The Arrival of the Visitors

Kevin Anderson fell asleep worrying about the new job he'd be starting soon after graduation next week in San Francisco the width of the country away.

Kevin was proud of himself for getting this lucrative appointment, but worried his ivory tower schooling in Virtual Architecture wasn't going to have prepared him for the real world work of the reconstruction of the City after last year's devastating earthquake.

He had been working at his computer now for hours, and was a little groggy. He was finishing the final revisions on his senior thesis, "Generating Autosolidifying Plane and Solid Surfaces in Parameter-free Virtual Space with 3-D Force Replication: A Computer-Assisted Energetic Design Model." What's that got to do with the real world, he fretted.
As he prepared for bed, he was also fretting about his roommate's absence. Not that it was unusual for Tim to spend weekends in New York. The City was so close and, after all, Tim had the money to enjoy its cosmopolitan delights. But, in spite of--or perhaps because of--their friendship, Kevin disapproved of what he suspected Tim was doing down there.
Even though unconsciousness came hard for Kevin, once he fell asleep, he slept soundly, drifting in and out of dreams of an idyllic vacation with his family in the backwoods of Maine where his dad had sometimes taken the family when the kids were young. Kevin slept so soundly, in fact, that he was not aroused by all the noise in the yard outside his Harvard University dorm a little after 1 a.m.

For weeks afterwards Kevin was going to regret sleeping through that event.

Timothy Lewiston combed his hair, still wet from the shower. He glanced over at the clock to see it was after 1:30 a.m. Social hour in New York City, he thought to himself. He'd told a friend he'd meet him between 2 and 2:30 at Zoncko's in the West Village. The cab'll take about twenty minutes, he figured. I've still got about fifteen before I need to leave. He turned back to the mirror.

Tim Lewiston was an attractive young man. He was small but solid. Except for his height he looked all the part of a rangy redheaded Texas cowboy with tight wiry musculature, a brush of reddish hair across his chest and down the centerline of his torso, blue green eyes, and a smile as beguiling as a country cowpoke. His Texas cowboy appearance was a little deceiving. It correctly identified his Dallas roots, but belied the fact that his grandfather had made a fortune in the oil business and had had the incredibly good luck to sell his holdings just before the Texas oil slump in the 1980s. His father, in turn, had the same good fortune to get out of the market at the end of the '90s just before the dot com collapse. Tim's mother and dad had retired to the California gold country about the time Tim started college in Cambridge. They had a ranch in Nevada City and a condo south of San Francisco in Hillsborough. And the family still maintained this bachelor apartment on the Upper East Side, though Tim was now almost the only one to use it during occasional jaunts to New York.

And the fact was, Tim did make those jaunts fairly often and without his parents' knowledge. He wasn't quite ready to tell them yet that he was "experimenting" with his lifestyle, hanging out at the bars along the newly renovated and hyper-chic Christopher Street. A young queer has to learn to hide things, he told himself. Indeed, he'd learned at Harvard he'd survive only if he kept on top of his feelings. Sometimes that had meant being practically merciless and occasionally quite rude.

Read about the photo of 'Bel on the back cover by Roy Blakey

As he slipped into his clothes, he thought again about the unpleasant confrontation he'd had over dinner with his now ex-boyfriend. And he recalled the conversation earlier in the week with his therapist as he acknowledged the failure of that relationship. Tim had remarked what a cruel joke it was that he felt unloved and unlovable because there were too many people who wanted him and he never knew if it were for his money, his body, or himself. "So I've just never believed in love," he said. "I guess I need to want somebody."

He glanced out the window hoping to find a cab waiting outside the building. He noticed a commotion on the street. A crowd had gathered down by the corner. A number of people were pointing up in the air. At first Tim thought maybe his building was on fire but, before he panicked, he realized they were pointing at something much higher than the building. He stuck his head out to see what was up there, but couldn't see anything.

His curiosity urged him to rush as he pulled on a jacket, locked the apartment door behind him, and waited anxiously for the elevator to let him out on the ground floor.

As he stepped out of the building, he saw people running past him toward the end of the block. He still couldn't see. Whatever's going on is certainly causing a lot of excitement. Maybe the Empire State Building's on fire. When he reached the corner and turned to see what everybody was looking at, Tim realized he should have gone up to the roof where he'd have had a much better view

Tim's worries about love and sex all seemed suddenly insignificant.

