BUT THE NEXT DAY, the fear has passed; in its place, a renewed self-admonition to look only forward, to think only forward. Faulkner was wrong: the past is so past it’s not even funny.

Here’s what I did. On Monday morning, I went out to the sidewalk just a few minutes before I knew they’d start streaming by and I put the notebook in the crook of the tree. Risky, because someone might get there before the girl and grab it just out of curiosity.

But then, just as I’d imagined, or predicted, or dreamed—as if she were a character I’d invented, acting according to dictates only she and I understood—she came out early. Her sister-or-cousin was with her, but the older girl was ten strides ahead. When she saw the notebook, she stopped dead and her shoulders slumped, with relief I assume. She waited for the younger girl to catch up with her, and then, as the two of them passed the tree with the little girl chattering away, she grabbed the notebook without breaking stride, added it to the stack her crossed arms held against her chest, and walked on out of sight.

I still don’t know what was in there. I never looked. But it did have her name on the cover: Abiha. Grade 8. Her last name, too, and her address, but those I will not repeat, though I remember them.

And I’ll admit, it made me feel pretty good. I mean, I have to laugh at myself, at what an outsize satisfaction this gave me, like doing something nice for a stranger was an idea that no one had ever come up with before me. It’s just that my interactions with people, over the years of my life, had grown more and more complex, secondhand, remote, filtered. Which made it easier to do harm. After L’Affaire de Notebook, I sat around for two days feeling a silly sort of rush, wondering when another opportunity to perform a small act of anonymous kindness might come along so I could score again. The fact that the beneficiary of my kindness was a person of color was part of the rush, then it wasn’t, then it was again. I returned to the act in fantasy and embellished it, imagining versions where she accidentally saw me or where she opened the notebook and found, miraculously, some money inside.

I don’t anticipate ever getting another job. It’d have to be off the books, obviously, day work, and who would hire someone who looks like me for that kind of labor? But even beyond that, I’m not one of those people who Needs to Work. The whole culture of employment: what does it serve, really? It serves the cause of maintaining the world as it is. You’re like a particle of blood circulating through the way things are, and the way things are is pretty fucking toxic, terrible, destructive, nasty, vicious, brutal, and corrosive. In exchange for some money? No. Not anymore. Pass.

Which means of course that the money I do have is a finite resource. But I knew that. From the beginning I was budgeting for myself only a certain number of years—I won’t say how many—but my new life has a strange and surprising feature, which is that I am spending almost nothing. So if money equals time, for me, then at my current cost of living I have a lot more time left than I imagined. It is not inconceivable now that my envelope full of cash will outlast me, as long as nothing about my present situation changes. And that flicker of possibility makes me even stingier, more selfishly protective of my little status quo.

So a kind of security descends and blurs the borders of the days. Boredom may become an issue. Not boredom. An unease, a restiveness. A feeling that all of this, the astronomical unlikelihood of my plan’s success, must have been for something.

You must make your life smaller, scale it down: maybe that was the answer all along. It’s a mindset, but I can see now that it’s also, more plainly, about technology: bereft of technology, you are thrown back on your senses, and your senses, you might say, only have so much storage. I can’t believe some of the things I used to know a lot about—celebrities, politics, culture—things that had nothing to do with me at all. Only disconnect, you might say, if you were still the kind of person who said shit like that.

And it happens naturally. That desire to cover the city on foot in order to contain it in my head: it’s gone now, and my movements have scaled down even further, reduced to the web of my daily needs. The laundromat. The camera-less bodega that sells beer and the newspaper. Even better: my movements now accord with the weather. If it’s raining out, I stay in; if it’s hot, I wait until later when it’s cooler. This simple equilibrium with the world brings me a sort of submissive peace. I know I am only discovering something that until very recently in human history did not require discovering at all.

I mean, my phone used to tell me, “You have a new memory.” Jesus!

There are eight houses on the block, four on each side of the street. Autumn’s is on the west side, two lots in from the south side, so slightly closer to Fourth Avenue than to Willow. It is painted white. Seven of the eight houses are painted white; the eighth, on the northwest corner (thus invisible from my window), is a weathered green. All of the houses are two stories. I have tried to determine whether the other houses are all single-family dwellings, unlike this one, but I can’t really see the comings and goings at most of them without standing in the street or on the sidewalk in a way that might be noticed. Parking regulations appear not to be enforced; I know this because a red Dodge Challenger has been parked in the same spot on the block since the day I moved in.

