I WON’T GO BACK to the library anymore, just because of the awkwardness with that Oscar guy, the way he pushed too hard and then acted all hurt, the misinterpreted racial dynamic there, which, I know from experience, gets messier the more you try to clear it up. Also the fact that the library took out almost all the chairs. But I find instead a great used bookstore—an enormous place, with CDs and records, too, and there is never anyone in there. How it stays in business, I can’t fathom. The owner is always there; he never speaks, but he doesn’t make you uncomfortable about staying for hours as long as you buy something in the end, even a little fifty-cent paperback. Easy enough to do. After a while I have a small tower of them on the floor of my room, unread, and I think about searching the Goodwill for some kind of shelf.

Killing an afternoon there, looking through a section labeled Abnormal Psychology (how are you going to resist that?), and I come across some galley or pamphlet titled The Levenson Test. It takes me a few seconds to answer the bell that rings: this is the test Autumn mentioned wanting to give me, way back when, the test she mentioned having been given herself. I flip through the pages, but I don’t focus on them. I’m thinking instead that this is my in with her; this is my icebreaker. Things have to be set right. We have been avoiding each other. That is, I know I’ve been avoiding her, and I suspect she’s been avoiding me because she knows she’d have to follow through on her threat to evict me, and for whatever reason, she doesn’t really want to.

I am still having fantasies about that cop who rousted me when I closed my eyes outdoors. Detailed fantasies: in one I run into him coming out of a bar, drunk and out of uniform, and I punch him in the face over and over until I hear sirens and I run off and leave him in some alley. It’s so childish. The last time I punched anyone in the face was elementary school. I’m going to jump a cop now? But I can’t turn it off, in my head. There’s one where I hit him in the knees with a pipe or a bat. Completely implausible. It’s not me. It’s in me—I guess that’s clear, it’s something I would do—but it’s not something I could do, lacking the courage, the strength, the technique, lacking all of it, really.

And what did he do to me to merit this fictional revenge beating? He humiliated me. He hurt my pride. He dominated me psychologically. Poor baby.

On that community bulletin board outside the library, a flyer with the words SPEAK YOUR TRUTH in large block letters catches my eye, and I get a little closer:

We will not be silent anymore. We invite you to speak out in solidarity with the people of America who join in uprising and rebellion against homophobia and systemic racism. We will not remain silent any longer as black and brown bodies are abused by the police. As our toothless anger disappears into the echoing hallways of social media and our mounting rage will consume us if we do not release it. We invite you to speak your grief aloud. Speak your truth today. We call upon all the residents of our region, no matter your skin color, your community, or your creed: Do not be silent. Your anger is real. Speak your truth today.

Then there’s an address—the parking lot of an art ­gallery—and a time and a date. The date was five days ago. So I guess all that truth got spoken. And wow, what a difference it made!

I mean, okay, I agree with the bit about the “echoing hallways of social media,” though it’s a bit preciously put. But deliver me, please, from people “speaking their truth.” If truth is that subjective, then it comes down to power or force, and we’re all fucked anyway. “We will be silent no longer.” When were you silent? In my experience, you won’t fucking stop talking. Speech is self-idolizing. Be more silent.

And the joke is, a little thing like that, some flyer that wasn’t even pushed into my hand but just stuck somewhere I happened to see it, that puts me in a confrontational mood for the rest of the day. I walk around muttering angrily to myself about it. What do I have to be angry about? Still, it’s academic to say I’m not entitled to it. It’s there. You can fully concede the argument that you aren’t entitled to it, but you’ll wake up in the morning and it’ll still be there.

I have to make it appear casual if I can; knocking on her door would only excite her defensive instincts. Sunday night I take a bag of trash out back and I stand there with it at my feet, hoping no one can see me, for half an hour, maybe more, until I hear her door open. I drop the bag in the garbage can and come around the side of the house, wiping my hands.

“Oh hi,” I say. “Need any help?”

She is holding one trash bag by its red plastic handles. “Got it, thanks,” she says and squeezes past me.

“Hey,” I say, and I can see her back stiffen. “I was thinking, remember that time you wanted to give me that personality test? Because you thought I was a sociopath?”

She stops. “Psychopath,” she says. “Levenson test.”

“Yeah. Well, I got a copy and if you want, I could come down and you could give that to me, just to put your mind at ease. I mean I thought about it, and I don’t like the idea of you thinking you’ve got a psychopath sleeping upstairs from you every night.”

