Elsewhere, however, there were signs that not everything in the city was quite as it should be. The technician’s next-door neighbor, an electrical assembly man, spurned the beach that morning in favor of the roof of his apartment building, where he lay down on a rubber mat to sunbathe. He stayed up there for a while, and noticed that he began to tan right away. Almost immediately, his skin gave off a burning smell. At one point, he came down for a break, and his neighbor found him oddly excited and good humored, as if he’d been drinking. When no one else seemed interested in joining him up on
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