Motel Nirvana. Melanie McGrath
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from an ability to heal inner children to the composition of sonic messages that would seek out and shrink malignant tumours. The eco-tourists would put out to sea each day, heady with expectation, and return in the afternoon in a state of mystic transcendence or savage disappointment, depending on whether or not there had been a sighting. The student’s job was single-handedly to control the mob in whichever mood, a task she went about with benign and systematic brutality.
Moored a little way off the coast of Blackbird Caye near to the eco-tourist compound was a reproduction Chinese junk, the Hercules. According to Ray, the junk was the scientific outpost of a project called Biosphere 2, a futuristic venture based in the Arizona desert. From time to time a limpid woman in a wetsuit would appear on the deck of the junk and wave at the lone scientist and her pride of tourists. The crew of the Hercules did not welcome visitors, said Ray.
This was just about all I knew of the Biosphere. I had come across a few speculative articles in the press and a few figures, such as the fact that the project had swallowed the $150m raised by a Texan magnate called Ed Bass (the same Ed Bass whose interests included Blackbird Caye), through a holding company, Space Biosphere Ventures. I knew that Biosphere 2 was the largest experimental closed environment on the planet – three and a bit acres sealed virtually airtight by a metal and glass frame – that eight people had been shut inside and left to get on with things, which they hadn’t managed quite to do, because the oxygen levels in the bubble had begun inexplicably to fall, necessitating the introduction of a new supply from outside. There had been rumours that Bass was influenced by a New Age cult led by a charismatic worker-poet whose aim was to begin life again somewhere out in space. Extraordinarily for these times, I had never seen an image of the Biosphere.
The last tourist bus has already left by the time Caboose and I turn off the highway onto Biosphere range. It is June, start of the rattler season – the heat so intense it pushes the air into strange, eddying flues and pulls at the ligaments in the throat. My fingers have fused to the wheel of the car and become woody and aged. Up ahead a paved track runs off the road and leads to a forlorn sentry house with a uniformed guard. Bumping across the cattle grid it feels as though I have crossed a border and am somewhere liminal that is not a part of America at all.
The hotel at the Biosphere is hunched along a mountain ridge above the complex proper, and has a view southward through the Canyon del Oro to the Santa Catalina Mountains beyond. I open my notebook and retrieve the number of Sam, a friend of someone I met in a bar outside Santa Fe. Sam now works at the Biosphere. The switchboard operator intercepts my call and promises to pass a message on.
In exploratory mood I throw off my boots, unpack my camera, take some tortilla chips from the mini-bar, flip on the TV (Star Trek – The Next Generation), flip it off, fetch a half bottle of Jim Beam from my suitcase and take off along the deserted paths running across the top of the ridge. To the east a mountain range glows hot from the reflection of the sunset and far below two huge, white-boned dome lungs spin in the shifting light like the eyes of spy insects. From the canyon to the south come the echoes of a woodpecker chipping saguaro cactus. Biosphere 2: two grand glass ziggurats embedded in the lilac rock of the Sonora basin and made insubstantial by the light, like some reinvented Crystal Palace, a grand and brilliant technological announcement. There are lights on in the human habitation tower which illuminate the surrounding metal frame in sodium flare and give the whole the air of an ethereal city. Tatty palms press up against the glass, below the palms floats a miniature ocean encircled by fibreglass cliffs. To the fore buff rocks, and upon them, stringy thornscrub scouring the structure’s frame, as if waiting its moment to punch through the glass and reclaim the air. A rustle in the bushes and a mule deer stumbles out onto the path and plunges down the slope of the ridge, leaving only a wave in the mesquite.
Back in room 11, there is no message from Sam. I lock the bolt and chain and call him again. Sam answers. Yes, he got my message, but he thinks I should talk to someone official. I just want to meet up, I say. Oh, he replies, he’s very flattered to be asked but he really feels it would be better for me to discuss the matter with a spokesperson. There is no ‘matter’, I reply, I just want to talk. But we’ve all signed agreements, says Sam, then clicks his tongue against his palate and hangs up. I ring back, but when he answers the phone I hang up on him too. Not revenge. I just can’t figure out what to say.
About two I take a couple of hits of J.B., swallow a unisom and fall into an easy sleep on top of my bed. Towards dawn I dream a series of amorphous dreams linked by their atmosphere of ambient threat. At about eight the telephone rings. Some stuffed shirt in the public relations department says he’s heard that I contacted Sam.
‘These things need to be done through the official channels.’ The roof beams begin to click in the heat.
A press pack mysteriously arrives at the same time as the chambermaid. Inside are a few factoid press releases, some xeroxed newspaper articles and a slim booklet about Space Biosphere Ventures. I browse through a couple, lose interest and take the first visitor tour beginning at the Orientation Center with its ‘environmental art’, followed by a supervised gaze in at the window of the Biosphere ‘Test Module’ and the opportunity to admire the complimentary tram which runs to and from the car park. I drift off and meander over to the Biosphere itself, where a desultory group of men and women sit in a small square of shade waiting for the official Biosphere tour guide to show up. From the Orientation Center, I have discovered precisely one fact – that Biosphere I is planet earth, which presumably makes Biosphere 2 the reissued version. A huddle of us collect in the shade and are rewarded eventually by the appearance of an anxious thread of a girl who busies down the pathway with a large black box slung about her hip, beating the box with the flat of her hand, as if it were a recalcitrant child she has grown too used to admonishing. The box, to which a microphone is attached, is careless of its chastisement and misbehaves from the start, puking up feedback, and spitting out white noise. Pretty soon it caves in altogether, which is no great disaster since no-one in particular is listening. They are eating. The skinny tour guide presses on, shouting bravely over the cacophony of fifteen men and women slugging back Coke and tamping down potato chips. I am trailing behind with my black notebook and a wetted pencil, waiting to catch a few ripe factoids and conduct a little independent research on the side.
Up close, the Biosphere looks remarkably like the new palm house at Kew Gardens near London. Unlike Kew, visitors to the Biosphere have not come to see the palms but the human inmates, the so-called Biosphereans or ‘expedition members’. Sadly for the visitors, the human habitation tower is cordoned off. There is absolutely nothing visible of a remotely prurient nature. Whoever heard of such a thing? There are murmurs of significant disquiet. The crowd, bored, overheated, and – crucially – having eaten all their snacks, are spoiling for a little rebellion. The guide tries her luck at mediating through the incipient mutiny by climbing down beyond the cordon and screwing her head to the glass in anticipation of a sighting. After a minute or so she comes up for air and says:
‘I seen one, planting crops.’
A shrunken ghost-face appears at the window and peers out briefly, causing the fattest man in the party to raise his eyes from his Coke and comment:
‘Looks damned near dead to me.’
‘Surprisingly,’ counters the tour guide, supposing she has the fattest man’s attention, ‘each Biospherean has lost on average only fourteen per cent of their original body weight.’
The ghost-face retreats back into a simulated salt marsh behind the glass.
‘What d’they eat anyway?’ asks a fat woman dressed in pink shorts.
‘Well …’ pipes up the tour guide. Something in her tone alerts pink shorts to the disturbing possibility that she is staring a lecture right in the face, when all she had been expecting was a sound-bite.
‘I guess they eat just the same as anyone else,’ says pink shorts, cutting the lecture off at the knees.
‘Well, you’d be surprised,’ perks up the tour guide. Jeez, she must be new on the job.
‘Meat?’
The tour guide smiles. Poor creature. So amiable, so anxious to please.