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struggles over a series of interchanges, scraping across seams. All the fight is out of him, a weird aimless momentum keeps him moving forward: escape imitates life. The duct snakes left, snakes right, and executes a sharp L-turn, each new passageway growing narrower and tighter than the last.
    He feels a zephyr on his face, and smells fresh air. The tunnel ahead slopes away dramatically, curving down and twisting. Jay stops and contemplates the drop. It’s not viable. No way can he control the descent, and he doesn’t know what lies ahead. It could be another vertical, down which he would plunge headfirst. And probably die.
    Shit.
He has to go back. Backward. No turning around. An accesspanel pops open behind Jay’s feet, and the flush-faced cop jabs his crew cut into the ducting, jack-in-the-box, flashlight beam aimed right at and blinding Jay as he looks back into it.
    “Yo.”
    Jay, spooked, reflexively pulls himself away from the pop-up cop, forgetting the steep drop ahead in the ducting, and then as gravity wraps its heavy arms around him he tries to catch himself, but the sweat-oily palms of his hands find no purchase on the air duct steel, and his weight passes the tipping point and Jay plummets down the duct, a fleshy toboggan, helpless, into utter darkness. It happens so fast he barely registers the abject terror that, later, he will always feel when he remembers the fall. There’s just the vague, disembodied feeling that this probably won’t end well. His nerves and senses are seared by the dull shriek and agony of his skin skidding on metal. A square of light hurtles toward him, breakneck, hardly the glow at the end of the tunnel that near-death stories always go on about, but maybe death comes at you in an angry rush, or maybe it’s just daylight through the metal screen crosshatching of a rodent guard affixed inside an exterior vent.
    Bigger and bigger and bigger as he plummets toward it, holding in its tracery sky, clouds, and that bright flare of sun into which Jay literally explodes, hashing his face and shoulder as the grille tears loose, and he tumbles out and drops, mostly naked, scared, heart pounding, hips and shins raw in the fresh air, legs and arms whirling without purpose. Later he’ll be told he fell thirty feet into a dumpster filled with trash bags that saved his life, the cardboard and loose garbage erupting as it swallowed and cushioned him.
    He doesn’t remember it.
    He remembers the narrowing air shaft, the impossible decline, the cop-in-a-box discovering him, a howling tornado of pain, an odd limbo of float, and suddenly not being able to breathe.
    The wind is knocked out of him. His lungs heave and spasm, emptied by the impact of the fall. He isn’t sure if he’s been paralyzed or if it’s just the dead weight on his limbs that’s making it so hard to move.
    “Breathe, Jay. Come on.”
    Someone claws away the collapse and gently lifts him at the waist, easing air back into his empty chest. John Q. Public has clambered up and over and into the bin, dug through for Jay, and found him, stunned, blue-lipped, eyes wide, and: “Alive. Thank God.”
    Thank God?
For a moment, Jay wonders if he’s misjudged them. Or is it just another indication of how desperately they need what he can’t give them? He gasps, gulps air. His arms fold into his chest, weak. Blood beads and runs down his neck from the crosshatch wound that stretches from his right eye and temple to his ear.
    “Jay.”
    “Yes.”
    “Don’t move.”
    “I’m all right.”
    “Sure, but don’t move. Let us—let us—”
    Mulish, Jay rolls over, getting his knees underneath him, and another pair of hands helps him rise out of the garbage, the smell of it suddenly overwhelming him, his senses returning, aligning, and the worried looks of Public and the purple-faced cop who have taken him into custody for something he didn’t see, and the bright sun and the glare of the whitewashed concrete side of the hospital or