Season of Open Windows, and the Second-Story Man He left the apartment that Wednesday morning as he did every other day, planning on getting some work done on a book he was writing. But something strange happened. "I felt really uncomfortable," said the writer, who asked that his name be withheld. Something was bothering me inside. I couldn't work at all. He could not remember feeling that way before. I couldn't pay attention to anything. It was very, very uncomfortable. So he went back to his home on Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on the top floor of the four-story building where he had lived for 18 years. It was around 11 a.m. on May 30. He ate lunch and lay down for a nap. "And then I hear something in the hallway, and it sounded like the owner fixing something," he said. He ignored it. But then: "I hear what sounds like the screen, but it sounded like a mouse, something like that," he said. He rolled out of bed and put on his flip-flops and stepped into the kitchen. A man stood there. A stranger. Before the writer's brain could absorb, analyze and react to this information, the man turned. "He shot out the window," the writer said. A fall from this height would have most likely been crippling, but the stranger reached across a few feet to the fire escape and grabbed on. And so comes, as sure as the city's other countless rites of summer, the "second-story man," a thief, nicknamed more than a century ago, who breaks into upper-story apartments by way of windows left open to the breeze. This intruder clambered not down, to the street, but up. "I got to see his hands and sneakers," but that was all, the writer said. I pursued him to the roof. I don't know what I was thinking. I opened the fire escape window and went up the ladder, just like that. He got to the top, primed for a confrontation, finding none. "There was no one there," he said. "I realized how stupid it was," he said. What am I doing here? I should be in my apartment and calling the police. He wondered if the intruder had jumped to the next roof - it looked as if a door there was open. The writer returned to his apartment and called 911. Detective Steve Panagopoulos arrived and found surveillance cameras on every floor of the writer's building; he called the owner for the footage. On the video from the top floor, outside the writer's apartment before the break-in, the man could be seen standing. More or less. "The male appears to be doing the "heroin nod," " Detective Panagopoulos said, describing the knocked-out-on-his-feet bobbing of an addict. At one point, he's slumped over, and he jumps up like somebody's grabbing him. The man can be seen on the video climbing a hallway ladder leading to the roof. He then headed into the writer's apartment. If he had not already shaken himself out of his nod, his surprise a few minutes later, when he was confronted by the writer in the kitchen, presumably would have done the job. After his flight to the roof, he is seen on the video scrambling down the ladder, to the hallway and, floor by floor, camera by camera, taking the stairs to the front door. He walked outside and turned right. He walked past a corner deli with a camera pointed down from an awning, giving the police another view. He crossed Metropolitan Avenue and, in doing so, left the 94th Precinct and entered the 90th. Detective Panagopoulos passed pictures from the video around bodegas in both jurisdictions. "I had no luck with that," he said. In Williamsburg, as the season of the second-story man begins, Detective Panagopoulos gave no-nonsense advice to residents - "Lock your windows" - and said the nickname was flawed. You know what it is? I think the majority of the incidents take place on the top floors," he said. They begin at the front door. They check the buzzers, right? Even this guy, he buzzed one apartment. A resident had let him in, and the intruder went to the top, where he broke into an apartment that should have been empty. The writer, who seemed deeply shaken by the episode, thought back to his irritability at work that morning and his return home. "I hate to say it's a premonition," he said. I can also say it's a strange coincidence. It's definitely something that's never happened before.