Green light flickered over John Marshall's face. Around him in the darkened room of the Space Defense Research Facility at March Air Force Base in Riverside, CA, other crew-cut young airmen steadily watched the hypnotic radar screens sweeping the skies for signs of invasion by missiles or bombers or, potentially even more threatening, space objects, like asteroids or large meteors, or maybe alien spaceships. Sometime in the future--if the current research going on just down the hall, John knew, were successful--such signs would be the occasion for activating the space shield, a force field that would surround the United States stopping all invaders from entering our air space.

Some of the other faces seemed intent, but most looked bored. John had had the job of supervising the radar monitors of the experimental facility now for several months. Most of the time he too was bored. Tonight he was thinking about his girlfriend. Before coming on duty, he'd talked with her on the phone. She'd told him she was going to be away for a couple of weeks on a job assignment. He hadn't liked that. He was jealous. But he had been too tongue-tied to explain his feelings. She's flying all over the world on assignment, hoping to reestablish her career with CNN after last year's fiasco. It was her own fault. And she's just too intent on this career of hers. But damn it. I can't talk to her about my feelings. If she'd just give me a chance…

After his shift ended, John hung around for a while. He was reluctant to go home. He knew Joan would be there. Probably packing. And he didn't want to face her. I'll just freeze up and we'll both get upset. He drank an extra cup of coffee to get himself alert enough for the forty-five minute drive back to Covina, the suburb they'd agree was halfway between his job in Riverside and hers in Hollywood. And he even smoked a cigarette. He'd quit smoking months ago and was not happy that he'd bummed one without thinking.

Finally he left the station, asking for another cigarette on his way out. He stopped just outside the door to light it. And then stood for a minute looking up at the sky. If only Joan and I could communicate…

It was a dark, clear night. The stars were brilliant. John was surprised how little haze there was. He gazed up at the stars, testing his memory of astronomy, as he smoked the cigarette. He forgot that he was peeved with himself for smoking it, for not being able to do what he really wanted. John was just thinking he'd identified the star Regulus in the constellation Leo, when suddenly it looked as if a hole had opened in the sky. The stars were blanked out in a circle almost directly overhead.

John blinked and then rubbed his eyes before he looked again. Oh my God. Just then he heard the horns go off signaling an alert.

Sister Margaret Mary Alacoque sang the words of Compline along with the other sisters at St. Benedict's Home. The elderly voices occasionally hit sour notes. Margaret Mary didn't think of herself as as old or feeble as the rest of the sisters around here. But then she thought, down inside, probably none of them thought of herself that way either.

Two years ago, when Sister Margaret Mary came to St. Benedict's she'd been happy to give up teaching and happy to get away from the cold winters back in New England. She'd been looking forward to the opportunity to spend her days in prayer. But by now she was feeling bored. Instead of a house of contemplation, St. Benedict's Home turned out to be an asylum for dotty old nuns. Margaret Mary might not have been so dissatisfied if she finally achieved the kind of mystical, religious experiences she'd longed for as a novice fifty years ago. It seemed like she had been waiting all these years for a chance to discover contemplation. And all she was getting were old women.

The world has changed too much. Nothing makes sense anymore. But better to believe in all those old stories, even if they were wrong, than to believe in nothing. Maybe I'd be better off dead. But, God, I wish just once You'd give me a vision, something to prove all these years of waiting on You were worthwhile.

After night prayers Sister Margaret Mary headed back to her room. As she often did, she went the long way around the outside of the building. She liked getting a little fresh air before bed. She was cantankerous enough herself that if the side door were already locked she didn't mind ringing the bell and making that young sister who was in charge of her wing of the residence hall come let her in, Sister Jennifer. Not a proper name for a nun anyway. She needs a little discipline.

The night air was cool, but not uncomfortable. Sister Margaret Mary sat down on a bench overlooking the convent garden. She was surprisingly out of breath and felt a sudden pain in her chest. My heart? she wondered, only half-afraid.

