Motel Nirvana. Melanie McGrath

sickness is pronounced “Altitude sickness” and finished off with a small cough.

      Ten minutes later I’ve agreed to purchase an African fetish (vegetarian camel tail-hair), two shards of crystal quartz in different good karma colours, four sticks of Bophuthatswana sandal-wood incense, a Hopi dream-catcher, a subliminal Higher Consciousness tape and a book promising to reveal what my personal task will be ‘in the glorious New Age, as we rapidly approach the “End Times” and the start of a new awakening for all of humankind’.

      ‘Where are you headed?’ asks the cashier, counting up the value of my purchases.

      ‘Los Angeles?’ I have no idea.

      ‘Oh, I went once,’ leaning forward and curling her hand around her mouth, ‘The entire city smelt of faeces.’

      ‘Yeah, well, it’s a long drive anyway,’ I reply, disheartened.

      ‘They’re having some real bad drainage problems.’

      ‘I probably won’t make it.’

      ‘Well, anyways, come back just before you set off and I’ll recommend some things for your psychic protection.’

      ‘Oh?’

      ‘Sure. Bad karma in LA. Whoopsi, here’s your credit card. Enjoy your purchases. And you think yourself into wellness, you hear?’

      At the southern end of Romero Street, uphill from The Ark bookstore, is a flat, rusty griddle of iron tracks, switches, sidings and signalling from the old Santa Fe railroad. Some workmen are renovating a clapboard barn by Guadalupe St, which was once, perhaps, the station warehouse. It’s now still possible to drive across the old track to get from Romero into Guadalupe, but sometime in the near future the whole station will no doubt be cordoned off, polished up and converted into a museum of one kind or another, for Santa Fe is a tourist town, and said by those who think in superlatives to be one of the most beautiful spots in the USA. Downtown, towards the plaza and the Palace of Governors, where the Spanish and Mexicans administered most of what are now the states of New Mexico and Arizona from 1599 until the land was ceded to the USA in 1846, Santa Fe settles into a parody of its tour-guide hagiography – all narrow streets and landscaped verges, chocolate brown and pink adobe architecture, spicy historical air. The City Different, the chamber of commerce calls it. I’ve read somewhere that movie stars own more property per square foot of the city than anywhere else on the continent; more than in Aspen, Colorado, more than in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, more than in Los Angeles or Martha’s Vineyard.

      In any case, Santa Fe may well fall by its own success. Marketed as a little pearl set on a desert sea, the town is beginning to sprawl. Cerillos Road, where the King’s Rest and most of the city’s cheap motels are situated, has become a long strip of fast-food palaces, sorry-looking lube joints and shopping plazas just like those in any other desert town. The strip even has its own rush hour as commuters from as far away as Albuquerque, sixty miles to the south, drive in to service the tourist business. Over the last ten years the price of real estate has risen so high that many of the hispanic families whose roots are in Santa Fe have already been pushed out to cheaper towns nearby, like Española and La Cienega. And so the town empties of the folk who both (in stereotype) attract and (in actuality) service tourism and fills up with folk who were once tourists returning as settlers and retirees – movie stars, ‘artists’, hangers-on, and, of course, people working on themselves.

      After packing the crystals and Bophuthatswana incense sticks in my suitcase, I take two sleeping pills and a long draft of Pepto Bismol, set the Higher Consciousness tape running, open up the book and crawl into bed with the rest of the motel wildlife. ‘Thousands are here now to help the unenlightened endure the spiritual and physical transformation of our world, which is soon to be swept into a higher level of consciousness,’ reads the book blurb. The author’s face smiles up from the inside cover, next to a tributary poem. In the preface she promises to share her glories, before returning to the octaves of home.

      DAY TWO

      Seven in the morning. The Higher Consciousness tape has run the tape machine dry and is silent. I get up and take a long look at myself in the mirror, but can’t make out anything much different. Yesterday’s nausea has almost gone although I still feel a little light-headed. The altitude has subtely altered the tone of my muscles, which are firmer now than yesterday. I cannot say that I feel more conscious though. The instructions on the tape box fail to explain how long the tape takes to work, or, for that matter, exactly what it does. Does it expand conscious awareness of the conscious or expand conscious awareness of the unconscious, or increase higher consciousness or raise higher consciousness of consciousness or something entirely different? I should have asked in the store.

      KIOT radio runs an early morning interview with Kenny Kingston, psychic to the stars, who claims ‘Harry Truman was the most psychic president the US ever had.’ Was that because of the Little Boy? Kenny K. doesn’t say.

      Up on the dresser sits the God Insight Box waiting to be consulted. The insight for the day, printed on orange card, in soy-based ink, is ‘I can change any thought that hurts.’

      The full weight of this piece of wisdom hits me in the shower. An end to personal failure and social guilt. I emerge feeling like a new person.

      At ten Gita comes in to dust. Gita is the Indian wife of the Indian proprietor of the King’s Rest.

      ‘No work?’ she asks. I smile and shrug.

      ‘Alone?’ She considers this before adding,

      ‘Always alone,’ giggling at her own presumption. ‘Wasting time,’ she concludes as though witness to the sad but inevitable path of an anti-social life.

      I make a decision to call Nancy and Walker.

      ‘Is that Walker?’

      ‘Yes,’ says Walker.

      ‘I’m in a payphone, Walker. What I wanted to know … what I wondered if you knew is why Santa Fe’s become, you know, a place where people, uh …’ – searching for an acceptable phrase – ‘… uh, work on themselves.’

      ‘Sure,’ says Walker, unfazed. ‘Ask just about anyone on the street. We’re all working on ourselves. It’s like, Santa Monica is full of surfers, and Santa Fe is full of seekers.’

      ‘But why is that?’

      ‘Well, the ocean’s there I guess.’ Walker pauses to give me time to get the joke. ‘Oh, you mean … I guess it’s, like, the energies and the desert, man.’

      ‘Desert energies?’

      ‘Uh, yeah.’

      I am about to bring the conversation to a close when Walker adds: ‘You could go to a therapist, or an empath or a psychic or something.’ Some woman in Walker’s room starts mantra chanting.

      ‘Do you know anyone?’ ‘Om’ throbs over the phone like a distant headache.

      ‘There are, like, thousands of’em in this city. You should check the Yellow Pages.’

      To me, psychics have always been the lament of evangelical Christians in suburban neighbourhoods, character parts in police dramas and a counsel-of-last-resort for the desperate. I suppose it had just never occurred to me that anyone could pick a psychic from the Yellow Pages and fix an appointment. My mother saw a clairvoyant after my father died. The clairvoyant told her that my father came out of the spirit world with this message: ‘Don’t drive so fast.’ It’s true, she does drive too fast. And then the psychic apparently said ‘Plus, you have a daughter who’s selfish to the core.’ But I don’t know if mum got the psychic’s name from the Yellow Pages or from somewhere else.

      Much though I’d like to believe – I mean I really would – in psychic phenomena, and however comforting it would be to know that my father was up in the ether somewhere supervising my driving, I find it difficult to believe in anything without first understanding