I screamed until I was hoarse. No one came to find me. No one came to stop me. Then I got back in my car and pulled back onto the freeway.

27.

I don’t know what I was expecting the convention to be like, but all around me stood baby boomers in golf attire, or sensible wedges for seniors, looking starry-eyed, with lanyards that said SPIRITUAL ENDINGS WEEKEND 2019, their names in bold. Outside, the misters were on full-blast, as they often were in the summer months deep in the desert, but they couldn’t do much against the heat inferno, and each time a new name-tagged attendee entered the lobby we were met with a furnace blast of hot air.

That they all would be comfortable enough to identify themselves so blatantly made me nervous—these were not casual seekers. Each person looked like someone’s mother or father, or someone’s grandmother or grandfather, and I could only assume they were all here because they were afraid to die. The parking lot was full of cars with license plates from different states, and it occurred to me that, just like me, these people had traveled to see “experts” who could tell them what the afterlife would look like. And, even more dire, they wanted help communicating with their dead loved ones.

Mediums lined up on panels to pick people out of the few hundred who had gathered in the carpeted ballroom of the fading Embassy Suites, which featured a pool and golf course within steps of the conference rooms. It was a one-stop shop for boomers. The crowd was mostly women, and something told me their husbands had stepped out onto the golf course, older white men in ball caps perfecting their swings while their wives tried to connect with people they loved who had passed on. There were pairs, too, husband-and-wife teams who had lost family members abruptly—daughters or sons—and desperately wanted to know if they were all right.

Books were set out on tables in the lobby adjacent to the ballrooms, so attendees could buy any number of self-published tomes about near-death experiences, pick up brochures for conservative talk-radio stations or AM radio shows that trafficked in conspiracy theories, or books about alien encounters. I had thumbed through some and noticed that the books mostly had the same kind of glossy covers featuring a waning sunset and Comic Sans font. Boomers crowded the tables and handed over crumpled cash before shoving their books into tote bags provided by the event organizers. A nearby room was filled with brightly colored silk ponchos, mystical print-adorned billowing lady-tops, and an array of overpriced Southwestern jewelry that had been manufactured in China. I made my way among anxious seniors looking through the daily agenda and complaining about panel overlap.