Steuer: What happened then?

Witness: I push and I push so hard that door opens a little, even though Mr. Jacobs is on the other side, trying to close that door. But I am stronger trying to open it than he can hold it closed, or maybe he got scared of the fire and ran away, because the next thing, that door flies open, into the stairs, and I fall right down into the stairway. So I get up, and look down the stairs but it is all flames and smoke, so I know I can’t go down the stairs, but I am thinking maybe everybody can go up to the roof this way, because I think that must be how they get out from the offices on the tenth floor.

Steuer: Did you go up to the tenth floor?

Witness: I go up there and nobody is left, and I look around where there are the pressers and the shipping tables, but then I go up this ladder to where there is daylight, and it’s a miracle to see I am on the roof, with firemen all around, and a fireman says, “Oh, look at this, I thought that was it but here comes one more,” and they tell me I have to go across a ladder they put across the big gap between the buildings. I have to do it or I won’t live, so I close my eyes and I do it, and it’s like a nightmare, but I do it, and then when I get to the other side there are students who help me stand up, so I can walk down the stairs of that other building, like a normal day, all the way down to the street, and then I go out. That’s what happened.

Steuer: Thank you, Mrs. Gottesfeld. You certainly do know your testimony. That’s all, Your Honor.

Crain: Mr. Bostwick?

Bostwick: Mrs. Gottesfeld, when we discussed your coming here today to testify in this trial, do you recall what I told you to say?

Witness: You didn’t tell me to say nothing. You just said I should tell my story in my own words.

Bostwick: And have you done that?

Witness: I done it three times already so far!

Bostwick: Thank you, Mrs. Gottesfeld. The People have nothing more for this witness.

Crain: We are adjourned at this time until Monday morning at nine o’clock.

Eleven

George hadn’t looked at the Huntington’s Concerto in a very long time. He had started to write it, with all the grandeur and finesse he could find at the time, when he was an undergraduate, but the Protein Rhapsodies had diverted him and he had never gone back to it, though he had not forgotten it. Every time he dropped a glass or couldn’t recall a word or tripped over a crack in the pavement, he remembered it. Rebecca didn’t know about this piece. Given her hatred for the disturbing lymphosarcoma sonata, George had never mentioned it, though he thought she had a surprising lack of curiosity about his inexplicable failure over all these years to be inspired by Huntington’s disease in some way for his music. There was no way out, as there seemed to George to be potential for bad karma if he took it up again and a kind of whistling in the dark bad karma if he let it remain tucked away. It remained a bundle of sloppy notations for an unfinished twelve-tone polyphonic mess.