In the 1980s movie montage, I tried on a bunch of outfits in the mirror before I finally decided on the shoulder-padded threads I’ll wear when I waltz into my studio Big Break meeting. When really, I rinsed in the cabin’s outdoor shower and crammed some stuff in a duffel. I was a week into my five-week editing bender away from my life in Boston, and I’d already gone full hermit. I hadn’t showered in days and was living mostly on instant coffee and beef jerky, avoiding the other artists because I was in the zone.

I’d also been hiding. I didn’t need Narek to pull his horn-rimmed glasses off his nose and tell me that. After I finally left him, I threw myself into documenting my friend Genesis’s fight for legal protections for synths. Then I lost her, too, a few months back—just as she became the face of the movement. I was here to work and hide and try to pull myself together again. I’d buzzed my hair when I got here. Something about shedding the outside world.

I don’t own anything professional-looking—I mostly look like I pinch my clothes from thrift shops. Which is sometimes true. I yanked on a white T-shirt that smelled clean and a pair of khaki shorts that were splotched with paint from my occasional house-painting gigs when film work dried up. I made sure to stuff Genesis’s tarot deck, my laptop, and Scarlett, my lucky hand-held camera with her red electrical tape slashes, into my duffel before meeting Yusuf and the others outside.

They followed me down the dirt paths, through the humid July air that was thick with biting flies, to the main house of the grounds, where a black bulldozer of a car idled in the driveway. I’d spent a lot of my twenties getting into cars with strangers, so what the hell. I hopped inside, into an air-conditioned bubble of awkward silence with me alone in the back row.

“Anyone you need to call to say you’ll be out of touch for a few days?” the guy in black at the wheel asked, as he rumbled off the dirt driveway and onto the main road.