Upon arrival, we both stepped out of the car dumbstruck. Her name is lost to me now, but when I asked the real estate agent what kind of privacy I could expect, she said, “Really?” She thought I was kidding. Then she collected herself and regained the confident, professional tone she’d been using on me the whole drive there. “The biggest threat might be hunters, but there’s so much land here that you may never even see them. And you can put up signs for that.” She wore a dress suit and high heels that sunk into the recently rained-on grass. When we opened the door to the main house I saw her shiver. She seemed nice, but I could tell she wanted to get back to town as soon as she could. Some people can’t take isolation.

And that is what the house, the property, was built for. Isolation. The house was as large as a mansion but looked more like a giant farmhouse—big and plain, with two kitchens, giant, witchy fireplaces, and cavernous rooms. Everything was layered in dust. The house wasn’t really my concern, though. My eye was on the empty clearing beyond the house, at the edge of the woods. That was it. I could see it. My city. My Apartment 201.

Oh, I suppose I could have moved to California and done it right, but that posed too many uncertainties—would I go to the beach? Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of never leaving the compound? And what about mudslides and earthquakes and drought and fire? Especially fire. It was too risky. California—the idea of California—was a shimmering dream and needed to stay that way. The California I wanted was gone, anyway. The California most people want is gone.

Behind the main house were several outbuildings. The last owner had been a hoarder of some kind, perhaps of automobiles, because each outbuilding was as large as a garage. We walked through them one by one. These would do fine, I thought, to hold all supplies or extra equipment.

“Well, there you have it,” the real estate agent said as we concluded the tour. By that time she had put on her bravest face; moments before, as we walked back toward the house, her heel had sunk into the ground and she had stumbled, sitting down hard, and mud had daubed a brown swath across her left ass cheek. As I helped her up her voice became brighter. “I think it would be great for getting away, or as a vacation home. Your very own mountain place.”

From then on when I thought of the property I thought of it as “the mountain place,” and never without the image of her sinking shoe. Her pratfall felt like good luck.