In this way, as people ate away their federally allotted fifteen-minute break and returned to work, and then motored home, the tragedy became the artist’s fault. People can be so selfish, you know? Maybe a woman has gotten off work, and then made her way home and is standing in her kitchen, careful not to touch anything or bump against the cupboards because she is still in her business suit. Her husband returns and shucks his Bass shoes at the door. People can be so selfish. She shakes her head, perhaps. She certainly didn’t want to see it. Her husband has already heard the news on the radio during the drive home.

This tsking propriety can be heard all over the city—how times have changed, how people have no consideration, do not take other people’s feelings into account anymore.

Just goes to show. As children are dropped unceremoniously at day care and shipped north to camps in the summer, while family life sits splay-legged on the point of the decade, the man, his potential reasons and flawed rationale forgotten, steps into thin air and falls at their feet.

Even so, when they go to bed, after the lights are out and the children are asleep, the parents dream their own dreams. They sleep as a remedy for the future, because all they can be sure of is that they will be tired, that much is certain. Living has become a demand, something that uses up time they could spend on something else. Eventually they go to sleep and dream.

Over and over again, they see the man’s free fall. It is visually persuasive but predictable. They see the body spinning, turning gently through the atmosphere. They see the concrete below him littered with fragments of safety glass. The body jumps off the ground at impact. The body bounces, and just when it will come to rest—a bag of blood and viscera and unknown reasons—the dream repeats. The body walks out the empty window and spins for a long eleven seconds … it hits the ground and bounces and the dream begins again at the twenty-third floor. Over and over again. This time they think maybe he waved at them. Or was it simply a reflex as he stepped out into nothing? An unconscious jerk of his hand as the body tumbled? Don’t worry, here we have all night.