The look on her face is not concern so much as revulsion. There seems nothing about me she doesn’t find subpar. But she doesn’t say no. She doesn’t say anything, just dumps her garbage on top of my garbage and reenters her home.

It’s a risk, but I feel like I have to at least try to do something to change the downhill run of her thoughts about me. That Fireball stuff—the whiskey that makes your throat burn—her eyes light up when she sees it, and I feel proud of myself for having figured her out even to that small extent.

First we get drunk, in nearly complete silence. After avoiding my eyes for the first few drinks she starts staring at me like she wants me to go.

“Can we maybe sit in your living room?” I say. “It’s hot in here, and these little chairs are rough on my back. I can see from here that you have real chairs in the living room.”

“No,” she says. “Nice try. First it’s the chairs, then the couch, then why don’t we just move to the bed. I know what you want, and you ain’t getting it. Look at your face! Is it because I said ‘ain’t’? You went to college, didn’t you, you went to some fancy-ass college.”

“If you like,” I say. “Sure.”

“I went to college, too, you know,” she says. “A semester and a half. It was bullshit. The only class I liked was Human Psych. If I’d stuck with it, I’d have gone into that, because I have a very strong natural gift for understanding other people, better than they understand themselves. Diagnosing them. I have a knack for—”

I tap the book, which sits next to the whiskey bottle on the kitchen table. “Wow me,” I say. She opens it and flips through it. Without looking up, she taps her nail on the rim of her glass, and I refill it. “Yeah, here it is,” she says. “Okay, ready?”

“Let’s do it.”

“On a scale of one to five: one is strongly disagree, five is strongly agree, three is neutral. ‘For me, what’s right is whatever I can get away with.’”

“This is a test?”

“A diagnostic test, not the kind of test you can fail. Well, I guess maybe you could fail it actually. Come on, one to five, ‘For me, what’s right is whatever I can get away with.’”

“One.”

“Okay, you’re lying, but that’s actually baked into the test. But try not to lie. I know that’s hard for you. ‘I would be upset if my success came at someone else’s expense.’”

“How many questions are there?”

“A lot of questions. Okay, you don’t like that one? ‘I don’t plan anything very far in advance.’”

“One is disagree? One.”

“‘Love is overrated.’ Total softball, that one. Shouldn’t even be on here. They should have asked me how to give this fucking test.”

And then she stops—her whole face, her energy, just stops—like she hears something outside the house. But it’s silent. She has gone somewhere in her head.

“Autumn?” I say.

She sees something. It is probably a memory. But in the moment it is much more present than I am. Gently I reach over and slide the textbook away from her. “Here, we can keep going,” I say. She is worrying me. I turn the book around toward me.

“‘In today’s world, I feel justified in doing whatever I can get away with to succeed.’ Yikes. ‘Success is based on the survival of the fittest; I am not concerned about the losers.’ Okay, to be fair that does sound a tiny bit like you, am I right?”

Her eyeballs finally move a little, and then they are back to focusing on me. “No,” she says in a small voice. “No you don’t. Give me that. Give me that!”

I push the book back toward her.

“I’m Levenson,” she says. “Not you.”

“Sorry,” I say. “Of course. Ask away.”

But she doesn’t take her eyes off me. She reaches out to grab the edge of the table. “I mean, who are you?” she says. “What are you even doing in my house? How did you get in here? You better not try anything. You better not get any ideas. I have a gun here.”

And without leaving her chair, she pulls open a kitchen drawer and produces it.

“Nobody even knows who you are,” she says. “If I dropped you right here, nobody would blame me, I’d be justified.”

“You’re right,” I say calmly. “You’re totally right. But look, the rent is due again soon, and you want to keep me around at least that long, right?”

She looks at me critically, the way a doctor might look at me. “Nah, you’re not so much,” she says. “You’re just the kind of guy who snaps one day. I can see it. You haven’t lived a life of crime, you lived a soft life, it’s in your voice, it’s written all over your face. You’re nothing to worry about. You had, like, one moment of courage, and you’ll be running from that moment the rest of your life.”

A warm night, second week of April. Not late, maybe six thirty. I am having a beer, hearing the faint whine of a power saw in somebody’s distant driveway, reduced to a not-unpleasant kind of insect sound by my closed window. Then I hear steps outside. Too light a tread, too fast, to be Autumn. Three knocks, gentle ones, not a pounding like you’d get from law enforcement. I could pretend not to be here—my lights are off—but curiosity wins out.

