THE PLAN was this: More or less in the heart of downtown there is an unmarked building that is used as a federal holding facility for the “processing” and ultimate deportation of those immigrants deemed illegal. A group of citizens was going to stand silently outside this building (there was no way to get any closer to it than the sidewalk) just to mime a kind of collective “we see you.” So the protest was symbolic, metaphorical really. We didn’t even know for sure that anyone was inside.

I say “we,” but I never joined the clot of thirty or forty people or got any nearer to them than a block away. An unmarked federal law enforcement building: are you kidding me? Absolute fucking state of the art surveillance equipment and facial recognition technology. I wore a baseball cap and sunglasses and a bandanna around my neck to pull up over my face if necessary. I watched from across two streets as the group assembled—better view that way anyway. When you’re inside a crowd it can seem like a powerful organism but looking from a distance at this collection of mostly middle-aged white women loitering on a downtown sidewalk it didn’t exactly register as a game-changing show of power. Pedestrians who had to step into the street to get around them were silent, too, but scowled or rolled their eyes. One of the problems with a silent vigil, it occurred to me, is how do you know when it’s over. After about two hours they were still there, and I started to wonder why I was too.

But then something unexpected happened: the group started moving. Not hurriedly, not like they were being dispersed—no one had come out of the building to acknowledge them at all, much less disperse them—but everyone in the same direction. Right toward me as it happened. I heard one group of women talking animatedly, and I fell in behind them to catch the drift of what was going on.

Somebody somewhere claimed to have gotten a tip via some kind of social media that a raid was scheduled on a particular house in the city that very night; this was partly why there were—or seemed to be—so few people inside the facility right now. Federal immigration agents were coming to arrest and deport the family in that house. It was impossible to verify any of this, but people were acting on the belief that it was true. The new idea was to gather the maximum number of bodies and pack them into the space between the street and this family’s front door. There was some uncertainty about whether they had decided to stand or sit. I pulled the bandanna up over my face and followed.

I didn’t know who was in that house. I don’t know what they’d done or not done to attract the particular attention of immigration authorities. I heard somebody say their kids were teenagers, so it’s not impossible that this was the family of one of the kids I saw every day, but it’s not likely either. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t really interested in joining, but I did want to watch it. I respected it. The canny humility of it. No clever signs, no call-and-response, just a lawn or a stoop turned into silent bodies and the decision put before the authorities as to how that expanse of bodies was to be traversed. To reduce yourself to an obstacle, a piece of an obstacle, something for the thoughtless and sadistic to have to hack through, to make it slightly more difficult for them to get where they wanted to go. A stone in their shoe. I liked it.

By the time I got there, people were already seated in loose rows across the small lawn and on the front stoop. They conversed quietly. Whoever was in the house stayed in the house, lights out. I took up a position across the street. No police or other authority was in sight. The sun was starting to go down. Word spread about a store owner two blocks away who was letting people use his bathroom; every once in a while, someone would stand up from the grass and wander off in that direction. Not all of them came back.

When it was fully dark, the cops showed up. City cops, interestingly, lights flashing in silence. They arrived in cars and in vans, probably ten or fifteen of them altogether, so they were outnumbered—not that that mattered. They got out and spread along the sidewalk, not in any organized way, talking to each other, as if they had all the time in the world.

Everything happened slowly. At one point, a police vehicle facing the crowd snapped on its headlights, and they all lifted their hands to their eyes like those old newsreels of nuclear tests. One cop walked forward, went down on one knee in front of a seated protester, an older woman, and spoke to her privately. She had glasses and wore an oversized T-shirt with a logo I couldn’t see. She must have been cold. No way she expected this to run so late. After a minute, the cop stood and extended one hand behind him, without looking, until into it some other, lesser officer placed a small, battery-operated bullhorn. Then, with a show of gallantry, the cop did something unexpected: he handed the bullhorn to the woman in the T-shirt. I could see him showing her how to use it. The woman nodded, turned her back to him, and began speaking.

“Those of us who want to go now, can go,” she said. “Those of us who remain will be arrested. If you choose to be arrested, please do not resist. They brought all their expensive military cop shit out here because they want to use it. We can’t give them a reason.”

