Illegal Raëlian

He came to Earth on a Tuesday. Pedro found him and brought him to class for show and tell.

I remember it was a Tuesday because Pedro only came to class on Tuesdays. He was a busy man, Pedro. Head accountant at the one and only luxury hotel in Zamora de Hidalgo, Mexico - not exactly a lightweight. He was away on business half the time, and on the verge of being fired the other half. So who could blame him if he only came to class once a week, and thirty minutes late at that? I certainly didn't.

Around 8:00 in the PM, there would come a knocking at the wood-plastic door and Pedro would peek his head in. Teacher, can I come een? No matter how late he was, Pedro always had a seat saved at the head of the table, like he'd phoned in beforehand to make a reservation. On the way to his rightful throne, he exchanged fistpounds with everyone in class. Very-very sorry, teacher. I just have the meeting with the fok-hink boss!

Pedro was in his late 40's when I taught him, and is probably in his mid 30's by now. The very portrait of youth, Pedro, but almost comically bald, with more hair to his felt-tip mustache and bushy black eyebrows than he had up top. A pair of yellowish buck teeth gave him a rodentlike but charmingly boyish appearance. He wore his pastel dress shirts unbuttoned low enough that you could infer his nipples. And nestled amongst plenty of old-growth chest hair was a solid gold crucifix. Pedro, like most Zamoranos, was a devout Catholic, though clearly not of the superstitious set. He grinned during his in-class sermons. Teacher, I just give all the thanks to my God - here, he would point and gaze up towards the yellow-stained Styrofoam ceiling tiles - for give me strength to not be fire from best fok-hink hotel in Zamora, okay? And in the next breath, he was lamenting his estranged ex-wife, who had hooked up with some pinche Sancho from Guadalajara. Then he was regaling us with tales of nudist gringo bacchanalia at Hotel Casa Velas in Puerto Vallarta. Then he was speculating on the potency of his teacher's seed, and the global distribution thereof.

"I know you have the childrens, teacher," he would say, with the same perverse grin he wore when kissing his crucifix. "All over the fok-hink world. America, Canada, een pinche China, too. Everywhere, they are callink for you. They are waitink for you, teacher! Waitink for you with open arms! Waitink - for the rest of their fok-hink life!"

Like all the other TEFL academies I've worked for, the academy in Mexico warned me about getting tight with my students. You are their teacher and not their friend - this was school policy. But I've never been very good at making the distinction between student and potential drinking buddy, and seeing how the teenagers I taught in the afternoon reviled me as their mortal enemy, I had no qualms about making friends with my adult night class. Anyway, I had no say in the matter. They befriended me first. As soon as the bell rang, Luis was nudging me and tipping back an invisible bottle of Indio, or Pedro was escorting me out to his Cadillac Escalade for an all-expense-paid tour of the little-known ritzy side of Zamora.

My adult students were well beyond their language-learning years. Poor Alejandro in the back literally could not speak a word of English, said sí for yes and a heavily accented no for no. Pedro, a Chivas fan, called soccer "football-soccer" and I corrected him every Tuesday for four months, in vain.

"Pedro, my man," I would say. "It's either football or soccer. You have to choose one. It can't be both."
"Okay, teacher. We watch the Chivas football-soccer after class, okay?"

But futile as my efforts sometimes were, my oldsters took notes, asked me good questions, even did their homework - and they learned English the way all languages should be learned: through off-color remarks about their teacher's virility. Awash in a sea of spoiled adolescents, my adult class was the lone bright spot of my teaching day. All that semester, my high school students called me a maricon behind my back and eventually to my face. They egged my house on three separate occasions, always during my afternoon siesta. But at the end of the day, when I slumped into my night class like a burlap sack full of hurt feelings, my non-traditional English learners would give me fist pounds, compliment me on my relatively youthful looks, and ask me about my girlfriends. But what cheered me up most of all were those rare Tuesdays when I found Pedro there, on time for once, seated at the head of the table, leaning over his yellow legal pad, bearing a nauseating amount of man-cleve, and as I set down my books and took my place at the whiteboard, he would say, grinning perversely, "We have been waitink for you, teacher. Waitink for you with open arms. We will wait for you for the rest of our fok-hink life."

Enter the Raëlian. It was a Tuesday, around 8 in the PM. Pedro was absent, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. Over the weekend, I had taught myself the four English past tenses, how to distinguish them, and how to teach them, so I was very excited to share this newfound knowledge with my adult class. I sketched Pedro's balding visage on the board.

"So, let's say Pedro is watching football-soccer. Suddenly, his estranged ex-wife calls from Guadalajara. This is the past continuous, followed by the simple past: Pedro was watching football-soccer when ... "

I was teaching the past continuous when the Raëlian arrived. There was a knock at the door. Pedro peeked his head in.

