It continued for several more paragraphs. It generated an unusual number of responses. I thought my satire was perhaps too obvious, but to my surprise, many people believed I was writing about Mark Zuckerberg.

Throughout this period, Jenny helped me maintain my equilibrium. Difficult times drive people closer, and no matter how frustrated I became, she was there almost every night to calm me down. Naturally I didn’t discuss marriage, but only because she had made it clear: one-and-done. Naturally. We did, however, visit my mother during the Christmas holidays. Let me tell you about that. It actually was a pretty big deal, because Jenny was the first woman I’d brought home in my second life.

My mother was warm and welcoming, which was not surprising. But her hearing had gotten considerably worse since the last time I’d been home. On the phone she had been able to hide it. At dinner that first night she had asked Jen how we’d met. “I was doing a hora,” Jenny had replied.

My mother was shocked. “You were a what?”

Jenny laughed. “The dance. The hora. We were dancing.”

She shook her head. “Oh no,” she said. “My Rollie can’t dance.”

Jenny agreed. “I know.”

“But he’s very good at other things,” Mom responded confidently, defending me.

That was one of the few times I saw Jenny get embarrassed. She looked at me and told my mother, “I know.”

We were lying in bed several weeks later, still laughing about it. My bruises had pretty much healed and my stitches were scarring into a facsimile J (if you had a vivid imagination). Jenny was poking me playfully, teasing me about “those other things,” when Cher interrupted us. “Rollie, there is a major event taking place,” she informed us, as she had been programmed to do.

“Cher, turn on the TV,” I said. We both sat up. CNN was showing a still image of an airplane, a Boeing 777 I thought. My first thought was that a passenger plane must have crashed. But the chyron below the image was frighteningly different: REMOTE HIJACKERS TAKE CONTROL OF PASSENGER JET.

“Oh my god,” Jenny said.

The details, as much as were known, got filled in quickly. Northern Airlines Flight 342, a red-eye from New York’s JFK to LAX, had been flying into the night at 36,000 feet when the cockpit warning system alerted the pilots that they had a problem. The plane, it was a 777, which had been cruising on autopilot, was inexplicably descending and veering off course. When the pilots attempted to regain control, they discovered that none of the flight systems were responding. That’s when they had called for help. CNN replayed the conversation between the first officer, a man named Mark Stein, and the control tower in Albuquerque. In an amazingly calm, professional voice he reported, “This is Northern Airlines flight 3-4-2 declaring an emergency. We have a complete loss of control. I repeat, this is…”

I took Jenny’s hand.

A voice had responded with equal dispassion. “Reading you clearly Northern Airlines 3-4-2. This is Albuquerque. Are you declaring an avionics failure?”