. “C’mon, I haven’t been out that way in so long. We’ll take my car,” she offers and the man is excited to have a companion on the last leg of his trip. He also feels that he has found a home in the desert, even if Jessica would eventually head back to Amarillo. Maybe the trip to Long Beach would be what they needed to fall in love and be together forever. Arnold and Naomi are happy for the two of them, but they have lives that they can’t put on hold for an impromptu road trip. The four sleep at Arnold and Naomi’s house and early the next morning, the man leaves his car with the couple who promise to look after it for him until he is back in town, and he and Jessica head out to see the Pacific, the culmination of the man’s journey.
When Eakran lands in the Albuquerque Airport, he is frustrated and upset with himself that he had not used his pod traveler, that is the size of a car but moves hundreds of times faster. Before the plane even lands, he can see that the source of the signal that his beacon is receiving is moving away from the city, and by the time he lands and finds a car to rent, the source of the signal of hours away. The scenery of the desert as he follows the source is some solace, it does kind of remind him of his home on the faraway planet he had left so many years ago.
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