IN THE PARK I find the patch of woods where I spent the night after my beating. I have held a gun only once before. I figure out where the safety is and, miraculously, it’s on. At length I am able after all to figure out how to eject the magazine; there are six bullets in there.

They are my assets now. The mistake I made with the money was that I waited too long and those assets were squandered. Apart from the five grand I gave to the boy: that money probably did some sort of good. Made something different, at least. The rest of my assets sat under my futon, under the literal weight of me, as I slept, where they did no good at all. Well, that’s a mistake I won’t make this time. My time is short, no matter how you look at it, and I won’t go with any potential unspent. And this is the part where I’m supposed to say, “And the last bullet will be for me,” but I actually don’t think that will be necessary.

Sleeping in the park is a no go. I can’t risk arrest, and also it looks like rain. Holding my tote bag with the gun in it, I make my way downtown to the Catholic Charities building. I take the least direct route possible, staying off all main streets until the end when I can’t avoid it, looking around every corner for a face that would recognize mine, for the detective, or Autumn, or Oscar, Haji, the kid with the fade, the red-haired cop. When I arrive, I stand briefly in a line of men, my face turned away from the street, and I am given a slip of paper with a number on it, and that slip of paper turns into a bowl of soup and a cot in a room full of cots. I see people staring at me, at my bag. I’d stay awake all night if I could, but it’s not possible, so I sleep with the tote bag in my arms.

Well, “sleep.” It’s in the night, of course, on my back, staring in the direction of the invisible ceiling, that the reckoning comes. My old business partner: we sat across from each other every day for fourteen years and already it is an effort to picture him. I’m sure he hates me. The business was failing anyway; the internet killed it. We were surviving by offering package ecotours to environmentally pristine places, thus contributing greatly to the defilement of said places. I tried to talk to him about that once, and he looked at me like I was insane. Our wives were better friends than we were; I wonder what that’s like now.

As for my wife and I, I remember, we got along mostly by hiding our real feelings from each other. It became a form of consideration.

There is a child, too, a daughter, but she is no longer a child, and we don’t know where she is. Her attitude toward us turned accusatory when she was about fifteen and never changed. I don’t know if she has any idea that I’m gone, that her mother is now alone . . . I can imagine their suffering, I really can. But when I try to gin up some personal remorse over it, I feel like I’m acting, it’s like being remorseful for something somebody else did. The person with whom my name and face are still associated by some: that person is dead. Their frustration is understandable, but it can’t touch me now. All around me in the dark, the sounds of unconscious men.

In the morning I am asked if I would like to attend a church service. I thank the man and leave the building, and when he asks compassionately if he’ll see me again that evening, I realize that he might.

Where do judges hang out? Courthouses. You don’t need to be some pixie detective to figure that one out, it’s just common sense. They’re not always there, court’s not always in session, and they don’t seem in general like nine-to-five types. But if you have the time and are patient, there is no way they won’t show up eventually. If they walk in, they have to walk out.

But first. A long, long hike out near the fairgrounds, not far at all from where I abandoned the car in which I arrived here a year ago. It’s a beautiful day. Cloudless, not too hot. The train tracks run through these undeveloped acres, near the highway, elevated a few feet above the brackish ground. The drone of insects, the irregular, beating swoosh of fast cars displacing the air.

I have to fire the gun at least once, for practice. It’s a waste of a bullet, maybe, but it will mean the second time I fire it my body will know what to expect and my aim will likely be better.

It’s not long, an hour maybe, before a train approaches. I can hear the vibrations in the track itself before I can see it. It’s a freight, which is lucky—slow and loud, almost no human beings on board. I stand and admire it for a while, then I turn my back to it. Shielded from sight, covered by the strained roar of the wheels bearing tons of who knows what, I lift up the gun with both hands and fire—at nothing, into the reeds. Though I have little sense of how loud it is, I can feel the recoil in both shoulders. It hurts! More importantly, I feel how that flinch from the pain lifts the barrel upward, just a touch but enough to make a difference. So it is a matter of being prepared for that and also for the fact that I will need to get up close.

I turn back to face the tracks and sit down in the grass. The gun is hot in my hand; I click the safety and lay it down behind me. The train is fantastically long; it must be ten minutes before the last car pulls the curtain of the sky across my vision. When it is quiet again—except for the insects and the cars, briefly drowned out but always there—I stand up.