“If you don’t believe in the real Mecca, why the hell do you want to replace it with a fake one?” I snapped.

A chill spread through the car. We’d been driving eight hours by that point. I had been in a crank since we left our campsite that morning; at a rest stop, Ana had checked her phone to discover that a friend of hers was selling off three tickets to Burning Man. I’d never known anyone who’d actually been, but I’d heard about it for years — how, over a week, tens of thousands of people built a utopian city in the blisteringly hot desert, filled it with surreal art installations, and on the final day burned a towering wooden effigy of a man. In fairness, the photos Ana had shown us from previous years looked pretty spectacular. But getting there would mean turning around and backtracking for at least a day’s drive westward. Plus getting tons of fresh supplies. Plus having to spend a week in the desert with thousands of unwashed pseudo-pilgrims seeking a “profound experience.”

“What are you afraid of?” she asked, fixing me in her stare.

“It’s not about being afraid of any —”

“Yes, you are. Anything spiritual. Earnest. Idealist. You balk at it.”

I clenched my jaw and drove towards the shimmering horizon. I pulled the sun visor down and squinted against the glare. We passed the charred remains of a trailer home and a shuttered gas station. And then nothing for miles. I could feel Ana’s words working on me. What was I afraid of? Losing myself? Becoming part of an ecstatic mass? I could never give over. Was I standing on life’s sidelines with my arms crossed? Was that my defence, to be over everything? Above it all? Was this all, in some way, about you? My distrust of all things spiritual, my need to push away from it, from you. What if I was too afraid to transcend? To find my limit and exceed it? What if I never let myself find the thing I didn’t even know I needed?

We drove in a seething, air-conditioned silence for another couple of minutes until, at the turnoff for State Route 56, I swung the wheel around. We were headed back west.

Ana leaned over and kissed my cheek.

I drove late into the night, twelve hours to Reno, where we slept in the parking lot of a Walmart. We woke just in time for the store to open and joined the frenzied scrum of “Burners” snatching up all the camping equipment, charcoal, bottles of water, canned food, and condoms they could carry in their carts.

“You don’t need the bug spray,” the disinterested lady at checkout informed me. “Nothing lives in Black Rock Desert.”