He suddenly saw himself letting go, just stepping through the stiff green hedge into the cool rectangular space, taking a few deep breaths, and then sleeping. He only wanted to rest. Sometimes a little brown bird would poke its way in and hop among the branches. If the leaves fluttered, Werner would rest the loppers for a moment, shift his weight on the ladder, then begin again.

He had an image now of himself as they would find him, arm around the cat, and was vaguely aware that people would be upset, although right then he couldn’t have said who. The best he could conjure was a blurred impression, pointillist stabs of color that stood for sisters; parents; his girlfriend, JM; friends he loved. Peter. Jeff. Chris, his old roommate, who used to sit Two on his lap, get her very relaxed and purring, then try to put her head in his mouth. She had thick whiskers, like barbed wire. Once while Werner was asleep, she had set a live mouse on his naked belly and he woke to feel it running up his torso and around his neck. They had been together for nine years now.

If he couldn’t save himself, maybe he could help her. Holding the cat like a vessel in front of him, he put her through the open window and out into the air so she could breathe. It was like being on drugs, the whole world surrounding him like a tidal pool, everything taking on equal significance and richness: the color of the skin on his hand, the eddies of refracted light, the amplified sound of sirens. Please, he thought. If we can just hang on, the fire department will break in and save us.

Holding Two, both their heads out the window, he looked down and saw that the fire had reached the fourth floor; the smoke was thicker now, less porous. There would be no rescue.

The wind stopped. Holding Two, Werner suddenly couldn’t see her. The wind had shifted and, like a fountain, the smoke came rushing upward, his open window acting like a funnel, sucking the black cloud inside.

Two began to struggle desperately. Werner glanced back, and the bedpost, a foot and a half away, was gone. The smoke looked like oily Jell-O, granular, particles whirling all around him.

There was no oxygen between the particles now, no way to negotiate anything out of it. The opposite, in fact; if air equaled life, then non-air equaled death, but this was a step beyond—it was non-air with poison.

In the stopped, strangled moment that followed, another thought burst loose and hung there, pale inside the black swirling column.

He would have to jump.