Summary

Introduction – In text printed in italics, narration introduces the context of the story: “there was, for a while, a very large and very famous city. For an even shorter while, the richest man in town was its mayor" (3). The introduction describes the size of the City’s population; how its citizens kept to relatively small paths of life, and similarly small circles of community; and how the wealthy tended to live far above the less wealthy and the poor, both physically (i.e. in tall apartment buildings) and financially. The introduction describes several inhabitants of a tall building owned by the City’s wealthy Mayor, including a wealthy man who was convicted of several financial crimes whose apartment was sold to another wealthy man, who found a half-eaten pie in the apartment’s refrigerator.

Pages 9 – 36. The story begins with a chance encounter between...