THERE’S THINGS in me I don’t talk about, and then there’s things in me I don’t know about. We’re moving into that latter realm now. Truths will be revealed. Desperation is here. Hunger, fear, things like that, things I’ve never had to face before, not in this open-ended way. There’s also a ­powerful—an undismissible—longing for revenge, well beyond the reach of reason. These pressures, every waking moment. My life has dropped the veil and turned to face me. I’m going to learn some things.

The first time we had sex, she was smirking, like finally she’d gotten me to confess something. Finally, I’d stopped pretending. Though not reluctant, she was strangely passive, making me do everything, take off all her clothes, pull her up from the couch, guide her in front of me into the bedroom. I felt her whole history with men in her demeanor, warped but triumphant, interested only in power, the power of choosing to whom she would grant access to herself and to whom she would not. I took her hair down. In the dark her tattoos were just shadows. I devoted myself to wiping that smirk off her face, and in the end, I did it.

The first-floor view of the kids passing by on their way to school is not as clear, and also noisier. Haji is there every day. His friend with the haircut has never reappeared, a fact I now look at in a different light.

So I have to figure out how to get Haji alone. I could of course just go out to the sidewalk and ask to speak to him, but his crew will stay right there while I do it, and in that situation he will never be honest, never feel afraid enough to be honest. There’s really only one way to go about it.

I go back upstairs for the first time in a few days and the room looks different. Things have been disturbed. Maybe just by the wind but I don’t think so.

Odd that she still hasn’t asked me about repairing my broken door, nor made any move toward hiring anyone to do it. Most likely she doesn’t think about it at all; she has forgotten this part of her house even exists. She’s got a strange sort of shine to her eyes these days. Maybe she is taking something. She goes out for only an hour or two most days, some days not at all. I don’t believe she enjoys fucking me in a physical sense, but it makes her feel wanted, and she starts to act sullen and mean if that want is too long in manifesting. I’ve got fantasies that jumpstart me, that keep me going. Not the sort I can share with her. I fantasize about holding a gun to her head as she kneels in front of me and asking her where my money is.

I’m pouring some flat soda down the kitchen drain when I hear the sound of movement behind me. I yank open the drawer and pull out a dull knife and spin around in a crouch to face the room, and there is a fucking squirrel in there.

It seems possible that she might one day out of nowhere disappear again, or lock her door and refuse to let me back in. If that happened, I’d still have access to my room upstairs as a way of avoiding the elements. Food enough for a couple of days or a week. I am starting to game these matters out.

The fact that she doesn’t ask me to contribute in terms of food or liquor must mean she understands I have no money now. Which must mean she knows what happened to it. Of course I think it was most likely her, but I have to be careful, I have to eliminate the other possibilities first, because the moment I confront her, it’s over, she will put me out on the street whether I’m right or wrong.

My rent is paid up for another twenty-five days, if that still means anything. She may have forgotten all about that. I did have to remind her last time. Just in terms of my own stability, I’m not sure whether it’s better to think about deadlines or not.

Sitting on her blanket-covered couch while she is out, picking up her check she says, I hear a knocking sound. It comes again—patient and regular, not loud—and I realize that it is the sound of someone knocking on my broken front door upstairs. Instinctively, I duck below the level of the couch back. I hear soft, slow steps. When I decide it’s safe to raise my head and look out the front window, I see a woman—short, not much more than five feet, with short hair and numerous earrings, wearing a dress and a jean jacket—standing on the sidewalk with her back to me, intently reading something on her phone. After half a minute she puts the phone back in her shoulder bag, lifts her face (which I still can’t see) appreciatively toward the sun, and disappears down Sugar Street.

“I could try to find work,” I say idly one night when we’re sitting outside on the front step. Autumn snorts. “Doing what?” she says. “Not whatever it was you did before.” Across the street from us is an open garage door out of which music blares. It keeps our remarks to each other short and loud.

The city election has come and gone; all the little yard signs are gone, too, with one exception, that billboard-looking military shot of Judge Hubert. Too heavy to move easily, I guess: probably a two-person job. Or maybe this was the plan all along, to leave his avatars all around the city, smiling, watching. The view of the sign is much different down here on the first floor. It keeps catching me by surprise, I keep thinking there is some guy standing across the street with a helmet under his arm.

