Bad Friday
There is a man standing in my bedroom. I will recall the silhouette of him, black against the yellow light in the hallway, until the day I die, the outline of his hat, which gives away his identity in seconds, but still not fast enough to quell my terrible, screaming fear. He is not a burglar or a crazed drunk or a rapist, which are my first three thoughts as I tumble out out of bed, hair askew, making noises like a baby animal, which I cannot stop making, even though I am instantly aware of how ridiculous, how childlike, they sound.
The man is all business, rapping on doors, checking behind them. My fourth thought is stupid. It is this: You with the hat. Get the fuck out of my apartment.
On Good Friday morning, an hour past dawn, I am asleep. I am asleep like a dead person sleeps. I am asleep like someone who's been fighting a cold for days, like a person who hasn't had a good night of sleep in a month. I am so very asleep.
I am so asleep that I do not hear a single one of the 22 fire engines clogging the blocks around my apartment, the hundreds—literally, hundreds—of steel-toed footfalls on every floor of the building. I do not smell the smoke, which is everywhere. I do not hear the neighbors pounding furiously on the door with their fists, shouting my name so many times and for so long that they give up, thinking I am away for the weekend. I do not see the ladders directly outside my window or the flicker of red lights. The only thing that wakes me, the last person asleep in a building full of shouting, panicked people. Are the admonitions of an enormous man hovering above my bed, a pike in one hand like a tower guard.
“Get up,” he says. “Now. Fire in the building.”
“OK,” I say, scrambling. “OK.”
He sees me hesitate, look around the room, take stock of the rancid air. I am walking-talking-sleeping. I have no idea where I am.
“Don't take anything with you,” he says. “Go.”
I defy him. I pull a coat off a peg, say a prayer that my glasses are where I think they are. (They are.)
“Is anyone else here?” he says. And then, a question I don't expect, tinged with disbelief. “Did they leave you here?”
The question has nothing to do with this thing that's happening. This fire. The question is the one he would ask if I had been left drunk at a bar at 2 am, tottering on my high heels with a lecherous dude's arm around my waist, or stuck on a rainy night without cab fare. The question implies grave injustice. I can almost hear his indignant next thought, the question answering itself in his mind. Because that's bullshit, if they did.
“I...”
He repeats it like I haven't heard him.
“No. My roommates aren't here. I'm alone.”
In the light of the kitchen, I can see him clearly. Even without the oxygen tanks or layers of equipment, he is a huge, huge man. The door to the apartment is open, the frame splintered. He stops, filling the space. He turns around in the way that enormous animals turn around, with meticulous effort, shouldering the load of himself.
“Actually,” he says, reconsidering, “Make sure you have shoes.”
I look down at my feet. Somehow, I am wearing shoes.
“I have shoes,” I say.
“Good.”
They have shattered the windows in the stairwell. The air is gray, chemical.
Descending from the floor above is the other woman who would not leave. The last two of us. But she stayed by choice and by stubbornness. The most awake things a girl can be.
Mary is in her nineties and a recluse and frail as a bird, her white hair in its neat bun, her wrists thin as the necks of bottles. She's lived in her fifth floor studio since 1957. She descends with the deliberateness of royalty, gripping the railings, taking one steady step at a time. She would not let them carry her. An entourage of six firemen, four in back and two in front, escorts her down each step.
I hit the morning air and see all of it. Ladders on the roof. A bleary crowd across the street, hugging themselves, rubbing their arms. Smoke pouring out of the restaurant downstairs.
I cross the street, lean my back against a wall. I am scared and calm as a stone. From the instant my eyes flickered open to this one, it has been a grand total of 45 seconds.
My phone is upstairs with all my numbers. My ID. Two computers, four designer skirts, prescriptions, my journals, the gold necklace my grandmother bought for me in Sicily when I was born, books. All my books. I wrap my trench coat around me tighter, watching the smoke, not caring. It could all go. All of it. And I wouldn't care. And if the fire moved another way up from the basement where it began, ten feet to the left, I might have died in there with all of it. Instead of prodding and shouting me out, that firefighter would have carried me. That's why they send the big guys to check apartments, to break through locks and and upturn beds. I have seen enough episodes of Rescue Me.
This is New York. There is always new stuff to buy.
Mary finally exists, slow, her firefighter entourage in tow. I am slightly jealous. Someone finds her a chair. A news photographer snaps photos. Someone offers me coffee and I refuse. A Red Cross guy asks if I need anything. I don't.
I don't. Right?
posted by Laura Motta at
5:26 PM
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