There’s a park not far from Sugar Street, with a cracked, weed-split tennis court, and a soccer field, and a drained swimming pool. Hiking trails, over and around some of the small hills that characterize the terrain around here. I followed one that terminated at the base of a statue: two men standing in old-fashioned dress, studying a proclamation or manuscript of some kind. The statue itself overlooks the city, but the figures’ eyes are down. I got up close to the base to read the names, and the names were Goethe and Schiller.

Goethe and Schiller! It felt like the end of Planet of the Apes. Probably some local citizens’ group, some German-American Society, raised the money for it a hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago. Now they were nearly lost in the trees. In another decade or two they would be able to confer in peace. Dead white men, refusing to look up.

I do have some thoughts about the world. I think they’re valid, worth hearing. Of course, who doesn’t think that? But the difference—or maybe the opportunity—is this: I’m nobody. I don’t mean “a nobody,” in the sense of being unimportant or powerless (though I am those things too); I mean I am literally nobody, I don’t exist. There is no particular agenda anyone could ascribe to me, nothing anyone could use to dismiss my thoughts as biased or agenda-driven instead of engaging with them. This is the world we live in now: no messages, only messengers, and you can always discredit the messenger. But no one knows who I am, what I am, where I am, so I couldn’t be judged, except on the quality of my observations . . . Worth thinking about. A manifesto, of sorts, although one would probably need to use a different word, as that one has been hijacked, hasn’t it, by its association with killing.

The paper lists “tag sales,” and sometimes I go. A good, secure, unsurveilled way to pick up little gadgets I didn’t even know I wanted, like a box grater. Priced to move at a dollar. What induces people to put price tags on their accumulated stuff and invite strangers into the house to pick through it? Recent death, probably, or sudden indigence, or maybe just a powerful impulse of vandalism directed at one’s own choices. Every knickknack a haunting, a symbol of the options one might still have if one hadn’t given in. The people doing the selling never seem in a good mood.

Her behavior has been odd, since that evening sitting on her doorsill. Jittery. Sees me and turns away. It’s also possible that I’m trying too hard with her. It’s difficult not to wonder what she’ll do with the fact, now out in the open, that my name is an alias. Perhaps there’ll come a moment when she wants something from me and will consider that she has the leverage to get it. For now, though, I’m sure she’s enjoying the power dynamic between us, one-sided even by landlord/tenant standards.

She did ask me if I ever gave that girl her notebook back. I won’t repeat what she asked me after that.

I went to the library for the first time in a while. I had it in mind to look up this Levenson test that Autumn mentioned that night. I asked the sad, lank-haired librarian if they had a card catalog. Naturally they don’t; they moved all that to computers years ago. Okay, I said, so I’d probably have to sign up for one of the terminals—

No, she said, that’s a separate thing. The catalog terminal is right here. Look, it’s connected to all the other libraries in the county, so if we don’t have a particular volume but another branch does, we have an interlibrary loan system so we can get it for you—

Connected, I said.

Yes.

Well, no thank you, that’s okay. Thank you very much for your help though. I appreciate it.

She gave me a look of grave mistrust. I retreated to the leather-chair area, and there was another man sitting there—a man I recognized from previous visits—a gray-haired Black man who wears polo shirts, some short-sleeved and some long, always buttoned all the way up to his neck. He smiled and beckoned to me with his finger.

“I have a card,” he whispered, “so if you ever looking to check something out, let me know. I can do it for you if you want.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s kind of you.”

I’m getting a little sloppy in terms of precautions, losing some of my habitual paranoia, for better or for worse. If something like that had happened even a month or six weeks ago—someone remembering me well enough to identify me, to address me—I never would have set foot in that library again.

The first snow! “Unseasonable” would be an understatement. It came overnight, to give one the impression of having slept for a month. Not even high enough to cover the tops of the grass blades in the unmown yards.

Back to the Goodwill, then, in search of a decent winter coat, and it is mobbed, like a Black Friday sale. Advance planning is one of the casualties of being poor. Sufficient unto the day, or however that goes. Anyway, I leave with nothing.

“Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” The library does have a Bible.

And by the time I get home that afternoon, the snow is gone.

Children go missing, from my perspective that is. They’re there and then they’re not, and usually if they’re gone more than a couple of days, they don’t return.

Abiha, of course, is my special one now. She has never been sick a day; or, if she is sick, she powers through it. She has the kind of impatient manner that comes from great intelligence; every time someone says something to her you can see in her face that she already understands and they are taking too long.

