Admittedly, this habit was an indulgence. It was always easier, talking to someone who wasn’t there. Who was dead. I tried not to do it too often, but funny things happen sometimes, when a person is alone.

There was one other disconcerting thing in those early days. As part of the authentic television programming, Three’s Company aired every Tuesday night at 9 p.m. So I was Janet, a character in the show, sitting inside the living room, and each Tuesday I’d watch the Janet on the screen sit in an identical room.

The first time it happened, that first Tuesday evening, I was lazing on one end of the couch, my bare feet tucked up under me. Chrissy sat on the other end. Jack was in the kitchen. Dinner had been heavy that night—coq au vin—and my eyes were heavy, pleasantly drowsing. Then the opening notes of the show’s theme played, a song I knew like my own soul. I awoke instantly, my brain filling with horror.

There, on the screen, was us. Janet sat on the couch, and Chrissy sat on the other end like a mirror image. On the screen, Jack entered from the kitchen wearing an apron, stirring cake batter in a bowl. The trio exchanged jokes. The audience laughed.

I was sitting up straight now. I looked over to my left. Chrissy had vanished. I was alone on the couch, and the kitchen noises had ceased. No light was coming from under any of the doorways.

My insides sagged. I stood and walked into the other rooms. Empty! I opened the front door, walked out on the balcony, looked around. No one was there. I could only hear the crickets softly chirping, no city sounds at all.

Behind me, familiar voices floated. I looked back at the TV screen. This refraction of myself I had not anticipated. The dog, who sensed my distress, bounded toward me from its food corner and sat at my feet. Waiting.

I ignored it. Quickly I closed the door and sat down on the couch again. I called Jack and Chrissy into the room. I needed to feel them close to me, and I willed them to breathe and speak.

They came. Slowly at first, like a pale wind, but bit by bit they coalesced into their fleshly selves until they were fully alive, Jack emerging bleary-eyed from his room dressed in a T-shirt and sweats, holding a book, Chrissy from the kitchen licking ice cream off a spoon, clad in her housecoat.

As the three of us crowded onto the couch, I pointed at the TV and murmured, “Who is that?” My voice was timid, a tiny squeak. I cleared my throat and stared at the screen. There they were, my friends, my family. My self.

“Is that us?” I whispered.

No one replied.

A note about the dog.

The dog, it’s true, was not getting any younger. Nor the bird. But the bird was so small to begin with, and required much less attention and care, and it was not trotting up to me when I got home from work, or when I got up in the morning, or relaxed on the couch, or walked outside in the evenings . . . the bird was not a knife, constantly jabbing at me.