One guy had managed to tie the rope around his waist and was swinging toward the windows, but the rescuers couldn’t get a grip on him. The second guy clung to the rope and also had it hooked around his feet, probably thanking the New York public school system for forcing him to learn how to do this in gym class. The third guy was the worst off. He was dangling from a stick at the end of his rope, holding on with both hands like a flying trapeze once it stops flying.

“Hey, I wanna look, too!”

Howie grabs the camera from me, and that’s just fine, because I was starting to get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Suddenly I started to wonder what had possessed me to come down here at all.

“How much you wanna bet those guys write a book about this?” says Howie. It seems Howie assumes they’re all going to survive.

All the while, Gunnar just stood there quietly, his eyes cast heavenward toward the human drama, with a solemn expression on his face. He caught me watching him.

“For the past few months I’ve been coming to disasters,” Gunnar tells me.

“Why?”

Gunnar shrugs as if it’s nothing, but I can tell there’s more to it. “I find them ... compelling.”

Coming from anyone else, this would be like a serial-killer warning sign, but from Gunnar it didn’t seem weird at all, it just seemed like some profound Scandinavian thing—like all those foreign movies where everyone dies, including the director, the cameraman, and half the audience.

Gunnar shakes his head sadly as he watches the souls up above. “So fragile ...” he says.

“What,” says Howie, “balloons?”

“No, human life, you idiot,” I tell him. For an instant I caught a hint of what actually might have been a smile on Gunnar’s face. Maybe because I said what he was thinking.

There’s applause all around us, and when I look up, I can see the swinging man has finally been caught by a cop, and he’s hauled through the window.