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When you’re so stunned by the instant introduction of unexpected information, your brain doesn’t immediately accept what’s in front of you. You realize you’ve been perceiving new details for several seconds without fully registering any of them. In addition to the pockets of people freaking out, there was a cackling laughter that echoed across the area, sounding almost like a demented animal. This was the final discovery in my chain of discoveries—that this laughter wasn’t laughter. It was the bloodcurdling cry of our chief executive officer, Evan Goldman, screaming in pain—literally sizzling alive in front of all of us and crying out with a depth of agony you wouldn’t believe biologically possible. Our boss, the most influential man in the building¬—and this week, arguably in Paris—was rolling around on the patio while apparently no one had the means to help him. The well-dressed crowd stood frozen as more and more screams came from more and more people. “Do something!” was shouted in different languages, and I soon realized that Jenn was no longer next to me. In fact, Jenn was nowhere to be seen.
“Jennifer!” I called out.
Most of us were riveted in place, especially the people around me, who were too far removed from the spectacle to take initiative. There had to be about sixty of us idly standing there. Evan was on the other side of the crowd from us under one of the bungalows, in a position slightly elevated by a wood platform, so I could catch glimpses of him if I moved a bit. Several men were whapping Evan with jackets and couch pillows and torn curtains and whatever else they could find—one lady was throwing a pitcher of water on him.
“Il ne marche pas!”
“Plus fort!”
“Je dit IL NE MARCHE PAS!”
It wasn’t working, and they were shouting that it wasn’t working as the dull, blue flame that covered his body refused to go out. A few other people had joined the rescue effort. God, the noise this guy made—that’s what you can’t get out of your head. The visual itself was mesmerizing but his unholy cries of pain were enough to make you nauseous. All of us wanted to converge and help him somehow, but other than the half-dozen people surrounding him, nobody else moved because nobody else moved. Jenn had grabbed a fire extinguisher—that’s what she went to do. I don’t know where she found it—no one else had the wherewithal—but over the tops of everyone’s heads she could just barely be seen as her brunette updo zigzagged its way toward the bungalows to deliver a huge plume of whiteness on Evan. She was dousing the guy when the entire situation got ten times more surreal—the wooden frame of the bungalow had caught fire. It’d been draped in silk sheets, and we now had giant streaks of orange flames slapping upward at the sky and converting to dark, black, disturbingly fast-rising pillars of smoke. The yelling turned to shrieking and before I could move, having been wedged in the doorway of one of the only two stairwells, I was pummeled by the surge of a crowd in panic.
“Jenn!” I called out.
I did my best to stay on the terrace and keep track of her, to give myself a chance to find my way toward her, but at a certain point in the turmoil, at the tipping point in the balance of mob dynamics, I couldn’t rightfully stand my ground without blocking everyone. So I turned around and headed downstairs within the swell of the crowd, descending a full flight before exiting the stairwell to circle back up to the roof by some other means. It was shortsighted on my part. The floor just below the roof was becoming a chaotic mess in its own right. Several patrons had shouted there was a fire above them and thus sent the restaurant into a frenzy.
Jenn was now officially separated from me.
I descended all the way down to the ground floor where I was rushed forward through the front doors and past an increasingly agitated population of people. The hotel staff were being aided by those police already present along with additional police, lots of them now, who’d pulled up out front. Fire trucks were arriving. Ambulances were arriving. Emergency lights were lighting up the massive stretch between the Concorde and the d’Orsay. In moments like these, your sense of the passage of time is shot to hell. You see things and hear things but don’t quite remember them merely seconds after they happen. I had a warped hyperawareness imbibing the visuals around me, noting sounds, noting particular voices from way across the crowd, while retaining none of it. I couldn’t keep track of what I was doing or what I’d just done, waiting within the growing throng of spectators, cordoned off from the area. I wandered back and forth among them, looking for Jenn, calling for Jenn, trying to see her face in the ranks of anyone who passed. The police would know, right? That’s what I told myself. They’d have some record of her, but they were overwhelmed, and even when I tried to talk to one of the paramedics, hoping to run a name by her just to see if a description got me anywhere—“Jennifer Graham, please. She’s half Asian, about five-seven, age thirty-eight”—our conversation went nowhere. I waited. I let the clock tick. I tried to pick out the most amenable-looking officer I could approach but the math of it had kicked in. I spent my work weeks calculating percentages, using actuarial statistics to convince people of things; I knew that with five fire trucks, one fire boat, six police vans, at least three ambulances, and a crowd of several hundred people, the chances of this havoc involving zero additional fatalities had to be zero. People were going to get hurt. I looked back up toward the top of the roof. It was still on fire. I could see the smoke but the angle was too steep to discern much else. An hour had elapsed down here and it was time for me to pose the question, the question I didn’t want in my head but which was forming on its own. What were the odds Jenn Graham didn’t make it out of the building?
