Three’s Company was sent to me by something divine, maybe a ghost or maybe God, five years before I won the lottery. On the night it first graced me I was staying at Krystal’s apartment, and two nights prior to that evening I had been beaten, and raped, and Scheele’s Market had been robbed, and Geannie and Jim had been gunned down in the cooler, and Hernan had been shot dead, and I had watched his blood settle into the grout lines of the brown tile near where I lay panting, facedown, trying not to taste the floor—that had been my prevailing thought in the moment, that I must not taste the floor for fear of being grossed out forever—and the coffeepot on the counter above me had exploded fantastically, comically, in the wake of gunfire, and a bullet grazed my neck. And then the police had come, and an ambulance and medical workers, and I was loaded onto a stretcher and taken to a hospital, and strangers examined and photographed me and took my statement, and the collective kindness of everyone witnessed me, and every sympathetic face telegraphed pity to me, and I was told the gunshot was only a flesh wound, that I was very lucky, and after I was kept overnight I was told by a doctor that it would be in my best interest if I stayed with someone while I recovered, and I was too exhausted to argue—which is how I came to dial Krystal’s phone number with shaky fingers while the doctor watched, and how I came to be staying with Krystal on the night I discovered Three’s Company.

After she picked me up from the hospital and brought me back to her place, she cooked me stuffing and macaroni and cheese from a box, both the good, brand-name kinds, and set me up with one of her dead grandmother’s crocheted blankets on the couch, and when she went to bed I lay with an ice pack on my crotch and a frozen pea bag on my left eye socket and flipped through the TV channels.

I watched a little bit of national news, and it all assured the end—grinning politicians, the nuclear threat, biohazards in the air, everything burning, everything flooding. The stakes. Then the local news came on and showed a familiar parking lot and the parrot-blue SCHEELE’S MARKET sign with a stretch of yellow police tape near it, and I zestfully pressed the channel arrow button over and over again, so hard the remote creaked.

A game show. An infomercial. A show about dead and missing children. Naked people vying for money. Movies about murder and unhappy couples and a dog and another murder.

Then, suddenly, a glow emanated from the screen. It was golden, like God. The warm air of the 1970s wafted over me, and I fell into a paralytic hypnosis. A show played on the screen but another thing was happening on a separate level, inside a secret flap of consciousness, and there was something autumnal about the feeling it generated, deep and nostalgic, regressing my heart to a past date that might have been real and might have been a mishmash of fiction or advertisements or childhood happiness, or a collection of weather: the pleasure of a rosy-lit room in a cold season, the dream of a warm ocean, the late afternoon sun. My reality cracked open, and the television spooned another one on top.