When I arrived she had already been there for hours, wading through the embarrassing amount of stuff two people collect over twenty years together and worrying over wolf spiders hiding in the basement’s damp corners. Boxes were strewn everywhere, an explosion of a life. The kitchen hadn’t been so bad, but the basement alone had taken four weekends to sort through and put into boxes, each one carefully labeled. We were only three-quarters of the way finished.

What was to become of it all? I did not ask. Had the house been sold? I did not ask. I did not wish to know or do anything that enhanced my consciousness above the level necessary for basic survival. My Three’s Company obsession, also going on five years by this point, had sunk me into a waking dream, and everything else—work, my time with Krystal, packing up the house, the past and present—became hazy and unreal, a mindless ritual. My brain actually felt soft when I performed my daily work tasks, as if reality itself had become mushy, and I began incurring warnings at work for carelessness. I stocked a dairy case with sour cream too near its expiration; on another day I had not secured a pallet and several gallons of milk fell to the floor and burst. In lieu of being formally reprimanded, I agreed to pay for the damages out of my own paycheck, and cleaned up the spilled milk myself, and because I stayed meek and mild during the dressing-down portion of my punishment, the warehouse manager was merciful. I lacked attention, he told me, and he was questioning my commitment to safety. I had shaken my head and nodded at the appropriate moments, having learned long ago that the best way to communicate with him was through well-timed head movements. So far my strategy of barely being alive was working.

That Saturday in the basement was no different. I floated along and counted the hours until I’d be back in my favorite spot in front of the television, deciding between a Season 3 episode and a Season 6 one. As I taped up boxes, I silently tested myself—my new project was memorizing the script of each episode. At night I’d been dreaming of terrible apocalypses, burned-out rubble where my neighbors’ trailers had been, everything turned to ash, until one night I awoke panting, my throat sore from breathing in the cindery debris, gripped with fear: What if the world ended? What if a global catastrophe happened? How would I watch Three’s Company? So I started memorizing each episode down to the finest detail. I had to become a living library.

Which is what I was whispering to myself in Geannie’s basement when I found Jim’s Christmas village. Krystal was in a far corner still waging war on the spiders, the short exhalations of her aerosol can moving farther away as she moved deeper into the basement.

I stood there transfixed. Each small building was in its original box, stacked up under the stairs. Nearby were the risers he used, and I could see the cotton batting rolled up inside a garbage bag. Taped to each box was a photograph Jim had taken of what was within, and I was surprised to see that each structure had a name—English Cottage 3, Anderstown Courthouse, WELCOME TO SNOWVILLE, Castle Vermontaly—and a designation as to placement. There had to be fifty or sixty of them, neatly stacked one on top of the other in a pattern that resembled a brick wall.