The only good thing I could see in keeping the dog was security, but it was so capricious and near wild at times that I doubted its instinct to protect or alert me of danger. The dog wasn’t an idiot. I knew it sensed my distrust. After the night with the cigarette, it never slept indoors again.

And when, late into the third year, after a night of desperate insomnia, the night before the storm, I got lonely and wooed it with soup bones and dinner scraps, and petted its ears and tried to name it, it ran away from me.

As the day turned into night, I called and called for it, but it never came. It disappeared into the woods and that was that.

It was a Thursday afternoon in October and the light was just beginning to fade, and outside the sky was masked with clouds and a chilly breeze picked up, but my name was Jack Tripper and I was tucked away safe in the kitchen of Apartment 201, cutting up vegetables, when the knock came.

Nearly three years had passed since the workers left and Ray and Brenda had fled the premises—almost three years since I had seen another human in the flesh. After my first year as Janet, I’d lived as Chrissy, bleaching my hair and piling on clownish eyeliner and blush, and trading Janet’s brown eyes for blue ones. That was a year of purity, like a freshly laundered blanket fluttering in the wind. Of all of the characters, Chrissy was the least bothered, the emptiest. And what beautiful emptiness it was. Information glided over her brain like water into a reservoir, a perpetual daydream. Time moved even further away from consciousness. During my Chrissy year I graduated from my old life into my new one, moving fully into a near-astral state, getting lost in blue skies or a blade of sun, the colors and intangible fabric of the decade cushioning me, and I thought no further than the next outfit, the shape of hair, walking the aisles of the local department store in a peaceful trance, the Muzak humming above me, the joys of holiday trimmings, a soft dream of love. It was a time of childhood.

But in the final hours of my second New Year’s Eve I moved into the next iteration, and since then I’d been waking and sleeping as Jack Tripper, and I dressed in Player shirts and blue boxer shorts, my hair cropped close and dyed a medium brown. My eyes remained bright blue. I had an entire bedroom to myself, and it felt luxurious having my own desk and closet, even a funky patchwork chair near the window.