She looked up at the night sky, as if she could peer through the heavens into the celestial realms. In lieu of her vision, she reminded herself of the good she'd done in her life, of the success of the students she'd taught over the years. Why just last night I saw that pretty Joanie Salado on TV. Sister remembered Joanie clumsily reading Shakespeare in Speech class. She smiled with the thought that something she'd taught had prepared that young girl for being a TV commentator. And Sister remembered this morning getting an announcement from his mother of Kevin Anderson's upcoming graduation. He was a sweet boy, a little bit of a sissy, but so talented. She used to get him to draw elaborate cartoons on the blackboard to spice up the daily announcements. You'd think he'd have made a better weatherman than an architect, she chortled. And then coughed painfully. She strained to stand up.

This cartoon-like sketch of Kevin, 'Bel, and Sr. Jennifer
by artist Shane Tanner graced the cover of the
1995 Peregrine Ventures release

She limped along the side of the old red-brick building. Coming round a corner, she saw the lights of Los Angeles spread out across the horizon. Just then Sister heard a roaring sound behind her. For a moment she felt afraid. She started to turn around when the sound overtook her. She looked up, thinking it was a jet airplane flying too close to the ground. Instead in the sky above her, moving in with ponderous grace, was a huge darkness. As she strained her neck to see better, a circle of amber lights flashed on above her. It was as though a golden halo opened in the sky. Her fear suddenly disappeared.
Margaret Mary sat right down on the sidewalk with a bump. She didn't feel the clutch at her heart. My prayer's been answered, she thought gratefully. She hadn't expected death to be like this. She hadn't expected God to open a hole in the sky and carry her soul up to him. But here it was happening.

She let her head fall back and she closed her eyes. She could feel the whistling wind blowing across her face and she imagined that now angels were descending from the golden circle in the sky, coming to carry her away. And, very gently, she gave up her soul to the Lord.

"This joint's about as short as it's ever gonna get, Joel. You sure you don't want the last toke?"

"Well, Bunny, since you put it like that," Joel answered, giggling. "Sure I'll take a toke." As he reached for the joint the older lady offered him, he added, "Wouldn't want the joint to get any shorter now, would we?"

"Huh?" Bunny responded quizzically. She had not quite understood the innocent fun Joel was making of her peculiar syntax.

"I'm just as happy with the moodie," Joel continued. "Since the doctor's been prescribing these for me, I haven't been smoking as much grass."

"So I've noticed." Bunny fell silent a moment, staring off into space. The two were sitting on the narrow deck of the Victorian four-plex they lived in on the edge of San Francisco's Mission District. "Look at all the stars," she mumbled under her breath.

"You wanna save the roach?" Joel asked struggling to hold his breath as he passed the joint back.
Taking a look at it in the dim light illuminating the deck from her kitchen, Bunny replied nonchalantly, "hardly enough to make it worth throwing away."

Joel giggled again as he flicked the roach over the railing. As a wave of euphoria rushed through him, he leaned over and gently hugged his friend and neighbor. He felt suddenly warm and affectionate toward her in spite of her eccentricity and occasionally maddening distortion of the English language.

Though now at least in her mid-sixties, Bunny lived just like the hippie chick she'd been as a girl. Her flat next door to his was mostly empty. Unless he invited her over for dinner, it appeared she ate nothing but carrots and brown rice. But in spite of her apparent poverty, she was always bringing homeless people around to share her carrots and brown rice and to get high with her--and, Joel imagined, probably to have sex. "Make love, not war," was one of her mottos.

Bunny frequently went up to Mount Shasta where she was connected with a band of UFO watchers who fervently expected and prepared for extraterrestrials to come rescue them just before the nuclear holocaust or the depletion of the ozone layer or the flood from the greenhouse effect devastated all life on Earth. Bunny herself called the group "fanatics" and had never moved permanently to the mountain commune, but added in her inimitable way that, "Still you never know when you might not want to be there--just in case. After all, you might get a chance to make love with an alien."

"Joel, you know, I'd worry about those moodies if I were you. I don't trust doctors. After all, Goddess gave us marijuana and peyote and magic mushrooms. They're organic. How do you know about these, uh, chemicals? …what they might be doing to your mind?"

Joel laughed to himself for a moment. Of all people to worry about what something might do to your mind! Bunny's taken enough drugs to burn out all the lights in Schenectady. Joel stopped himself, thinking, Oh God, now I'm starting to sound like her.

