says Walker, unfazed. ‘Ask just about anyone on the street. We’re all working on ourselves. It’s like, Santa Monica is full of surfers, and Santa Fe is full of seekers.’
‘But why is that?’
‘Well, the ocean’s there I guess.’ Walker pauses to give me time to get the joke. ‘Oh, you mean … I guess it’s, like, the energies and the desert, man.’
‘Desert energies?’
‘Uh, yeah.’
I am about to bring the conversation to a close when Walker adds: ‘You could go to a therapist, or an empath or a psychic or something.’ Some woman in Walker’s room starts mantra chanting.
‘Do you know anyone?’ ‘Om’ throbs over the phone like a distant headache.
‘There are, like, thousands of’em in this city. You should check the Yellow Pages.’
To me, psychics have always been the lament of evangelical Christians in suburban neighbourhoods, character parts in police dramas and a counsel-of-last-resort for the desperate. I suppose it had just never occurred to me that anyone could pick a psychic from the Yellow Pages and fix an appointment. My mother saw a clairvoyant after my father died. The clairvoyant told her that my father came out of the spirit world with this message: ‘Don’t drive so fast.’ It’s true, she does drive too fast. And then the psychic apparently said ‘Plus, you have a daughter who’s selfish to the core.’ But I don’t know if mum got the psychic’s name from the Yellow Pages or from somewhere else.
Much though I’d like to believe – I mean I really would – in psychic phenomena, and however comforting it would be to know that my father was up in the ether somewhere supervising my driving, I find it difficult to believe in anything without first understanding it. For example, as a child in a Catholic school, I found the Catholic notion of transubstantiation particularly tricky. I would worry about the finer details: how come Jesus’ body wasn’t all eaten up? Wouldn’t it be rotten after two thousand years? Even now, knowing that belief is based not on literal truths, but on metaphorical ones, I remain confused. Although I don’t believe in them, if a psychic told me I was going to die the next day, I’d probably still be worried.
‘I’m not going to any psychic from the Yellow Pages. You don’t know what you’re getting.’ This for my own benefit as much as Walker’s.
‘Sure,’ replies Walker, good-humouredly, ‘You could go see Chris Griscom. She’s got this school called the Nizhoni School for Global Consciousness and this, like, place, the Light Institute? They deal with the Earth Mother and the Goddess and all? Uh, it’s not psychic though, it’s more like consciousness and the healing energies. I kinda learned a lot from her. She converted Shirley Maclaine.’
With hindsight, I see that it was at this point I came to the realization that I was dealing not just with an unfamiliar set of behaviours but with an entirely foreign inner architecture. It was like being propelled back into that period in adolescence when even though everyone listened to the same music, you still felt that you were the only one who really understood the lyrics or that you were the only one who didn’t understand the lyrics, but that in any case you were alone. It occurred to me then that I was suffering from the kind of numb insensibility brought on by navigating through an emotional and intellectual territory that might be labelled ‘here monsters lie’ on the map of experience. This realization was to bring with it a solitude more complete than my habitual isolation. The longer I considered it, the more it gripped me. How long would it be before I scuttled back empty-handed to my familiar world or capitulated to the demands of the new one and assumed its principles and unconscious ideologies – in short, became one of them?
Mid-morning I order a cup of coffee and a donut at Galisteo News, a New Age-y dive which carries papers from outside the state and is popular with tourists and transplants. One of the local freesheets leads with the headline ‘Whole Life Special’, previewing some sort of New Age-fest to be held in Santa Fe the following week. It continues with the sub-header ‘Connect with the transformational energy of your “real” self.’ On the inside back is a picture of a thin woman with big hair and mascara, and underneath her the legend ‘Chris Griscom shows you how to expand your perception to include the multi-dimensional perspectives of global consciousness,’ with the address of the Light Institute of Galisteo and a phone number.
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
