Motel Nirvana. Melanie McGrath

up? Wouldn’t it be rotten after two thousand years? Even now, knowing that belief is based not on literal truths, but on metaphorical ones, I remain confused. Although I don’t believe in them, if a psychic told me I was going to die the next day, I’d probably still be worried.

      ‘I’m not going to any psychic from the Yellow Pages. You don’t know what you’re getting.’ This for my own benefit as much as Walker’s.

      ‘Sure,’ replies Walker, good-humouredly, ‘You could go see Chris Griscom. She’s got this school called the Nizhoni School for Global Consciousness and this, like, place, the Light Institute? They deal with the Earth Mother and the Goddess and all? Uh, it’s not psychic though, it’s more like consciousness and the healing energies. I kinda learned a lot from her. She converted Shirley Maclaine.’

      With hindsight, I see that it was at this point I came to the realization that I was dealing not just with an unfamiliar set of behaviours but with an entirely foreign inner architecture. It was like being propelled back into that period in adolescence when even though everyone listened to the same music, you still felt that you were the only one who really understood the lyrics or that you were the only one who didn’t understand the lyrics, but that in any case you were alone. It occurred to me then that I was suffering from the kind of numb insensibility brought on by navigating through an emotional and intellectual territory that might be labelled ‘here monsters lie’ on the map of experience. This realization was to bring with it a solitude more complete than my habitual isolation. The longer I considered it, the more it gripped me. How long would it be before I scuttled back empty-handed to my familiar world or capitulated to the demands of the new one and assumed its principles and unconscious ideologies – in short, became one of them?

      Mid-morning I order a cup of coffee and a donut at Galisteo News, a New Age-y dive which carries papers from outside the state and is popular with tourists and transplants. One of the local freesheets leads with the headline ‘Whole Life Special’, previewing some sort of New Age-fest to be held in Santa Fe the following week. It continues with the sub-header ‘Connect with the transformational energy of your “real” self.’ On the inside back is a picture of a thin woman with big hair and mascara, and underneath her the legend ‘Chris Griscom shows you how to expand your perception to include the multi-dimensional perspectives of global consciousness,’ with the address of the Light Institute of Galisteo and a phone number.

      I have a friend, called Fergus, who lives in New York and is very dear to me. I cannot remember how we met, or where, so there can’t be much of a story to it. In any case, Fergus is one of four people I know who are currently living in the USA. Two have disappeared completely and the third always says he can’t talk whenever I call him. Fergus, on the other hand has promised to fly over and spend a weekend with me while I am in the southwest, but I don’t think he will. In some ways he’s reliable, but in others, he’s just another SOB.

      ‘Ferg, it’s me.’

      ‘You still in Texas?’

      ‘Santa Fe.’

      Fergus, I know, does not approve of Higher Consciousness tapes and God Insight Boxes and psychics and angels, but I mention them anyway in the hope that I am wrong. I am not wrong.

      ‘Kooks.’

      ‘That’s easy to say,’ I reply, ‘but if enough people believe it, you can’t just write it off.’

      A bitter laugh.

      ‘That’s the democratic principle, isn’t it?’ I’m wounded, ‘Anyway, how come you’re such a cynic?’

      ‘Don’t call me that,’ Fergus is wounded. ‘This is America, remember.’

      ‘OK, muddafukka.’

      ‘Much better.’

      ‘Fergus, I can change any thought that hurts.’ At that moment a voice comes on the line and asks for another $2.75. Then the phone begins ringing without my having hung up. ‘Hello?’

      The voice replies ‘You owe $2.75.’

      ‘Yeah, I know, I’m just trying to find it.’

      ‘You owe $2.75,’ says the voice for the third time.

      ‘Look,’ I counter, needled, ‘I never asked for credit.’

      The voice persists: ‘$2.75.’

      I hang up. It rings, I pick up, a voice says ‘You owe $2.75.’ It’s still ringing ten minutes later, by which time I’m sitting in room 12 with the TV tuned into Oprah and a collection of compulsive eaters.

      This is the start of my lost week.

      Five days anyway. Five mornings at The Ark, five afternoons and evenings at the public library on East Macy Street. In between only Gita’s morning dirges – ‘Work?’, ‘Alone?’, muffins, coffee, Camels and a couple of unisom at bedtime. By the end of the week, I have conquered the astrological texts, esp and the paranormal, read interminable accounts of alien abductions, absorbed Tibetan reincarnation prayers, books on angels and Ascended Masters, followed recipes to make the body invisible, interpreted chanting records, xeroxed a chart indicating in diagrammatic form how best to hug a tree, taken advice on organising your own rebirth, skimmed guides to the millennium, noted apocalyptic predictions of the earth changes and begun the long preparation for a course in miracles.

      At the end of the fifth day I compile a list:

      PATHS TO SPIRITUAL FULFILMENT (NEW AGE)

      

      1. Intuitive development

      Chakras, auras, astrology, channelling, oracles, tarot

      2. Creating your own reality

      Transformational journeys, meditation, dreamwork, astral projection, brain machines, drugs

      3. Transitions

      Birth, death, reincarnation, past lives

      4. Spirituality

      Mysticism, Native American spiritualism, nature worship, the Goddess, the Crone, miracles

      5. Consumption

      Shopping

      

      and resolve to make this my agenda.

      DAY EIGHT

      Awake at six, feeling elated. It’s sunny outside, but cool still. A rust-coloured hummingbird motors around the agave outside my room. In the shower I am overtaken by the uncomfortable but undeniable possibility that the longer I spend alone the lonelier I may become.

      My God-Box insight for the day is:

      It’s never too late to have a happy childhood

      printed in soy-based ink with a picture of an ancient swinging in a child’s playground.

      A woman at the juice bar in Wild Oats on Cordova Street recommends wheatgrass juice on account of its positive impact on prana. She doesn’t say whether it takes prana away or gives it to you, but at $3 a pop you’d have a right to expect it to do one or the other, surely. She directs me to the seating area, where, pinned up on the corkboard is a notice advertising a drum birthing workshop: ‘The second day of the workshop is spent in birthing teams ritually birthing both your drum and yourself. You will be guided in how to co-ordinate sound, breath, your body and the team’s energy in order to give your drum the best life possible. A properly birthed drum will pull tremendous amounts of energy from you in order to begin its life, just as a baby does.’

      ‘You here for Whole Life or just doing some work on your-self?’ asks the juice-bar attendant, with the dilute resignation of a person who finds that life in the periods between trips tends towards the crushingly predictable.

      ‘Bit of both, I guess,’ I reply in non-committal tone. She waves away an insect, suppressing