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.
In any case, Santa Fe may well fall by its own success. Marketed as a little pearl set on a desert sea, the town is beginning to sprawl. Cerillos Road, where the King’s Rest and most of the city’s cheap motels are situated, has become a long strip of fast-food palaces, sorry-looking lube joints and shopping plazas just like those in any other desert town. The strip even has its own rush hour as commuters from as far away as Albuquerque, sixty miles to the south, drive in to service the tourist business. Over the last ten years the price of real estate has risen so high that many of the hispanic families whose roots are in Santa Fe have already been pushed out to cheaper towns nearby, like Española and La Cienega. And so the town empties of the folk who both (in stereotype) attract and (in actuality) service tourism and fills up with folk who were once tourists returning as settlers and retirees – movie stars, ‘artists’, hangers-on, and, of course, people working on themselves.
After packing the crystals and Bophuthatswana incense sticks in my suitcase, I take two sleeping pills and a long draft of Pepto Bismol, set the Higher Consciousness tape running, open up the book and crawl into bed with the rest of the motel wildlife. ‘Thousands are here now to help the unenlightened endure the spiritual and physical transformation of our world, which is soon to be swept into a higher level of consciousness,’ reads the book blurb. The author’s face smiles up from the inside cover, next to a tributary poem. In the preface she promises to share her glories, before returning to the octaves of home.
DAY TWO
Seven in the morning. The Higher Consciousness tape has run the tape machine dry and is silent. I get up and take a long look at myself in the mirror, but can’t make out anything much different. Yesterday’s nausea has almost gone although I still feel a little light-headed. The altitude has subtely altered the tone of my muscles, which are firmer now than yesterday. I cannot say that I feel more conscious though. The instructions on the tape box fail to explain how long the tape takes to work, or, for that matter, exactly what it does. Does it expand conscious awareness of the conscious or expand conscious awareness of the unconscious, or increase higher consciousness or raise higher consciousness of consciousness or something entirely different? I should have asked in the store.
KIOT radio runs an early morning interview with Kenny Kingston, psychic to the stars, who claims ‘Harry Truman was the most psychic president the US ever had.’ Was that because of the Little Boy? Kenny K. doesn’t say.
Up on the dresser sits the God Insight Box waiting to be consulted. The insight for the day, printed on orange card, in soy-based ink, is ‘I can change any thought that hurts.’
The full weight of this piece of wisdom hits me in the shower. An end to personal failure and social guilt. I emerge feeling like a new person.
At ten Gita comes in to dust. Gita is the Indian wife of the Indian proprietor of the King’s Rest.
‘No work?’ she asks. I smile and shrug.
‘Alone?’ She considers this before adding,
‘Always alone,’ giggling at her own presumption. ‘Wasting time,’ she concludes as though witness to the sad but inevitable path of an anti-social life.
I make a decision to call Nancy and Walker.
‘Is that Walker?’
‘Yes,’ says Walker.
‘I’m in
