Fire Incident Report
a teardrop in an ocean of mass-produced garbage
*Archiving* this essay from 2016 for Leon Dische Becker’s Moleskine-sponsored editorial project the Towner.
I like to nap by the front window, lulled by the crashing waves of traffic, the hiss of diesel-fueled semis, the rumble of metal bodies barreling over potholes, the cacophony of car radios lined up at the red light at the end of the block, and the drone of the train rushing in and out of the station. There’s a rhythm to the machines. On Sundays, gangs of quads from East New York rip by and the bikers from the warehouse across the way pop wheelies in the empty lanes under the train overpass. The noise filters in from Atlantic Avenue, one of Brooklyn’s major arteries that reaches from the East River to the Van Wyck. The stretch where I live, the thoroughfare runs parallel to the Long Island Rail Road, its six lanes of traffic sandwiching the above-ground tracks. Our second-story apartment is about level with the train platform.
I lived alone before I moved onto Atlantic, but found another kind of solitude in this commercial space with high ceilings and painted-over brick walls, surrounded by traffic and transience, the sounds of cars whizzing by and subletters whose footsteps I can’t recognize. The warehouses that line Atlantic are each indistinguishable from the next. Our dirty yellow building with CAR SERVICE crawling down the side is exceptional only because its ours. Standing there at the front window, at the right angle, I can see only S, E, R, and V. The scale of those bold red letters divorced from the rest of the word makes me feel too small, like an ant staring at a candy bar wrapper, but it’s really a matter of speed not size. They’re designed to be read at a distance from cars zooming by at 30 miles an hour. Anyways, I don’t mind feeling small, invisible, anonymous, a teardrop in an ocean of mass-produced garbage.
A new subletter moved in February 1. She hung on a hook by the front door a khaki green jumpsuit that looks like it came from an army surplus store. I watched her put it on and take it off when she came and went out onto the street, which was being dusted daily with snow. I liked to work on my laptop slumped into the couch by the front window. I didn’t have much to say to her, but I’d look up from my screen to watch her zip and unzip so as not to ignore her.
I remember exactly what I was wearing when the fire department came the first time. A boyish white tank top and too-big burgundy basketball shorts with white paint stains and a black drawstring. I’d been sleeping naked when I heard the subletter wail in a garbled voice, “I feel weird.” I looked at my phone. It was four in the morning. Annoyed, I tried to pretend I was still asleep. Then from the hallway, I heard a knock at another door, a crashing sound and then the frantic voice of another roommate, “Is anyone else home?”
I scrambled to find the tank and shorts. That’s the last thing I remember before everything cut to black. Then, like a hackneyed POV shot from a bad movie, there’s a bed, a lamp, and a desk in another bedroom slowly coming into focus. I have a hazy recollection of stumbling through our narrow hallway crowded with boxes and then my memory cuts out again. I’m facedown on the living room floor. My roommate is on the phone. She tells someone, “my roommates keep falling over.” Firefighters in black and yellow come through the front door. I tell everyone, “I feel fine. I’m just really tired. I’m just going to stay here.” I end up in a hyperbaric chamber at a hospital in the Bronx being treated for carbon monoxide poisoning.
The bills later came in the mail. I ignored them. I quit my job and went on a road trip with the man I’d been texting from my hospital bed. When I came back home and he broke my heart, there was a new subletter to complain to about what a jerk he was. I started dating a woman and stopped when we slept at my house for the first time rather than hers. I didn’t like the way she judged my lofted bed and ink-stained sheets. I still lived like a teenager the way everyone does in artist lofts with too many bicycles and half-dead plants.
The firefighters came again in October. I was working on my laptop in the middle of the afternoon when smoke wafted up from the unit underneath ours. Three firetrucks blocked off Atlantic Avenue’s westbound lanes. I watched from the sidewalk as beefy men in helmets hustled in and out of the unit underneath ours. A man I’d never seen before in plaid boxer shorts and a blue bathrobe stumbled out of the unit. His skinny brown calves looked especially naked, his face especially rough. Smoke billowed out as the firefighters axed through the storefront’s tinted glass window. Sparks flew as they sawed through the lock on the hatch door out front leading to the basement below. About six or seven of them seemed to be doing all the work while about three dozen more milled around like grunts, occasionally rolling or unrolling a hose.
After half an hour of this circus, I watched a second civilian emerged from the unit remarkably unphased. This one I recognized. We got his mail sometimes and he got ours. He introduced himself as Alex, most of the envelopes said Ali. The business was supposedly a car service dispatch but the metal grate out front was only open irregular hours and I’d never seen any taxis around.
I hadn’t really thought much about what went on down there until the carbon monoxide incident. When I still thought there was a chance I could sue the landlord for my hospital bills, I’d gone to city hall to get a fire incident report, which detailed that there were men sleeping in that office space below us. This was less surprising than what the second fire incident revealed. When the glass window was destroyed, it became apparent the office had been designed with the bathroom in the front, a small toilet and sink pressed against the front window’s tinted one-way glass that faced Atlantic Avenue. The now exposed toilet made the whole scene inscrutable. According to a fire insurance salesman whose sister used to date one of the firefighters, it was a mattress fire. Someone had fallen asleep with a cigarette in their mouth.
We weren’t allowed back in our building for a couple hours. I found my next-door neighbor standing off to the side of the commotion, her red hair shining in the sun with her roommate’s yappy dog on a leash. She was annoyed. She’d had to leave work to take the dog out of the smoke-filled building. We both complained for a minute. The dog kept barking at me. I didn’t learn much about her until the memorial service.
The next time the firefighters came it was January when she hung herself. At the bottom of the stairs, I still find mail from creditors with her name on it.