Journal Entry for May 14, 1997 at 17:00

Classified:

Top Secret

“We are One!” a voice sounded in her right ear as she drew to a stop at the intersection of Bundy and Santa Monica. “We are taking our anti-smoking campaign overseas,” the voices from the unidentified source continued.

Momentarily, her daughter piped in, “Mommy, that man’s smoke is bothering me.” She frowned for emphasis forcing her Mother to take action. Her Mom reached over to the passenger side of their vehicle and rolled up the window on her daughter’s side.

“Mommy, why does that man look funny?” her daughter added, as Mom pulled herself back up behind the steering wheel. This prompted Mom to look past her daughter to the car with the smoker next to them and carefully assess the driver. The man in the vehicle--a silver Land Rover--rolled forward slowly to bring his driver’s window directly into her line of sight. She could discern from his profile that he was not a normal variant of anyone she would consider a contemporary human.His head was noticeably larger and appeared to be nearly spherical. It was draped with very fine blonde hair--nearly colorless--in a Dutch boy haircut that hung limply in the air between the bottom of the back of his head and his shoulders. His facial features, from what she could see, were very flat, with an imperial chin and small, fine-shaped nose. She sensed he allowed her to peruse him deliberately and when he felt she had taken him in in some detail, he slowly turned from profile to face her.

She was initially taken aback at seeing his face; it was not ugly, in fact its features were perfectly symmetric and perfectly formed, however, it was very strange. Her surprise registered on her face. Reading her confusion, his thin lips traced a quizzical smile, and he leisurely dangled his left arm out of his window and with his thumb flicked the butt of his lit cigarette to let some ashes fly.

Her gaze followed the flow of his black clad arm, with his opaque white hand holding the cigarette. There seemed to be one heart beat between them, then he shook his wrist forcing a watch to peek out from under his long sleeve. He continued to nonchalantly dangle his cigarette out the window while studying her, his fingers perfectly long, thin, regular and manicured. While she could not read the brand on his watch, she understood it to be the very finest in time keeping machinations and she was given to understand that she was late for something. He took advantage of the opportunity that time allowed for her to assimilate all of this information about him by quickly moving into the vacated space in front of her vehicle. The traffic light had briefly turned from red to green and back again, allowing only the one vehicle in front of her through the intersection. He moved so quickly that she did not have time to react and to move her vehicle forward. She did not miss out on the fact that the timing of the traffic signal was irregular.

“Now step out of the car and let her take a good look at you,” a young male authoritative voice commanded. While she clearly heard this directive, her daughter was oblivious to it.

To her amazement, the driver-side door to the man’s vehicle slowly opened, reinforcing the impression that the voice(s) she heard were in fact a real presence, yet somehow not everyone in her surroundings could hear them.

“Mommy, what is he doing?”

She only responded by extending her right arm across her daughter's body to keep her from freeing herself of her seatbelt. She continued to watch carefully, as she was given to understand this particular show was happening just for her benefit.

The man extended a very long, very thin, black clad left leg and well shod foot to the ground. Once his foot landed and he tested his footing, he slowly drew his entire body out of the vehicle and remained standing in place, with his back to her, certainly allowing her the chance to take a very good, long, hard look at him.

He was very tall, his erect frame exceeding the height of his vehicle. His legs were spindly and clad in a tight black fabric that enveloped his lanky legs without revealing his musculature. His slacks were beltless and rested snugly without binding on his thin, masculine frame. He had a very small buttocks almost to the point of being non existent. His hips were narrow. The opaque, semi-glossy fabric of his black shirt draped fluidly around his broad shoulders and long arms and was tucked smoothly into his pants. His bulbous head was balanced on a reed-thin long neck. This last detail bothered her most about his appearance since she surmised his neck was about one-fifth the diameter of an average human neck. Overall, she concluded that he was aesthetically pleasing to the eye despite his unusual appearance.

He slowly turned on his heel to face her and stood motionlessly staring at her. She knew to greet him with the obligatory “Peace!” and she did her best to project telepathically to him, however, he seemed non-responsive. He began to walk toward her and while she strained to hear any kind of communication from him or those intrusive voices—all was silent.

She noticed his gate was unusual; he moved like a puppet on a string--almost as if he wasn’t aclimated to the gravity on Earth. As he approach she sensed her daughter's heightened state of anxiety, so she did what any mother would do—she deftly flipped him the bird. She felt this defiant gesture would at least demonstrate to her daughter that she wasn’t afraid and so neither should she be. That same quizzical smile flitted across his lips, so quickly she wasn’t sure it happened at all. He continued to methodically plod his way to the rear of his vehicle, turning his back to her once he reached the tailgate. He gingerly opened it up and she considered for a moment pinning him between the vehicles by rolling up slowly on him, but she was not sadistic. Had she not been miffed at this display in front of her child, she would have laughed at the sight of his thin limbs flying around in search of something in the back of his SUV, when finally he straightened and turned to face her, this time holding two small bottles of Evian water in one of his hands. He raised them slightly to her eye level, went back into his vehicle and drove forward through the intersection. The timing of the light was such that once his door closed, it turned green.

‘Great, they’ll be poisoning the water next,’ she thought to herself. She wondered why no one else seemed to notice the extra-ordinary length of time for the traffic signal to change. No-one honked or even seemed remotely interested in what she and her daughter had witnessed. She drove west behind him for several city blocks until she had to turn north to the service station, and he continued westbound. His vehicle did not have a license plate. She would have liked to chase him down, but she felt constrained by the presence of her child in the car and the need to get to her son before the nursery school closed.

While she didn't appreciate the mystery, the encounter gave her something to focus on outside the chronic pain in her body, and the migraine in her head; 'Who are 'We' that are 'One' and what do I care about any anti-smoking campaign?'

From Maxie Time, by Raida Abachi