There is a sort of hopeless boredom that wafts over the courtyard, men leaning arms folded, whispering to each other and gesturing, in terse shorthand and with just-lit cigs, towards the tower. The winds are quiet here, though in the columns of warm floodlight ahead some swirls of what looks like dust, or maybe tiny flecks of vapor, coalesce obviously into little shapes, tongues of breath forking like flame and winding up the facade, brushing, kissing the brick. The tower’s base glows in the fine particulate mist. Seems the breeze is somehow starting out here, being generated, snatching up some energy or movement from the tired huddles and pulling it in, along the path and up the interior spiral ramp to the lit platform at its top. Some nighttime anomaly is sucking vampiric, some unknown specific of the night’s pressure gradient drawing, ceaselessly, on paltry human respiration; nobody here can breathe too deeply, and the cigarettes keep going out.