IMAGINE YOUR BIOGRAPHER. Let’s say it’s a she. She sits at your kitchen table and she’s polite and respectful and full of enthusiasm for the task at hand, which is to gather up everything there is to know about you, the record of your life. There are some things in your past that you would just as soon she didn’t know about, and you’re relieved when she seems not to know those things, at least not yet. After a few hours, she can see you’re tired and so she thanks you warmly and goes out into the world to interview everyone who’s ever been close to you, patiently, perhaps for years, at which point, she says cheerfully, she will be back to follow up.

It’s not just the suspense over whether she’ll learn what there is to be learned. It’s knowing that the time, however long or short, between now and the day of her return is all the time you have to alter the record.

I figured out where the Goodwill is and bought some furniture. Nothing too big to fit in the car, nothing too big for me to carry up those back stairs by myself. So that meant a futon, which I unrolled on the floor against the interior wall. I’m getting used to it; at a minimum, it beats sleeping in the car. And it does have the upside, when I’m lying on it, of preventing me from being visible through the windows.

A card table with collapsible legs, two metal folding chairs, a deep, canvas camp chair that also folds and is surprisingly comfortable. The futon and a comforter and some sheets. Haven’t figured out where I’ll wash them. A pillow. A trash can. Silverware and a couple of plates and a coffeemaker and a pot. They have everything at the Goodwill, and except for the loading bay in back, they do not have cameras.

She watches me through her blinds. If I wave, she waves right back, so she isn’t hiding, exactly. I paid her six months in advance, as promised, utilities included, so there’s rarely any occasion to speak to her.

She dresses the same every day: shorts, two or three layered tank tops, hair piled up on her head. Hard looking. Her clothes are all tight. Maybe she likes being provocative, or maybe they’re clothes she bought years ago and they don’t fit the same now. Her name is Autumn, or so she told me. I’m in no position to be skeptical of anyone’s name.

$165,406. The envelope, for now, is underneath the futon.

After much painful banging with the flat of my hand, the windows open, and the smell exits like a reluctant spirit. The front window faces roughly east, so I had to buy some kind of curtain if I didn’t want to wake up with the dawn every day. Also a curtain rod, a screwdriver, and some screws. The next time I saw Autumn, she gave me a little sarcastic lip purse and said, “Look who’s handy.”

I thought about a TV, while I still had the car to transport it, but for a TV to work, you need an antenna, and I don’t know. An antenna in my home? Signals go two ways, whether they tell you so or not. I compromised on a radio. I went to Goodwill every day until one appeared: a very pleasing old clock radio, as it turned out, the kind with an actual dial. That’s the beauty of Goodwill; they’re not just restocking the shelves with the same items, reordering as things sell out. It’s passive, even random up to a point. Everything depends on the circumstances of the people who show up at the loading bay door with stuff they need to get rid of, intimate circumstances you’ll never know.

No phone book, no computer, so I spent an entire day driving around the edges of town looking for some kind of auto-salvage yard, someplace raggedy enough that I could hand them the keys to the hatchback and walk away. I never found one. Or I found two, but they looked too reputable, and I couldn’t figure out what to say to the men I saw there, how to explain the kind of transaction I was looking for without arousing their suspicion. So here’s what I did: I made sure every trace of me was out of the car—wrappers, napkins, everything—and drove until I found a service road off the highway, near some kind of spooky runoff pond. No houses there, no structures of any sort. I pulled into the scrub, and when I was convinced I didn’t hear anything except distant traffic and insects, I wiped the car down with my shirt for prints inside and out, I threw the keys into the pond, and I walked away. The only part of this plan that felt less than genius was that I was now several miles from home. Also, I didn’t quite know how to get back there, except in a rough, follow-the-sun kind of way. I didn’t want to ask anybody where Sugar Street was. I didn’t want to ask anybody anything. So it took me almost four hours, though to be fair I did stop three times just to rest and get something to drink. It was close to ten p.m. when I found the house; I felt like crying. She pulled aside the curtain and watched me limp up the driveway toward the back stairs, the flickering light of a TV framing her head.

