Melanie McGrath - Motel Nirvana

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.

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 a yawn with a flailing hand.

‘Have you been out to the desert yet?’

I shake my head.

She opens her eyes in mild surprise, as if offended by my unconventional behaviour.

‘You must go! The life force there! I mean, the whole desert energy thing roots you into this amazing consciousness of your interconnectedness with all beings.’

‘What,’ I suggest, recalling the texts of the lost week, ‘transformative at the soul level?’

‘We’re talking molecular. ’

‘So you’re saying it acts as a kind of metaphor for the holographic universe?’ I persist.

‘Right.’

‘Biocosmic resonation?’

She smiles a smile a highway wide. ‘Hey, you’re into that too.’ Then leaning in close enough for me to be able to smell the tang of grease in her hair. ‘Tell me, did we meet in a past life?’

‘Uh huh,’ I reply, returning the smile.

‘I knew I’d seen your face before.’

I’m driving to Chris Griscom’s Light Institute in Galisteo, about twenty miles south of Santa Fe, for a ‘Knowings’ in which people gather ‘knowing’ from themselves and ‘apply it from a place of enlightenment’. I had always imagined wisdom to be an accumulated quality, only now I am told it can be taught in Knowings workshops.

South of Santa Fe, the sky unfurls to an artificial blue, scribbled over with cirrus. Last night’s roadkill still lies moist and filleted on the highway, as yet undiscovered by the ravens sunning themselves in the squawbush on either side of the road. It is the first day of summer heat. The sun is yellow now; by noon it will shine as whitely as magnesium flare.

The highway passes right through Galisteo then out onto the other side, across the Galisteo basin. At speed, you might pass the village of Galisteo altogether before your eyes had even registered it. The main street is little more than a strip of dry clay messed up into troughs by the winter rains. A black mongrel dog tied to a loop set into an adobe wall pulls at its chain and howls. Caboose draws up and slides into the verge, too early for the ‘Knowings’. On the pavement lies an old fake swiss army knife, handle picked at by ants, blade sound enough. Near to the place where the dog is tied, two hispanic women and a man in a straw hat sit in the shade of a mesquite tree still covered in the papery casings of its lost blossom. Across the road towards the Spanish church, the plastic honeycomb from a six-pack drifts in the breeze. A car runs over it, slows momentarily then flows south leaving its image slipping into the heat shine.

The patrona of the local store is stationed on a wooden chair outside brushing away the dust with a Spanish fan. A radio tuned into a Santa Fe station spits out part of the signal. She follows me into the store, lined along one side with Uncle Ben’s; she smoothes her hair, lifts the plastic cover from a plate of danish pastries, wipes off a fly and moves along the counter. Taking my five-dollar bill and making a little show of it, she opens a wooden drawer where there are five-dollar bills and one-dollar bills, fixed together with an iron bulldog clip and passes back some coins. I sit up against a wall hard from the sun, sip from a bottle of warm, sweet soda and watch the black dog shivering on its chain. A boy with worn down shoes comes by carrying a bunch of mint with the leaves dragging in the dust.