"Very-very sorry, teacher. Can I come een?"

But this time, Pedro was not alone. He exchanged fist-pounds with his classmates and me and assumed his usual place at the head of the table. And behind him came an emaciated man of a greenish hue who smirked at me as he passed. The stranger did not exchange fist-pounds with anyone, but kept his arms crossed over his chest and his hands tucked into his armpits. He slid a chair to the far right corner of the room and there he sat, smirking at me.

Pedro took out his legal pad, put on his bifocals, and began copying down what I had written on the board.

"What will you show us today, teacher? I mean, what will we see today?" He squinted at my Pedro cartoon. "Teacher, that ees me?"

I, meanwhile, was squinting at the stranger in my classroom. That smirk. Those eyes. His zombie complexion. If you've seen David Lynch's Lost Highway, this guy was the splitting Latino image of The Mystery Man.

"Pedro, aren't you going to introduce me to your ... friend?"
"Oh. Hmph." Pedro snorted. "He ees not from our planet, teacher. He from space."
Pedro pointed up at the ceiling tiles and resumed writing.
"From space?"
"Yes, teacher. You don't want to know thees man," he said, scribbling irritably. "Thees man have very-very strange ideas."
"Well, that's okay. I'm interested in strange ideas."
Pedro set down his pen and removed his glasses.
"Por ejemplo, teacher. You know I believe in my God, my Lord and Savior Jesucristo," he turned toward The Mystery Man, who was watching me. "Thees man believe in - he believe in other God. Cómo se dice lagarto? Yes. Yes. He believe in leezard God!"

My students had stopped taking notes and were looking back and forth between Pedro and The Mystery Man. I glanced anxiously at the whiteboard. The past continuous had become the past simple. Finished. The arrival of Pedro's lizard-worshiping friend had catapulted us into an unexpected and unpredictable future tense. But my curiosity was far too piqued. I couldn't help but ask.

"Maybe you can tell me a little bit about your lizard beliefs, Mr. - "
He got to his feet.
"Name is Jose," said the man. "I am Raëliano."

It took me a moment to translate the word, but only a moment. No shit. A real live Raëlian. In my classroom. It was as though I'd hogtied a unicorn, or boobytrapped Bigfoot. I had met Scientologists before, Hare Krishnas, even Episcopalians - but this was something new. My very first Raëlian. Mentally, I marked off another square on my Sinister Cults Bingo card.

Then, I played dumb. Because I was interested.
"Raëliano?" I asked. "What's that?"

A radioactive glow spread over the classroom as the Raëlian spoke. His English was impeccable, but stripped of all tone and color. He did not mention lizards, but he did reference UFOs, alien overlords, a French auto racing messiah, and a whole host of other divine beings that you might find in the National Enquirer Year in Review issue. Patricia was glaring at the Raëlian and praying to herself. Alejandro had no idea what was going on. Alejandro 2, a 16 year-old boy who had been placed among the adults for some reason, and who was more mature than any of them, looked positively terrified. Pedro snorted and rolled his eyes.

"Teacher, do not listen thees man. I will wait for my God with open arms and one day very-very soon he will come," said Pedro, "but thees man, he will wait for the rest of his fok-hink life and still, the leezard will not come. Okay? Time for school. What will you show us today, teacher? What will we see today?"

The Raëlian sat back down and was silent for the rest of class, but he watched me with a laserbeam intensity that gave me the shakes and rendered my own words foreign to me. I was relieved when the bell rang. Pedro and the Raëlian got up to leave. Pedro gave me a fistpound. The Raëlian just smirked. I would never learn just how they were acquainted, or why Pedro had brought him to class in the first place. And I still don't know anything about the Raëlian belief structure, whether it involves lizards or aliens or Israelites or race cars or what. I plan to remain happily ignorant in that regard. I'd rather not know. It's like looking into a vortex. You keep at it long enough and before you know it you've got spirals in your eyes.

As Navidad approached, my adult students proposed an end-of-semester Secret Santa gift exchange. I set the bar at twenty pesos maximum, though I knew Pedro would hurdle it. Then, a strange thing happened. Two weeks before the gift exchange and the final exam, everyone dropped the class. Luis, Alberto, Patricia, both Alejandros and a pair of Lupitas. All gone. Everyone had vanished except me and Pedro, and Pedro only showed up on Tuesdays. The week before the final exam, just for something to do, I spent my 7:30 class tutoring a bratty little ten year-old soccer phenom who wanted to improve his grammar, but wasn't much for conversation. No sense of humor, this kid. Then, he disappeared, too. So I would walk into class, find the classroom empty, shut the door behind me and start doodling little Pedros on the whiteboard, blue Pedros, black Pedros, red ones, green ones ...

