Riggs Warbling

Riggs Warbling is introduced as Sloane Wolfmann’s spiritual coach and is later found at Arrepentimiento, where he has become an armed defender of Mickey Wolfmann’s desert settlement. His movement from the Wolfmann household’s loosely defined spiritual practice to a conviction that zomes open paths to other dimensions links personal entanglements with the project’s precarious future.

Identity and Introduction

Riggs enters the story descending the stairs silently while Sloane pours drinks. The extra glass on the tray has prepared Doc Sportello for another person’s arrival, but the figure’s quiet approach makes a striking impression. Sloane identifies him as her spiritual coach, establishing his role in her household before Doc begins to suspect that their connection is more intimate than the title suggests.

Doc reads the pair’s apparent spiritual discipline skeptically. He imagines that their meditation may sometimes serve as a performance for people nearby, and suspects Riggs is Sloane’s boyfriend—the man Shasta Fay Hepworth had mentioned. The scene leaves the relationship unconfirmed by Sloane, but establishes Doc’s interpretation of the household’s spiritual language as entangled with private desire and social display.

Spiritual Practice and Zomes

Riggs’s most distinctively stated interest is zomes. While taking sips directly from the margarita jug, he announces that he is into them, introducing the unusual structures as more than an architectural curiosity. That brief declaration gains significance later, when zomes become central to his account of how he might escape danger.

The structures appear at Arrepentimiento, Mickey Wolfmann’s desert project, which is described as his penance for once charging people for shelter. Doc and Tito see several zomes linked by covered walkways, their shapes pointed rather than perfectly hemispherical. Even the count is unsettled: Doc counts six, Tito seven, perhaps eight. The uncertainty extends to enormous pink, nearly spherical formations scattered across the terrain; they may be natural rocks or human-made objects. The landscape thus resists a stable reading, while Riggs’s earlier interest gives the structures an interpretive charge.

Arrepentimiento and the Threat of Destruction

When Doc encounters Riggs again at Arrepentimiento, Riggs has grown a beard and is holding a cocked .44 Magnum Ruger Blackhawk aimed at Doc. The confrontation makes clear that Riggs is no longer simply a spiritual presence in the Wolfmann household: he is armed and prepared to guard the settlement. His threat casts Doc’s visit as a dangerous intrusion, even as Riggs’s own explanation turns toward the vulnerability of the place he is defending.

Riggs tells Doc that F-105s from Nellis pass overhead every half hour, day and night, and says he has come to see the flights as deliberate and authorized. He fears that Mickey may eventually approve a rocket strike against Arrepentimiento. In his account, destruction would include not only the community but its records, erasing the project’s history as well as its physical presence. The settlement’s isolation does not protect it from military power; the repeated aircraft overhead make that danger part of its daily conditions.

Belief, Fear, and Narrative Role

Riggs insists that the aircraft and the desert’s hazards do not frighten him because he can leave whenever he chooses. He says zomes can function as doorways to other dimensions and gestures toward one as the exit that will keep him safe. The claim places his confidence in an extraordinary escape alongside his concrete awareness of the settlement’s exposure to military flights. The evidence does not establish whether he believes literally that he can pass into another dimension, or whether the belief is a way of confronting the threat.

This contrast defines Riggs’s role in the novel’s account of Arrepentimiento: he is at once its armed protector and a witness to the forces that may destroy it, yet he locates safety not in the project’s survival but in the possibility of leaving it by way of a zome. His presence also connects the domestic world of the Wolfmanns, where spiritual coaching and suspected intimacy overlap, to the desert community and its uncertain fate.