The invited response upon finding Arnold hurtling through the air toward his death is to wonder what put him in that position. Even with the idyllic, flashing memory that follows—of his son, Paris, and Paris’s mother, Darline, the three of them happy and together on Paris’s kindergarten graduation day—it’s very possible that Arnold’s story will be the story of a fall: his descent from family happiness to the decision to end his life. But the context added by the following paragraph reveals that Arnold’s is a different type of fall entirely, one “he had neither intended nor chosen,” but a “dive that had resulted from his left foot slipping off the scaffold and his body sliding out of his either loosened or broken safety harness, as though a wrathful hand had pulled the straps off him, tipped him on his side, and tossed him into the air.”

The events that led to this point in Arnold’s life unravel slowly throughout the story. He grew up as a “child servant” in a household in Port-de-Paix, Haiti, having been “given away by whoever had brought him into the world.” He’s treated horribly by the family and repeatedly told that he’s “worthless.” When Arnold escapes them, he starts doing manual labor, sleeping in the warehouse where he works. He manages to save enough money to secure passage on a boat to Miami, and, after a delayed, four-day voyage on which the passengers have to drink seawater and urine and are “ditched in the middle of the sea” by the captain, Arnold survives the swim to shore. This isn’t the story of a fall, but Arnold’s climb—the choices he made, the actions he took, and the unimaginable obstacles he overcame just to make it to that position. A triumph of agency and human will subject only to one, unnameable, unassailably higher power.

One of the first things we learn about Arthur is that he’s never wanted “to feel bound.” Bound by material things like clothes and cars, but also by circumstance, fate, the “wrathful hand” that stacked all the odds against him and then, once he’d beaten all those odds, casually “tossed him into the air.” The hand that puts Darline, Paris, and Arthur in the impossible position of watching family, friends, and others “like” them die or get detained in their attempts to make a better life. After landing in the cement mixer, Arnold sees an airplane flying above him: “And that was when he realized that he was dying, and that his dying offered him a kind of freedom he’d never had before. Whatever he thought about he could see in front of him. Whatever he wanted he could have, except what he wanted most of all, which was not to die.” The freedom that had always been denied him—the freedom of easily moving to wherever he wanted to be, to somewhere and something better—is granted only in his dying moments. He finally has it, only to have it taken away.

There are two sides to fate and circumstance. Darline’s presence on the beach on the day Arnold swims to shore “felt as though they had a rendezvous, planned by someone neither of them knew.” The same hand that takes and denies so senselessly can also give just as much, if not more. Arnold and Darline make a life together, and Arnold becomes a father, a “gift” generously offered to him by Paris. In turn, father and son make paper boats together, like the boats whose respective voyages took Paris’s father away and then brought Arnold into his life. Boats that, like the hand of fate or God or circumstance, can both aid people in pursuing new lives and, in the process, also take their lives away. The constant struggle between agency and fate, between freedom and being bound, means that anything, no matter how hard a person worked to achieve it, can be snatched away at any instant. But it’s still worth the effort, and it’s worth doing everything in our power for the people who are making it. Even in death, Arnold will “guide Darline back to the beach, to look for others like him.”

In school, Paris’s teachers deem him “slow.” But they “could not understand what the boy had been through. They did not know that his father had disappeared just a few feet from him.” They see the situation he’s fallen into, but they fail, or don’t try, to see him. An immigration lawyer tells Arnold that he arrived in the United States “without inspection.” He didn’t see an immigration official, “which meant that, technically, he wasn’t even here.” In the video recordings taken of his fall, Arnold looked “not like a person but like a large object plummeting. He was moving too fast to be identifiable as a human being.” By telling Arnold’s story, Danticat puts the reader in a very different position, one from which we can see and understand the human being. One—the only one—from which we can see how miraculous it is for someone like Arnold to be where they are and how tragic it would be to have that taken away, whether by death, deportation, or any “higher” authority.

Every life and situation is worthy of inspection. Those who hear about Arnold in the news won’t know so much as his real name, let alone his full life story, but he was here, and he’ll live on in the love he leaves behind. In the cement-mixer truck, which “had always looked like a spaceship” to Arnold, Danticat offers an image somewhere between an airplane and a boat, between unbound freedom and the extraordinary trials and hardships that so many immigrants face head-on in finding it. Their lives and stories should never be overlooked. Because while six and a half seconds is enough time for a person to fall, it isn’t nearly enough time to understand everything—the full, human life—it took to get there.

Read “Without Inspection,” by Edwidge Danticat, in The New Yorker.