The Valkyries

climbed into the back.
    Gene began to give instructions—take that road there, go for a few miles, drive fast so that the car gets cool inside, turn off the air-conditioning so themotor doesn’t overheat. Several times they drove off the narrow dirt road into the desert. But Gene knew what he was doing. He wasn’t going to make the same mistakes they had.
    “What happened yesterday?” Chris asked for the hundredth time. She knew that Gene wanted her to ask. He might already have seen his guardian angel, but he acted like any other young man his age.
    “Sunstroke,” he finally explained. “Haven’t either of you ever seen a film about the desert?”
    Of course they had. Thirsty men, dragging themselves across the sand in search of a drop of water.
    “We didn’t feel thirsty at all. The two canteens were filled with water.”
    “That’s not what I’m talking about,” the American interrupted. “I mean your clothing.”
    The clothing! The Arabs with their long robes, and several hoods—one on top of the other. Of course, how stupid we were! Paulo had already heard about that, and he’d already walked across three other deserts … and he had never felt the desire to take his clothes off. But here, that morning, after the frustration of the lake that they seemed never to reach …
How could I have had such a stupid idea?
he thought.
    “When you took off your clothes, the water in your bodies began to evaporate immediately. You can’t even perspire, because the climate is so dry. In fifteen minutes, you were both already dehydrated. No thirst or anything—just a slight feeling of disorientation.”
    “And the exhaustion?”
    “That exhaustion is death arriving.”
    I sure didn’t know it was death arriving,
Chris said to herself. If someday she had to choose an easy way to leave the world behind, she would come back and take off her clothing in the middle of the desert.
    “Most people who die in the desert die with water in their canteen. The dehydration is so rapid that we feel as if we’ve drunk an entire bottle of whisky, or taken an overdose of some tranquilizer.” He suggested that, starting now, they drink water periodically—even if they weren’t thirsty—because their bodies needed the water.
    “But an angel did appear,” Gene said.
    Before Paulo could say what he was thinking, Gene ordered him to stop at the foot of a cliff.
    “Let’s get out here and go the rest of the way on foot.”
    They began to walk along a narrow path that led to the top of the cliff. Before they had gone far, Gene realized he had forgotten the flashlight from the car. He went back, picked it up, and sat on the hood of the car for some time, staring out at the desert.
    Chris is right; solitude does strange things to people. He’s behaving strangely,
Paulo thought as he watched the youth down below.
    But, a few seconds later, Gene had climbed the narrow path again, and they pushed on.
    In forty minutes, with no great difficulty, they had reached the top. There was some sparse vegetation there, and Gene asked that they sit down facing north. His attitude, usually expansive, had changed—he seemed more distant, and looked as if he were concentrating hard.
    “You’ve both come here in search of angels,” he said, sitting down at their side.
    “That’s what I came for,” Paulo said. “And I know that you have spoken with one.”
    “Forget about my angel. Many people in this desert have already seen or conversed with their angel. So have a lot of people in cities, or at sea, or in the mountains.”
    There was a tone of impatience in his voice.
    “Think about
your
guardian angels,” he continued. “Because my angel is here, and I can see him. This is my holy place.”
    Both Paulo and Chris thought back to their first night in the desert. And they imagined their angels once again, with their raiment and their wings.
    “You must always have a holy place. Mine once was a small apartment, and at another time, a square in the middle of Los Angeles. Now it’s here. A sacred hymn opens a gate to heaven, and heaven appears.”
    They both looked around at Gene’s holy place: the rocks, the hard ground, the desert plants. Perhaps snakes and coyotes passed through here at night, too.
    Gene appeared to be in a trance.
    “It was here that I was first able to see my angel, although I knew that the angel was everywhere, and that the angel’s face is the face of the desert I live in, or of the city where I