The dream eye begins to pick out details: how his scuffed wing-tip turned on the sill, his windbreaker flag-snapped in the breeze generated by his fall. When he bounces the blue nylon catches the spangles of glass and throws them up like confetti. The details are vivid. His face is serene until it hits the pavement and in the split second of the bounce it loses all shape, becomes, for a moment, a cartoon face, or like a magician’s sagging cane; the structure underneath going from rigid to elastic as the head is crushed. The skin does not break.

After a while the dreamers notice the coffee cup on the desk next to the window, how his step from the sill draws the eyes to the cup in the foreground so that they can read the cheery office motto: A job done right! The dreamers reflect on how pretty the blue enamel is, almost cobalt. A color they haven’t thought of since an art-survey course in college, how the cobalt is mirrored in the glass and then, poof! Gone, set against the sky, which doesn’t come close to matching the cheap mug in beauty or intensity. They collect these details—half-wave, the whipping windbreaker, collapsing head, the glass, the cobalt mug—and hold them together like a bouquet as the dream repeats, adding the slate of the concrete and off to the top of the frame, the pink contrail of a jet.

There is too much to hold, but the dream repeats. Like it or not, the man winks. You’re sure of it. He steps, brown wing-tip on the gray carpet, his hand in a half-wave that draws your eyes to the cobalt coffee mug, and when you look back his head is disappearing, but you swear, as it dips below the windowsill, you swear that he winks at you.

This is doubly selfish, but there is no helping it. It is unfair for him to jump to his death in front of you and then he waves and winks, and the colors are so beautiful, but you can’t ask him whether or not he really winked, and who placed the mug there. He is dead now, and you can’t ask him.

It repeats. You know you could have turned away earlier, that you needn’t have watched and now the price is being paid—you are chained to the dream and cannot stop it.