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with his window—beating his fists against the latch and heaving his weight against the frame.
    Minna stopped singing.
    “Bragg?”
    She stood up. Bragg didn’t answer—locked in the other world beneath his fingers, mouthing the sentences he wrote. Minna looked back across the road. Up above, the music kept on spinning like a spider:

    …goodbye yellow brick road,
    Where the dogs of society howl.
    You can’t plant me in your penthouse,
    I’m going back to my plough.

    Down in the street, the traffic was piling up and a pair of streetcars had been surrounded by a horde of milk trucks and taxicabs. Nothing was able to move and the worst of it was, the man in the window had begun to panic. Perhaps he imagined the streetcars had come to parlay with him; make their peace and go away forever. But how could they hope to hear him if he couldn’t open his window?
    Minna could see he had failed altogether to budge the sash. Apparently, this was more than the man could bear, and she watched in horror as he ran away and returned with a baseball bat.
    “Bragg?” she whispered. “Hurry…!”
    The man began to beat out all his panes of glass, and because the shards were falling to the sidewalk, people started to run for cover. Not an umbrella in sight.
    “Stop!” Minna cried.
    The man was climbing onto his window-sill.
    In Minna’s mind was the thought: if only Bragg would come and help me…But Bragg had reached the climax of his story and was shaping it in perfect cadences, every word and every sentence judged against a count of syllables. He used a thesaurus for this and just at that moment he was looking for a two-beat word for inhibition.
    Minna and the streetcar man, it seemed, were alone in their private vacuum.
    “Stop!” she cried again.
    To no avail.
    By the time Bragg surfaced and at last appeared, the vacuum had been shattered.
    Just as the man had risen onto his toes and leapt, Minna had put her hand through the glass in order to break his fall.

    “What in the name of heaven did you think you were trying to do?” Bragg asked her in the Emergency Ward of St. Michael’s Hospital. A doctor had wrapped a bandage around the stitches in her wrist—and Minna had been told to lie on her back for half an hour, until the sedation took effect. “Stop him,” she said, “of course.”
    Then she had looked away at the painted, peeling wall, closing her eyes and praying that Bragg had not been able to read her mind. Stop him, of course , is what she had said. But that was not quite true. In the moment, her hope had been that she would catch him; catch the man with her hand held out, the way you catch the rain.
    While Minna gave the appearance of having fallen quietly to sleep, Bragg sat down on the iron chair beside the bed and took a slip of paper out of his pocket.
    Inhibition , he read.
    Stricture .
    Hindrance .
    Restraint .
    None of these was right.
    It took him roughly half an hour to decide. The word he chose was impasse .

    Stuart Bragg’s background provided him with money: just enough to buy a house—not enough to avoid a mortgage.
    Shortly after the man had leapt to his death on Queen Street, Bragg began to think about a house where Minna would be safe from the influence of visible suicides and where the detritus of humanity wouldn’t be on parade for her perusal every time she wandered to the window.
    Bragg did not yet understand, back then, that Minna didn’t “wander” anywhere. Nothing she did was done by chance and if he had only read her notebooks (not that she wanted him to) he would have discovered she was keeping meticulous track of how the people down on the street were faring. This was her journal of despair—but not her own despair. Somewhere, deep in the body of the notebook, written in a margin, were the words: and what of me? I cannot articulate and have no desire to tell where I have been and where I am going. Surely this is dangerous. What am I hiding? When will it surface?
    But that