GWEN WHITMAN Recent college graduate on a spiritual quest for meaning

NO. 1, NO.3, NO. 4, NO. 5, NO. 6, NO. 7 and NO.8  Seven philosophers lost in the desert. They are addressed individually by their respective numbers and collectively as The Library. They can function as a group.

THE DIRECTOR The keeper of the artistic vision

THE PLAYWRIGHT An avant-garde proponent of new theater

JEN KELLER and TED KOMINSKY Park rangers

ALIEN 1 AND ALIEN 2 Well, aah… , aliens

She’d been walking through the desert all night. She figured it was better to walk at night, despite the cold; at least she wouldn’t get fried to a crisp in a place with no shade.

One could say Gwen was experiencing an existential crisis and was trying to find herself, even though she was only twenty-four and the middle of her road was so far into the distance she wouldn’t get a glimpse of it for another couple of decades. 

Regardless, she was indulging what she perceived to be her dark night of the soul, college behind her, unappetizing options in front of her, sensitive, idealistic and over-educated, the perfect symbol of her generation.

Gwen had always prided herself on her strength of character and being self-reliant. 

Ever since she could remember, she had made her own choices, acted upon them decisively, and owned the consequences. 

Her life choices would have met the unequivocal approval of any life-coach or counselor, if only she ever found a need for either. 

Only people without direction needed someone to make plans for them, she mused, during the rare breaks in her busy schedule that allowed her time to pass judgment on her fellow humans.

How did she end up here, she asked herself repeatedly now, and by that she didn’t mean how did she end up walking through the desert at night, she knew exactly how that happened: she decided to go on a spiritual journey to find deeper meaning, so she took a bus from Anaheim to Los Angeles, and then via Phoenix, to Sedona. 

Once there, something felt wrong to her, something that told her to keep looking, to go back to the Village of Oak Creek, with which she had felt an instant connection when the bus passed through it. She was stiff from the twelve hours on the bus, and the village was only seven miles down the road, so she threw caution to the wind and started walking.

Have you ever tried walking on the side of a busy road in the desert in late afternoon? 

Between the glare, the dust and the constant endangering of her life, Gwen found a more exciting and less accident prone route beckoning in the distance between two gorgeous rock formations that looked eerily familiar but she couldn’t remember why, and abandoned the main road, relieved to no longer feel the powdery dust crunching in her teeth. 

This had happened three days ago.

When the first night approached, Gwen was petrified with fear, alone in the barren land punctuated here and there by alien shapes she could barely make out in the darkness: giant cacti or karstic rocks or just plain boulders. She couldn’t tell. 

She feared everything from scorpions to sinkholes and cursed her own stupidity for twelve solid hours, expecting a sudden and untimely death at any moment. 

At first she reassured herself that, in an area so famous for its hot springs, she was bound to run into people eventually, even at night, but no such luck.

She kept on walking, too afraid to lie down on something with stingers or thorns, guided forward by the light of the stars. There were so many of them, and they felt so close, like the entire sky lowered itself above her head, so she could see it better. Straight through the middle of it, the Milky Way cut an ethereal path, one she instinctively followed in her travels below.

She didn’t even realize she’d walked the whole night until a pink and orange glow stirred up on the horizon, the beginning of a deeply spiritual and awe-inspiring dawn which revealed to her two things: she’d been walking away from her destination for ten solid hours and she could barely feel her feet and her back.

Wisdom dictated she should find some shade and rest. The walk at night hadn’t been as bad as she expected, if only it didn’t take her farther into the wilderness. She found a little shallow cave eventually, and figured she should sit down, eat something and take careful sips out of the water bottle she decided on a whim not to throw away when she got off the bus, and then use the sun to orient herself and plot a more useful itinerary for the next leg of her journey. She didn’t make it past the second activity.

When she woke up, the sun was setting, and she felt well rested, despite sleeping on bare dirt. Walking at night seemed like a good idea, because she figured she could navigate by the stars if she found a bright one and keep her eyes fixed on it. She didn’t know which star it was, but it didn’t matter. As long as she walked towards that star, she wouldn’t go in circles; her selection was shining in the right lower quarter of the sky. 

Strangely enough, for a California native who’d spent a good part of her childhood by the ocean, Gwen knew nothing about boats, or navigation, or the stars’ movement across the firmament. 