Wake up in the morning feeling more hopeful somehow. Unencumbered, all potential. This experience is changing the way I see. I’ll go so far as to say it has made me optimistic, even if the radio won’t shut up about how winter is coming.

With no warning from downstairs, there is a brief irregular banging and then the heat comes on, accompanied by a smell that mercifully spends itself after the first two hours or so.

The whole manifesto idea, on further reflection, seems vain. Words are vain. It should be about doing: silently, anonymously, and on the smallest scale possible. No third-party involvement, no observer bias. That’s the aspiration. And there is an opportunity here, a unique opportunity of my own creation, if I can just figure out what it is.

The paper runs a story about the local refugee center. There’s no news about it, it’s just a profile, an evergreen they probably update every year or two. There is more than one such center in the city, but this one, I recognize, is in the neighborhood. Families come from Burma, it says, from Sri Lanka, from Eritrea, from Syria, from Somalia. The city has a long history of welcoming refugees, one that goes all the way back to the Underground Railroad. The story is a kind of feel-good piece about the city’s generous heart; in two paragraphs near the end, though, comes a reluctant-seeming mention of recent events: funding to the centers cut, enrollment at the center’s free English classes down because of fear of immigration authorities. Fear, that is, of making those authorities’ job too easy by gathering together in one place for an hour or two. Also, there have been demonstrations, public demonstrations, against the centers themselves. People with signs, people with flags. Police having to ensure the refugees safe passage in and out of the building. There’s a photo of one such police-escorted passage, and there are children in the photo, but I don’t recognize any of their faces.

Five p.m., the clouds reddening from beneath, and there is a knock on my door. There’s only one person it could be, but it’s not her.

“Good evening,” Haji says. He is smiling broadly, as he has probably already learned he must do around white strangers. “I hope I am not disturbing your dinner.”

I can feel the flush rising from my neck to my face and am helpless to stop it. The sound of his voice—which I have heard before but never below a yell—is unsettling. His smile wavers.

“No, not at all,” I finally say. What can he possibly be doing here? He has come to ask me for something. But for what?

He has a speech prepared. “I am an eighth grader at the Wysocki Middle School. We are raising money for a class trip to the state capitol by selling candy.” Only now do I notice that he has a sort of plastic briefcase dangling from his hand. He opens it. “The candy itself has been donated by a local business, so every dollar you pay goes straight to the school for the purpose of the trip. Would you like to help us out?”

Tell me about yourself, I want to say. But this conversation, now that it is a conversation, feels perilous in so many ways. I nod, but he does not see me; now that his pitch is finished, he is finally looking past me into the room itself, and his expression is one of confusion.

“I don’t get many visitors,” I say.

“The lady downstairs,” he says. “She told me to come up here.”

“I’ll take twenty dollars’ worth,” I say, and his face lights up. “Will you wait here a second?” In my head, I hear Autumn laughing. I close the door on him, not quite all the way, and I get down on my stomach to fish the envelope out from under the futon. Twenty dollars, he informs me when I return, gets me twenty candy bars. I pick out an assortment. I want to let him be on his way—I can see he is fidgeting—but I know that once I make my selection, our time together is over.

“What’s your name?” I say instead, and he tells me. So now it’s okay that I know it.

That night I sit in the camp chair, all the lights out, and eat two Mounds bars and a Kit Kat. Haji knows which is my window now. My sense of that window as a one-way mirror is gone. Pretty canny of old Autumn, when you think about it, which I do.

With the low temperatures, as with the high, comes a diminished motivation to go out. More time in my room. The heat, which used to come on and go off capriciously, is now steady and generous and has a narcoleptic effect.

Fire engines wake me in the middle of the night, and, unable to go back to sleep, I have the new experience of watching the sun rise while eating my last three candy bars. Frost has etched the corners of my window.

Twenty dollars. I could have given him two hundred or two thousand—pretty much the same to me. Sent all those kids to the fucking state capitol. But that would have made our interaction remarkable: a story to tell others, a window to point up to. The safest course, as ever, is not to attract notice.

December begins, and while my rent is paid through the month, I don’t see any upside to waiting. I want to stay on impeccable terms. Once it’s late enough in the day that there’s no risk of waking her, I take twelve hundred more dollars out of the envelope under the futon, walk downstairs, and knock on her door. No answer.

No answer the next day, nor the day after. No sight or sound through the front window of her coming and going.

Maybe she knew she would be gone for a while and set the thermostat for my benefit.