Inside the smoke, he turned with his cat, moving from the doorway back to the window, three long strides broken down into tiny, fractured increments of motion. Nude descending a staircase of absurdity—it wasn’t even his fault, and this is how it ends? He almost laughed. Whatever had happened had happened on a floor below, some accident that had nothing to do with him, but he would be part of the outcome.

It wasn’t so much that he’d never thought it would end this way as that he’d never thought it would end. His life was so absorbing—a series of long studio days pulling images out of the dark backgrounds. And he was moving away from that now, the backgrounds receding and the objects themselves seeming less iconic and barnacled and more…something else. He had wanted to see where he was going was all, had wanted to follow the work.

He was thirty-six, mid-stride metaphorically and literally. His first studio in New York had been on the property of Cohen Carpentry; the scent of sawdust and the industrious buzz of power tools had become linked with the other accoutrements of creativity—the bristling arrangements of brushes in their jars, the silver tubes of paint, the tin echo inside the turp can as he lifted it to pour. On a grant, he had gone to Europe and traveled for four months, drawn to the construction sites in each city he visited. Enormous crawling insects with men operating their pincers, thick sinewy cables like muscled arms, pulleys with long horselike faces, iron beams baled and lashed together like bundles of kindling, strands of rebar emerging from concrete, bent like giant curling hairs. Werner, lonely and ecstatic, made drawings of it all.

The drawings, back home, became paintings. He painted his way through the objects to what was beyond; he painted the camshaft of the ocean liner until it was like a word repeated so many times that it turned into something new and foreign.

Even watching all his catering colleagues growing stark, faltering with their trays, eyes getting larger as their flesh diminished, Werner had never realized that something unimaginable occurred when the end slithered up. It curled around your feet and entwined you; you became part of it instead of it becoming part of you.

Once, inside the laurel hedge, Werner had found an old Crush bottle hanging suspended, completely encased by tines. The hedge had sent feelers down inside it, twisting into the bottom and then twining back up through the neck. It was marvelous and beautiful and Werner tried to pull it free, but the hedge wouldn’t let go of its prize.