Mike hears an ambulance rushing behind him and covers his face as it speeds by to avoid the debris flying off its roof. A cell phone lands at Mike’s feet and he picks it up. Every piece of debris is specific. The phone is on and miraculously undamaged. Twenty-two missed calls, it reads. Mike scrolls through the phone book: Alee, Cindy, Dad, Harley, Jesse, John, Kit, Lucy, O’Neil, Mom, Oliver, Orla, Steve, Trina. Mike thinks about calling “Mom” or “Dad” and telling them what he found but he can’t do it. He imagines a mother sitting in front of her television, calling her child’s phone every fifteen minutes. She has made a pact with herself not to call more than that, because she doesn’t want to tie up the networks for the emergency services and her baby was always bad about answering the phone anyway. She’s OK.

Suddenly, the phone rings in his hand, startling him. He puts it on top of a mailbox and keeps walking, thinking again what it must have been like in the buildings. That young man in his cubicle, looking out the window, is only a few yards from the terrorist in the cockpit, before they are both incinerated. Mike imagines the terrorist, looking out the windshield. I won’t be afraid to die. The building is far away and then suddenly it is very close, and he can see into the windows for an instant, see the young man surfing the Internet. On the plane the other terrorists are guarding the passengers. A child is crying back in coach, and even the terrorist with the boxcutter cannot make him stop, though he threatens the child’s father. The father keeps telling the child to quiet down, just quiet down.

Mike walks past office furniture, a swivel chair, crashed on the street. It was sucked out the windows of the north tower. Mike remembers visiting his father’s office on Wall Street with Lyle and racing down the long hallways on a swivel chair. Then just beyond the barricade, in the distance, Mike sees a crushed body, and he knows somehow that it is someone who jumped from the tower. Mike hopes this is impossible, but he also knows what he sees, and he imagines being this person. He is on one of the top floors when the black smoke is rising through every vent and the walls are growing hot to the touch. And he decides to jump.