Summary
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.
Synopsis
Harry loses his hat. In searching for it he becomes entangled in one of the girders of a tall building that is being hoisted in the air, and is seemingly carried with it up into the clouds.
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