Chapter 2
2
T he last thing I needed that cold gray Thursday morning—other than the fucking water heater being broken and having to contemplate the possibility of (maybe) taking a cold shower—was for the fire alarm to go off. I didn’t have the energy to deal with it. I hadn’t planned on leaving my place until twenty minutes before my lunch meeting.
I opened my front door slightly and peeked outside. My neighbors were making their way downstairs. I found it bizarre because my experience living in earthquake-prone Los Angeles was that people didn’t take seriously things like sirens, drills, or even the actual earth shaking if it was below 5.5 points on the magnitude scale. But they were somehow not ignoring this alarm.
Still wearing my pajama pants, I put on my blue Writers Guild of America West hoodie, donned a pair of flip-flops and, before descending to the street, grabbed my keys, cell phone, and laptop and stuffed them inside a LACMA tote bag. I have separation anxiety issues if I am far from either of those two electronic devices for any extended amount of time.
I lived on the tenth floor and knew enough about fire alarms—because of a brief stint on a TV show about sexy firefighters—to be aware that I shouldn’t take the elevator. So I made my descent to the street slowly and almost alone. I might have been one of the last residents to exit the building.
The stairway felt eerie. The fire alarm was still blasting but there was not a single person in sight. It didn’t feel safe. I wasn’t scared of the possibility of getting trapped by fire in the building; I couldn’t even smell smoke. It was something else. A creepy feeling made me accelerate until I reached the exit.
I’m not one to recognize many of my neighbors—I’m terrible with faces and use my cell phone as a conversation-avoiding tool when in the elevator or other public areas—but I guessed the throngs of people garbed in different informal styles crowding Broadway Street by the building’s main entrance must all live there.
Of course, there was one person I did recognize, even if both of us seemed to be doing everything in our power to avoid one another. I’d even taken the stairs up to my apartment on many occasions to prevent being stuck with him in the elevator. And I’m not exactly your always-take-the-stairs-and-count-your-steps health-nut Californian.
David was there on the street as well. Now, please don’t read his name the American way (DAY-vid) but the Spanish way (dah-VEED) as he’s a proud third-generation Angeleno of Mexican and Argentinian descent.
David, naturally, was being his most obnoxious, helpful self. He assured everyone there was nothing to fear and that the fire department was already on its way. I’m sure he’d checked to confirm that was true. He might have even had more than one source who corroborated that fact. He was thorough if anything else. He kept asking by name about neighbors from whom I hadn’t heard in my life, making sure they were all accounted for. The guy was leading a head count, for fuck’s sake! He even went as far as taking his own light-down jacket and giving it to a woman in her seventies who was wearing a T-shirt and shorts. Sure thing, she hugged him. I can’t blame her. He’s all six feet of manly huggable splendor.
I guess you can draw your own conclusions now. I’m a socially awkward screenwriter who’d just woken up that day and whose idea of a nightmare is having to call a restaurant to make a reservation. David is a city reporter who’d probably been up since five that morning, gone for a run, volunteered in some place or other, and already filed an error-free story and sent it to his adoring editor.
Go ahead, take his side. All our former common friends did it anyway. I’m told he’s more fun and engaging to be around.
David gets on my nerves because I’m a heartless spoiled bitch. That and, you may have guessed it, there’s an entangled backstory. I’m gonna make this short because I hate when a tale gets stopped for the exposition dump portion, and I interrupted the narration when a possible fire was developing.
David and I were friends in college, and then we were best friends, and then we made out and kept doing it and then, at some point, we sort of started officially dating. We even moved in together and shared a cramped one-bedroom Art Deco bungalow in Central LA with a historically original (if malfunctioning) kitchen. We broke up about two years ago, left the bungalow, and by some mischievous turn of fate ended up renting separate units in the Eastern Columbia during the same week. They were having a sale.
Now you know.
Back to the spillage of humans on Broadway Street.
The firetruck arrived then and, to my dismay, most of the neighbors started clapping and cheering. We still had to wait for almost forty more minutes though. If it wasn’t because my agent had agreed to meet a fifteen-minute walk away from there—she was willing to drive from Beverly Hills to Downtown with the excuse of trying a vegan ramen spot in Grand Central Market—I’d be calling her and asking for a postponement. But even if the firefighters took the rest of the morning, I could simply drop by as I was, though I didn’t recall having checked myself in a mirror that day. If I told Beatrice (my agent) that I’d been in a fire, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind me looking a bit disheveled. And she would not be able to accuse me of not taking my career seriously.
She’d complained about that on a couple of occasions during the last few months, but I’m focusing again on unimportant things.
Returning to the fire. We were informed by one of the firefighters that there was no trace of actual flames anywhere in the building. They believed the alarm had been triggered by accident. I wasn’t surprised. The least interesting or exciting possibility tends to be the one that happens. As a screenwriter, I was well aware that real life tends to be far duller than fiction. Also, with the ability humans have to do things they aren’t supposed to do, I wondered why fire alarms weren’t triggered accidentally more often.
But of course, with my bad luck that morning—cold, unshowered, and improperly attired—everything wasn’t over yet. Rumor had it (and rumor at the Eastern Columbia always arrived via the apartment 10B tenant—our resident gossip) that there had been a death in the building.
A violent one.