I had never told Krystal I’d been house-hunting, let alone the location of my new place. Now I was a hundred miles from my place of origin, and whenever I felt anxious on off days, I visualized myself crawling on hands and knees across each mile, just to reassure myself of the distance. When I had gone to see her that final night, I had planned on giving her the address in case of emergency, of even (horrifying, the secret memory of it!) inviting her to live with me, maybe, in a room inside the main house for a limited period of time, until she got on her feet again. We never got to that, obviously—sometimes there was a God. There was very little chance of her finding me now, and if I went back to find her it would ruin everything. She would be back in my life, bringing with her the zombie glaze of my old self, along with all its ghosts.

I told myself that I needed to keep my new place pure. I had done the right thing, anyway, forcing her to get on with things. I had shown her what was best for her, even if she hated me for the rest of her life. I took solace in that fact, and if I felt any guilt or love I only had to conjure up the image of Krystal kneeling over the Santa village in Geannie and Jim’s living room, smiling up at me with her ghoul face, to cure myself.

All that was behind me. Geannie and Jim, Hernan, the robbery, the aftermath, Krystal, the grocery store, the fucking walk-in cooler, the shakes and sweats, all the peering neighbors, news reporters, everything. All my mistakes and misfortunes, left in another town! Just that easy. The things money and an asshole temperament could buy.

I would not chalk up my new life to mental illness. It wasn’t, either, that my previous, pre-lottery life had been so terrible. Aside from the robbery, which had been incidental, my life had been fairly boring but pleasant. I had held a job, and I’d known people on a friend and acquaintance level, and I had taken myself out to eat once in a while, taken myself to the occasional movie, read some good books, paid bills on time or close to it. And I had enjoyed the outdoors and lived in my own place—basic but mine, and it had been relatively clean and free of pests or infestations, and reasonably heated and cooled for comfort—and my health had been decent, and I had stayed out of legal and criminal trouble. I had possessed all of the things that a traditionally good life were conditional upon. I was functionally human. Why, then, had that life always felt like a pastime, just something I was doing while waiting for my other self, the actualized, better version of myself, to come along and make it real?

In my heart of hearts, I had wanted to be exceptional. I wanted to believe I had a higher purpose than staggering from one day to the next in fear or exhaustion, death always hanging out up ahead. The people I knew or met, especially after the robbery—Krystal, people at work and at all the places I went, from cashiers to moneybags like Mr. Larwin—they all seemed dead, or happily dying, dug into their own little foxhole of existence, enjoying the dirt of their particular ditch. And until the robbery I might have been fine with that life. Perhaps I even would have actively chosen my reassuring routine, mortified by merely wanting more and all the selfish implications that came with the wanting.