Autumn says she has a doctor’s appointment, so I have a couple of afternoon hours alone. Today, then, is the day. The Wysocki kids pass by in front of her window, left to right, boisterous, unhurried. When the group moves on and the noise dies down, I go out to the street, turn right, and follow them.

I maintain a gap of about fifty yards, trying to look up only when necessary. Haji—wearing a polo shirt, a new-looking one, and cuffed jean shorts and high-tops—is listening to music on cordless headphones, staying with the group but in his own world. It’s not hard to imagine him pointing to my window and telling his friend there’s a crazy white man up there who’s an easy mark or that he’s the one who suggested the candy scam in the first place. At a minimum, he knows that friend’s name.

I have to pay attention, because I have no idea which is his stop, so to speak. We turn off Sugar at Walnut and then off Walnut at Grove. No one appears to have noticed me, even in my state. But kids are not attentive. Everything inside their world is so unbearably important and intense that even things on the edge of their vision might as well not exist. Suddenly, Haji turns and heads up a stoop, and another boy enters the house with him.

I stop and wait until the rest of the group is out of sight. Then I advance. The house is white with gray shutters, none of the paint recent, and from my angle it has a slight rightward lean to it. One of the street-facing windows is covered with newspaper. But I don’t have time for these details. All that matters to me now is the unseen. I walk up the steps and knock nonofficiously on the door.

The other, younger boy answers. “Could I please speak to Haji?” I say. “It’s okay, he knows me.”

Based on the boy’s expression he does not accept the premise that it is okay. He shuts the door gently in my face, and I am not sure what this signifies. I settle on taking a few steps back, down the stairs, so that I might be seen from the windows and judged too poorly dressed to be a representative of the government or law enforcement. A few seconds later, the front door opens again, slowly, cautiously; Haji stands in the opening, blocking it, one hand on the jamb and the other on the door frame. “What you want?” he says.

From my position halfway down the steps he appears about a foot and a half taller than me. But he is not a threat to me, not really; it will always be the other way around. I see a curtain move and another face appears in a first-floor window, another boy, this one maybe six or seven years old.

I have no plan. I suppose my plan was that the sight of me would cause him to panic and confess, that if my expression suggested that I knew everything already, he would come clean out of self-interest. But that isn’t what’s happening. I don’t know everything; in fact I know nothing at all. That’s probably what is written on my face, whatever I intend.

“Do you remember me, Haji?” I say.

His chin pulls back slightly when I say his name; he instantly loses a little bit of his bluster, and from this I can tell that he does not recognize me, that he is frightened and undermined the way anyone would be if a total stranger suddenly addressed you by name. He has been on the threshold of my home, and he has spoken to me at least twice, but he has no memory of any of this. Of course I do look a little different now, probably alarmingly so.

“What you want?” he says again.

“I want,” I say, “my money.”

A true statement, whether he has it or not.

Next door, a man leans out of his window.

Haji looks back over his shoulder and shakes his head. “You crazy?” he says to me.

“You sold me candy,” I say—a little louder now, since others, visible and invisible, are listening. “You came to my home. Your friend with the fade, he came there too. I gave you money. I gave him money. And now it’s gone.”

Now he is afraid. He shakes his head again, at me. “No,” he said. “What are you doing? Who are you?”

“Where’s my money?” I say.

A voice inside me is trying to settle me. Speaking low and nonstop, it is saying: Obviously he doesn’t have it, does he look like someone who just came into a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, what, do you think he invested it? And look at his face. Look at it. He obviously has no idea what you’re talking about. Kids are good liars but you can still tell the truth from an act, can’t you? And what if he does have it? What if he does have it? What were you going to do with it anyway, except use it to extend your claim on your own worthless life? What would he do with it, if he had it? And how did you get it in the first place, what, that just doesn’t matter anymore?

But no logic can reach me now, not even my own; all of that is no match for what’s on the surface of me, for the part of me that faces and meets the world. “You know what happened!” I yell. “Tell me! Tell me and I’ll let you go!”

He steps back and closes the door.

The man leaning out his window is gone now, too, but I still feel surveilled. I’m alone in the street, maybe four in the afternoon, and it’s impossible to tell whether the sense that I’m in danger is coming from within me or from the air. I run from it, not very gracefully or well, but I run until I’m out of breath and can look behind at the empty street to see that no one is pursuing me.