The truth was, at the bottom of everything, I had succeeded. I had achieved my dream. I had muscled my way out of my old life, wrapped myself in a new cocoon, and wriggled out born anew. I had jumped timelines, and I had even brought someone with me, and together we lived on an alternate plane, inside another time. People who declare things impossible lack a ruthless imagination.

Each day was a gift. As Mr. Roper I made the rounds on the apartment building every morning. I kept the plants in 201 thriving. Jack and Janet and Chrissy came back to me, and I went to see them regularly, though I never stayed long. Sometimes Helen came with me, having more mechanical experience than I had, and took care of anything that went awry. She was very handy. In the evenings I would cook, or she would make us peanut butter sandwiches, her nails black with grease from whatever she had been doing with one of the vehicles she drove around the property to keep herself entertained. It felt rather wicked and delicious to subvert things this way. In the bedroom, too, we reversed the narrative. Instead of running away from Helen, I ran toward her. I was unafraid.

The days were round and full and sweet. It was an era of golden light and gentle breezes, of falling asleep holding hands. No dread and no fear entered in. We did not have to practice our parts. For once I lived effortlessly, my mind as clean as a toothpick pulled from a fully baked cake, and there was no record, no history, no memory, no larger world to which I had to answer. I was free.

But good things can never last, can they. This is the nature of good things. And finally, one afternoon in March, the phone rang.

I was checking on Apartment 301 when I heard it. At first it sounded far away, across the sea. Then its clear bell seemed to vibrate up three flights until it reached my ears, my stomach slicing at me.

Helen was downstairs washing dishes, and I envisioned her pausing, drying her hands. I could almost hear her footsteps as she moved toward it.

Earlier that morning we’d had an argument. It was about keeping pets. On a recent binge we had watched the Season 1 episode “No Children, No Dogs,” again, and in the week since then she had become fixated on getting a puppy. Several times she had broached the subject, but I always found a way to steer the conversation in a different direction.

And when she suggested it again over breakfast that morning, I had said, again, “No.”

Because we were Stanley and Helen, I had never explained to her my own brief foray into pet ownership, but I was determined to dissuade her of this notion. I tried to conjure a sad scenario of pet loss I could say I didn’t want to repeat, a white lie about my past that would pull at her heartstrings, thus closing the matter. But as hard as I tried I could not come up with a suitable sob story on the spot.