THE NEXT MORNING, Saturday, half-awake, I hear noises from the baseboard heat register beside my head. Tapping, creaking; no voices. I put my ear to the metal. There is somebody down there.

Carefully, I stand and walk to the window. Footsteps in the snow, from the sidewalk to the front door of the house. They could be anyone’s.

No one enters or leaves through the front door all morning, then all afternoon. It has to be her, I’m thinking by the time the shadow of the house itself has reached the sidewalk. Who else could it be? Still, the risk to myself is hard to discount. I’m Bertha Rochester up here. Night falls, outside my room and inside it, and the sounds from downstairs cease.

Noon. Slowly, quietly, I lift up my futon and take twelve hundred dollars out of the envelope. Downstairs, I knock gently on the front door and then take two steps backward into the snow.

She looks terrible. Her body thinner, her face fatter. She’s wearing leggings and a bulky old sweater. The cold air swirls around us as we stand on opposite sides of her threshold. On her wrist is a paper bracelet.

“Not now, okay?” she says. “Later.”

“I have the rent for you,” I say.

“What? Oh Jesus,” she says. “Come in.”

And just like that I am in her home, the door shut behind me. She takes a step backward. A silence ensues, and to break it I reach into my pocket and pull out the twelve hundred dollars. “The next six months,” I say.

“Oh sweet Jesus,” she says in a strange, emotional voice, and she takes it from me, not roughly but gently, as if it might crumble into dust. I can’t get a good look at the bracelet, but it seems like it might not necessarily be a hospital bracelet; it could also be from a concert or a festival or a club. It’s yellow.

Autumn looks up and seems surprised that I am still there. “Well, listen, thanks,” she says and moves toward me—for a moment I think she is going to embrace me—but she is really just taking the shortest path possible, which is more or less through me, toward the door. The room we are in is a sort of foyer or maybe an enclosed porch; there are two cushioned chairs made of bamboo and a coat rack and a mirror. Through the open interior door is her kitchen. I don’t want to leave. I want to ask her where she’s been, why she put me in such danger, whether such a thing can or will happen again. What I say instead, to postpone my departure, is: “The cops were here.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. “So?” is her answer. “So the fuck what? Is that your business? Maybe you’re a cop yourself. That would explain a fucking lot actually.”

“I’m not a cop,” I say, not for the first time. On the kitchen counter I can see a pile of mail and a big, two-liter soda bottle with the label peeled off.

“Listen,” she says, “I have things to do, so maybe just get back to minding your own fucking business,” and just like that I am outside in the snow again, staring at her door. Strangely relieved, though, or maybe reassured is the word. For a minute there she seemed like her old self.

Next morning is sunny, and the children passing by on their way to school are mostly free of hats and hoods. Their heads are like closed buds, like harbingers of spring. But Abiha is not there, nor is her companion.

In the winter a kind of gray, all-encompassing cloud cover comes down some days like a pot lid, diffusing the light. Nothing casts a shadow.

On the streetlight pole outside the bodega where I buy soup and beer, there is a handwritten sign saying, Abolish ICE. Underneath it, in a different hand: And SNOW.

The local radio is suddenly dominated by one story: a house fire on the west side in which two people died, an adult and a child. There are fires all the time—particularly in the poorer sections of the city, where buildings aren’t up to code and tenants are living off the books. (Situations like mine, in other words.) But there is a twist here, which is that the fire was set. The occupants were a Yemeni family, plus some other relatives or friends, many more, in total, than anyone knew were living there. One voice on the radio says it was the result of some kind of family dispute. Another says it was the landlord, who hadn’t collected rent from the tenants in months and wanted the insurance on the property instead (though if a landlord—or anyone else—were to hire an experienced arsonist, that person would have done a less conspicuous job than this arsonist apparently did). But the real flashpoint is the suggestion that neighbors did it, white neighbors, that it was a hate crime. This is the theory with the most adherents, even though or perhaps because there is no direct evidence to support it.

The address of the destroyed house is not Abiha’s address.

I take a walk to the site itself, nineteen blocks away. (I’m pleased to realize that I know the route there without having to consult the street map on the back of my door.) I intend only to stand across the street and look at whatever’s there until it stops being “news” to me. But when I get there I am surprised to see four or five other people who have apparently come to do the exact same thing.

There is no house, only a pile of ash and charred timbers spilling out of a small concrete foundation like a dead volcano. A miniature bulldozer sits nearby. The fire didn’t do all this; I saw in the paper that the city razed what was left of the structure because it was deemed so unstable as to be a danger to the houses on either side, both of which are abandoned it seems, with plywood nailed over the windows. There’s no more smoke, but the smell of wet ash is still everywhere.