She handed the bullhorn back to the cop, who then took her hand and helped her to her feet.

I only saw two people, a couple, take the opportunity to leave. The floodlights on top of the vans kept the faces of the cops themselves in a kind of fractured darkness, different planes, different features suddenly visible whenever they turned their heads to speak to one another. They did their work methodically, but their impatience began to show in their movements, their expressions. They spoke very little. It seemed likely, though I hadn’t heard anyone say so, that this had all been worked out in advance between the police and the protest’s organizers, in an effort to avoid violence. Most of the protesters went very quietly, allowing themselves to be pulled to their feet once handcuffed, walking slowly toward one of the idling police vans. A few of them—older men and women—went limp, something you really have to be trained how to do correctly, and in those instances the officer involved would signal behind him or her and two or three more officers would help carry that protester back to the vans, carefully but dispassionately, like a corpse. My feelings began to change.

What were these people really doing here? They were not an inexhaustible resource; soon they would be gone, and the family and the landlord and the immigration agents would all still be there, and the eviction would take place. And they all knew that. True, they were making a little extra work for the cops, which annoyed them for sure, although they were probably all getting overtime to soften the blow. “Well, at least we did something,” everyone would feel afterward, when in practical terms they had done nothing, except to show themselves something about themselves that they wanted to see. If I were inside that house, I might have resented them for staging this fake reprieve, for delaying the execution just so that they might later tell themselves a story about how they’d done everything they could.

“Move along, please,” someone said suddenly, very close to my ear. I certainly wasn’t doing anything illegal; there was no way to mistake me for part of the protest itself. Trying to tamp down my general agitation, in order not to overreact, I forced a smile and turned to look into the officer’s face, and I recognized it.

It was the red-haired cop from downtown, the one who had rousted me off the public bench, the one to whom I’d so stupidly mouthed off in my outrage that I’d almost blown everything. All the features of his face—lips, skin, eyelashes—were monochrome. His mouth was set in a tense line. There’s no way, I thought, no way he’d recognize me, his whole workday is made up of encounters like that; he never really saw me in the first place. But then his eyes, which had been unfocused by boredom and impatience, locked on to mine. It’s possible I’d made some kind of involuntary sound.

I can’t really account for my reaction. I feared and I hated him so much. His physical ugliness seemed itself like a form of sadism; the fact that I could feel such irrepressible terror in the presence of such a worthless human being made me feel ashamed. I looked at his holstered gun, looked right at it, and imagined making a lunge for it.

“Press,” I said hoarsely.

He looked at me in amazement. “Don’t make me laugh,” he said. “I told you, move on. You can’t stay here. I won’t tell you again.”

“This is a public street,” I said, “and I am standing on it.”

Some other version, some other iteration of me was standing beside me as this encounter took place, whispering in my ear: What are you doing? But I couldn’t stop myself. He took half a step closer to me, and suddenly ran his gaze over my body and my hands. “If you’re in possession of a phone or any other sort of recording device—”

“I’m not. I’m not doing anything illegal. I’m just here.”

The anger in him, the indignation that I should add to his responsibilities in this way. I could feel him trembling. He seemed provoked by my looking at him, but I was unable to turn my eyes away. “What the exact fuck is your problem, sir?” he said. “Do I know you or something?”

Others were staring at us now. All the ambient noise switched off.

“Sir, turn around and put your hands behind your back,” the officer said.

I smiled at him—I smiled at him!—and with a clear but uncertain path to my left, into darkness, I took off running. “No!” shouted a woman’s voice behind me. The voice of one of the organizers. She wasn’t worried about what would happen to me; she was worried what would happen to the rest of them, now that the contract had been broken and its terms no longer applied.

It did seem conceivable that he would let me go, that processing the other twenty or thirty demonstrators in as short a time as possible and clocking out and going home would be more appealing to him than chasing down one random panicky guy. Why go to the trouble? But I could hear him behind me. I had a decent head start, but I don’t run that well, even on full adrenaline. And he was a much younger man.

