A half an hour later they flattened him out and trundled him along a series of tiled passageways. The hospital seemed both futuristic and worn out, like an old starship. Above him were fluorescent bulbs behind ribbed plastic panels. Wafers of light, one after the other, until he gave up and turned his head to the side. A man he couldn’t see was steering the gurney expertly on its rubber treads, bumping it through doorways and, once, giving it a generous push and letting it glide alone down a quiet corridor, past a nurses’ station where an African-American woman looked at Werner without curiosity.

It didn’t seem utterly impossible that he had died but couldn’t tell, that no one here could, that they were all dead too, guiding gurneys, giving shots, whispering along in blood-spattered clogs. His lungs felt full and frightening in his chest, like cow udders.

They got him off the gurney and situated in a bed with a stainless-steel trough around the edge. He tried to sit up and someone pushed him back down.

“I’m going to be your doctor,” someone else said, a jovial Italian man surrounded by others. They all stared down at Werner as brown liquid was poured on his shoulders. It was cold and pooled up in the trough. The doctor had a big horse needle, curved. He slung his necktie over his shoulder and began sewing Werner’s deepest cuts from the inside out.

He heard someone in the group telling his story, the jump from one building to another, and a new embellishment, compliments of the lab: his carbon monoxide levels had been so high that in another ten seconds, he probably couldn’t have done it, saved himself.

I didn’t save myself, he thought. It was random.

You could spend your whole life swinging from rings and high bars, doing racing dives at seven a.m. into cold pools, but if the smoke happened to rise in a particular way, blocking the view of the window across from you, or if that window had a tall bureau in front of it instead of a bed, then your athletic ability was nothing more than an anecdote to be mentioned at your funeral.

This realization was new to Werner, like the sense of failure had been. It was a shameful, contaminating knowledge, jabbing him in the ribs like the finger of God. Werner felt a prodding, something being tugged upward and then released. It had been more than a half an hour since the lidocaine.

“I’m starting to feel what you’re doing,” he told the doctor. “I can feel my shoulders.” He was becoming agitated and hallucinatory; he could feel God plucking at the slippery muscle. Where were the people he knew? JM and the others. He was supposed to work that night for Glorious Foods, and it was all taking too long.