Motel Nirvana. Melanie McGrath
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specifically New Mexico state, is the place all America goes to find itself, just as it found itself in California thirty years before. Empty, yet historically rich, materially poor (forty-seventh poorest state in the Union) and thus apparently spiritually uncompromised, New Mexico has found itself become the baptismal font of secular and humanist America. Santa Fe, the City of the Holy Faith, is its focal point. Visitors and settlers congregate in Santa Fe to indulge in that peculiarly American pastime – working on the self. The deeper America’s spiritual crisis gets, the more spiritual self-improvement is deemed necessary and the more money and visitors fetch up in Santa Fe.
A greater number of American people believe in extra-sensory perception than believe in the existence of hell. Rolfing, rebirthing and psychic surgery are now more widely practised than rhinoplasty or liposuction. And even though most Americans would like to think of themselves as Christians, there are more alien abductions reported every year than sightings of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. I read as much in an article, and found it easy to believe. In fact, on the strength of the article’s two assertions – more people believe in esp than in hell, and more Americans are abducted by aliens than are visited by the Virgin Mary – I took a plane to Texas and bought a wretched car and drove seven hundred miles to Santa Fe. There was something about the New Age that fitted into the American story, somewhere, or so I thought. And that, in brief, is why I am sitting watching TV in a cheap motel and waiting for something important to happen. I have with me a copy of The Aquarian Conspiracy, as yet unread, a gold card box, a guidebook to New Mexico and a hunch that whatever I find will tell me something about what is happening at the end of the century in which America finally became too big for itself.
Inside the gold box is a collection of cards and an instruction booklet. The booklet invites its reader to pick a card at random from the God Insight Box and connect to the eternal unity through the principle of synchronicity. Baking soda brings teeth up whiter than any ordinary toothpaste, adds a woman on the network channel. I close my eyes and pick a card:
As Above, So Below.
As Within, So Without. Everything I see is a Reflection of Me.
A rose bush taps on the window outside, sending an iridescent hummingbird spinning briefly above it before disappearing from view. Already the sluggish heat of the afternoon has passed, and in its place breathes an easy wind. The sky’s so cataracted with dust-filled clouds I can no longer see the sun. Maybe there will be some rain, but most likely it will not rain again until late July or August, when the late summer thunderstorms begin. I am considering naming the tin-can Chevy ‘Caboose’ from part of a line in a country song. Sums up a distant kind of affection, that word, and I don’t like to get too sentimental about cars. Sentimentality is something I avoid.
In the bathroom swigging Pepto-Bismol from the bottle it occurs to me that the insight card has got it wrong. It’s just not true that everything I see is a reflection of me, only the way I see it. The ghoul-face with its inconstant mouth grins modestly back from the bathroom tiles in cubist manner.
Back on the network Geraldo is being shown how to kick box by a Crips girl. I lean over for the remote, sending the gold box sliding off the bed and ejecting a ‘Don’t worry, Be Happy’ card with a smiley face printed around the text. The moment I see that smiley face I know I want my money back.
‘Hello, this is The Ark bookstore?’ says a man’s voice in uncertain tone.
‘I’m calling from a pay phone,’ I reply. I don’t know why I say this, but I often do, even when I’m not. ‘I came in earlier and bought a God Insight Box?’
‘Uh, huh,’ acknowledges the voice.
‘I’d like to change it.’
No answer.
‘I don’t know, it’s something about the insights. They don’t feel very deep to me. I thought they’d be deeper.’
‘Oh,’ says the voice. ‘Okey doke. No problem. Just swing by.’
A thin young woman sits cross-legged at the entrance of The Ark flicking through a picture postcard book of celestial beings. Next to her stands a man, about twenty, turning a gold loop around in his ear.
‘Angels?’ I ask as an opening gambit, pointing towards the book.
The man nods.
‘Uh-huh, I did a thesis. Healing studies,’ replies the young woman, returning to her pictures. The man reads my confusion and says ‘Cool,’ as both a confirmation and an expression of general amiability.
‘The thing about healing’, I volunteer, responding to the signal, ‘is it never seems to end. I mean, I never met anyone who was actually healed.’
‘Yeah, right,’ replies the woman, ‘I think I read a book about that.’ She tips her head to one side and gazes at me with an arch little smile.
‘English?’
I nod.
‘I went to Avebury once …’
The man with the gold hoop, who is oscillating awkwardly in and out of this conversation, introduces his friend as Nancy and himself as Walker, ‘ex-pro-surfer, ex-Angelino, currently member of Mobillus Trip’.
‘That a band?’ I ask. Walker, who does not seem at first acquaintance to be a man of great intellectual fluidity, glances down at his friend for reassurance, but, seeing she has already returned to her picture book, he takes stock and thinks for a few seconds, twirling the loop in its tunnel.
‘Hard-core funk rap psychedelic, with some West Coast hip-hop influences, uh, but we’re kinda dropping those.’
The skinny woman shakes her hair, looks up, ignoring the conversational diversion; ‘I had this dissertation to do on crop circles? I went to Avebury? And it was cool? I saw these things, like black butterflies hovering above the stones? And, like, I just knew that they were in touch with my higher self? It was like through the third eye?’ She taps her forehead.
I recall a newspaper article I had read some time before which had speculated that some of the stones would be removed to make way for a new road and relaid on a green site outside the town.
‘Wow.’ She wrinkles her brow. ‘You know, the Goddess is real strong there, I don’t think they would be allowed to do that. In Avebury, the Goddess is all over the place.’
‘Perhaps I was mistaken.’ I begin a retreat towards the centre of the store.
‘Hey,’ says the woman, tearing a corner from the book and scribbling something on it, ‘Here’s our number. Call.’
In a large aviary opposite the astrology section are stationed a dozen half-bald canary birds perched mute on dowelling rods. A series of Tibetan wind chimes moves in draughts, and behind a blonde wood counter at the back a woman wearing unbleached drawstring pants fiddles with a volume knob to adjust the level of whale song in the background. Another woman with a birthmark sits cross-legged on the floor behind the counter polishing a didgeridoo with a can of Pledge, but there is no sign of the man I might have spoken to on the telephone. A spirit of unease prowls around The Ark, due in part to its interior décor – an emulation of a home improvement catalogue circa 1972, with softly padded armchairs and cushions reeking of patchouli grouped around an Afghan rug – and in part to some ambience more mysterious. The customers, wary as beaten dogs, cling to the sides of the room, making occasional nervous sorties out from palmistry to crystals across a no man’s land of bean-bags. I make for the woman with the unbleached pants, and am attempting a precise explanation as to why the insights in the gold box are a little short of satisfactory, when my stomach gives an unexpected, vertiginous heave and sends a fragment of taco chip topspinning out onto the stripped wood floor.
‘Altitude sickness,’ I shrug.
The cashier shakes her head.
‘I don’t think we can change that Insight Box, now, ma’am,’ she says, as if the taco chip had automatically divested me of all consumer rights,