The inside of the building is dark and full of machine-made smoke, but they still want to be absolutely certain we can't see anything at all. They tell us to put our fire-resistant hoods on backwards over our facepieces. In this posture we look like criminals condemned to hang, waiting on our knees in the stairwell as if begging forgiveness from the instructors. We wait while they hide the bodies inside the apartment.

Breathe in: the roar of my next breath coming through the the line feeding my mask, a feathering of cool air against the sweat on my face, then the soft thunk of a valve closing, stopping off the faintly pressurized flow. And out: the far-off click of the valve as I exhale. Slowly... make this tank last as long as possible. I've run out of air before, and felt the awful suck of the mask gripping my face as I tried to pull in a desperate and useless breath. When you use the last air in the metal cylinder strapped to your back, you cannot make your lungs expand because there's nothing left to fill them. Time and time again we practice holding our breath and fighting off the body's blue panic while we disconnect our air hose and have a partner hook it into their own supply.

If you freak and pull your mask off, you're dead. You will be informed of this by instructors at high-decibel levels so many times that you may wish you really were.

They're ready for the search. We go in in teams of two, crawling low to the floor, each person holding an ax, Halligan bar, or some other kind of tool. Blindly, we hug the wall, having agreed to stick to either the right or the left side and invariably follow it through the apartment. The wall is our lifeline, and we keep an arm or leg in contact with the wall at all times as we search. We use the tools to extend our reach as we probe for victims. I hold the business end of the ax and swing the handle under beds and out into the middle of the room, trying to determine if the objects it hits might be organic and in need of rescue.

I would like to think that it's a sign of our growing professionalism and skill that we manage to work our way through the darkness swinging iron bars and axes without routinely breaking bones and amputating each other's limbs.

We stay together and call back and forth a lot. It is astonishingly difficult to hear over the sounds of the SCBA and the blundering search; in a fire, the background noise would be even worse. As we advance, we're trying to assemble a mental map of the environment. If you have to get out, the only accurate way is to turn around and follow the same wall you hugged on the way in.

It is surprisingly, nauseatingly exhausting work. Bearing the weight of equipment on hands and knees leaves my kneecaps feeling like they've been whacked with wooden planks. I've developed what appears to be an indelible line of reddish patches down my spine, the result of repeatedly healed abrasions from the SCBA harness. Our breathing as we search is ragged, coughing, and we yell to be heard over each others' respirations.

We are well into the apartment when my partner's vibralert goes off. The automatic alert indicates he has less than a quarter cylinder of air left, and makes his faceplate vibrate and buzz. When a vibralert goes off, it's time to go. We turn around and begin following the wall back out, left hand or foot maintaining contact as we did on the way in. Eventually we spill out into the stairwell, empty-handed. We failed to rescue anyone.

We switch out our empty cylinders for full ones and take another go at it. We grope along the tops of couches, behind doors, using hands, feet, a tool, whatever we can to feel our way through the rooms. This search should be thorough but it must be fast. Part way down a hallway we come across the dummy, our victim. I am gasping for breath and the dummy feels like it's made of lead. It's sort of stiffly blobby and there doesn't seem to be anywhere I can get my gloves to grab on to it. We struggle to pull the dead weight back through the way we came, following the wall, trying not to lose or orientation as we haul our victim through doorways and across overturned furniture. It bangs painfully into more obstructions than I would have thought existed in the room.

Once again we cascade out of the door and into the stairwell, gasping and pulling off our hoods, with our monstrous, heavy victim in tow. Seeing it now for the first time, I think it looks sort of like Gumby. It's kind of overstuffed, lacks hands and feet, and doesn't really have a defined neck. I've saved an enormous claymation figure from a fictitious fire. And damn it, I feel great about it.