“That’s okay,” the nurse said automatically.

She prepared a morphine shot for him and as she gave it, two gowned and masked figures were ushered in to stand alongside his bed. They were wearing paper hats and booties. Werner recognized JM’s eyes and then Peter’s. He wept again, helplessly, like he was seeing people from his distant past.

“Werner,” they said through their masks, touching him on the legs.

They had found the wallet, the money, and the glasses and taken two bottles of good champagne from his refrigerator. Nothing else was salvageable.

They were so sorry.

He closed his eyes and paddled away on his morphine raft. He watched himself throwing a series of baseballs through a window, making a bigger and bigger hole, then saw himself throwing his cat through it, a gentle, underhand toss. He saw Two plummeting off a bridge in a cartoon landscape, and he saw himself reaching down with a long, long arm to neatly catch her, a foot above the water, on a waiter’s tray.

He roused himself to talk to JM and Peter. “I canceled my job for Glorious,” he told them. “But I’m supposed to work for Sarah too. I think I can do it.”

Their eyebrows rose.

The nurse left her station then to escort the visitors out, and Werner reclined into the cartoon landscape, a giant resting his back against a sand-colored butte. He reached out and grasped the cool railing. Giants were the moves he liked best back when he flew; they were preparation, momentum gathering for what would happen when he let go of the bar. He did his impeccable mount: swing forward straight-bodied, get a little tap, arch, pike, then up into a handstand. Now he was balanced over the railing of the bedrock bridge, high above Fall Creek.

“Fucking Doc,” the charred man cried out.

The fall from the trestle all those years ago had been long enough for him to entertain regrets, although Werner had gone in just right—perpendicular, arms at his sides in tight fists, chin down. The impact was an explosion from below, like being hit with a plank on the soles of his feet and socked in the jaw at the same time. He plunged down and down, like a bullet shot into the water, the force of it lifting his arms. In the last moment of his descent, before he began to rise naturally and then to kick, Werner had looked up to see a pale green pillar of light leading to the surface.

When he woke, things were different. The female nurse had been replaced by a male one, and the swearing man by an intubated patient with a sighing ventilator. In the bed next to Werner’s was a small white figure, a toddler covered in gauze. Her face was turned in his direction, but her eyes were closed.