He could see two options. One was taking a T-shirt, wetting it, draping it over his face, then leaving the apartment and making a run for the roof. The other was crossing the living room to the fire escape and joining his neighbors in their cauldron of despair. The stairwell to the roof wasn’t navigable; he’d already glimpsed it when he opened his door. The living room was dense with smoke; if he did make it across, there was no way he’d get the window gate unlocked. It was new, put in when Werner was out of town, crisscrossed bars with a key the super had placed somewhere along the ledge above.

He was trapped, nearsighted and naked in a burning building. He reached behind, groping, and found the robe that always hung from the loft bed. He put it on without pulling his head back into the room. He leaned farther out.

Werner had said just that night to his friend James that he was sick of being a caterer and wasn’t going to do it anymore. He was thinking of taking a long-ago professor’s advice and becoming a fireman, a good job for an artist. Not that his fellow caterers weren’t artists too—painters, opera singers, designers—but this was 1991; AIDS and Reagan had happened and Werner hadn’t gotten out of the business when everyone else did. No matter how depressing it got, his coworkers growing gaunt and dying, the economy surging and plummeting, he just hung in there.

He had seen a man nearly lose a hand once, not at the retread factory but later, in college during a gymnastics meet, a friend whose leather grip had somehow caught in the apparatus when he went up and over the bar. His wrist twisted as he finished the revolution, and he hung there until they could climb up and unbuckle the glove. They laid him on the floor, and the hand looked so strange lying against the blue of the mat, the wrist bones jutting straight up, white and exposed, that someone put a Dixie cup over it.