“Good evening, sir,” he says.

It’s the boy with the blond fade. This is the first time I’ve seen him, other than at a distance, since he and his friends hooted me off on the sidewalk when I asked them about Abiha. So, two months? Six weeks? If the high, dyed, asymmetrical hair looked badass before, it’s somewhat self-undermining now against the dark V-neck sweater over a collared shirt he has worn in an effort to be formal.

“I’m an eighth grader at Wysocki Middle School, down the street, and we are selling candy to raise money for a class trip,” he says. “I have—”

“Again?” I say. “A class trip where?”

He pauses, as if to collect himself. Under the spell, perhaps, of the spiel he has spent so long rehearsing, he shows no sign of recognizing me, of having met me before. “The state capitol,” he says.

“Didn’t you already go to the state capitol?” I say. He looks confused. “Not you, your class. Didn’t somebody else come to my door back in the fall and sell me some candy for a trip to the state capitol back then?”

He doesn’t look embarrassed or caught out; he looks as if his feelings are hurt.

“Don’t you remember me?” I say.

His mouth drops open as if to speak, but nothing comes out. I try to remind myself that he is just a child, but it’s too late for that.

“It’s not about the money. It’s that I don’t like being made a fool of,” I say. “If you want to go to the state capitol five times a year, I’m perfectly fine with that, I just don’t like being made a fool of.”

“I am sorry to disturb you, sir,” the boy says. He takes a step backward, half turning in the direction of the stairs.

“And I love candy,” I say. “I really do. If I could just get you to be honest with me, if you would just show me that much respect, I might buy all your candy. How much have you got in there?”

Kids in groups are dissemblers, but he is alone with me, and his eyes tell me that he is scared in a way I don’t think he would be if he remembered me, if he remembered having met me before. It is confounding that I have left this faint an impression on him. Well, I will make myself memorable.

“Open it up,” I say. “Seriously. What would it cost me to buy the whole case?”

Slowly, he gets down on one knee and lays the red plastic case—just like Haji’s, maybe the very same one—on the landing outside my open front door. He lifts the lid. The trouble he is having in counting up his inventory is that he is trying to do so without taking his eyes off me.

“What was your favorite part of the state capitol last time?” I say. “The rotunda, I bet.”

Here I am, standing there, the kid kneeling in front of me. It’s all come to this. Whatever pits us against each other, whatever dooms us in our lizard brains, whatever makes the world the unredeemable pit that it is and will always be: here it is, in this moment. It was never not here. It will be here until we finish wiping each other off the earth.

I turn around and—closing the door almost all the way, but not latching it, in order to make him stay—I go under the futon for the envelope. I unwind the string and open it up and I count out five thousand dollars. It takes a minute. When I pull the door wide again he is still on his knees, lips moving, running his fingers over the candy bars. He’s had plenty of time; he must have been nervous and started over.

“Stand up,” I say. I’m trying to make my voice gentle, but I can’t quite do it. He stands up and sees the money and his eyes go very wide. I hold it out to him.

“Just take it,” I say. “It’s not a trick. I mean it, take it.”

He takes it without looking directly at it. “I don’t . . .” he says.

“Just one thing I want to ask you,” I say. “Where’s Abiha?”

“Abiha?”

“Your friend. Abiha. She was here and then all of a sudden she wasn’t. Does she still go to Wysocki?”

And with the mention of her name, I can see in his eyes that he remembers me now. “I don’t know, sir,” he says.

“You don’t have to sir me. Just tell me what happened to her. Where is she?”

“I don’t know who she is.”

“I don’t mean ‘where is she’ like I’m going to go find her, I mean what happened to her. Is she okay?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know who that is. It’s a big school. I really don’t.”

“Cops, immigration, maybe her family? Maybe they just moved, mom or dad got a job somewhere or something? You can tell me! There’s nothing I could do about it anyway!”

He is trying not to cry.

“Put the money in your pocket,” I say. “Someone might be watching.”

He does it. He is too confused to be grateful.

“Goodnight,” I say. I start to close the door.

“Wait,” he says. “Don’t you still want the candy?”

I do. I do want the candy. It’s only fair. I reach across the threshold; he puts the handle of the plastic briefcase in my hand, our fingers brushing uncomfortably, unavoidably, and I shut my door.