On the drive out of the city we crept along at fifteen miles an hour, one car in an impossibly long snake of red tail-lights slithering into the horizon, passing gas stations with cardboard signs taped to the pumps saying, Sorry, Out of Gas.

I began to panic. “I really don’t think we’re prepared.”

“If those burnouts in the golf cart are prepared we’re prepared,” Ana countered.

I shook my head. “I think there’s a 20-percent chance we might actually die.”

We arrived in the dead of night and spent three hours trying to drive our tent pegs into the rock-hard earth. Despite the desert’s name, I’d been picturing something sandy, but the ground had the consistency of dried clay. I tried using a mallet against the pegs, but that only bent them. Eventually, we managed to jerry-rig a shelter by tying our tent up with ropes attached to our car and the van of our very patient Dutch neighbours, with whom we shared our campfire meals over the following week. Ana mostly hung around the tent chatting with whatever shirtless dirtbag happened to be passing by, while Will and I spent our days Instagramming photos of ourselves in front of various curiosities — forty-foot hands emerging from the sand, a three-storey fire-blowing spider, a pyramidal temple of wood built entirely without screws. I’d never been photogenic, which, in the era of the selfie, was a liability. It was as if photographs revealed some fundamental unease within myself that, in real life, I had managed to disguise through motion. Will, on the other hand, looked effortlessly otherworldly in each one.

At the end of the week, we gathered on the playa, shoulder to shoulder with the sixty-eight thousand other unwashed and dust-coated bodies to watch a one-hundred-and-five-foot wicker man set alight. I was startled to feel the heat of it on my face. As if I was surprised, somehow, that it was a real fire. As I watched it burn I thought of all the sacrificial bodies imbued with the collective fate or sins of a people. The rock walls at Mecca, pelted by pilgrims during the Stoning of the Devil. The human sacrifices of the Aztecs, who became sacred vessels carrying the fortunes of the community. I thought about the hours I’d spent in church studying the sallow ribcage of Jesus on the cross, his crucified body lingering in the space between living subject and object of worship, between man and symbol.