On the day of his fiftieth birthday, a lightning bolt strikes his apartment building and burns it to the ground, leaving Asterios homeless. This moment is key for multiple reasons. First, Asterios’s apartment complex is comprised of two skyscrapers: an echo, subconscious or otherwise, of Asterios’s desire for duality in all things. When one of them burns down, that aspect is stripped away from him.
Asterios’s old perspective is gone, and he is now struggling to find a new one. Finally, the act of being evicted from his home forces Asterios to decide what is truly important to him. As he rushes from the burning apartment, Asterios deliberately ignores a book on the history of architecture and instead chooses three objects: the lighter his father owned, the magnetic watch he received as a child, and a pocketknife Hana had found on their honeymoon.


The three items in and of themselves hold significance, however, in some ways it is the mere number of objects he chose to save that is the most important. In a flashback roughly halfway through the novel, Asterios and Hana have a brief tête-à-tête regarding their possessions.
The fact that Asterios acts on that tangential comment from Hana when his apartment burns demonstrates that he is finally starting to move away from his obsession with two.  The theme of moving from a mindset of two to that of three runs throughout the novel, and is the subject of one of Hana’s lectures on negative space. In this flashback, Hana places two bricks in a vertical position on a podium, equidistant from each other.


Mazzucchelli once again uses his artwork to subtly indicate his agreement with her perspective. The opening tableau for this chapter, at first glance, appears to be simply the image of two tulips. If the reader pays close attention, however, it quickly becomes apparent that the tulips are actually forming the shape of Hana’s head and shoulders: just like in Hana’s lecture, there are three. This panel also serves as a metaphor for how Asterios treated Hana during their time together. He often saw the things around her, such as her sculpture, but he rarely took the time to actually see her. Asterios did not need to completely revoke his perspective and take on Hana’s—as in a way that would still be acting under an assumption of strict duality—but rather he simply needed to acknowledge it, and therefore her, as being legitimate.

Asterios has been slowly coming around to this point of view during his time in Apogee, as seen in the way in which he interacts with the family who takes him in. Ursula Major in particular has a plethora of ideas that Asterios should thoroughly disagree with, including a penchant for feng shui, astrology, and reincarnation, to name a few. While Asterios does not accept the idea—he questions her theory repeatedly—he does remain open to it.
The old Asterios would never have managed to keep his perspective fluid enough to hold her oppositional opinion with any kind of regard. Asterios is finally pulling away from the old duality and becoming more open to others.  
