The world was this as well, figures in windows a thousand feet up
dropping into free space, and the stink of fuel fire, and the steady rip of sirens in the air.
The noise lay everywhere they ran, stratified sound collecting around them, and
he walked away from it and into it at the same time.
There was something else then, outside all this, not belonging to this, aloft.
He watched it coming down. A shirt came down out of the high smoke,
a shirt lifted and drifting in the scant light and
the falling again, down toward the river.
They ran and then they stopped, some of them,
standing there swaying, trying to draw breath out of the burning air,
and the fitful cries of disbelief, curses and lost shouts,
and the paper massed in the air, contracts, resumes blowing by,
intact snatches of business, quick in the wind.