Apartment 205 was never mentioned in the series.

After Ray and Brenda left, I felt wiped out, as if I had run a marathon, and as I lay in the gravel driveway, listening to silence bloom in the trees, I considered ignoring Ray’s last words out of spite. It’s really important you unlock 205. His touch on my arm still tingled. His earnest face kept wafting up at me, as well as my curiosity. Perhaps it was food or something else that might spoil, or maybe it was another fantastical mechanical device—a Jack Tripper robot that needed to be oiled or powered on right away. Whatever it was, I decided to get it over with so I could stop thinking about it.

I walked back to the apartment building and climbed the stairs to 205. I pressed my ear to the door, preparing myself for anything. I heard nothing. I turned the key and twisted the knob, listening to the creak of new hinges.

The open doorway was a dark mouth carved into the bright day, the sun nearing its highest point overhead. I stepped inside and listened. Still nothing. The cool air collected around me. When my eyes adjusted I saw that this unit had a similar layout and furnishings to the other apartments in the building, though it was blander, blanker. The walls were bare.

Suddenly I heard a scrabbling noise and an odd tune. It was coming from the bathroom. Light emanated from the crack beneath the closed door, and as I walked toward it my stomach tightened. Fleetingly I had the thought that Ray had hated me all along, perhaps homicidally so, and as I turned the doorknob and pushed open the door, the idea of the robot floated up again. I imagined murder, the perfect murder—mechanical strangulation, my corpse rotting in my grand creation, Ray’s final declaration of what he really thought of me.

But no. No robot and no murder.

Instead, on the floor of the lighted bathroom, was a small puppy. A white Labrador retriever.

How could I have forgotten? It was the unnamed dog Larry gave the trio in the first-season episode “No Children, No Dogs,” which they in turn anonymously gifted to the Ropers to avoid eviction. Then the dog disappeared. It was never seen before or after that episode, one of those vanishing plot devices. Now here it was, whimpering at my feet.

The other sound came from slightly above me. A low chirping noise. In a cage hanging from the ceiling sat a yellow bird. The Ropers’ parakeet! It had sat in a cage in their living room, another plot device. The bird was luckier than the puppy, though. It made recurring appearances throughout the Ropers’ time on the show.

I was pleased that Ray had remembered. These were his gifts, I understood, even more than the carousel-like rooms. The closer I looked at the bird, though, the more uneasy I became. Something seemed wrong. Then I realized.

It wasn’t a parakeet. It was a canary.