Now everything that can identify me is corporeal, unsheddable: blood, DNA, face, fingerprints, voice, retina, whatever. Not much I can do about any of that. They say that when you undergo a bone marrow transplant, if you survive it your blood type and DNA actually change. Fascinating, though obviously not something one could consider, you can’t just walk into a hospital and ask for a transfusion of someone else’s stem cells a la carte. In any event, I’ve done what I set out to do: I’ve gone quiet. I emit no signal. I cannot be triangulated. I’m Tom Joad. I’m nobody—who are you?

Even so, it’s not easy to let your guard down. The fear of being seen is ingrained, reflexive. I hear cars slow down on the street outside and step back from the window. I avert my face when strangers pass me walking the other way. I try to calm myself, to remind myself that no one knows me here, that this is a big country. But most people have no idea how thorough state surveillance is today, how complete and invasive and perfectly unscrupulous. The moment you feel like you can relax—like you’ve left your pursuers nothing, you’re a cold trail, you’ve won—that’s when you’re most likely to slip up, according to the laws of irony anyway.

Peak summer now. Humid and still. Not much better at night. The radio informs me that we are poised to break a record. At least I don’t have to talk to anyone about the weather, because I don’t talk to anyone about anything at all. There’s a decent cross breeze in my room when the front and rear windows are open, but my futon is too low to the ground to feel it, so sometimes I will get up in the middle of the night and sit in the camp chair in the dark to cool off.

I could never really cook. A life of fast-food takeout would do me just fine, in theory, but every inch of those places is camera-covered. The counters, the drive-through, I wouldn’t doubt the restrooms too. So I have to find diners, roadhouses, people running restaurants out of their homes, their backyards. There’s more of those than you would think.

For instance, just six blocks off Sugar Street, it turns out, is the best Korean restaurant in the history of the world. It doesn’t even have a sign outside, apart from a laminated square of cardboard in the front window that just says open. It looks like—in fact, it certainly must be—someone’s house. The kitchen is just a kitchen. Beyond it there are four tables, never more than one of them occupied, and yet the menu is eight pages long. Six blocks is a ruinously long way to carry any kind of noodle dish involving broth, so once in a while I’ll take a risk and eat in. Sometimes a woman will come out of the kitchen, nod to me politely, and then seat herself at the table next to mine to roll out dumplings.

It’s not a hairshirt situation—the Goodwill, the thrift-store clothes. I’m not martyring myself. I miss nice things. Plush furniture, art on the walls . . . But if you want to live beneath notice, this is how it has to be: no accounts, no subscriptions, transactions only of a certain immediate type, in certain unpatrolled venues. Nothing escapes the world’s attention like a poor person. Of course I am not a poor person. I know that, every one of my deprivations is a choice. Still, I am living the life of a poor person, and, increasingly, I look like one.

She says she’s the owner of the house, which would be good news for me but also strikes me as unlikely. She doesn’t have a car; there’s a bus line I’ve seen on Grand Avenue, and that must take her wherever it is she goes. I’ve seen her wearing scrubs. Once in a great while, when I’m lying in the dark but not sleeping, I hear low voices: through the floorboards, through the vents. Could be the TV.

The soul of the radio is dark as pitch. It used to be the mainstream, bland corporate realism, but then technology moved forward and what’s left behind is mostly just rage getting shot into space. Something ugly is eventually released when you keep talking and talking with no idea who’s listening to you. Like some Cro-Magnon version of the internet. Anyway, there is a local AM station, which is useful for me, but when it turns to nationally syndicated talk around drive time I find I can’t tune in for very long without starting to feel angry myself.

The gradual process of replacing all my clothes. Bought a short-sleeve, button-down shirt today at a place called Thrifty Shopper, took it home, took off the shirt I wore to the store, stuffed it in the trash, and put the new one on.

I should feel happy. Triumphant, even. I set out to do the impossible thing in this bugged panopticon of a world—step outside it, remove myself from it, cancel every claim on me, not by killing myself but by conceiving and then stepping into a second, empty life—and I did it. I am noncomplicit. There were a lot of cords to cut, and I cut them all. Opting out was not a course others would have granted me, so I had to make it happen. It required not only careful planning and discipline but also a revolutionary hardening of my spirit. Still, I guess there is a sort of mourning period, even for yourself, even for little deaths that you alone imagined and then personally brought about.

$164,745. I think it’s important to note that I didn’t ruin anybody. I just want that on the record, even though, of course, there must be no record. I could have, but I didn’t. I didn’t clean anybody out. I took what I needed, though that need was challenging to calculate. They’ll be all right. They might not see things that way, but if I concerned myself with how others see things, I’d be right back where I was.

