In my former waking life, back when I was working in the supermarket warehouse and living in my trailer, the daily news of current events had been tiresome and upsetting, a white-noise villain that occasionally reached enough volume to gouge the few moments of peace I’d grabbed from the day. I had avoided it. I never liked being reminded that far beyond the grand drama of my own sorry life, a larger play was taking place, one that didn’t consult me but could obliterate me at any moment.

However, in my newly made reality even the bleakest headlines and TV news reports were something of interest. I was like Scrooge on Christmas morning, pleased with everything. A true historian would no doubt be appalled to know how diverting I found world events. And this glee was despite my efforts to have Janet-type reactions to the oil crisis, or random terrorism, or news of another rapist or serial killer rampaging through local neighborhoods—I attempted disgust, disbelief, outrage. I even tried to affect the casual fear a person engages with every day just to get along—the anxiety of a concerned citizen—but the enjoyment of my surroundings was all-consuming. I was sick with contentedness.

Best of all, time moved in a sludgy pattern. Aside from the weather, and the dates on the newspapers and TV Guides, nothing alerted me to the moving days. The theory of timekeeping—of days and weeks, of holidays and birthdays and age—became an abstraction. The days were best when they passed like one long, silky strand, with no anger or despair, no insomnia, no traumatic past or anxious future, just the idle annoyances of laundry or something equally small and meaningless and gentle.

Time was happening, surely, but not to me.

I’d be lying if I said I was completely free, though. During the first few months, as I settled in alone, visions of my past life (what I thought of as my “past life”) did bubble up every now and then—a vision of Krystal standing in the middle of darkness, her ravaged face wailing at me, and Geannie’s house behind her, its malevolent Christmas cheer blazing from every window. Or, more disturbing, a fond memory would surface—the two of us eating together in silence, maybe, or taking drives together out to random deserted places the way we used to in our sister years, before the robbery—and the images washed over me in waves of longing, of nostalgia for my own life. Those were weak, ugly moments. Like rotten floorboards in my current reality, they threatened to send me crashing through to the dark basement of the past. At those times I wondered what became of Krystal after I left for good, and occasionally I even considered finding out. But the day after we last saw each other I had disconnected my phone number, quit my job over the phone, and got the hell out of town. I left the sale of my trailer to Larwin and whatever company he used to make such transactions, gave no one but him a forwarding address, and instructed him to keep my new address under wraps in case anyone came sniffing around.