He stepped out of the fire. That was the first thing we saw. The flames like a sunlit sheet hanging, a perfect wall of light, and a man walking calmly out, unharmed. Breaking the light as he did, a black figure, a shadow upright, and the men who circled the fire staying still, waiting for the phantom shape to pull apart, melt back into the light. Separated from the fire, a man walking calmly out, his hands pulled up to his chest and a second dark shape, small and quivering behind his hands.

This displacement of perspective: interference around an earth-bound satellite. And from where we stood uselessly about, our sight did bend, and we saw a telescoping doubleness, a dark shape emerging from light, itself slowly finding definition and light, and a second dark shape emerging slowly from the first, as if there were a fire at the man’s chest, a second man emerging from it, and the silhouettes of the man’s splayed fingers, tiny versions of ourselves standing about.

The black shape dropped from the man’s hands, landed two and two, quietly, its back arching up, head down, long tail curling up like a hook. Its arching back singed, it let threads of thin smoke up into the air above it, rising together and then pushed away, a third curve, as the furnace-air of the building’s burning rolled out.

We stood frozen there in our heavy coats, faces hidden behind our helmet’s visors, all reflecting the orange light of the fire and the shape of the man. Some held axes, useless now, and some were frozen in the process of unwinding the hose. We all watched the man come forward, his double circling his feet, rubbing its smoky back against his leg, the tail around it like a vine. And I was at the front, counting to myself one, two, three, and thinking in the moment that the second shape dropped from his hands, that four was the time. A solid, square number. An open box. A tool for prying open. A pictograph of a cat, resting on a sill, its tail dropped down along the wall. And four, I will break forward and go to the man, a man walking calmly out. Sole survivor.

I go forward toward the man, the man walking unharmed from the flames. The man’s hands, now empty, hang at his sides. The night around us is black, black drawn blacker by the brilliance of the fire, the lights flashing, this circle of men in yellow coats and helmets, closing off the light, night at our backs.

I am still moving forward, one hand raised as if to take the man by the shoulder, hurry him away from the danger, but the man is still so far. How long? How long have I been frozen here beneath their eyes. I am a young man. Brave. But I’m afraid of the man who has walked from the fire, a shadow at his feet that slithers and gives off smoke. My hand is still raised. I am still moving. The lights from the trucks are swinging round to flash upon my visor. Across the walls. Gone into night. Red upon my face. I am coming forward. I see my own hand, raised. I am not afraid.

The house is going to go. I can see that. We all can. And I see the man still standing with his back to the flames. My own hand still raised. Nothing moves. Eight men and one cat. A house creaking under the roar. Basement windows shining like headlights. The whole place will go down.

What if I don’t move? What if I turn, gone, into the night? Six others waiting to step forward. A strange habit, thinking this way. When I buy tickets for anything, sitting there in the auditorium, in the theater, wondering. If I didn’t show up tonight, would anything be different? Would these two move closer, the man taking my seat? Would they meet, talk, go home together and make love? All from my absence. But I stay, sitting quietly in my seat. The woman doesn’t look at me. I go home alone.

But I’m working now, or at least about to work. About to do something. I can feel this moment. The moment before another moment. These are the best. Show over, everyone rising to leave. Her coat brushing my arm as she lifts it from her lap. The moment before I speak.

This moment doesn’t end. Begin to count again. Four. On four. I will move. One. Two. Three. The high screaming crack of house-beams. A rush of burning air. Light everywhere. Four. Four. Forward, into the flame.

The moment before another moment. That moment gone, I am here, solid in this true moment. The next is unseen, a question behind the rippling air of fire-heat, the vastness of the night left behind, the crashing of the men through the burning beams and debris. They’ve got the hose on it, like a battering ram against the aluminum siding glowing hot. Surrounded by heat. It’s inside my clothes, inside my skin, exciting molecules, my whole body racing, charging, colliding with itself. I have found the man.

We stand facing each other in the heavy heat, the shirt on the man’s back smoldering, about to ignite, and I reach out, my hand already outstretched, the time for waiting gone now, take the man by the arm, pull him quickly from the flames. Passing through a second wall of flame and out through the heat that encircles the whole place, a bubble of overheated air that quivers and shakes, bends the lights from the trucks, bends the light from the fire as it flashes on the grass, bends the light of the stars, still somehow visible in the sky above, and seems to circle the large orange moon above the trees. It shivers. It rolls. Cold stone in space. Heat between. A reflection in a pool or a pool itself. A pool of warm water, reflecting flame. The waters of the moon come to cool our burning bodies. Out into its stream, alive.