That weekend, Jamie and I went camping. He had been in the office all month—no fieldwork—and said he wanted to get outdoors. I wasn’t sure that car camping counted, but it was the best we could do, so we drove to a campground, set up our tent on a pre-groomed square of dirt, built a fire in the premade fire pit, and grilled some steaks that we had purchased at the grocery store down the road—steaks that were decidedly not local or organic or grass-fed but came in a Styrofoam tray, bloody and absurdly cheap, the product of farm subsidies that we paid for with our tax dollars because farmland fit our vision of America as a place of plenty.

I heard his footsteps retreating down the hallway, down the stairs. I lifted the next item out of the box, a gray wool skirt suit. The fabric felt soft and luxe, a subtle pinstripe running top to bottom. But when I held up the matching jacket, I could tell that something about it was no longer right, theshoulders too big, the lapels too wide. This had probably been my mother’s nicest suit, the one she wore to court when she argued a big case. I held the jacket and I pictured her standing in front of judge and jury. She had been so full of life, so full of joy. How was it possible that I still had this jacket, and yet I didn’t have her?

We entered a vast windowless space, seemingly a ballroom, though who would want to host a ball in this windowless space was a mystery. The room was filled with hundreds of booths, each with a table and a sign, a salesperson or two shilling product that was at least tangentially related to happiness. A guard at the door checked our badges; only conference attendees were allowed in.

“I’ll finish my dissertation,” I said. I had spent so many years working up an argument that the mind was all that mattered. But I had been wrong about that, too. The body was undeniable. I was surprised to find that the idea of going back to the unfinished document on my computer made me excited. I was ready to return to a world that didn’t believe life could be so easily overwritten, so easily codified.