There’s a bodega a block and a half from the house that sells beer, but they have a big camera right over the door, in a mesh cage. There’s a safer one about twice as far away. I only buy one six at a time, even when I could carry two. Keeps me from overdoing it. Tempting, some nights, to polish off the six in one go just to put myself to sleep, but what lies down that road? Nothing good.

The initial plan was to spend some time covering my new home city by foot, getting acclimated, forming a kind of aerial layout of it in my head. Once the fear of being seen had worn off a little, that is. But it is so hot. Ninety-two yesterday, the radio says. Even with a hat, after twenty or thirty minutes on the sidewalks the sun dizzies me. There’s also the knee issue, though the heat actually helps with that, most days.

So: more time than I imagined in this room. I won’t compare it to a jail cell, it’s much, much bigger than a jail cell, and anyway I’ve always flattered myself that I’m the kind of person who would do okay in jail, not socially, maybe, but mentally. It wouldn’t break me. But that doesn’t mean I want to go.

Outside my front window, growing on the sloped strip of grass between the sidewalk at the end of Autumn’s yard and the street, is a remarkable tree. I don’t know what kind of tree. I have gone my whole life without learning how to tell one tree from another, one plant, one star from another. What’s remarkable about it is that it has a huge network of long, thick limbs but only about four or five feet of trunk. It looks like someone hammered it too hard into the ground.

The airport must be pretty nearby. When the wind’s a certain way, flight paths take planes more or less right over my roof. The last time I was on an airplane—which, come to think of it, was the last time I will ever be on an airplane—there was some kind of commotion during boarding, some delay. Nothing violent, no raised voices, but suddenly there was a gate agent on the plane, and the captain, joining a knot of people in that sadistically narrow aisle. I was sitting near the back. A flight attendant breaks off from the group and heads toward me with a smile on her face and also blushing a little bit I think, though it’s hard to tell; they wear so much makeup. I look at her as she gets closer, my heart starting to pound—am I in trouble? What did I do? What’s with the smile?—but she just sails right past me and stops a couple of rows behind.

“Sir?” I hear her say. “There is a gentleman in first class who would like to switch seats with you.” I turn around and she’s addressing a guy in military uniform. I noticed him when we were boarding, not so much because of the camo but because he looked about seventeen years old. He’s staring at the attendant, not moving, polite but confused.

“To thank you for your service,” she says, and I must have made some kind of sound, because the strangers sitting directly behind me both turn their gazes away from this exchange and regard me blankly, just for a half second, like synchronized, before turning back.

The kid sheepishly stands, grabs his carry-on, and makes his way up front. A minute or two later, some older dude wearing expensive clothes walks past me, takes the grunt’s seat, and I swear to God, the people in the humiliating steerage class of this commercial airplane start applauding for this fascist, leaning over to shake his hand. What a selfless aristocrat! Thank you so much for giving this kid the thrill of experiencing Delta’s first class, before you put a high-tech gun in his hand and send him to the other side of the world to kill some unwhite people he doesn’t know for the protection of profits he won’t share in!

I’m not a big “thank you for your service” guy, let’s just put it that way. I wished someone else in first class would switch seats with me, so I could spend the flight grilling this dim teenager about what he was doing and why, what kind of sap he was to think that executing his government’s murderous commands in exchange for a break on college tuition would make him into a man. Make him admired. Except it did, right? Everybody on that plane admired the hell out of him, and they admired the hell out of that robber baron who was sending him off to kill or be killed. It was just me. I was the one who didn’t belong. And that made me a little sorry for myself. I hadn’t yet learned to move toward the not belonging. Instead, all I had with which to try to dampen my anger was the thought that if that plane went down and I was taken out of this world, at least both of those death dealers would leave it with me.

I don’t know what made me remember that story. Yes I do: the planes flying overhead. But when you’re sitting in the same chair all day and part of the night, I guess the past is just going to seep in, that’s all there is to it. Good luck trying to wall it out.

$164,522.

I went to the woods to live deliberately. Is that how it goes? I had room in the car for a box or two of books. But they felt like evidence. I left them where they were.