The star she’d picked moved to the other side of the sky in rather determined fashion and set around 1 a.m., leaving her stranded with no guidance.

By the end of night two, she found herself back at the cave, realized she’d been walking in circles the whole night and dropped to the ground, too tired to eat or drink.

Thirst woke her up in the late afternoon. She drank the rest of the water, ate the last sandwich and started walking, trying to pay as much attention to the ghostly shapes in the distance as she could. Her eyes had adapted to night view, and she was surprised to notice how many details she could pick up by the light of the stars, in what she would have described as pitch dark the day before.

A quiet peace suffused her, almost some kind of elation, when she realized she was probably going to die there in the desert, where the desiccating heat would preserve her indefinitely, like a sacred and arcane burial rite, and decades would pass until someone would find her, if at all.

There was comfort in the thought she would become one with nature, without the artifice that accompanies being laid to rest, artifice which serves to distract the living from their fear of dissolution. No such fear for her, though. She would cross the Silver River in perfect peace, under the black velvet sky, looking up at the stars.

One has to assume dehydration and exhaustion had something to contribute to this altered state of consciousness. 

Inertia and survival instinct kept pushing her forward, and even in the dark she noticed the landscape had changed: a little shrub here, a mesa there. In the wee hours, she turned around a boulder and found herself in someone’s backyard. 

All her peaceful acceptance of death went down the drain in an instant and she rushed around the property, clambering slopes on her hands and knees, so desperate she was to find the front door. There wasn’t one. Instead, a bead curtain chimed softly in the wind, saturated by a familiar acrid smell.

‘Oh, God, please tell me there’s somebody here! Please let somebody be here!’

“Did you step on the gravel?” a gritty voice arose. It was difficult to see the face it belonged to through the thick cloud of smoke.

‘How are they even alive? This could knock out a horse! Or an elephant!’

“Which is it, horse or elephant? Be precise,” another gritty voice commented from the opposite side of the room.

“Give her a break, No. 1! She’s exhausted!” a gentler voice retorted.

“How did you get here and where are you going to sleep?” the first voice went up a few decibels, thrown squarely in her direction.

“Where is here?” Gwen asked, hopeful. Peels of laughter ensued, no doubt fueled by the copious happy smoke; they lasted for a while, showing no signs of subsiding. 

“We don’t like strangers,” a fourth voice became suddenly serious. “Go away!”

Gwen got drenched by a feeling she couldn’t categorize, but which fell somewhere between dread and disbelief.

“Leave the girl alone, No.3! Ignore them,” the kind voice emerged from the smoke to reveal its source. “You can call me No. 4. Are you hungry, my dear?”

“Thirsty.” 

No. 4 watched her as she drank a whole pitcher of water in big gulps.

“Slowly. You’ll make yourself sick. Are you sure you don’t want to eat something?”

Gwen gave the idea some thought and reached the conclusion she wouldn’t mind something to eat.

“Follow me.” 

No. 4 led the way outside, where he started looking behind boulders and under cacti in a fashion that reminded her of a treasure hunt. 

‘How high are these people, exactly?’

“We keep free-range chickens,” No. 4 explained. “They always leave us little surprises hidden the nooks and crannies. Here we go!” He emerged triumphant from behind a boulder, holding two oblong eggs, off white and covered in brown speckles.

“I don’t think those are chicken eggs,” Gwen hesitated, careful not to offend her hope for survival.

“Close enough,” No. 4 found a sharp stick on the ground, poke a hole in the top of the first egg and offered it to her. He then punctured the second egg and savored it with delight, forgetting she was there altogether. He remembered her eventually and encouraged her to dig in, and Gwen was too stunned, tired and unraveled to refuse. She drank the raw contents of what she didn’t doubt was a vulture egg, surprised her revolted stomach didn’t return the offending substance.

“Life becomes a lot easier when you start differentiating between what you need and what you think you need. Look at it this way: better him than you.”

“Him who?”

“The vulture, of course! I suppose the original plan had the predator and its prey reversed.”

Gwen didn’t want to impose, so she started planning her return trip in silence, determined to leave the next day at the crack of dawn, before the others woke up.

“What’s the best way back to Sedona?” 

“I sincerely wish I knew,” No. 4 smiled with his eyes.