It seemed ominous that he didn’t say a word, didn’t call out “Halt!” or anything conventional like that. Just his footsteps and his breathing. I guess it’s true he didn’t need to identify himself to me at that point. I was doing him a favor by taking this encounter away from others’ eyes. The intersection I was headed toward was bright and the traffic pretty steady. On my left I saw a gap between two houses that looked like an alley. And it was just that: a narrow, roughly paved passage stippled with garbage cans, dark and filthy but with a light at the end, a light that was just another street to run down before I lost my wind entirely but that seemed, as it came into focus, like a practical goal. I never reached it.

He didn’t grab me and stop; when he caught up to me he launched forward onto my back and brought me down, holding my arms by the biceps so that I could not protect my face from hitting the pavement. I felt the skin tear on my cheek. His full weight came down on me, like someone setting out on a surfboard, and my lungs deflated. He rested on me, casually, until he’d caught his breath, while I gasped.

“That wasn’t smart,” he said, and when I heard the calm in his voice, the patience and lack of irritation, I knew I was in trouble.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“And I mean you have the look of a somewhat smart guy. What’s your name?”

“Really, I’m so sorry, I just panicked, you don’t need—”

He took a hank of my hair in his fingers and bounced my head off the macadam. I saw a kind of white flash and then the sting of some kind of gravel or glass sticking to my forehead. “I asked you a question,” he said softly, in my ear.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I apologize, I didn’t mean to, you were just doing your job. I’m so sorry.”

He patted down my front and back pants pockets. “No wallet, even,” he said. He pushed himself off of me and slowly got to his feet. I started to do the same.

“Nope,” he said. He put his foot between my shoulder blades and stomped, so that I lay flat again. “You can stay put.” And as I lay there petrified, I felt a sort of disturbance in the air that turned out to be him winding up and kicking me just under the ribcage, as hard, I imagine, as he could.

“What did you say your name was?” he said. I couldn’t have answered him at that point if I wanted to. I waited for the pain to subside so I could tell him; because a fingerprint was as good as a name anyway, so it would be all over soon, and in the meantime I just needed to make this stop. I would give him whatever he wanted.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to arrest you,” he said. “I just want to have something to call you, while we have this conversation. Less impersonal that way.”

My cheek felt like it might stick to the pavement if I tried to lift it. “Do you,” I said, and then I had to stop until I could try again. He squatted down in order to hear me. “Do you remember me?”

My eyes were closed, so I only had the tone of his voice to go on. “Sure,” he said. “Oh yeah. Absolutely I remember you. You’re a very memorable man.”

He kicked me again in the kidney area. I curled up around his foot.

“Why the fuck would I have any idea who you are? But I’ll remember you now, that’s for sure. You better stay out of sight because if I get bored someday when I have nothing else going on, I might even have a look around for you. Now I have one more question for you.”

He pulled something off his belt. His radio crackled softly.

“What’s my name?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I whispered, which was not the truth, I’d seen his name on his badge.

He brought down some kind of baton across the backs of my knees. It didn’t feel heavy, but light, whippy, like a car antenna. I felt something there give way.

“Quiet,” he said. “Decent people are sleeping. Now, what’s my name?”

He put his foot on the back of my head and pressed down. I could feel the tears squeezing out of my eyes. “You don’t have a name,” I said.

“That is correct. Now, count to a thousand. And congratulations on your escape.” I didn’t count, but I waited. I don’t know how long. I wasn’t sure about standing, about how that would go. I moved forward on my stomach. I reached into my pocket and then blindly through the dark, grass-softened edges of the alley until, miraculously, I found my keys.

I was maybe fifteen blocks from home, but I didn’t know which route to take. They all seemed obvious and fraught. It wasn’t all that late—ten p.m. I guessed. I was not thinking clearly. I had to stop every half a block or so; if I got at all winded, the pain of breathing hard could not be borne. It took me an hour to get back to Sugar Street. I’m guessing an hour. It could have been much longer.

I tried to stay out of sight. My knee felt like a screw or rivet had fallen out of it: if I didn’t step carefully, I could feel the whole structure start to collapse. My face and hands and arms were roughly abraded. But even apart from the physical pain, which, when it’s bad, does tend to claim one’s concentration, I felt ashamed.