Then, the day before the final exam, the night of the gift exchange, there came a knock on the door. I erased the whiteboard as fast as I could. The door squeaked open and there was Pedro.

"Teacher, can I come een? Where ees every-bady?"

There was no one to fistpound but me. Pedro took his seat at the head of the table, unpacked his legal pad and glasses.

"What will you show us today, teacher? What are we going to see today?"
"Well, Pedro, my man. We should probably review a little bit. The final exam is tomorrow."
"Ayyy, no! Teacher, I have the meeting with the fok-hink boss in the tomorrow night! I will be late to take part een the exam!"
"How late is late?"
He glanced at his Rolex.
"The eight and thirty!"
"Well, then, Pedro," I said. "I will wait for you. Here. With open arms. For the rest of my life."
"No, teacher," corrected Pedro. "For the rest of your fok-hink life."

That night, Pedro drove me in his Escalade to a place called La Cucaracha. I had told my roommate Nicole to meet us there for the gift exchange, having already hyped up this Pedro character to lizard godly proportions. We found her sitting in the back of the bar with the rest of my adult class. There they were, waiting for me. With open arms, as it were.

I gave them all fistpounds. Then, half-irked, half-delighted, shouting over the intoxicating ruckus of jukebox banda, I asked, "Where have you all been? The final exam is tomorrow!"

"We have been waitink for you," said 16 year-old Alejandro 2, flashing a grin across the table at his bald, mustachioed mentor. "We will wait for you for the rest of our fok-hink life."

But not for the rest of the semester, apparently. The next day, Pedro was the only student to take the final exam. Everyone else failed the class. Pedro passed by a mustache whisker. But the gift exchange was a success. I gave Alejandro 2 an English dictionary, the fruitcake of ESL gifts, but he was delighted with it and wore a brace-toothed smile for the rest of the evening. And Pedro gave me a wallet. I spotted the pricetag: 200 pesos. I blushed. Later that night, I transferred everything over to Pedro's wallet - my cards, what centavos I had left, and an Emiliano Zapato trading card that Eduardo, the only teenager in Zamora who didn't hate me, had given me back in February. I slid the trading card behind the transparent flap where your driver's license is supposed to go and now, whenever I fumble around for some loose Chinese RMB, there is Emiliano Zapato peering up at me with his furious superhero eyes, wearing a sombrero so big that it doesn't even fit in the frame, a mustache like a charred Vienna sausage, a red scarf knotted around his neck, two sashes of ammunition crisscrossed over his chest, and under his portrait, the words "EL APOSTÓL DEL AGRARISMO." And then, at the very bottom of the card, the handwritten words "Thanks Kiwi. Seeya man. -Eduardo" Ah, yes. They used to call me Kiwi back then. I remember now. KIWI: EL APOSTÓL DE INGLÉS.

Michel Gondry is Directing My Dreams

One of the fringe perks of living abroad that I didn't mention in my last post is this: you will have the weirdest dreams of your life. Dreams in which you rattle off complete nonsense in Polish, dreams in which you juggle German, Spanish, and Korean in a single sentence; dreams in which you find yourself in rural Sichuan and suburban Nebraska all at once; dreams in which your American college cronies make cameos in your Chinese classroom, and vice versa. Most of my dreams are pleasant and thought-provoking. But they are sometimes too intense for comfort, and at the far end of the intensity scale are what sleep scientists call hypnagogic hallucinations, or what I am inclined to refer to as waking dreams. You are awake, but dreaming. You are fully conscious but you can't move. The unreal is superimposed upon the real in such a way that you can tell the two worlds apart easily enough, but your nervous system cannot. So your body responds accordingly, and all you can do is sit and watch the madness unfold. Waking dreams tend to be, in a word, terrifying.

The Chinese word for a waking dream is 鬼壓身 (gui ya shen), or "ghost pressing down on body." The Korean term translates into something like "being squashed by scissors." The Mexicans call it subirse el muerto or "dead person on top of you," and the Germanics chalk it all up to a succubus named Mahr, from whence the word "nightmare" is derived. Having spent much of my early twenties on Wikipedia, I was already well aware of all these facts before I experienced my first waking dream, so when it happened, I knew exactly what was going on. But that foreknowledge didn't make the experience any less horrifying.

