Bewildered Travel: The Sacred Quest for Confusion

5. Holy Strangers

i once pointed to someone walking past my house and asked a three-year-old friend of my daughter’s who it was. “The stranger,” she said with an ominous tone. Our culture is fascinated and obsessed with “strangers.” We warn our children about strangers, insisting at a very early age that they distrust them. Sexual predator, kidnapper, thief—one might think we lived on the frontier, our security and safety constantly in peril. The Neighborhood Watch is vigilant, fortunately, and we’re glad that there are retired folks on the block, sitting by the curtains, just keeping an eye on things while we’re at work. At night there is a Citizen Patrol, wearing bright orange vests and carrying cell phones: Moms and Dads walking the circuit. Twenty->ve years ago I was visiting my sister in Hollywood, and a police cruiser pulled to the curb as I walked to a shoe repair shop: “I didn’t recognize you from the neighborhood,” he said. I resented it then; • 107 F I V E Holy Strangers these days I’m glad that the police are alert. And since September 11, Homeland Security is watching for the deadly strangers with ceaseless acuity. Unfortunately, strangers are hard to spot, especially since they look a lot like “us”—or are us. The crime statistics warn us, above all, against friends, neighbors, and family members. The supermarket tabloids are much more likely to shout a story about one family member who murders another, and maybe that’s why the JonBenet Ramsey murder or Susan Smith’s drowning of her children or even O. J. Simpson stories ran for so long. David Lynch’s Twin Peaks touched a very raw nerve when Laura Palmer’s murderer turned out to be her father—or, better yet, the evil spirit, Bob, inhabiting her father. For that matter, Oedipus and Hamlet have lethal strangers in the home. Patricide, fratricide, suicide— they are the crimes that are simply too heinous, the crimes of the stranger in the home or the stranger in the mirror. What is a stranger? Strangers are from “there,” not “here.” They are unfamiliar—not of our family, our culture, our values, our understandings. Their customs are funny and their clothes are, too. They speak with an accent. Above all, they make us uncomfortable by reminding us that there is a “there,” and that “here” is only here, not everywhere. They hold values that are in con?ict with ours; in fact, they have values that seek to undermine ours. They are the vanguard of invasion, spies, the singular point of not here, not us. A friend tells a story of approaching remote villages in India, nothing yet visible except trees, but everyone already knows he’s there. It’s as though there’s a small but detectable alteration in the rhythm, he says, an alteration that can be heard, felt. A stranger is around. He knows he’s been detected because as soon as he goes into some bushes to pee, some boys are already there, waiting and watching. Strangers exist only where there are borders (though they might be the borders between our own towns or between our home and our neighbor’s). We cross a border and encounter strangers immediately, a fact that seems as odd to me now as that 108 • bewildered travel it should rain on one side of the street and not on the other when I was a child. On one side, San Ysidro, California, and on the other, Tijuana, Mexico. On one side, ranch homes, safe water, English, and people who know what I mean when I speak about . . . well, anything: the Republican National Convention that was going on in San Diego (I saw James Carville outside a hotel and said, “Keeping ’em honest?” “Tryin’,” he said), the trolley (“Does this one leave next?” “No, the one that will arrive over there”), lunch (“Large fries?” “No”). On the other side, a waiter rushing to get me a taco that may or may not have beef and a glass of water that he may have understood I wanted to be from a bottle; a four- or >ve-yearold girl on Avenida Revolucion, smiling up at me, but smiling because she’s friendly or to slow me down to look at her mother’s handicrafts spread on the sidewalk? A hotel manager scowling as I check into the...