But I steeled myself against it. The library would not be open at this hour, not in Janet’s world. I reminded myself of this world’s purity, how necessary it was to maintain it. One slip and all could crumble. And I wouldn’t be able to undo it. That was the danger of setting routines, of transgressing one time—once an idea turned into action there was no undoing it. It was written in permanent ink.

I tried to get back into character. Janet Wood. I was Janet Wood. I picked up a magazine lying on the small wicker coffee table and flipped through it. Then I went into the kitchen and rummaged around, drank a glass of water. I looked out the window but saw nothing, only shadows. At times like these, I often considered going for a walk—surely Janet would do that, such a simple thing. But then I started thinking: Would a young woman as cautious as Janet have walked the Santa Monica streets in the wee hours of the morning? In the late seventies, early eighties? I decided against it. I settled for going out on the balcony, looking at the sky and imagining smog. That was one detail I couldn’t fake. The sky was always so clear and the stars blared above me, threatening me with my native timeline. They wouldn’t let me stay out there long. Those were hours of desperation.

Anxious nights were okay, though, I told myself. In the morning I tried to start fresh. Just a bad night, I told myself as I brushed my hair in front of the mirror and looked into my brown eyes. Janet was only human, after all.

How to explain it? I was myself and Janet Wood. I was a vessel and she inhabited it, took up space; this was true of all the characters. When I went multiple days in character I lulled myself into thinking I was her, and as her I conjured up Jack and Chrissy, squinting until I could see them fully fleshed in front of me, down to their shoelaces, and in this way I also conjured the occasional customer at the flower shop, and sometimes my visiting boss, Mr. Compton. I pictured my boorish dates. My imagination was wild and deep; I had entire conversations, arguments, laughing fits . . . to an outsider I would have looked insane. But I had never felt more occupied, more employed, than I did when offering myself up to these ghosts.

There were so many things I had never fully enjoyed as my old self that I was now discovering. The spiritual ecstasy of walking into an anonymous building like the market, or an office, or the community center—of walking in and feeling my insignificance wash over me. The smallness of being here! In this timeline! How wonderful it felt to be a guest. These petty epiphanies felt large.

My timeline transplant was an endless wonder. Technically, I did not belong in the 1970s. I had not been born there, and I had not arrived there the usual way, growing up stuffed full of fear, with the unknown looming ahead of me; I lacked the prejudices one’s parents and their parents’ parents had handed down to a 1977 native; I was free from the vague weight of societal ills peculiar to recent history that accumulate in the average person’s psyche and seem so crucial in the moment. Politics, culture, fashion, social upheaval, the latest gadgets, global crises . . . they remained at a remove, and therefore they seemed charmed and special when I read about them in my 1977 LA Times every morning.