I had gone out walking, the day the book arrived. The mail truck rolled past me, and turned onto my road, right in front of me. Turning sharply on my heel, I backtracked.

I had been walking along a sea-side street with a wide, pale sidewalk, and some cliffs that looked over the sea. It was a beautiful day for walking, with a sky full of puffy white clouds and a comfortable breeze over the island. There were houses that blocked my view every so often, and I felt a little self-conscious looking over their lawns toward the sea, but the sky was deep cerulean, and the clouds seemed a heavy, almost dark white in front of them, not dark with raine, but dark with shadows.

I passed an old man mowing his lawn. He had combed white hair and a navy blue jacket, and bright yellow ear protection. Then I turned the corner onto my street. At the cul-de-sac was my apartment building and above it, the train tracks and the high end of the island. A train pulled in now, lurching to a halt.

The mail truck had rolled to a stop at a townhouse halfway to my mailbox. By the time I caught up, it had pulled away and stopped in front of my apartment.

The mailman was coming out when I got there. He held the door for me, and I smiled gratefully, out of breath. Sweeping my hair into a ponytail I slipped the key from my pocket, pressed it into the lock, turned it, and pulled the door open. Sure enough, a slim brown package had been shoved inside, next to a magazine, which was folded in half but not creased. Taking these things, I went upstairs, wrapped in the distinctive smell of the magazine.

I slowed my pace in the hallway, listening for the footsteps of my neighbor, in case my she was there, but as usually, the hallway was dead silent, like church. All I could hear was music from a passing car, and high above, a train pulling out of the station.

I wanted to read the book right away, but something held me back. I set it carefully on the kitchen table on top of the magazine.

I hung up my coat in the hall, untied my shoes and set them by the door. Then I walked to my window and looked outside. It was filled with sunshine, like a fish tank is filled with water. The island bustled below, and overhead, the thunder of trains running in the clouds..

I felt that I was about to learn something significant, and that if I were not in the right frame of mind, I might not receive it correctly. If that occurred, I would be left with a useless jumble of facts. I imagined I could string them together, but there was no guarantee that it would have the same effect, even if I got them in the right order. If my intuition could be trusted, I thought, then the information I was about to receive must be more than a list of facts. It wasn’t merely a list of facts, it was also a sensation and a feeling, or a sense, that would be missing even if I did put the pieces together. Some things cannot be received even by understanding them. They must be received through more careful and elusive means, though I couldn’t have said what.

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My mind was filled with a mess of things. The briskness of the walk, my rush to find the packages. I pulled the shade. In the shade of my apartment, I determined that a ritual would help prepare me for the information I was about to receive. With the shades closed, the apartment had an airy feel, with light filtering through the blinds, across the pinewood floors, and a cluster of long, thin shadows here and there, slanting across the floor and the walls.

I went to the closet and opened it. Inside was dust and a lot of cardboard boxes. There on the top shelf sat a small metal toolbox, which I lifted down. Inside, I found a mess of drill-bits, screw drivers, allen-wrenches, and a box cutter. At the bottom there was also a small electric saw. I pulled the box-cutter and a screwdriver from the box. The box cutter had no blade, so I used the screwdriver to remove the screw that held together the two-part body of the box-cutter, and pulled a blade from the small storage compartment inside—a thin, trapezoidal piece of metal with blades on either side. Fitting it into the blade-encasement at the front of the knife, I screwed the halves back together. I performed these motions slowly and carefully. I had a scar on my right hand from my childhood, when I had cut myself with a similar knife when I lost my grip.

Now, I took the utility knife and sliced the tape on the package. Then I eased the paper wrappings away. Inside was a small paperback, sandwiched between bubble wrap. Without touching the book, I lifted it with the bubble wrap and set it on the table.

Then I washed my hands in the kitchen sink, dried them thoroughly, and returned to the table. Now I took the book in my hands. I shouldn’t put so much pressure on you, I thought. Maybe you’re just an unusual biography, or a think-piece. But something tells me you contain a kind of forbidden knowledge. It was odd to think that a used book might contain something like that. Someone tried to erase this book, the thought flashed through my mind like a shudder, like a feeling that someone is watching. No shadowy figures appeared at the window, but I remained ill at ease. Someone did try to erase this book.

I had the book for a few weeks after that. On weekends, I sometimes felt the desire to read it, but reading it felt equivalent to a departure, and did not feel prepared.

Around the island, the seasons were changing. The rainy season had begun, and flash floods swept down the mountainside and over the island. A thin layer of mud filled the streets and caked the sidewalks. On sunny days it baked into a pleasant crunchy coating on the roads, like peeling paint, and the street sweepers swept up great clouds of brown dust trying to remove it before the next cloudburst.

With winter coming on, the train stations were bustling with cleaning crews, removing any last debris from near the tracks to prevent it from sweeping over them come spring, when the snowmelt on the mountains could wash over the train tracks. The autumn wind, which had been warm for a time, had turned frigid, and people took out their winter coats and scarves, and wore them loosely, and unzipped, but to protect against the wind.

And all the while, a feeling of doubt settled over me. These changes, which the island seemed to undergo annually, were new to me, and ominous, and I still knew very few people. I had no friends to comfort, or to comfort me. I spent my days in the library, writing, but I found my stories laced with melancholy.

So at last I read the book.