The Fire Marshal's Report for the Youngstown Community Museum fire, filed November 14, 2013, records the following facts: the fire originated in a junction box in the ceiling of the main exhibition room; the junction box had not been inspected since 1998; the wiring was aluminum, which was common in buildings of that era and which is known to degrade over time; the ceiling beams were untreated pine, installed in 1972; the museum's fire suppression system had been deactivated two years earlier due to budget constraints; the museum's insurance policy had lapsed sixty-two days before the fire; the fire was ruled accidental; no criminal charges were filed.

The report runs to fourteen pages, including diagrams of the building's electrical system, photographs of the burn patterns, and transcripts of interviews with the museum's director, the building's owner, and the firefighters who responded to the call. The report is thorough. The report is accurate. The report tells you everything you need to know about how the fire started, how it spread, and how it was extinguished.

The report does not record the following facts:

It does not record that the junction box was originally installed by a man named Frank DeMarco, who worked as an electrician in Youngstown for forty-three years and who died of lung cancer in 2005, three years before anyone thought to check the wiring in the museum. Frank DeMarco had been a careful worker. He had followed the code. He had used the best materials available at the time. But the materials available at the time were aluminum, and aluminum degrades, and Frank DeMarco had no way of knowing that his work would, thirty-five years later, contribute to a fire that nearly killed a twenty-three-year-old museum employee named Kevin Walsh.

The report does not record that the museum's director, a woman named Eleanor Park, had spent three years trying to secure funding for a new fire suppression system. She had written seventeen grant applications. She had met with four city council members. She had organized two fundraising dinners. All seventeen grant applications had been rejected. All four city council members had expressed sympathy but had been unable to allocate funds. Both fundraising dinners had raised a combined total of eight hundred forty-three dollars, which was enough to fix a leaking roof but not enough to install a fire suppression system. Eleanor Park resigned three months after the fire and moved to Arizona, where she lived with her sister and did not talk about the museum.

The report does not record that the insurance policy had lapsed because the museum's bookkeeper, a man named Gerald Simmons, had forgotten to renew it. Gerald Simmons was sixty-eight years old and had been the museum's bookkeeper for twelve years. He had never missed a payment before. But in the summer of 2013, his wife had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he had been spending his days at the hospital and his nights at home, staring at the ceiling, trying to remember what he was supposed to be doing. The insurance renewal notice had arrived in August. He had put it in a pile on his desk, intending to process it the following week. The following week, his wife had taken a turn for the worse. The week after that, she had died. The week after that, he had returned to work and found the renewal notice buried under a stack of condolence cards. He had processed it that day, but the coverage had already lapsed. He had called the insurance company and begged for an extension. The extension had been denied. The museum had been uninsured for sixty-two days when the fire started.

The report does not record that the seventeen cardboard boxes in the installation "Nothing" had been arranged in a spiral by an artist named Sarah Kim, who had grown up in Youngstown and moved to New York and come back to make something that was about nothing. Sarah Kim had not thought about the museum in years. She had moved on to other projects—paintings, mostly, large canvases of abstract forms that sold for five figures and hung in galleries in Chelsea and Tribeca. When she heard about the fire, she felt a brief, distant sadness, the kind of sadness you feel when you learn that a house you used to live in has been demolished. She had not been back to Youngstown in six years. She did not plan to go back. The installation had been a young artist's gesture, a way of reckoning with the nothing that she had felt growing up in a town where everything was disappearing. She had outgrown that gesture. But the gesture had outlasted her, and now it was gone.

The report does not record that Kevin Walsh had been in the basement of the museum on the afternoon of the fire because he had been cataloging a box of photographs donated by the estate of a woman named Margaret Collier, who had lived in Youngstown for ninety-one years and had taken photographs of the town every year from 1935 to 2012. The photographs showed the factory when it was new, the streets when they were full, the stores when they were open, the people when they were young. Margaret Collier had died alone in a nursing home in Akron, and her photographs had been donated to the museum because nobody else wanted them. Kevin Walsh had been cataloging them because he believed that someone should want them, that someone should remember, that the record of what had been lost should not itself be lost.

The photographs burned with the museum. All seventy-six of them. The negatives had been destroyed years earlier in a flood. There are no copies.

There are other facts the Fire Marshal's Report does not record. It does not record that the aluminum wiring used in the museum was manufactured by a company called Alcoa in 1972, at a plant in Davenport, Iowa. The plant is still operational. It produces aluminum for aircraft and automobiles and consumer electronics. It has never been cited for a safety violation. The wiring it produced in 1972 was up to code. The code was inadequate, but nobody knew that in 1972. Frank DeMarco did not know it. The building inspector who signed off on the installation did not know it. The museum's director at the time, a man named Walter Greene, who died of a heart attack in 1981, did not know it. The code was updated in 1984, and again in 1990, and again in 1999, but the museum's wiring was never updated, because updating the wiring would have cost forty thousand dollars, and the museum had never had forty thousand dollars.

