IT’S 7:50 A.M., and no foot traffic on the sidewalk beneath my window, and at first I think maybe I’ve mistaken Sunday for Monday but then I realize: the school’s winter break must have begun. Christmas is imminent, though I know this mostly from the radio.

So I turn it off. Nothing from downstairs, nothing from outside, nothing through the airwaves: it feels like armies of silence are gathering.

The next day, a patient, insistent knock on the door downstairs: Autumn’s door, the front door. I can just see the top of a man’s head; I have a better look at his van. I can see that he’s holding a clipboard. When did a clipboard ever bode well? After three rounds of knocking—each the same, no increase in urgency—he looks around him and then starts to circle the house. For a moment he is out of sight and then his footsteps are audible on the back stairs.

He is certainly not a cop. He is wearing a tie, for one thing. A little lapel badge identifies him as an employee of the gas and electric company. He confirms this verbally.

“Is Autumn here?” he asks, almost sweetly.

The living arrangements are explained to him.

“Oh. Well, then, legally it’s not your responsibility—just want to make that clear—but since it affects you, you may want to tell her when you see her that she is now three months in arrears on her bill, and so I’m here to serve her formal notice that her service will be cut off in ten days if payment isn’t made.”

He is a young guy—thirty at most—and, given the prickly job he has, I would expect him to be a little warier of people, less cheerful. Perhaps he is some kind of sociopath.

“There are city assistance programs she can avail herself of if she chooses. I’ll slide these brochures under her door.”

Avail herself. He is giving a speech. What sort of person could be this divorced, spiritually, from the nature of the work that he does? Almost every sort of person, is the answer. He is still talking. He has a script to get to the end of. It is amusing to imagine the change that would come over his face were he suddenly pushed backward down the stairs.

“Should the shutoff take place, the sheriff will accompany a technician from—”

The sheriff? Not clear why law enforcement would need to be involved.

“There are a lot of laws governing things like turning people’s power off,” the man says. “The sheriff is present to act as a witness that all of those laws are observed. Plus also, there is sometimes a confrontational aspect to, uh, to the act itself.”

How much is the account in arrears?

“How much?” He flips through the printouts on his accursed clipboard. “Four hundred and forty-one dollars,” he announces, “and sixty-one cents.”

He waits, as requested, while the door is fully closed. A minute later I open it and press the money into his hand.

“Okay,” he says, surprised but also happy. This will make him look good, to come back to the office with something to show for his efforts at collection. Tough, task oriented, not unmanned by compassion. “I can, I probably have the change, just to make it exact—”

His left hand is in his pocket, his clipboard temporarily held between his knees, as the door closes on him again.

$162,730.

She can’t have sold the place. I would have seen buyers coming around, inspectors. It’s the holiday season, when people sometimes have extended visits with their families. So that could be it. But her mother is dead, and Autumn got the house, which does not suggest the involvement of siblings.

I am probably overreacting. But here’s the thing: with Autumn gone, I am squatting here. I have no lease, I have no identification. They could take me in just for finding me inside the house. It doesn’t seem like too much of a reach to think that something bad may have happened to her, and if that’s the case, I’m in an even worse position.

I have stopped turning my lights on at all. I am rationing cans of soup to myself; there is plenty more soup at the bodega, but I don’t want to go to the bodega if I can possibly help it. I don’t want to be seen leaving my room or entering it. The snow, when it falls, falls overnight and blankets everything. By day the ground records and freezes every footstep.

On New Year’s Eve, I hear rare noises on the block, even through my closed window: music, thumping, shouting—party noises. All of a sudden they go from muffled to loud. There are young men in the street. And then the sound of gunfire. Five shots in a row, evenly spaced out. I am already lying on the floor, but I writhe closer to the window, underneath it, for protection. A sixth shot, followed by laughter. Celebratory gunfire, midnight, Happy New Year gunfire. The door shuts and the music muffles again.

Guns are yet another fundamental subject about which the life I’ve led has taught me nothing. I’ve never owned one, never held one, never fired one. Am I a little curious? Sure. I think everyone is. I’ll bet it’s very satisfying. Shooting in the air, though, seems an odd impulse to me. All risk, no reward. If you’re going to do it, wouldn’t the satisfaction be in aiming at something?

The walls of my room are blank, except for the street map taped to the back of the door. No new marks on it for quite some time now. Winter in these parts is about stoicism, endurance.

Huge, empty birds’ nests, exposed now in the tops of the leafless trees.

First Monday after New Year’s, school is back in session. I hear the crunch of footsteps on the snow. I don’t risk looking out the window. If I can see them, they can see me, right? It’s so cold that the whole procession takes only about half as long as usual anyway. Much quieter too.

I keep the radio on at such low volume that I almost have to press my ear against it to hear.

What if the guy with the clipboard wasn’t who he said he was? What if he was some grifter who’d found a genius way to scare strangers into handing him cash? Lying on my side, facing the wall, I touch the register, and it’s still warm.

Second Monday of the new year. The problem with shrinking your life down to a handful of pieces is that when one of those pieces is taken away, the effect is disproportionate. Knowing that one’s thoughts or perceptions are irrational does not make one safe from them. It’s the quiet, the isolation, the fear, the winter, the light bouncing off the snow. I am having dumb ideas. I think that if I lived downstairs, in rooms with actual furniture, I might be able to pull off posing as this house’s owner if anyone came around. This starts to seem to me like a legitimate plan. I want to go downstairs and check for unlocked windows. The only thing that stops me is the likelihood of being seen.

I am supine on my futon, wide awake, eyes adjusted to the dark, when lights begin playing on my ceiling, filtered by the curtains. Red, blue, red: police car lights. I turn off the radio and wriggle over to the window like a figure in some movie about urban warfare, like a holed-up bank robber. There’s a single police car parked at the end of the driveway, a single police officer—I can just see the top of his hat—knocking on Autumn’s door. The surge of fear I feel almost causes me to pass out. Carefully, I slide back down so that my head is below the level of the sill.

After a minute, receding footsteps, and a few seconds later—the longest seconds of my life—I hear his engine rev and see the lights on my ceiling move and elongate and finally dissolve. I have to assume he didn’t imagine anyone might be up here. I start breathing again, a little dizzy from having stopped. I look critically around my room, which contains nothing incriminating apart from myself, and the money.

Fear is humiliating, and humiliation, in its aftermath, breeds anger. Yes, I am technically a fugitive, still. I’ve done things for which I could be arrested, and there are almost surely open warrants with my name on them. So what? What difference does it make to a cop or to anyone else if I am here—an angry man in a lonely room—instead of some other place? Whose interest is it in to put me back where I supposedly belong? Some would call it cowardly, pulling the old Irish exit on your own identity, on everyone and everything you knew. Well, I gave up a lot, materially speaking, in order to live by a principle. Call me a coward, then, call me whatever you want. I can’t hear you.