common ring-tailed lemur.
And to think that without the Steigers the world would have remained ignorant of these things.
So the tenth day ends, without satisfaction, in room 12 at the King’s Rest. Gita has been in to clean and left a few nominal swirls in the dirt on the dresser. Outside the air is still as sleep and pearly with dusk. Roseanne Barr’s disembodied voice oozes through the wall from the room next door. For some days now I have felt a strange longing which is neither a longing for contact nor a longing for conversation, but rather, a need to be on familiar ground. Had I been travelling in the Solomon Islands I should have faced my isolation with greater equanimity, but every westerner expects at least to comprehend America, if not to feel in some measure at ease there. Here I find so many hints of common ground give out quite suddenly, like false byways. Someone you can rely upon to have an opinion about soap opera or McDonald’s turns out to have seen angels in her backyard and the man who sells you a cup of coffee thinks himself a reincarnation of Nefertiti. Even among the seemingly familiar there can turn out to be almost nothing recognizable.
DAY ELEVEN
I wake with a start from some instantly forgotten dream as the sun begins to burn blue holes into the earliest light. Some overnight rain has stripped the rose outside of its petals leaving a few trembling stamens held fast in the arms of the calyx. A raven lifts itself from the roof and banks into the sky. The one other guest is packing his car and heading back home, to Colorado by the looks of it. There are no clouds now, just a wondrous filmic sheet flung about the earth and moving lightly in the void, as if pegged out to dry.
Remembering the despondent mood of the previous night, I unpack my African fetish, Hopi dream catcher and quartz crystals and arrange them about the room in an attempt to brighten up the place and construct the kind of homeliness which is at present missing. I light a Camel, drink the remains of last night’s root beer, now flat, switch on the TV and wonder why it is that all American anchorwomen have the same hairdo.
At around nine Gita knocks and, without waiting for a response, lets herself in. Looking down at me sitting on the bed she says, to no-one in particular, ‘Alone watching TV,’ with the satisfaction of one delivering a biographical summation for the purposes of an obituary.
Breakfast of sour frijoles and huevos a la plancha in a cafe in Española, a small, hispanic town about thirty miles north of Santa Fe. Black water runs out from the beans, leaving strange Rorschach blots on a stack of flour tortillas heaped beside.
These I point out to the waitress when she returns to fill my coffee cup.
‘What do they suggest to you?’
‘UFO? I dunno.’
‘Pick an insight card.’ She looks down for a moment at the little gold box, pincers a card between brilliant red nails, studies it a moment, throws it back on the table and pours the coffee.
The card reads ‘Slow down, you’re going too fast; You gotta make the moment last …’ with Paul Simon credited on the bottom in psychedelic letters enclosed by double quotation marks. “Paul Simon.”
‘What’s that for, anyhow?’ Before I leave she asks for it back to show to her boss, but he’s too busy loading a delivery of icecream into the freezer.
Sixties, sixties, sixties. Sometimes it seems as though the sixties generation unplugged en masse after Woodstock. Do they suppose that nothing’s happened since? Like, the end of the Cold War, like the digital revolution, like AIDS, like democratic elections in South Africa, like crack, like the rise and rise of the kind of people who still remember who Paul Simon was, or is, or who give a damn in any case.
Every time I hum the tune I get the line ‘you move too fast’ repeating in my head. ‘You’re going too fast’ doesn’t even scan.
During the drive back to Santa Fe it occurs to me that, despite having been in New Mexico for nearly two weeks, I have taken almost no account of the landscape outside the city limits, which is at least as great a draw to spiritual tourists as the New Age cafes and bookstores downtown. So I swing off the freeway at the next turning, signposted to Chimayo, and head up a single-track paved road onto a desert plateau lined in the far distance with naked mountains whose peaks, despite the sun, remain ice-powdered, giving them the appearance of cut salami sausages. A warm, desiccated wind exposes the matt grey underside of the sage and fragments the plain into a subtle mosaic of drab green and grey. Fifteen minutes of walking through the brush and my position feels unchanged, the mountains ahead as remote as Elysium. A deep cloud, dark as bomb dust, hangs over the horizon fifty or sixty miles away, tailing rain. I realize that it is not so much isolation that is at the heart of my dispiritedness, but claustrophobia.
Santa Fe is quiet today. Down in the plaza some Indian women are laying out jewellery on blankets under the shaded boardwalk of the Palace of the Governors. The afternoon wind has brought humidity, and the possibility of a thunderstorm; art stores and restaurants and parking lots are empty. Although the city is reputed to be at ease with itself, you only have to walk around the plaza before the tourists have arrived or after they have gone to sense the air of restlessness and disquiet. The chamber of commerce sells the city as a place of such antiquity and harmony that its three cultures – Hispanic, Native American and Anglo coexist in steadfast and separate juxtaposition, and extrapolates from this the myth that the City Different is a place of relaxed permissiveness. In fact, New Mexico has a history sufficiently long to have blurred the distinctions between Hispanic and Native American into a complex and pleasing slurry, without annihilating either. It is the newcomers who, unable or unwilling to grasp the subtleties of the place, have saddled it with the label ‘tricultural’ and, with that simple tag, rewritten history. A colonial census of 1790 recognized seven ethnic groups in Santa Fe: White Spanish; Coyote, or Spanish and New Mexican Indian; Mulatto, or half-Afro-American; Genizaro, who were Indians captured by Plains Indians and sold back to Spanish colonists as slaves; Indio or Indian; Mestizo, or a mixture of Spanish and Mexican Indian; and Color Quebrado, which pretty much summed up anyone left over. They were in part united by the conservative lifestyles most suited to harsh terrain and in part by trading alliances. Anglo-saxon culture, in particular liberal anglo-saxon culture, came late to New Mexico, and laid itself like skin on the soup beneath. Since the influx of wealthy, liberal, overwhelmingly white vacationers and retirees in the 1980s and 1990s, land prices have soared in Santa Fe. Every day a letter or an op-ed piece in the Santa Fe New Mexican mourns the conversion of the city from living place to outdoor museum.
I’m going to tell you about Pete. Pete makes his living as a New Age technoshaman. A technoshaman is a shaman with a computer, apparently. It’s a profession with a scientific bent. In fact, much that goes on among New Agers is of a scientific bent, for science can be harnessed in support of more or less any kind of ideology and, by being thus appropriated, spoiled for any other. Afterall, what does it matter if computers powered by crystal matrices and extra-low frequency psychic protector lenses and human beings grown from lemur babies sound improbable? Gene splicing and nanotechnology and virtual reality are pretty crazy too.
Pete the Technoshaman has been developing his technoshamanistic software for eleven years and has chosen to base his code on the Mayan calendar on the grounds that the mathematics of the Mayan grid is the same mathematics as the mathematics of life, a numerically reciprocal permutation table. Pete’s mission has something to do with the rising level of chaos, which, according to Pete, will lead inexorably to the world being in flames and bridges burning behind us.
‘There’s no going back to the Garden of Eden,’ he says, ‘which didn’t even really exist anyway.’
In his living room he has an AppleMac fixed to