Eventually the weather breaks, and I can get out a little more. The bodega, one day, had a street map for sale on the counter by the register—just one—and I bought it and taped it to the back of my door. I don’t carry it with me. I don’t want to look like a tourist, especially in places where no tourist would ever go. I walk and explore and come back home and look at the map to see where I’ve been.

The main arteries here are not pedestrian friendly—the sidewalk stops and starts—and so I take mostly side streets, and I get lost quite a bit. Residential streets, where you don’t want to linger. Downtown I’d be less conspicuous, but it’s a long walk from where I am, and besides, there’s a level of risk there. Cameras all over. I wear a hat at all times, and sunglasses. I’ve stopped shaving.

She must wonder why, if I have no job, I leave in the morning and come back at night. Maybe she thinks I am engaged in some great criminal enterprise. She stares at me, unsmiling. She doesn’t really have to interact with me until the end of the year, when the rent is due again.

The number of churches seems disproportionate. I can walk a ten-block rectangle and come across five of them. It’s an immigrant city—I know that much about it—which may explain some of that dark Catholic grandeur. But then there’s the Al-Zahra Mosque and something called the Casa de Restauración that clearly used to be a showroom of some kind, until they covered up the windows and slapped a sign over the door and bam, a house of God.

I don’t get it. I don’t admire it at all, never have. First off, organized religion—all of it—is mostly just codified misogyny. That’s a fact. But whatever I may think of it, it’s still out here doing its retrograde work. Every time I walk past one of the older ones, doors propped open in the heat, no matter the hour, I see a handful of people in there.

Total severance from yesterday is the goal, but that’s difficult when your memory insists on replaying the same few scenes over and over, looking for loose ends, ways you might have revealed yourself without even knowing it. One bit of recent history I can’t make my brain stop looping: I’m haunted by the stupid answer I gave Autumn when she asked me what my “deal” was. “Just looking for a fresh start.” Jesus! Things shady people say. I’ll probably get that question again at some point, if not from her then from someone else. I need to be ready with a story that sounds plausible without getting incriminatingly close to the truth:

My deal? I had a child—a daughter—and the child died. She was sick for a long time. I would love to be able to say she didn’t suffer. How she suffered is something I can’t discuss. Her mother and I were already divorced when she got sick, which is one of many things I will never forgive myself for. We came back together for her but I get why my wife can’t stand the sight of me now, the sound of my voice. I, too, can’t bear to see anyone I used to know, anyplace that featured in my former life. I can’t bear it that all of that didn’t die along with her. So I left in order to become a stranger, to be surrounded by people and places with absolutely no sympathy, no affinity for me. It numbs the pain of opening my eyes every morning.

(Not terrible. A little over the top, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Autumn has a maudlin side.)

Or maybe: My deal is that I care about the future of this planet—not of human beings per se, human beings can and probably should go fuck themselves right into extinction for all I care, but of this planet. I worked for a while in the nonprofit world, me and my nifty law degree, and what I learned was something I should have already known, which is that the idea of reforming murderous governments by appealing to said governments to reform themselves is worse than useless. So I went outside the law. Let’s just not get any more concrete about it than that, for your sake and for mine. I went outside the law and that is where I remain, and there are powerful people who would label me a terrorist because labeling someone a terrorist grants you license to do anything you want to make them go away. I have chosen instead to make myself go away. For now.

Mid-August. I try to get out when I can stand it. The sidewalks on my block, the rickety porches, open or enclosed, stay empty almost all the time, at least when the sun is up. At night it’s darker than a city block should be. I’d thought at first that the streetlights just weren’t working, but then I saw that each of them was cracked wide open. How? Probably by shooting at them? I wish I’d been here when that happened; it must have been a party.

No place to go, no place to be. No interactions, no relationships. That’s when you can feel time passing, doing its work on you. I mean actually feel it. The day tingles like stepping out of a bath. I can feel time on my skin.

What connects you to other people? Selfish instincts, mostly. That and the internet. I don’t miss the internet as much as I thought I might. It lasted a short while, that dopamine withdrawal they talk about, but then it went away. Not surprising, really, since I lived for years without the internet before somebody thought to invent it. All that instant connection to the world, to friends and strangers, to “the news,” it feels like the human condition when you’re in it, but when you’re outside it you see that all along it was just a product, something sold to you so relentlessly every minute of every day that you forgot it was transactional at all. Then at some point there was something called the internet of things, a phrase I never really understood, but anyway I am now all about the internet of the senses, which can’t be monetized or hacked, limited bandwidth maybe but the privacy controls are outstanding.

