Two weeks later, performing the same task, I saw them again. The same two men, I thought, at least they looked the same to me, standing at the tree line and taking pictures. This time they had a tripod set up. A third person was with them, a woman.

I decided to run toward them. Adrenaline shot through my limbs and I charged headlong at them, never taking my eyes off their faces. They scrambled to collect their equipment, and then they vanished. I could see the bright colors of their winter jackets retreating over the hill from where they had been standing. The three indentations the tripod had made in the scrappy snow looked like bullet holes.

Around this same time I was losing it a little, losing the thread of my original project; it started in earnest when I tried moving Mr. Furley’s television up to Apartment 201. Moving the TV was purely an indulgence. Miraculously, the programming on Furley’s TV had not been damaged by the fried generator, perhaps because it had been hidden inside Ray’s secret compartment at the time, and my yearning to set everything in 201 right again, even if it was a terrible patch job, overwhelmed my previous adherence to keeping everything in its place.

The only snag was that Furley’s television was a giant floor model, with a heavy, ornate casing that made transporting it nearly impossible. I tried not to think about Rita, or her strong arms. On my own, I had loaded it onto a dolly, and was slowly pulling it up the steps, grunting with every tug, when my Roper back pain flared up and my grip loosened for a second.

I watched, horrified, as the dolly and the TV tumbled down the steps, end over end, until it landed on the first-floor concrete with a spectacular crash, and broke into little pieces.

That loss disheartened me in a way I never fully recovered from. I had no one to blame but myself. And what was with my back? I was supposed to be Cindy, the effervescent athlete. Clumsiness aside, I should have been able to hoist that up by myself, no problem. It seemed as if the ghost of Mr. Roper had possessed me, had resurrected himself at the worst possible moment.

And where was Jack? Where was Janet? I hadn’t seen either of them since Rita had left.

I let it get to me. Instead of going out to my day job as I should have done, there were dreary afternoons I sat around the apartment unbathed and unfed, moping and staring at where the useless television sat, my eyes inevitably drifting upward, drawn to the wall beyond, where the director of Three’s Company would have stood with his cameras aimed right at me. The fourth wall.

What did this wall look like? The at-home television audience, of course, never saw it on the real show. In fact, there were a total of five walls in Apartment 201 that were completely unknown to me, one for each room that appeared on-screen. Everything in the show—every line of dialogue, every tape date and trivia tidbit, every plant, every wall hanging, every stick of furniture—all of it was knowable to me but this.