He looked down at his left shoulder where there were three cuts, large and startling, their pink interiors visible. His right shoulder—swooningly close—had a catastrophic wound, dark red and complicated, a fissure down into his body revealing something sinewy and glistening. He could see his own muscle, the broad deltoids that a man wears fitted over his shoulders like a cape. Werner began to cry.

He never could hold her if she didn’t want to be held.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said. A wave of grief rose over him, pushing him forward into something new and unfamiliar. Failure, a bottomless black lake with something moving inside it.

He began crying so hard it sounded like a fit of choking.

The EMT guys were more or less unmoved by this. They kept sneaking assessing looks at his face as they put gauze over his wounds.

“All right,” Werner said, pulling himself together, trying to sit up. The backs of his hands were like the hands of someone who has been murdered and left lying in his own blood. “You have to tell me what happened to my face,” he said.

The men handed him a mirror so he could see what they were looking at—there were no cuts, his face was intact, but it was so white it seemed like an emergency in itself, with black rings of soot circling his nostrils and mouth. He looked like one of those spectral creatures in a Japanese horror movie, the subliminal ones shown only in flashes.

Smoke inhalation, possibility of charred lungs.

The EMTs had their walkie-talkies going, communicating with the hospital’s emergency department. Amid the clatter and static, the cop returned and asked if Werner wanted him to call anyone.

“Would you call my girlfriend?” he asked. “Tell her where they’re taking me.”

The cop took down the number as Werner was strapped onto the gurney, asked if the girlfriend should bring anything.

Werner tried to think. “Maybe she could bring me a blanket,” he said.

They conducted the ambulance through the New York streets, siren blaring. He had always wondered what this felt like. His mother didn’t know where he was, none of the people he loved knew where he was right now, didn’t have any idea that Werner had been forced to jump out of his life and into whatever this was.

He sobbed for a moment inside his oxygen mask. The EMT reached over and adjusted it. Calmed, Werner shut his eyes. These gondolier guys were taking care of his physical self, placing their poles in the deep canal and pulling him along. He could relax, gliding forward over black water, the things that mattered falling like coins from his pockets.

He started crying again.

The ER at 5:00 a.m. was completely deserted. A ringing, fluorescent silence, then eight people crowded around to look at Werner. Poking, prodding, asking what happened.

The EMT told them that Werner had jumped out of a burning building into another building, one that wasn’t on fire, thereby saving his own life. This caused a stir.