Feet up, Werner dialed Eugene, Oregon, and had a nice conversation with his mother. He liked to call home late, when they were just getting to the end of their West Coast day and he was still energized, sitting in his skivvies in the over-hot apartment. The walls were bumpy and pocked, thick plaster reinforced with horsehair, but he had whitewashed them and hired someone to refinish the wood floors. They were hay-colored and gleamed in the lamplight. His paintings hung here and there, dark backgrounds with shapes emerging out of them—construction machinery, the camshaft of an ocean liner, simple tools, almost but not quite abstract.

When Werner finally slept that night, it was like sinking slowly through water, fathom by fathom, to the ocean floor. He might have been dreaming when the wiring finally ignited, carrying fire upward through the building. He thought he could feel things swirling in the darkness, but when he tried to reach for them, the weight of the water pressed him to the bed.

Sometime between four and five a.m., the tenants in 2C heard a heavy pounding noise in the ceiling, which then collapsed. Their upstairs neighbors in 3C heard the same sound and then their ceiling collapsed as well; they made it to the fire escape and began screaming. The 2C tenants left through the stairwell with their children, although the wife became paralyzed with confusion and fear and the husband had to drag her. In the panic they left their door open.

The fire engulfed 2C and billowed out into the hallway. Werner woke to the sound of screaming. He was next to an open window on a loft bed six feet off the floor. He sat up and pulled the string to the light, a bare bulb in the ceiling. Rectangular shapes jumped at him in the glare—wardrobe, doorway, rug. The screams were of a type Werner hadn’t heard before.

His brain spun like a tire that wouldn’t catch: the familiar terrain of his bedroom, the heavy scent of smoke drifting through the petals of the window fan, his own bent knees draped in a sheet.

He needed to get dressed and get to the street, help whoever was in trouble. He grabbed for his clothes but couldn’t find the first thing he needed, underwear. He turned, and then turned back. He could see them in his memory—stacks of brightly colored boxers as well as the other kind, folded neatly on a shelf—but there was something blocking him, an invisible membrane between Werner and the next step. He stood in front of the tall, impenetrable wardrobe. He had been awake for approximately fifteen seconds. The screams were loud and prolonged, people coming unhinged.

Without his underpants he couldn’t think.