Zomes

Zomes are pointed, dome-like structures built as part of Mickey Wolfmann’s desert project, Arrepentimiento. Their unfinished shells, baffling interiors, and Riggs Warbling’s claim that they can open onto other dimensions make them more than an eccentric architectural feature: they embody the project’s collapse while holding out an uncertain promise of escape from the desert and the ordinary world.

Design and Setting

Doc Sportello and Tito Stavrou first see the zomes from a ridge above a remote valley, where Arrepentimiento appears as a small cluster of concrete structures set within a much larger, only marginally developed desert. Several zomes are connected by covered walkways. They are not perfect hemispheres: each rises to a point. Even their number is uncertain. Doc counts six, while Tito counts seven, perhaps eight, and the terrain between the men and the complex is strewn with large, nearly spherical pink rocks that might be natural or manufactured. The scene offers no reliable distinction between the project’s designed forms and the surrounding landscape.

The distant buildings seem at first like an image set down in the desert rather than an accessible place. Doc and Tito decide to approach on foot, wearing enormous souvenir sombreros from Glitter Gulch against what Tito calls dangerous rays. The walk takes longer than they expect; the structures seem not to draw nearer, and the sun makes the crossing feel hostile and otherworldly. Lizards watch them without moving. The approach turns the zomes into a destination that is visible but strangely difficult to reach, as if distance itself were part of their architecture.

The Abandoned Project

At close range, the zomes cease to look like futuristic dwellings and begin to resemble the remains of an abandoned construction site. Sun-bleached scrap lumber, rusted cable spools, plastic pipe, Romex wiring, and a wrecked air compressor lie among the structures. Windblown plastic sheeting exposes the frameworks beneath: struts and connectors that recall an openwork soccer ball, cactus patterns, or seashells brought back from Hawaii. The shifting comparisons make the buildings appear at once engineered, organic, and incomplete.

The site’s condition sharpens the contrast between Wolfmann’s ambition and what remains. From a distance, Arrepentimiento had seemed like a completed vision of a desert settlement; up close, its exposed skeleton records an interrupted undertaking. Its name and design suggest a project imagined as penance by a man who had once charged people for human shelter, but the evidence at the site is not a functioning community. The shells stand amid the materials of work that has stopped.

Interior and Hidden Space

One zome’s door opens easily, and Doc steps inside into a high, shadowy vault. The interior contains a gigantic refrigerator stocked with beer and other food, slot machines, a pool table, and reclining chairs. This unlikely combination gives the place the air of a retreat or recreation room rather than a conventional residence. Its furnished interior also complicates the abandoned appearance of the site: the project is visibly unfinished, but this particular space has been arranged for someone to occupy.

The room appears to contain more space than its exterior could hold. Riggs explains the design through a wry reversal of Buckminster Fuller’s concern with economy, describing it as more cubic feet per dollar enclosed. The line turns the zome into a joke about architectural efficiency, but Doc’s impression of impossible interior volume gives the building a more unsettling quality. Its shell does not seem to account for the room inside. That mismatch makes the structure feel less like an ordinary shelter than a threshold whose dimensions cannot be confidently measured.

Riggs’s Other-Dimensional Doorway

When Doc and Tito meet Riggs at the site, Riggs is agitated and grips a black handgun. Fighter jets pass overhead, their engines roaring close enough to interrupt the conversation; Riggs watches the sky and briefly raises his weapon. Against this exposure to military aircraft and the desert’s dangers, he claims that zomes can serve as doorways to other dimensions. The F-105s, coyotes, scorpions, snakes, and heat, he says, cannot harm him because he can leave whenever he wishes by stepping through a door inside.

Riggs presents this passage as a means of safety, not as an invitation to explore. When Doc asks to look, Riggs warns that the door is not for everyone and could be dangerous. The claim remains his, and the encounter supplies no confirmation that anyone has crossed into another dimension. The novel leaves the zome balanced between two readings: a peculiar structure in a derelict development and a possible escape hatch imagined by a man living amid military noise and desert exposure. Its uncertainty belongs to the scene rather than being resolved into proof.

Recurrence and Significance

The zomes return as an image after the visit to Arrepentimiento. When Doc sees Shasta Fay Hepworth again, she wears a seashell on a thong around her neck. He notices that its shape and markings recall one of the zomes in Wolfmann’s now-abandoned desert project. A small object carried on a person thus echoes the monumental structures left behind in the valley, linking the desert encounter to Doc’s later meeting without explaining the resemblance away.

Across these appearances, the zomes gather contrasts rather than a single settled meaning: shelter and abandonment, geometric design and organic pattern, exposed desert and shadowy interior, visible structure and apparently impossible space. Their connection to a project conceived as penance gives their ruined condition a moral dimension, while Riggs’s account turns their doors into a fantasy of departure. The shell on Shasta’s neck carries the image beyond the site, so that even after the project has been left behind, its strange forms persist as a reminder that the boundary between a material ruin and an imagined elsewhere may not be as firm as it first appears.