JULY 1 comes and goes. No mention from Autumn of the rent. I still have some winter clothing upstairs, but everything else has made the transition to her place. It’s all on the floor; she’s never mentioned clearing a drawer for me or anything like that. I try to keep the piles neat.

If she has my money, then it’s not inconceivable that she considers my rent, so to speak, already paid, and I am good to stay here indefinitely. So long as the status quo is that I am completely, entirely dependent on her, she seems okay with it. I still search the place when she’s out. Sometimes I want to challenge her directly, but the level of risk there is still too high. I have nowhere else to go.

We have less sex now than we used to; on that score, I guess she feels her point has been made.

The Judge Hubert sign, incredibly, is still out there, its frame held down by sandbags. I wish I still had Oscar’s saw. There he stands, fit and smug in his desert camo, briefly emerged from the turret of his tank. You know, for Justice. Apparently he came back from a few years of murdering random brown people to protect rich white people’s access to oil—excuse me, “fighting terrorism”—and his big revelation was: You know what kind of career all this arrogant, detached, technologically based racist killing has really prepared me for? The Law! And not advocacy, either, but impartiality, because who causes suffering less partially than me? Presumably white voters saw that picture of him on his tank and agreed: yes, please, let this guy keep up the good work of administering justice in some place that I will never have to see.

I have a sort of daydream in which I appear before him. It’s not consistent, though, because sometimes he shoots me through the chest with some kind of missile while people cheer and other times he lets me go, just waves a hand and lets me go, after all I’ve done, after all my selfish transgressions and the suffering I’ve caused, just because, apart from the muscles maybe, I look a little like him.

Summer heat again. Autumn says she has a new front-of-house job at a tattoo parlor, keeping track of appointments, taking payments, just part-time; then she says it’s not really an official job, just helping a friend of hers out of the goodness of her heart. Some or none of this may be true. When she’s absent, I take the opportunity to get out of the dark apartment and breathe some air. I don’t go far—just around the block once usually—because I can’t lock her door.

School is out for the summer. The hotter it is, the fewer fellow pedestrians I see, but there are some. Lately I do let myself reminisce, because reminiscing is a way to hold off the future. I don’t reflect on my old life, though, but on the year just past, on the way that I pontificated about making my world smaller, and now my world has shrunk to the point where the block itself is the entirety of it.

The last leg of this modest orbit puts me back on Sugar Street, tracing the path the students take to school in the morning. It’s pleasantly shady and the smells are a mélange of blooming trees and household garbage. A rather petite young woman is on my side of the street, walking in the opposite direction, wearing a sundress, big sunglasses, short hair, tattooed arms, multiple and asymmetrical earrings. We have to turn sideways to avoid contact on the sidewalk as we pass, just a few feet from Autumn’s driveway, and we do so with a social smile. And then, from behind me, as I turn down the driveway and approach the door, I hear my real name.