Traffic was coming to a halt on that side.

He’d thought to stop, but stopping wouldn’t have helped, Wales thought, looking again into the mirror from a half block farther on. A collection of shadowy people stood out on the pavement, peering down. He couldn’t see the woman. Though no one was kneeling to assist her—which was a sure sign. His heart began rocketing. Cold sweat rose on his neck in the warm car. He was suddenly jittery. It’s always bad to die when you don’t want to. That had been the motto of a man named Peter Swayzee he’d known in Spain—a photographer, a silly man who was dead now, shot to pieces covering a skirmish in East Africa, someplace where the journalists expected to be protected. He himself had never done that— covered a war or a skirmish or a border flare-up or a firefight. He had no wish for that. It was reckless. He preferred the parts that weren’t war. Culture. And he was now in Chicago.

Turning south onto the Outer Drive along the lake, Wales began to go over what seemed remarkable about the death he’d just witnessed. Some way he felt now seemed to need resolving, unburdening. It was always important to tabulate one’s responses.

The first thing: that she was dead; how certain he had been about that; how nothing less seemed thinkable. It wasn’t a moral issue. Other people were helping in the event she wasn’t dead. In any case, he’d helped people before—once, in the UBahn, when the Kurds had set off plastique at rush hour. No one in the station could see for the smoke, and he’d guided people out, led them by the hand up into the sunny street.

The other thing, of course—and perhaps this was a moral issue: he was moved by the woman as he’d first seen her, falling into the snow, almost gently, then standing and righting herself, getting her hand set properly onto the top of her head. Putting things right again. She’d been completely in her life then, in the fullest grip and perplex of it. And then— as he’d watched—three steps, possibly four, and that was all over. In his mind he broke it down: first, as though nothing that happened had been inevitable. And then as if it all was inevitable, a steady unfolding. In his line of work, no one had a use for this kind of inquiry. In his line of work, the actual was all.

The lake was on the left, dark as petroleum and invisible beyond the blazing lanes of northbound, homeward traffic. Friday night. Out ahead, the city center lit the low clouds shrouding the great buildings, the tallest tops of which had disappeared, igniting the sky from within.