"But, Bun, they're legal, they're cheap, they're harmless. They've taken the crime out of drugs. And they address the real problem."

"The real problem?"

"Sure. Drugs were a problem of technology. Technology created them, imported them, and sold them,. And the technologization of society got people so uptight they needed or wanted them. And like with all the other problems of technology, the only solution is in better technology. The answer to the drug problem was better drugs that provide euphoria and get you high without doing any damage, dulling consciousness, impeding judgment, or slowing response time."
"I still don't trust the government," she replied.

"Well, at least the government finally started telling the truth about drugs. That's what was necessary before anything could've been done. Now, if only they'd start telling the truth about nuclear weapons and international diplomacy and that force field they want to build in the sky…"

"…and UFOs," Bunny interjected one of her favorite subjects. "After all, the people deserve to know what we all know we know"

Joel was just thinking that Bunny's communication skills might have been a whole lot better if there'd been moodies back in the old days instead of acid, when suddenly Bunny's mouth dropped open.

She slowly began to stand, pointing up into the sky behind Joel's head. "Here they come," she managed to say.

"Oh, Bunny, come off it," Joel commented skeptically, thinking that as soon as anybody mentioned UFOs around Bunny she starts seeing things.

"No, Joel. I mean it. Look."

He turned around.

Joel felt the blood rush from his face. He wondered if Bunny had been right. Maybe the moodies can cause hallucinations.
"Oh my God," she said, "It's as big as if it weren't even there."

Called back to reality by Bunny's nonsensical phraseology, Joel did a little reality testing. He asked himself if what he were seeing slowly move across the sky could be explained as an airplane or maybe the Goodyear blimp.

But no, the flat dark shape, encircled with golden lights, was obviously not a blimp. That just couldn't be anything else but a real flying saucer.

"Damn," Bunny said, "here I am in the City. This is no time to not be at Mount Shasta."

"Yeah," Joel answered, feeling more euphoria than any combination of drugs could produce. "But you don't need to be at Mount Shasta. They're here, Bunny. They're right here ."

Joan Salado watched TV most of the night, switching through the five hundred and twenty channels the cable brought in looking for new news. She was excited and she was worried. It was almost 3 a.m. and John still wasn't home. She wasn't surprised that he might be held up on base, but still she worried. What if more is going on than is getting reported? What if the Aliens, uh, Visitors--what should I call them?--are hostile? What if there've been attacks?

She'd once read a story about a team of scientists who'd faked an alien invasion in order to get the conflicting countries of the world to see they could cooperate with one another. For a moment she wondered if this invasion had been faked. But she had looked out her own window only a few hours ago and watched the ship move slowly across the Southern California sky. She knew it was real.

Remembering the awesome size of that ship, Joan felt a surge of fear and respect pass through her. The world is never going to be the same again.

That was not an all together unwelcome idea. Part of Joan's upset this evening had preceded the arrival of those spaceships--or whatever they were. Joan was still trembling with the embarrassment of this morning's scene at the Air Force Base. And wondering if her career with CNN could withstand one more blow like that.

A year ago Joan had become suddenly famous as the CNN staffer to report from the Great San Francisco Earthquake. The public loved her and her down-to-earth reaction to and reporting of the disaster. She produced a series blending warm, "womanly" human interest stories with hard-hitting catastrophe footage, characterized by her use of compact, mobile cameras--in which she was sometimes shown climbing through ruined buildings or under collapsed freeways helping perform rescues as well as report on them. Her star was rising.

Just as the quake story was dying down, Joan discovered that a Department of Homeland Security project to generate the space shield had been going on in a facility in the Rumsfeld Research Park in San Francisco and that the experimental device had been turned on at the time of the earthquake. Joan accused Dr. Maxwell Humphries and the military of covering up the fact that this device may have been responsible for triggering the quake.

She'd made a splash in the news with the story, but then the story was squelched by the Pentagon and dismissed as ludicrous and Joan was professionally discredited. She'd been reassigned to the Hollywood office and given jobs reporting on celebrity weddings and fancy night club openings.

