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part of the roof had collapsed. “They told us in the drills that that was only a faint possibility,” said the man who had offered his hand.
    “They don’t know,” Fred said. “At that point, everyone started grabbing what they wanted to take with them: family photos, cell phones, food.”
    Tom came out of the car. “People grab to flee a fire like they grab to flee a flood,” he said. Fred nodded, though William didn’t know if he was agreeing or just acknowledging the idea.
    Just then a woman gasped and pointed; the crowd turned, almost in unison. A man was going across the far edge of the meadow—at least William thought it was a man. It was a plume of fire with a dark core, and it was making a noise that was not quite a shriek but not quite a word: a high note, eerily pure. “Andy,” a woman said. The figure lurched forward a few more steps and then collapsed onto the grass. Another man appeared from the building and started hitting at the fire with his coat. “Is it Andy?” another woman said. Paramedics rushed toward the middle of the field like water to a drain.
    Louisa’s friend Mary liked to say that there were two kinds of people: those who couldn’t stand to see people fresh from an accident, all busted up, and those who couldn’t stand to see people who were terminal, slowly withering on the inside. Louisa had announced she was the second type and waited expectantly; William said nothing, but they both knew he was the first. A few years earlier, Louisa, who never complained of pain, had felt a stabbing in her belly. Bleeding had followed. The doctor ran tests, and in the days of waiting, as William worried over every terrible possibility, he wanted nothing more than to escape, to get in the car and drive north as fast and far as he could. The tests came back, and the doctor explained what had happened, pointing to pink areas on a chart of the female anatomy. Louisa wept. A pamphlet outlining fertility treatments was pressed into William’s hands by an overeager nurse. On the drive home from the doctor’s office, Louisa stopped crying, and William made his peace with the almost lunar silence that followed.
    Now, with the paramedics still on the burning man, William took out his keys and opened the car door. “What?” Tom said. “We’re not leaving, are we?” They could see the burned man’s legs, clothes in shreds, in the gaps between the paramedics. The man moved for a little while on the ground and then stopped moving. Orders were shouted, skin was wrapped, a stretcher procured, the body hoisted. There must have been sirens, but William did not hear them.
    The coffee shop, the Bean Counter, was the small dream of a pair of married accountants. They had been fixtures in the place, greeting guests and always finishing each other’s sentences, until something snagged after a year or so and they split up. People now called it Grounds for Divorce, with not a little sadness. William and Tom ordered from a stringy young man with a faint caterpillar of a mustache and carried the cups to a table by the front. A pair of women fake-hugged another pair of women they didn’t seem happy to see. Three five-year-old boys were banging hell by the counter.
    “You know what I was thinking about when we were by the fire?” Tom said. William shook his head. “I was thinking about the man who was running across the field.”
    “That’s understandable,” William said.
    “But not about his pain, or his misfortune, or anything like that. I was thinking about the physics of it.” Tom bent his head, dug a thumb into the hinge of his jaw. It was a gesture William had seen on Louisa. “You know Aristotelian physics? He said that certain elements seek certain locations. It’s in their essential nature. Earth moves toward the center, or down. Fire moves toward the sky, or up. By his reckoning, a man who’s mostly fire would fly away, but that man went down to the earth. I wondered what Aristotle, or