Motel Nirvana. Melanie McGrath

      ‘One thing I’ve always wanted to know is whether it gets a little smoggy down underground, you know, without the benefit of the wind?’

      The princess smoothes her pearl-grey hair and winds a thread around one of the anchor buttons of her catsuit.

      ‘You must have learned such a lot in your 267 years.’

      ‘I have had the occasional enlightenment, it’s true. Actually, all our power comes from an electromagnetic injection into the crystal matrix that harnesses the ethereal power and provides energy for a million years. It is completely clean and entirely without ecological consequences. So, you see, we have no smog at all. You have yet to learn such technologies. Earth people are remarkably backward in some respects.’

      ‘You know, your majesty or whatever,’ I continue, emboldened. ‘I sometimes feel confused and barely human.’ There’s a rustle of recognition in the audience. ‘I do have this weird little birthmark on my back. Suppose I’m Lemurian, like you. I mean, how could I tell?’

      She looks at me darkly, smile faded away to a little flicker about the nostrils.

      ‘I don’t think that’s likely, you’re probably just an extraterrestrial.’

      Sometimes I can be so cheap it gets me down.

      In the coffee bar, a Californian called Talon invites me to a free demonstration of his Tachyon energy bodysuits. Now, in different circumstances nothing would have kept me from Talon’s Tachyon energy bodysuit, but I am committed to the Brad and Sherry Steiger lecture at 5.30. No matter, says Talon, why doesn’t he swing by after the lecture, and he’ll give me an individual session ‘with no obligations’, so we fix a vague time and Talon wanders off back to his Tachyon energy booth and I never do discover exactly what Tachyon energy is.

      Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger are New Age celebs, which is to say, they have made appearances on The Joan Rivers Show and can afford a half-page ad in the Whole Life Expo catalogue. Their books include Hollywood and the Supernatural and Mysteries of Time and Space. The most recent, Strange Powers of Pets, was a Literary Guild selection. In addition Sherry Hansen Steiger is a licensed publicist while Brad once won the Film Advisory Board’s Award of Excellence. The Milwaukee Sentinel apparently says they have ‘a wonderful understanding of the forthcoming changes.’

      After a 267 year-old Princess, can anything surprise?

      By their own account, Brad and Sherry Steiger stumbled across intimations of an answer to the question: ‘Who made us what we are?’, quite by accident. After years of painstaking research they discovered, almost as a by-product of their work into alien intelligence, that the great human tribe, far from being mere cosmic incidentals, had in fact been shaped many thousand years ago by collectives of advanced entities from other planets, and in particular from Venus. Suddenly, everything else made sense to them. The giant fossilized footprints they had come across in Peru (was it Peru? I forget) were obviously those of an advanced reptilian being which had evolved on earth and migrated to another part of the solar system; and the well-documented Mayan practice of elongating infant skulls by squashing them between boards was doubtless intended to be a sign of deference to the Indians’ oval-headed alien masters. Why, rock pictures show that the aliens even knew about photosynthesis and were employing it for their own ends, not least of which was to splice up some human genes and cross-breed them with other useful things – plants and spaceships. They’d even got the technology to manufacture human beings from the Madagascan common ring-tailed lemur.

      And to think that without the Steigers the world would have remained ignorant of these things.

      So the tenth day ends, without satisfaction, in room 12 at the King’s Rest. Gita has been in to clean and left a few nominal swirls in the dirt on the dresser. Outside the air is still as sleep and pearly with dusk. Roseanne Barr’s disembodied voice oozes through the wall from the room next door. For some days now I have felt a strange longing which is neither a longing for contact nor a longing for conversation, but rather, a need to be on familiar ground. Had I been travelling in the Solomon Islands I should have faced my isolation with greater equanimity, but every westerner expects at least to comprehend America, if not to feel in some measure at ease there. Here I find so many hints of common ground give out quite suddenly, like false byways. Someone you can rely upon to have an opinion about soap opera or McDonald’s turns out to have seen angels in her backyard and the man who sells you a cup of coffee thinks himself a reincarnation of Nefertiti. Even among the seemingly familiar there can turn out to be almost nothing recognizable.

      DAY ELEVEN

      I wake with a start from some instantly forgotten dream as the sun begins to burn blue holes into the earliest light. Some overnight rain has stripped the rose outside of its petals leaving a few trembling stamens held fast in the arms of the calyx. A raven lifts itself from the roof and banks into the sky. The one other guest is packing his car and heading back home, to Colorado by the looks of it. There are no clouds now, just a wondrous filmic sheet flung about the earth and moving lightly in the void, as if pegged out to dry.

      Remembering the despondent mood of the previous night, I unpack my African fetish, Hopi dream catcher and quartz crystals and arrange them about the room in an attempt to brighten up the place and construct the kind of homeliness which is at present missing. I light a Camel, drink the remains of last night’s root beer, now flat, switch on the TV and wonder why it is that all American anchorwomen have the same hairdo.

      At around nine Gita knocks and, without waiting for a response, lets herself in. Looking down at me sitting on the bed she says, to no-one in particular, ‘Alone watching TV,’ with the satisfaction of one delivering a biographical summation for the purposes of an obituary.

      Breakfast of sour frijoles and huevos a la plancha in a cafe in Española, a small, hispanic town about thirty miles north of Santa Fe. Black water runs out from the beans, leaving strange Rorschach blots on a stack of flour tortillas heaped beside.

      These I point out to the waitress when she returns to fill my coffee cup.

      ‘What do they suggest to you?’

      ‘UFO? I dunno.’

      ‘Pick an insight card.’ She looks down for a moment at the little gold box, pincers a card between brilliant red nails, studies it a moment, throws it back on the table and pours the coffee.

      The card reads ‘Slow down, you’re going too fast; You gotta make the moment last …’ with Paul Simon credited on the bottom in psychedelic letters enclosed by double quotation marks. “Paul Simon.”

      ‘What’s that for, anyhow?’ Before I leave she asks for it back to show to her boss, but he’s too busy loading a delivery of icecream into the freezer.

      Sixties, sixties, sixties. Sometimes it seems as though the sixties generation unplugged en masse after Woodstock. Do they suppose that nothing’s happened since? Like, the end of the Cold War, like the digital revolution, like AIDS, like democratic elections in South Africa, like crack, like the rise and rise of the kind of people who still remember who Paul Simon was, or is, or who give a damn in any case.

      Every time I hum the tune I get the line ‘you move too fast’ repeating in my head. ‘You’re going too fast’ doesn’t even scan.

      During the drive back to Santa Fe it occurs to me that, despite having been in New Mexico for nearly two weeks, I have taken almost no account of the landscape outside the city limits, which is at least as great a draw to spiritual tourists as the New Age cafes and bookstores downtown. So I swing off the freeway at the next turning, signposted to Chimayo, and head up a single-track paved road onto a desert plateau lined in the far distance with naked mountains whose peaks, despite the sun, remain ice-powdered, giving them the appearance of cut salami sausages. A warm, desiccated wind exposes the matt grey underside of the sage and fragments the plain into a subtle mosaic of drab green and grey. Fifteen minutes of walking through the brush and my position feels unchanged, the mountains ahead as remote as Elysium.