The house is probably too far away from Wysocki Middle School for the dead child to have been a student there. I don’t know why that matters to me, but it does. But it shouldn’t. A girl died in her bedroom in a fire. How is that any more real if it happens to touch your own experience in some thirdhand way? Ego is all that is.

I feel uneasy, and when I turn my head I see that all four of the others on the sidewalk—one a couple, the other two solo—are staring at me. It’s true that I don’t resemble them. I’m not sure what they want from me. After a few uncomfortable moments I settle on shaking my head sorrowfully. It is deliberate and fake, even though I do feel sorrow.

After a brief whispered discussion between the couple, one of them breaks off and walks toward me. She is small and white, much younger than me, with a sort of Frida Kahlo unibrow that makes her gaze seem accusatory. She hands me a piece of paper and walks away without a word. Something about her clandestine manner makes me not unfold it until I’m out of her sight, heading back home. It’s nothing but a date, a time, and an address. Above that is the familiar all-caps insistence SILENCE = VIOLENCE, and below it is a kind of stylized logo, some kind of clip art off the internet, that just says: FIGHT.

Fight whom, though? Fight what? Fight misfortune and horror? Fight the fact that the poor will always suffer disproportionately, that there will always be hatred and selfishness and lack of compassion? That there will always be poor people? I’ve got news for you, Frida Kahlo, you might as well declare war against yourself, because all those things you hate? They’re in you. This is what it means to be human: to survive is to act selfishly, to participate in oppression, to consume more than your share in order to save yourself, to commit crimes. You can say, “Oh no, not me, I’m different,” but what good does that do anyone, even if in your case it turns out to be true? The idea that humanity can somehow triumph over what’s most awful about itself is narcissism. We’re the poison, we’re the virus, we’re the fire, and the only way to stop it is to let it run its course.

Anyway, I take a pass on this meeting, or whatever it is.

It’s about ten degrees hotter in my room than it was a week or two ago. She must be cranking that thermostat. I’d say she was doing it just to make me uncomfortable, but I remember how she’s looked the last couple of times I’ve seen her—like she’s freezing—and I know she’s not giving me a thought at all. I open the window maybe half an inch and hope that the bitter chill outside and the sauna inside will make for equilibrium somehow.

Last month, if you include the rent I prepaid, I spent four hundred and thirty dollars. I guess that’s something to be proud of, that I have grown able to get by on so little. Anyway, I sit down and redo the math. It’s difficult because it involves calculating how much longer I think I’m going to live. But even the most selfish estimate leaves me, in lieu of a serious lifestyle upgrade, with more than I’ll require.

After dinner, too early to go to bed, two beers in, thinking, thinking, and I hear someone on the steps leading up to my door. It is not possible for anyone to sneak up on me when I’m at home. In my camp chair, facing the window and so with my back to the door, I stop breathing, on full alert. The knock, when it comes, is so soft that I know it must be someone other than Autumn. But it is her.

“I was thinking about something,” she says. She’s wearing one of those oversize, full-length down coats, despite which she is shivering. I invite her in, and she ignores me.

“I’m undercharging you to live here,” she says. “I mean, it’s obvious. You’re paying me six months at a time, like it’s nothing. And so you ambushed me with the cash in hand and I took it, but we really should have renegotiated. You’re going to have to pay more.”

Her eyes are red, her skin has broken out underneath a thick layer of makeup. She looks bloated, puffy, and it’s not just the coat. She is trying to fire up her usual intimidating expression, but it wavers, and something else is flickering underneath it.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “No. You can’t just come up here and extort money from me when you need it. A deal’s a deal.”

“Well, you gotta go then,” she says.

“Cool,” I say. “Give me back my twelve hundred dollars.”

Of course it’s gone. I want to know where, though. Something about her refusal to be grateful for it makes me feel entitled to know. I’m not averse to helping, in some way. And what does she imagine happened to her electric bill?

“I’m paid up through July first,” I say. “You want to raise my rent at that point, you’re entitled, just as I’m entitled to go somewhere else if the rent is too high. We don’t have a lease, but we have an understanding . . . Listen, you look like you need to sit down. You won’t come in?”

Without a word she turns and walks back down the stairs, her hand on the railing the whole way.

I want to have pity for her, I do, but what is pity really? It’s invasive; it’s vain and presumptuous. It’s not what she wants. And she’s certainly not offering me any pity in return. She put me at risk. Now she’s in trouble, and she could have asked me for help but she tried to bully me out of it instead. It’s all about domination to her.

I didn’t have to advance her all that money. I did it because it’s in my interest to keep her somewhat stable, yes, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t generous as well. It had an element of generosity to it.

And who ever said we needed to understand each other anyway? You know who she is, what she’s about, what she believes. I mean, you know who she voted for.

$160,809. I bought a lighter comforter.