Motel Nirvana. Melanie McGrath

tour guide swallows.

      ‘Gross,’ says pink shorts.

      And for a single moment we tourers are of one triumphant fraternity, basking in the illusion of a common victory.

      Ten minutes later, the tour guide disappears into the staff rest rooms with liquefying eyes. A few stragglers hang around with questions but twenty minutes later there is still no sign of her, which leads me to suppose there must be an escape hatch fitted round the back for precisely such awkward moments.

      It has become another damned hot day and the nearest air-conditioned space happens to be a movie theatre in the tourist village showing “Meet the Biosphereans”. The quotation marks are important. No-one gets to meet the Biosphereans because they are sealed into a giant glass cage but anyone can “Meet the Biosphereans”. Not that anyone other than me actually shows up to “Meet the Biosphereans”, but they could have done. At the interactive Q and A after the show the projectionist, noticing a certain vacuum in the theatre, skips down the aisle, proffers an agonizing grin and says ‘Oh, oh, seems like you’ve got them to yourself, ask any question you like,’ so I say, ‘Wha’d they eat anyway?’

      Back at the control desk the projectionist presses a button and Sally Silverstone, co-captain Biospherean, appears on the screen and begins to explain how to make a Biospherean pizza, at which point, under cover of the dark, I slink off to my room like a bad cur, lie on my bed with a can of beer from the mini-bar and watch a Tex Avery cartoon on the TV.

      That evening I’m feeling lonely so I ask the man next to me in the Biosphere Cafe if he’d mind my joining him. We natter inconsequentially about this and that for a while. He shows me a scorpion under a prickly pear and mesquite pods lying on the desertic soil like dried-up slugs; ‘full of protein for the cattle’. He points out a place where the diamondback rattlers come out to snooze in the sun. I tell the story of Ray Lightburn and the sea at Dangriga, and it turns out that the man I’m talking to knows Ray Lightburn, because the man I’m talking to is John Allen, head of the Biosphere’s R&D. He’s been out to Blackbird Caye.

      ‘That’, he says, pointing to a blue peak illuminated by the sinking sun ‘is where Carlos Castaneda found himself.’ Allen loves the Sonora. He likes to think of it as the desert-lovers’ desert, a man’s man’s desert. Allen mentions the Biosphere – only to say that it is a gesture that will grow into inventions and gadgets and information, and, eventually, to the human colonization of the universe. I am briefly troubled that a man so wedded to his environment should long to occupy another, but the thought soon leaves me, replaced by admiration for the man’s ambitions. We talk on through books and travels, winding skeins of conversation. At about seven the sun strikes a silver lozenge on Allen’s bolo tie and projects an orange halo around his face. For those couple of seconds John Allen turns to look directly into the sun and smiles. And then he says, ‘So you’re one of those indomitable British traveller women.’ That really gets me.

      A few weeks later I stumble on a paper written by Allen and shelved away in the library at Arcosanti, an experimental ecological community built on the desert uplands north of Phoenix. I take the paper out and read it, for no other reason than a general curiosity. About himself, John Allen writes:

      I acted many roles to avoid creating a personality and by 1962 I was up to four distinct lives a day in Manhattan: a global technocrat, a Village writer working on the ‘Great American Novel,’ a hip adventurer and a revolutionary. By mid-1963 I added a fifth, an entrepreneur in high-tech and energy corporations and somehow, innerly, everything came to a stop.

      It seems he was known as Johnny Dolphin then, or perhaps that was just his nom de plume. In any case, the man who is or was John Allen or Johnny Dolphin went off to Tangier and meditated himself out of his fix – a not wholly original activity in the late sixties. Later, towards the tail end of that decade, he put himself ‘into the hands of magician shamans’, somewhere in Latin America, and lived on strange herbs and his own mythology.

      We are twenty-five years on and Johnny Dolphin now heads R&D at one of the most grandiose scientific longshots in history. How’d he get there?

      According to his own testimony he ‘perceived intimations of a Planetary Mind’ around 1967, which he took to be the call of the Noösphere, a mystical realm apparently combining nature and technology in perfect balance. But this was not all that happened, for he also had a premonition ‘that the contours of a newer and mightier Mind are beginning to appear. I call it the Solar Mind – it’s the Mind capable of foreseeing the evolution of the entire solar system and making provision for the integrated operation of Culture, Life, Matter and Energy on that extraordinary scale.’

      He came to the conclusion that the future of humankind lay elsewhere. John Allen began to believe in getting off.

      That night at Arcosanti I am lying in bed watching the stars in the Arizona sky, thinking about the ghostly face peering through the half-light from inside Biosphere 2. If the earth must crumble into a poisoned miasmic shell, then I want to crumble with it. Rather that than be shut into a sterile pod and blasted into space to live a simulation of a life on some boiling sulphuric planet. Next morning, driving away from Arcosanti I recall the feel of the thick grey air over the pale brown sea at Dangriga, and I recall the coral sun creeping along the Canyon del Oro and by the time I have reached the freeway I have formed the conclusion that Ray Lightburn, John Allen and their like are prophets of doom, and that, god knows, those are the kind of prophets we least need.

       There’s a Seeker Born Every Minute

      ‘Everything you are, except hydrogen, is made of stars.’

      Very Large Array Telescope Visitor Center,

      Datil, New Mexico

      Polarized light drops silver contours around the rows of date palms. The dimming sun over Camelback Mountain is bloody with colour. A Latter-Day Saints temple across the street dissolves into gobbets of rosy haze. It’s magic hour in Mesa, Arizona, and I’m in a terrible mood. The mood stole up on me a couple of days ago. I don’t know why it’s with me, nor how to make it go. For the time being we are reluctant fellows. An endless stream of inner witterings has kept me awake at night, invading my dreams, tick tick ticking over breakfast. Cheerios, toast, black coffee. Black. Coffee. And the time is … sugar, sugar and milk. Nip nip nip. Buzzzzzz. Noyz noyz noyz. Tune out, turn off, drop dead. A terrible, terrible mood.

      I’m sitting in the Paradise Cafe reading Arizona Light, the state’s premier New Age freesheet. One item catches my attention, an article on the back page about the rise in reported alien abductions. The article tells the story of a Sedona woman who claims her foetus was taken from her by some unknown thing when she was out walking in Secret Canyon near Sedona. It was an overcast day, but she noticed a very bright light through the trees, almost as if a shaft of brilliant metal were being lowered to the ground. After watching it for a while she began to feel she was locked in some strange form of time warp. Alarmed she turned back towards the mouth of the canyon, but however hard she walked, the scene around her remained unchanged. She could hear her own breathing as if it were the breath of a giant. She woke some hours or minutes later lying on the path with a peculiar feeling of emptiness, a little bruised, but otherwise ostensibly none the worse for wear. On a routine visit to her doctor she discovered she was no longer pregnant. Aliens had taken her child, and implanted a chip in her brain to ensure she would never recall in detail what had happened to her.

      ‘Hi.’ A woman in beads puts her glass of juice down on my table. She glances at the copy of Arizona Light. ‘Heading to Sedona?’ Sedona is to Arizona what Santa Fe is to New Mexico, only more so. There are more New Agers in Sedona than in the whole of the rest of America, bar Santa Cruz and Sausalito, California.

      ‘Driving?’ Her hair smells of Revlon Musk.

      ‘Hmmm.’ I feign indifference in the hope she’ll have the grace to leave me be.

      ‘Going up tomorrow?’