It does not record that the fire suppression system was deactivated by a maintenance worker named Curtis Blake, who had been hired by the museum on a temporary contract in 2011. Curtis Blake was a good worker. He was thorough and careful and he took pride in his work. He deactivated the fire suppression system because it was malfunctioning—it had been triggered twice in the previous month by false alarms, and each false alarm had cost the museum five hundred dollars in fire department response fees. The money was supposed to come from a grant that Eleanor Park had applied for, a grant that would have paid for a new fire suppression system and the repair of the leaking roof and the replacement of the broken windows in the basement. The grant was rejected. Curtis Blake was let go. The fire suppression system remained deactivated for two years, and then the fire started, and there was nothing to stop it.

It does not record that the museum's board of directors met four times in the year before the fire and discussed the fire suppression system at every meeting. The board consisted of five members: Richard Poole, the retired factory owner; Margaret Chen, a retired schoolteacher; David Morrison, a lawyer who practiced in Cleveland; Susan Hartley, a real estate agent; and James Washington, a pastor at the First Baptist Church. At every meeting, Eleanor Park presented the same cost estimates and the same funding shortfall and the same warning about the risks of operating without a functioning sprinkler system. At every meeting, the board expressed concern and sympathy and a commitment to finding a solution. No solution was found. James Washington later told the Plain Dealer that he had not slept through a single night in the year following the fire. He had lain awake in his bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about the sprinkler system and the seventy-six photographs and the twenty-three-year-old museum employee who had almost died in the basement.

The report does not record that Dale Hargrove, age forty-seven, former employee of Hargrove Steel, stood in front of the installation for forty-five minutes every morning for seven months before the fire. It does not record that he never spoke during these visits. It does not record that Kevin Walsh always made him a cup of coffee, and that Dale Hargrove never drank it. It does not record that on the afternoon of the fire, Dale Hargrove hesitated for somewhere between thirty seconds and one minute before running into the basement to save Kevin Walsh. It does not record why he hesitated. It does not record that the hesitation was not cowardice but entropy—the accumulated disorder of three years of unemployment, two years of silence, one divorce, one estranged son, twenty-two years of a life that had been rendered irrelevant by the closure of a factory.

The report records the facts. The facts are necessary. The facts are not sufficient. The fire was caused by a faulty junction box, but the fire was also caused by Frank DeMarco's aluminum wiring, by Eleanor Park's rejected grant applications, by Gerald Simmons's grief, by Sarah Kim's spiral of empty boxes, by Kevin Walsh's belief that someone should remember, by Dale Hargrove's hesitation, by the seventy-six photographs that burned before anyone could see them, by the factory that closed and the town that emptied and the world that moved on.

The fire was caused by entropy—the universal tendency toward disorder, the law that says that closed systems always run down, that information is always lost, that what is organized will become disorganized, that what is remembered will be forgotten. The junction box was just the local manifestation of a universal principle. The spark was just the point at which the disorder became visible.

The Fire Marshal's Report does not mention entropy. It does not mention Frank DeMarco or Eleanor Park or Gerald Simmons or Sarah Kim or Kevin Walsh or Dale Hargrove or Margaret Collier or her seventy-six photographs. It records the facts. The facts are the bones. The flesh has been stripped away. The flesh is what matters, and the flesh is gone.

The fire was not the only thing that the Fire Marshal's Report did not record. It did not record the day after the fire, when the residents of Youngstown gathered on the sidewalk outside the empty lot and stood in silence, watching the smoke rise from the ruins. They did not speak. They did not cry. They just stood there, their hands at their sides, their faces blank, and they watched the smoke, and eventually they went home.

It did not record the week after the fire, when the city council met in emergency session to discuss what should be done with the empty lot. The council members debated for three hours. Some argued that the lot should be sold to a developer. Some argued that it should be turned into a park. Some argued that it should be left empty, as a memorial to everything that had been lost. No decision was reached. The lot remained empty for two years before the Johnson Family Foundation grant arrived.

It did not record the month after the fire, when the Plain Dealer ran a series of articles about the decline of Youngstown and the failure of the museum and the rescue of Kevin Walsh. The series won a regional journalism award. Marcus Webb, the reporter who had written the first story, was promoted to senior correspondent. He used his new position to cover other post-industrial communities—Gary, Indiana; Flint, Michigan; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—and every story he wrote was informed by what he had seen in Youngstown, by the faces of the people on the sidewalk and the smoke rising from the ruins and the knowledge that the facts, the bones, the fourteen-page report, would never capture the flesh of what had been lost.

It did not record the year after the fire, when Dale Hargrove stopped drinking whiskey. He did not announce this decision. He did not join a support group or mark the days on a calendar. He simply stopped buying whiskey, and he stopped drinking it, and he started drinking coffee instead—black coffee, the way Kevin used to make it, the way it had been waiting for him every morning on the front desk of the museum. He drank the coffee in his apartment, sitting in his chair, looking out the window at the empty lot where the grocery store used to be. He drank it in the morning and in the afternoon and in the evening. He drank it until his hands stopped shaking and his head stopped aching and his thoughts stopped circling around the same dark center. He drank it until he could remember what it felt like to be awake without wanting to be asleep.