We spent the first four days between Playa Quemada and Timanfaya National Park, hopping barefoot over volcanic rocks. Our sham wedding began to make sense during those days, a different kind of sense that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but that gave me self-assurance. The hours melted over us as we sat on the beach with nothing around besides the gently sloping hillsides with their otherworldly palette of colors. Reds and blacks, and me determined not to spend any more time in front of the computer screen: that Martian desert was better than any virtual world. I used to get up in the mornings before Ismael to dive into the cold Atlantic and—let’s be honest—to have a little time to myself; afterward I’d have breakfast in the bar in what was called the town, although it didn’t seem like one to me. We never referred to it as such, but Playa Quemada was really a village. There were many other words that didn’t pass our lips. We spent hours without formulating a single thought, swaddled in simple, infantile phrases: “I’m going for a swim. Bye.” Or, once in the sea: “No one’s ever going to drag me out of here.” Ismael was reading up on the brain, and at night we talked about the ancient responses that contact with the natural world would produce in our bodies. We’d grow gills if we spent long enough consciously submerged in some remote underwater valley.