The fire crew would have to come from behind the building, Werner realized, in order to climb up and save him; they’d have to carry their ladder through the vacant lot, over the cyclone fences, and into the dark space between the two buildings. Growing up, Werner had worked his way around his family’s property on a tall stepladder each summer, moving it a few feet at a time as he trimmed the eight-foot hedge that ran along the border. From a distance, the hedge was squared off and stylized, like the neat shrubbery in a Grant Wood painting, but up close it was a dense chaotic bramble of bent twigs and thick, waxy leaves. Bay laurel. He knew its shades of green intimately. Once, far away from home, Werner dreamed of the bay-laurel hedge, of stepping inside and finding it hollow, a cool rectangular box that he could lie down in.

Firemen weren’t going to save him. They didn’t even save cats anymore.

His cat! He turned to shout her name into the apartment.

He couldn’t believe what was behind him—the smoke was everywhere, dark and billowing. He shouted into it and then listened. After a moment, coming from somewhere far away, he heard a meow. He kept calling, and the meowing got closer and closer until finally Two was at the open bedroom door. Werner took a breath and ducked back to snatch her up. She struggled, her fur matted and sticky with soot, so he held her in front of him under the arms like you would a toddler. She yowled, raspy from swallowing smoke.

It was like trying to breathe through flannel. Werner realized he was going to die.

The dark back seat of a car in Iowa City, returning to campus from a gymnastics meet junior year. Werner and Nate, the guy who would later nearly lose his hand, folded into the back seat, Clayton the all-around guy driving, somebody else shotgun, all of them high on exhaustion and victory. Werner had a simple but impeccable high-bar mount—vertical jump, grab the bar, swing forward, arch, and then pike in to create the momentum that would shoot the legs up to a handstand. After that, the delirious, controlled fall into giant circles, the body as fully extended as it would go.

In the middle of campus, coming over a rise, they saw it just as they hit it: black ice on the downslope of a steep hill; the car in front of them skated sideways as their car hit the ice and shot forward like a bullet. Slowly revolving, the sideways car turned and headed back toward them broadside, gaining velocity, its blue flank growing larger and larger. It felt like five weeks, the time between the two cars starting to skid and the jarring impact.

That’s what time felt like now, elongated and dreamlike, the outcome sliding toward him out of the cold night.