• On that March Saturday, the penultimate day of Spring Recess, the Chicago sky was overcast, lifelessly and ominously backlit by the exanimate sun. Not that the two men confined for the last hour in the dim and sinister elevator shaft within the burning Hotel Millennium would know, or care for that matter. One of them, Charles Anthony, a twenty-two-year-old Harvard student visiting friends in Illinois, was leaning against the sleek elevator wall, trying not to panic. The other, a gray-haired middle-aged man, crouching over in a corner and alternating between wild yells for help and resigned spells of fatalistic silence, was forty-seven-year-old Daniel Stuarts, an out-of-work actor, forced to resort to a life of crime to feed himself and his family, driven nearly crazy with guilt over the crimes he had committed. As the lethal smoke oozed into the dusky elevator car, the thoughts of both men rambled from one wild escape hope to another, until all hope was extinguished save one. Both Charles and Daniel reached this escape prospect at about the same time, yet both hesitated considering their fate in the event of failure, replaying in their minds the only remaining option, a possible escape of one and a a certain sacrifice of another.

    When the smoke blanket descended halfway into the cabin, Daniel could wait no more.

    "What," he whispered slowly, "do you want to do?" His dry, hoarse voice cracked from exhaustion. Daniel had been shouting nonsensically just moments before, trying in vain to get help.

    "Someone will help us," Charles said carefully, not believing it himself.

    "Nooooo!" Daniel wailed at Charles, his ululation stopping with a violent cough. "There is a way, and you know it! We both know it!"

    "I'm sorry, but I think the only rational option for us is to wait for help. It will come. We're in the middle of a burning hotel, inside a broken elevator, surrounded by smoke. Any possible escape from this cabin would be perilous," Charles said softly, almost to himself, his face turned to the wall, away from Daniel.

    "Look here... Look here I said!"

    Charles turned around slowly.

    "I may not be a genius, but I know that there is a way out, and even if only one of us survives, it's better than none surviving," Daniel told Charles heatedly.

    "No... I'm sorry. No," Charles said strongly, but his trembling hands betrayed him.

    "No!" Daniel retorted, "if you don't agree that one of us should escape through the trapdoor," he pointed to the hazy rectangle in the ceiling above, "I'll kill you. That will make the choice simple."

    Charles knew his chance companion was serious. "Fine," he said even more quietly, now lying supinely on the floor to avoid the smoke seeping into the elevator, "do you have a quarter on you?"

    "I don't have anything!" Daniel snapped.

    "Okay," Charles said, pulling a coin out of his back pocket, "heads, you stay here; tails, I stay here." Daniel said nothing, so Charles flipped the coin, both men watched its steady trajectory as it flew from Charles's hand to the parquet floor of the elevator and rattled mockingly.

    "Heads," Charles stated quietly.

    Daniel lost his control: "I will live! It was tails! Pick it up and tell me it was tails, or you die," he said pulling out a small gun from his worn-out brown jacket. Daniel stared at the coin as Charles reached to pick it up. Charles silently placed the quarter on edge in his palm and tipped it over, so that it would show tails.

    "Tails," Charles whispered.

    "Thank you."

    As Charles helped Daniel up to the trapdoor above, Daniel kicked Charles in the face and jumped up to the platform.

    The entire elevator was filled with smoke now, and as Charles fainted, exhausted and suffocating, Daniel escaped, climbing up an elevator cable to safety. Charles was unconscious when the cable snapped, weakened by the fire, and Daniel plummeted to his death. Charles regained consciousness a few hours later in a narrow white bed in a small white room. Everything was okay, he was in a hospital, and he was going to live. He also learned that the other man was found dead at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

    On Wednesday, four days after his harrowing experience, Charles was discharged. His burns were healing, and the physical pain was also subsiding. Yet, no matter how forcefully he pushed the memories away, he could not forget that he helped another man to his death. The irony of the outcome was completely wasted on Charles.

    Back in Cambridge on Thursday, Charles, heads and arms covered in bandages, walked into the Memorial Hall auditorium, for his first class of the day: "Learning English Through the Bible." Charles looked around the lecture hall, eyeing his classmates carefully. Nobody gave him more than a passing glance. "Not one of them has experienced what I have lived through," Charles though, "and they know it right away, just by looking at me; yet they look right through me as if nothing happened, indifferent to my distress." Charles didn't know what to make of this. On one hand, it was reassuring that, no matter what happened to him outside of school, at school he would always be the same person to his peers. On the other hand, their indifference unnerved him. Shouldn't they care that he, their peer and fellow human being, had almost died?

    "Irony," Charles's English professor cried out, walking to the podium, "is the logic of the insane."

    Uncontrollably, Charles's thoughts drifted to the dead man in Chicago, then to his indifferent classmates, and ultimately to the story of Cain and Abel. One line from the story kept reverberating through his mind, escalating in volume each time, until it became a maddening wail, an insane flood of sound, until the howling inside his head became so deafening that he could not hear anything else. When the chimerical echo finally abated, Charles calmly pondered: "Where is your brother Abel?"

    "I don't know," he replied aloud. "Am I my brother's keeper?"