“Building’s on fire! Call the fire department!” he yelled, leaning out the window.

Straight across was his building’s twin, silent and dark. Off to the left, in back of the buildings, was a vacant lot surrounded by cyclone fencing. Beyond that was Ninety-Sixth Street. Sirens but no fire trucks. Below him, flames were shooting out of the third-floor windows and curling around the edge of the building.

He lost his fear. He was completely in the moment, experiencing instead of anticipating. Time stretched like rubber. Fascinated, he wandered around inside each moment as though it were a cavernous room.

Summer job at a retread factory, endless deafening days in which the hours were earned slowly through an accumulation of stiff, stinking cords of rubber to be stamped and stacked and helpless, imaginary encounters with every girl in his high-school class. Ghost girls who joined him at his locker first thing and followed him out onto the floor. He had to brush past them in order to do his work; interference—one wrong move and your finger, hand, arm is gone. The clock would hop its minutes interminably and then suddenly everyone was poised, Werner and his colleagues, men in big gloves who had been out of high school for thirty years. When the buzzer went off, they were like a herd of steers aiming for a hole in the fence.

Get out while you can, they told him.

Sound clattered back into his head and he began to hear people screaming again, this time from the fire escapes on the other side of the building. Black smoke was billowing from the windows below. The fire was working its way up, floor by floor, the wind moving the smoke to the south, where the fire escapes were. His neighbors kept screaming, many voices, desperate and trapped. Werner was sure they were dying.

Beyond the end of the building and across the vacant lot, he saw a dozen or so people at the bus stop on Ninety-Sixth standing against the cyclone fencing and staring up at the building like people at a bonfire, their faces lit by flames.

He was still experiencing perfect clarity, assessing everything he could see in a clinical manner, sweeping his gaze from the people watching to the flames below him and the strands of black smoke funneling out the windows.