Melanie McGrath - Motel Nirvana

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, ‘because you’ve already benefited from the Insights. You wouldn’t take a bottle of Tylenol back after your headache was all gone,’ she smiles indulgently, ‘I can recommend a few things for the altitude sickness, though.’ Altitude 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.