Coincidentally Dr. Humphries' research program also moved south to March Air Force Base near Riverside. The move was officially explained as a precaution to protect the delicate equipment which had been damaged in the San Francisco earthquake, but Joan fervently believed the lab was moved to get it away from a fault line so future experiments wouldn't cause another earthquake. In part to resurrect her career and prove she was right and to prevent further earthquakes, she'd continued on the sly to trace down stories about the space shield research.

She'd learned through her current boyfriend whom she'd met at one of those night club openings and whom she'd pursued in part because he was in the Air Force at March A.F.B., that Maxwell Humphries was giving a talk to Pentagon contractors at March just that morning. She'd sneaked into the talk--with her mobile camera tucked surreptiously over her ear like a wireless headset--hoping to get a clue about Humphries' work that could exonerate her.

As the lecture began, Humphries explained that even though the Terrorist War seems to have cooled with the establishment of the U.N. redress and reconciliation courts mandated by Al Qaeda, there was still threat against the homeland. Now it came again in the form of attack by air. The three missile attacks on New York City in the last few years was evidence.
The latest international hot-spot was the Nasserine Civil War. The Loyalists, Humphries said, were believed to control missiles capable of reaching the United States. He reminded the audience that recent intelligence reports indicated that Saudi space-based weapons and even old-fashioned, but still firable, Russian ICBMs had ended up in the hands of the Nasserinian rebels, and perhaps even former Iranian and Iraqi insurgents, South African Reactionaries, Korean Sovereignty Partisans, Russian Neo-Czarists, and who knows how many others.

His project, he explained, has been to create a "space shield" over the country which would prevent missile intrusion. Once expanded worldwide, the shield would be able to block unauthorized military actions anywhere on Earth. And he added that, theoretically, it might even protect the planet from collision with an asteroid.

Joan was just congratulating herself on getting into the lecture--and thinking about how to position her head so the camera would pick up Humphries' every facial expression, when the scientist recognized her in the audience and started shouting, "THAT woman, get her out of here."

She was surrounded by security guards and literally dragged out of the room. She'd never been so embarrassed in her life.
Her supervisor had left her an email notice that he was expecting to see her in his office first thing tomorrow morning.

All evening Joan had been worrying about getting fired and reminding herself that the arrival of the spaceships changed everything. But still John wasn't home. It was admitting to him what had happened this morning that she feared the most. John had never been sympathetic with her effort to undermine Maxwell Humphries' research. After all, he was now working in Humphries' own department. And he'd kept reminding Joan how careful he had to be to not let slip anything about his relationship with her.

Just then, Joan's dime played a gentle ringtone, Edith Piaf's classic L'hymne a L'amour (Let It Happen), resurrected as the poignant love theme for last year's Oscar-winning sci-fi tearjerker romance, When Worlds Collide.
The dime, as they'd come to be called, was the all-in-one, hand-held phone, text and voice messaging device, satellite computer link, gamer, and audio-video save/play pod that, under a number of different brand names, had become the essential work and play tool of 21st century DIgital-MEdia-sophisticates.

L'hymne a L'amour was the signal the call was coming from John.

"Hi, honey," he said. "Sorry I'm so late calling. The base was locked down tight till a few minutes ago."

"I guessed as much," she answered. "Hey, got any hot scoops for me?" She tried to keep the conversation light. She had no intention of mentioning this morning's embarrassing scene, at least not on the phone.

"I probably know less than you do. I haven't heard any news. We've been on red alert since the ship first appeared over the base…"

"Where's it now?"

"Still right overhead."

"Hmm? You think they're interested in the space-shield?" she asked.

"Look, Joan, I probably shouldn't be talking about this stuff. And don't mention the space-shield," he said coldly. "Anyway, the reason I called was to say I was late and to, well, apologize for what I said earlier, I mean, about resenting your assignment…"

"Well, that'll probably change anyway. Everything's gonna change."

"'cept us?" John asked sheepishly, hoping she'd understand the veiled import of his communication.

"'cept us."

The Arrival of the Visitors

Articles and Excerpts:

Gay Consciousness

Enlightenment

Gay Spirituality

Mystical Vision

The Hero's Journey

Seeing Differently

The Vision

People

Book Reviews

Toby Johnson's Books on Gay Men's Spiritualities:

The Arrival of the Visitors

The Arrival of the Visitors