The air is hot and the breeze does little to cool me off underneath my leather jacket, but the heat isn’t the only reason I’m sweating.

AT A CIRCLE K on Northside, I buy a Diet Coke and a burner phone and text Caesar from the parking lot. I’m halfway done with my Diet Coke when he sends me back an address on Aaron Street. All I could find, he texts.

Insert kissy-face emoji here, I text back, then slide the phone into my jacket pocket and mount my bike.

Atlanta is constantly rebuilding itself. During the Civil War, whatever parts of Atlanta the retreating Confederates didn’t destroy, General Sherman put to the torch. Ever since, contractors have made a good living in this city, whose Latin motto, “Resurgens,” means “rising again.” And now that ceaseless cycle of rebuilding has reached the Bluff. For every ugly or abandoned house, there is an empty lot or brand-new construction. Same thing happened in my uncle’s neighborhood, Grant Park, east of the city. Urban renewal with a vengeance.

Lipstick on a pig, as Uncle Gavin would say.

When I was a teenager, in an early iteration of Self-Destructive Suzie, I pissed off a would-be thug named Luco and basically dared him to do something about it, in front of his posse. He responded by dragging my ass to the Bluff and doing bad things to me. I don’t dwell on it. But to me the Bluff is cursed, a place of nightmares. The very soil is rotten. The city has poured millions of dollars into the Bluff and surrounding neighborhoods in an effort to revitalize the area. But I’d be perfectly fucking fine if the entire place was bulldozed and buried under asphalt and concrete.

Aaron Street is a microcosm of Atlanta—out of a dozen lots, three are empty, three have houses so new they look like freshly painted toys, one has an empty shell only a crack dealer would find inviting, and the rest have small but intact houses, their yards neat and clean of trash. The Baptist church at one end of the street and the heavily fortified liquor store at the other are the final, ironic touch.

The address Caesar sent me is a bungalow with white siding and a screened-in porch on one side like a box. There’s a light on over the front door, moths droning around it in circles. I park my bike on the street and stuff my helmet into the cargo compartment, then take a deep breath to settle myself before I walk up the concrete path to the front door. I imagine men behind the windows of the white house, crouched in the shadows, waiting. My heart is beating at a fast clip, more in anticipation than fear. But I know that at least some of the men who are now watching me are not inside the house.