High Life

A straw boater, jauntily cocked one moment, becomes Icarus’s wing in miniature when a gust flings it from Harry’s crown and deposits it on an iron vertebra of an unfinished skyscraper. Harry, part moth, part martyr, pursues. The girder, already shackled to a crane’s cable, lurches skyward; Harry’s suspenders snag on a rivet and the city yawns beneath him like a voracious proscenium. What follows is not slapstick but a vertical Stations of the Cross: each floor passed is another confession booth where Bartine Burkett’s gaze—now a speck, now a sob—refracts through glass and steel. Clouds clot into cathedrals; wind sings through rivet holes like a boys’ choir of orphaned nails. At apogee, hat and man fuse into a single dark constellation against the sodium dawn, a crucifix of felt and flesh that no theology can unpin. Then the descent, slower than guilt, a drift not downward but inward, until the metropolis itself inhales and swallows the spectacle whole, leaving only the echo of a straw brim scraping against the vault of heaven.