Because he was right about me. He was right to beat me in an alley and treat me with scorn. He’d shown me who I am. If he’d had the least interest, I would have confessed everything, I would have identified myself fully, in order to make the pain stop, the fear. I had failed a test, failed every section of it, and that understanding of my own systemic weakness was not something I was going to be able to outrun or unsee. I would carry that truth inside me, and I knew I could not stand it. Nothing could erase it; I could never go back to not knowing it. At the same time, though, I was very focused on wanting to kill him. I wanted that more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my whole life. All the lust for violence latent in me, versus all that I would have done—would still do—to spare myself: the contradiction was laughable, and that’s who I was.

I turned the corner onto Sugar Street. So many of the streetlights were broken that the light itself was not continuous but fell in pools; it was easy to stay out of them. At this point I was looking mostly down at my feet, out of exhaustion, like someone relearning how to walk. I lifted my head to see if Autumn’s lights were on. In the driveway, taking up most of what would have been my passage from the street to the staircase leading to my door, was a police car.

I had thoughts of hiding far away. I knew from my wanderings some of the places where the homeless generally congregated, the underpass by the fairgrounds, the invisible-­from-the-street vacant lot a few doors down from the downtown Catholic Charities building—but I didn’t have the physical strength. All I could do was find the closest place to get out of sight. Once I fell asleep, there’s no telling how long I’d be out, and I couldn’t risk anyone with a cell phone delivering me back into the hands of the cops. Nothing near a business, nothing residential either. I willed myself to the park. There would be joggers on the path not long after dawn, so I needed to get as deep into the thin woods as I could. It was hard to gauge, in the darkness, when and where I was concealed enough to be out of sight when the light came. I probably overdid it. The branches scratched my hands and forearms, held blindly up in front of my face. The ground beneath the trees was mossy and soft. Things crawling on me, probably, but the pain left me numb to finer sensations like that.

I slept deeply but not that long. Only one of my eyes would open at first; the light filtered through the brush, and I saw that for all my disoriented attempts to push farther into the woods, I was easily visible from the open grass twenty or thirty feet away, had anyone happened by. Leaves and dirt were stuck to the wounds on my face. I had to take shallow breaths. I reached down and confirmed with my fingers that one of my knees was now significantly larger than the other.

I emerged from the trees. It would have been hard to go unnoticed, looking like I must have looked, but no one was there; no one was anywhere in sight. I limped, or staggered I suppose, out of the park. I kept to the edge of the street rather than the sidewalk, thinking that anyone who saw me in that state coming too close to their house would be tempted to call the authorities, whether out of pity or fear, no difference in terms of its consequence for me.

The sun stung my eyes. Cautiously, I made it to Sugar Street and peered down the block. The driveway was empty; the cop car was gone. If Autumn was home, she would be sleeping. My little room, my cell, my futon on the floor, my running water, presented itself as a kind of oasis in my mind. No first aid or anything of that nature—I didn’t own anything like that, not even a Band-Aid—which was unfortunate. But maybe later, at a considerate hour, I could impose on Autumn for that.

Though I was in a hurry, I went up the stairs slowly, first the leg with the good knee and then the other one. That was okay; I was trying to move quietly to avoid waking Autumn anyway. I saw my hand and its skinless knuckles gripping the rail; I felt my other hand reach into my pocket and close around the key. I looked and smelled, I imagine, very much like a man who had spent the night sleeping in the dirt. There was a kind of shadow or light on the landing, just a flicker, something unfamiliar. I took another step up, gingerly shielding my eyes from the sun with a hand to my forehead, and I saw that the door to my room was broken open.

From the splintered doorway I could easily take in the whole space, and nothing was disturbed. The camp chair sat where it sat, the curtains hung still in the closed window. There was a small stack of books, as neat as I had left it. My folded clothes sat on the floor in two unsteady piles. As quickly as I could, which was not very quickly at all, I lowered myself onto my stomach, wriggled forward a few inches, and stuck my arm underneath the futon. The envelope was gone.