“When can I get sewn up and leave?” Werner asked him.

“We’re sending you to intensive care,” the doctor informed him. “Smoke inhalation can lead to severe pulmonary edema.” He gave this time to sink in before he continued. “Very dangerous if that happens. The alveoli begin to fill up with fluid and you stop breathing.”

Werner felt like swooning. Drowned by your own body. He had held Two like a vessel out the window. The whole thing seemed now like a succession of moments. In that moment, and the moment before, the smoke had been curling sideways around the building, a bolt of black cloth unwinding. Then it stopped and there was a moment of emptiness before the black current was swept upward, and he realized it wasn’t like cloth at all; it was dark and viscid, like used motor oil, and they weren’t breathing it, they were drinking it.

Those fucking people rescuing their TVs. He hadn’t even saved his cat.

The dark lake that he thought was all around him was now seeping inside, making his lungs swell like wineskins.

“I just want to be sewn up,” Werner said.

“Yeah, I don’t know why you haven’t been,” the doctor replied before disappearing.

He lay there some more, congealing.

The curtain rolled open a few inches and a janitor took a look at him, left, and then returned with JM, who was unprepared for what she found, the bloody mess on the gurney. She had been told only that she needed to come pick him up. Werner broke down at the sight of her. She was wearing blue jeans and a wool coat, her blond hair stuck inside her scarf, which she unwound without taking her eyes from Werner. Her face, her lovely off-kilter mouth. Like the brass key, JM had somehow made the leap with him to this new world. He put one hand over his eyes, crying.

“Two is dead, I dropped Two.”

“Werner,” JM said, touching him. “What do you want me to do?”

“You have to find her,” he said. “Get somebody to go around back with you, under my window.” He wanted her to find other things as well—his glasses, his wallet, five hundred dollars in a bureau drawer.

JM sat and spoke quietly to him for a while and then stood up, rewinding her scarf around her neck, this time lifting her hair free of it before leaning over him again. She would come back; she would try to bring his friend Peter with her. He felt the soft knot of cashmere against his chest and then she was gone and someone else materialized, another apparition. A Filipina woman in pink scrubs, blurry and beautiful, with coral nail polish as flawless as the finish on a new car.

“You haven’t been sewn up,” she informed him, lifting the gauze from his wounds. “Let’s do that.”

His muscle was exposed, the ragged opening leading down to it coagulated and angry. “And you are?” he asked her.