And then, on my perambulations, a discovery: a public library. A terrible one, but still. It’s not even that far off Sugar Street—maybe a fifteen-minute walk—despite how long it took me to happen upon it. They have daily newspapers, which is huge. They have a music room, but it has an Out of Order sign on it that looks old. They have leather chairs, and the chairs are half-full of men about my age, dressed about like I am, groomed about like I am, staving off vagrancy.

Went back again today. A thick brick square, probably considered ugly at one time but aged into nostalgic dignity. Named after someone I’ve never heard of. High ceilings, a round dome above the checkout desk, open stacks, lots of light. And air conditioning! I thought I’d learned to live without it, but when it took me by surprise, I felt a purely physical relief almost to the point of tears.

Books have clearly lost the battle for floor and shelf space over time. There are magazines and rows and rows of CDs and VCR tapes. And long tables holding a total of eight computer terminals. Free access to the internet. In an instant I am that close to my old self and thus to an answer to the question of whether and how I am still being looked for. I could find out. I don’t remember all of my old passwords anymore, but I remember most of them.

But when I walk casually by the checkout desk, I see the laminated sign spelling out the rules for use of the computers, and Rule 1 is that you must show some form of ID. So that takes care of that. My only glimpses of that realm will be whatever sites other library patrons happen to be looking at when I pass behind them. I’m pleased to see that the monitor cameras have all been covered with masking tape; at least someone thought of that.

When I walk outside again, I look for a cornerstone and find one: 1915.

It’s appealing, comfortable, quiet, a place to go. And then I return home one afternoon from my third or fourth outing to this library and at the bottom of the exterior stairs, sweat-soaked, I see that my door is open. I consider running but then I hear a voice, Autumn’s voice. I get up there and she is not alone. There is some dude in chinos and a work shirt with a logo on it. She looks at me with a little smirk. He does not look at me at all.

“Inspection,” she says. “For energy efficiency or whatever. It’s annual. They do it for free, but then they try to pressure you into buying storm windows or some shit. A total scam.”

This probably explains the stoic, let’s-get-this-done look on the face of the inspector.

“You weren’t home,” Autumn says, “and this was when the appointment was scheduled, so . . .”

I wait for what seems like half an hour while the inspector gets to his knees to shine a light into my heat register and then struggles to his feet again. They leave, and I stand with my fists clenched until I hear them clear the last of the exterior stairs; then I lock the door and do a full-on belly flop to get my hands under the futon. The envelope is still there. I dump it out on the bed and count it. Still there.

But the lesson is that she feels free to enter the room when I am not home. And so, even though it is obviously not a viable solution long-term, I don’t leave the room for the next four days.

I try to come up with a backstory that might scare her off a little, though some finesse is required since I am not a scary person:

My deal is that I am in witness protection. I can’t tell you why, Autumn, because it’s much better that you don’t know. Better that, if someone should come around here asking, you’ll be able to tell them in all sincerity that you don’t know a single thing about me. That way they’ll leave you alone.

On the last Monday of August, noises out my front window early in the morning, and when I got up and peered out: children. Two or three, then more, then a stream, all moving in the same direction. Like an arroyo dampening and then flowing after a storm. All different ages, some in groups of two or three or six, some alone. They were aimed, I realized, at the school: school was back in session. I’d forgotten all about it. But now here they were. Some trudged straight ahead without stopping; others procrastinated, hitting each other, chasing each other. They reached out and touched that low-slung tree at the end of the yard as they passed it, like they were happy to see it again. Maybe a quarter or a third of them wore headphones or earbuds, squeezing every second of music out of the day, right up until they entered the school and were forced to remove them, or so I imagined: I’d walked past the empty school building many times but whatever the rules were inside of it was a mystery to me. Anyway, kids with their ears covered or filled so that they couldn’t hear the collective noise they made, but that noise was all I could hear for half an hour in the morning and then, in the afternoon, for a longer time, because there was less of a rush about getting home. That limbo, the in-between, that’s what was theirs, and they occupied it as long as they could, unselfconsciously, performing only for each other, no sense whatsoever, even in the middle of a public street, that anyone else might be watching.