Page 96 of Lucky Night

That’s it. Those are the ten hazards.

What the fuck, FEMA? You offer tips on dealing with nuclear war, but not a goddamned fire? The priorities here are just…

She comes out of the bathroom. Try the fire department again.

He does. It’s busy.

He ends the call. Dials again.

Busy.

He lowers his head, rubbing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose.

I feel, he says, gathering about him all his patience, his great forbearance, drawing it around him like a kingly robe, that the management of this disaster leaves a great deal to be desired.

She takes the phone out of his hand and sets it down.

She pulls him to his feet and embraces him.

They hold each other for a long time.

What should we do now? she says, remembering when that question provoked the jaunty answer,maybe a little light fellatio?She’d been profoundly uneasy back then, no matter how she’d tried to hide it. But those were golden times, compared to the present.

Let’s get dressed, have a drink and catch up on the news, he says.

Get dressed. Because they’re still naked. Which doesn’t feel remarkable because they’re usually naked when they’re together.

I don’t want to get dressed, she says. I’m sick of clothes.

An attitude that would normally gladden my heart, he says. But with the heat off, and that big window, it’s going to get chilly in here.

He brings the robes out of the closet. She doesn’t want to put on one of those, either—they remind her of Edvin. But better a robe than her tired, tiresome skirt and blouse. Picked out so carefully last week, when she was packing for her trip, anticipating this night. Silky, clinging things, intended to arouse him, very briefly, before he tore them off her.

So robes it is. He pours them each a glass of champagne—they’ve barely touched the second bottle, given the events of the evening—and they sit at the end of the bed.

He unmutes the television.

Though the hotel isn’t commenting, and the FDNY is a little too busy to entertain media inquiries at the moment, journalists, fire experts and internet sleuths have been hard at work piecingtogether what happened on the twenty-fifth floor. The leading theory, relayed to them by Brian, the self-serious CNN reporter, is that while firefighters were busy dealing with the fire on twenty-one, flames were sneaking upward via the building’s electrical conduits, as smoke had traveled to different floors earlier. Trapped inside metal tubes, the fire triggered no alarms or sprinklers as it snaked past the twenty-second, the twenty-third, the twenty-fourth floor.

At last it hit twenty-five, a vast open space, intended to be an exclusive lounge with views of the city. The space was still under construction when the hotel opened last week.

Sources tell us that the floor was serving as a staging area for building materials that construction workers, racing to meet the opening deadline, didn’t have time to remove. Those materials are believed to include large amounts of oils and solvents used in the hotel’s decorative paintwork, as well as dozens of lithium-ion batteries used in cordless hand tools.

Fucking hell, he says.

When the fire reached the unfinished floor, it escaped the exposed conduits, hit the highly flammable materials, and exploded.

Jenny takes the remote and changes the channel. Fox is reporting on the fire, too. She keeps flipping. ABC, NBC, even BBC America is covering it. The chyrons blare phrases like:

Deadly Blaze

Historic Calamity

Urban Conflagration

She flips past channel after channel. If it’s on Al Jazeera, they’re truly fucked.

Look at that. A little humor. A touch of irony. Even now.

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