The market and the robbery haunted every article and video segment about my win. For those few weeks, as I went to work and home again, I was careful not to look anyone in the eye, knowing that my coworkers’ and neighbors’ memory of that event was being refreshed daily. I was framed as a success story, a person who had been dealt reverses and then advanced to the front of the line. According to these reports, I was a Christian dream in action—suffer now, glory later—and the words happy ending were used more than once, as if winning the lottery was the end of my story, my final payment, materially and spiritually, for whatever had been taken from me.

And things were taken from me—oh yes, the media wanted everyone to know exactly what had been taken from me. The sordid details of the robbery were trotted out again, and the newscasters smacked their lips recounting the facts as if tasting a favorite dish for the second time. Some reports described me as “a survivor,” a term that was so ludicrous I snorted the first time I heard it, its suggestion of heroism. As if there is heroism in keeping one’s body alive.

If only they knew how I wanted to shuck it off, this shell. This bag. This thing that carried me around from place to place. When I looked in a mirror, I never knew what I saw. It wasn’t me.

The local paper had a field day, too. I made the front page. This happened soon after word got out. At that time I was still answering the door, foolishly thinking that if I gave them a statement they’d go away. The reporter had been some blonde pearl-and-suit lady, and when I opened my door to her she had actually stuck her foot, clad in a flashy patent-leather heel, inside the jamb. I had stood there, staring at her foot as if it were an alien probe, flabbergasted. As I stared, she asked if I thought Geannie and Jim were in heaven, sending me gifts. If I thought Hernan was blessing me. Did I believe in the afterlife? In justice, in karma?

Firmly but swiftly, without any particular malice, I kicked her foot out of the doorway, and she hopped back, as if my booted toe had burned her. The screen door she’d been holding open slammed between us. For a moment we both looked at each other in a strange moment of clarity, dazed at the things we were lowering ourselves to.

She didn’t mention any of that in my profile, though. Instead, her article painted me as the “reclusive salt of the earth” of the local region, and was accompanied by a photo of me smiling thinly and radiating hostility, my one concession to civility after kicking her. This is how Krystal discovered I had won the lottery.

In that first year, that year of my project’s construction, of creation, I listened to the news over the radio. I treated those months as a farewell to civilization, and so felt an obligation to stay in touch with the current era as much as I could, barring actual communication. From the top of the mountain I masqueraded as an engaged citizen with an audience of zero.