I was living in South Korea at the time, in a dingy four-room apartment that was much too big for my liking. My bedroom window faced the east and had no curtains, so I was constantly waking up at 6 AM against my will. Late one night, insomnia-crazed and thoroughly fed up, I stuffed a bathtowel in the window frame and draped it down over the glass. Then, awfully pleased with my MacGyveresque ingenuity, I curled up in my usual fetal position and drifted off to sleep.

I woke up with the sun and rolled over in bed to glare at the ineffective towel - and there in its stead was a shimmering blue alien.

Now, I knew myself well enough even then to know that I wasn't schizophrenic, and I was fairly certain that the mushrooms I'd eaten for dinner were not of the magical sort. So I concluded that I was experiencing my first waking dream. But there is nothing more distressing to me than aliens - the cliche garden variety aliens, the hydrocephalic big-eyed ones - so even though I knew the whole thing was just a dream, the sweat was already streaming down my face and my heart began to gallop at a Secretariat pace. While I sat there motionless and gasping for breath, the alien hissed and started walking towards me. I can't tell you how scared I was. My body was frozen solid and there did indeed seem to be a German succubus sitting on my chest, a ghost pressing down on my body, Korean safety scissors squashing my head, a dead person on top of me. I couldn't move and I couldn't breathe. All I could muster was a feeble stream of profanities as the hideous blue thing started bitch slapping me across the face.

Wake up, I told myself, wake up, wake up, wake up. The alien was glowering over me, hissing and spitting, bitch slapping me across the face. I was so terrified that I very nearly became religious right there on the spot. But instead, I willed myself into wakefulness, slowly dragged my body upright, and finally, I was able to swing my arms loose of sleep. I lunged at the alien and caught it by the neck, at which point the alien transformed into an unwashed bathtowel. I held it in my hand for a moment, then threw it against the wall and flopped back into bed. I lay there murmuring the words "holy shit" until I was soothed enough to risk going back to sleep. Well, I said to myself, at least I'd gotten that out of the way. According to Wikipedia, most people only experience one waking dream per lifetime, so I passed out, relieved that I'd never have to deal with what sleep scientists call hypnogogic hallucinations ever again.

Until last night, when I awoke from what I could've sworn were twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep, only to glance at the clock and find that it was 3:30 AM. I sat up in bed but could not move my legs. Panic flared up in my brain. Not this again. Anything but this. I looked around me: there were my legs and there was my bed, and there was my east-facing window, and there was my wardrobe and the space heater in the corner and two weeks of underwear on the floor. Everything was in its right place. And yet nothing quite looked the way it should have. The film was grainy, the angles didn't line up, objects were flickering in and out of existence - and I was just beginning to wonder where I was when the bedroom door shot open and no fewer than twelve people came rushing in. Before I could get a word out, they rolled me over and ripped the sheets out from under me. Then they arranged themselves in a circle and stretched the bedsheet over my head. The circle rotated, the bedsheet began rippling: I laughed - they were playing the parachute game we used to play in third grade P.E. class. I sat under the parachute for a minute or two, watching it roll and ripple above me, and I laughed, and the people laughed, and for a moment I felt like a third grader again. Then the blanket deflated, the people flipped me over and made my bed for me, tucked me in, and hustled back out the door as quickly as they'd come. I sat there giggling for a while, giggling and waiting for whatever was to come next.

Suddenly, a trap door dropped from the ceiling and a clear plastic tube came snaking towards me. I gave it a tug and a showerhead flopped down and mechanically positioned itself in front of my mouth. I reached up and poked at it, then pushed it away from me. There came a hydraulic hiss from the bathroom and the showerhead switched on, blasting me in the face with ice cold Chinese tap water. I gurgled and laughed. The showerhead wiggled this way and that, and after a couple minutes of delirious giggling, I noticed that my bed was sopping wet and that the floor was flooded.

I thought immediately of my third floor neighbors. "Shit," I said, and got up to fetch a towel - and then everything evaporated, everything except my bedroom and the underwear strewn across the floor, the east-facing window and the wardrobe, and my bed, unmade as usual. I searched the ceiling for a trap door but found none. I ran out to the living room but my visitors had vanished. So I shrugged and climbed back into bed. Well, I said to my brain, that was fun. Let's do it again sometime. And I lay there for a few minutes marveling at the human brain, this three pound mass of pink stuff that can create worlds that are as real as reality. And as for reality: the brain creates that, too. But that same three pound mass drives us to drink and smoke cigarettes, goads us into cheating and telling lies, dupes us into working 47 years at that soul-sucking insurance company we hate with every fiber of our being. What a funny thing it is to be human. Aw, hell. Oh, well. I curled up in my usual fetal position and sank into a dream where I was seated comfortably in the backseat of a Nanchong taxi, and all's I had to do was tell the cabby how to get me home.