A great ringing racket in the hallway outside the metal door to my brother’s apartment startled me; I bounced from his couch and in two short strides, reached the door. I opened it and set the ringing free to bounce off the interior walls; in the hallway, a light was flashing, and the red fire alarm bell attached to the wall next to Clifford’s door was screaming a high-pitched alarm in concert with the ringing. My brother’s apartment is at the end of a long hall, and when I looked down that hall, I saw doors open, and heads popped out, the prairie dogs of the floor. I closed Cliff’s door and walked to a table in his apartment and disconnected the power cord from my MacBook Pro laptop. I placed the cord and the laptop in my black messenger bag. I walked to a 4-drawer filing cabinet next to the desk on which sits my brother’s TV and picked up my Nikon D3400 and the 55-200mm lens next to it; I placed both into the bag. I walked around the corner and glanced into his bedroom at Cliff, who was prone on his bed, working a “find-a-word” puzzle. I said to him, “fire alarm, Cliff,” and my brother slowly wrestled his ungainly bulk upright, reached for his cane and stood up.
My brother lives in the same building that our mother occupied from about 1990 to 2010, when she moved to Maryland to live with our sister. Cliff has shown no interest in living anywhere other than the apartment building that has housed him for more than twenty years. He was also, despite the urgency of the alarms, unconcerned. We opened his door and glanced to the opposite end of the hall; firefighters had opened the door to the stairwell, looked into the hallway, and closed the door. The stairwell closest to my brother’s apartment was two steps away; Clifford pushed open the door and once in the stairwell, positioned himself behind the door. “We have to get downstairs, Cliff.” I knew my brother was going to labor down the steps with his halting gait and his cane, but he didn’t move. “I was told,” he said, “to stand behind the fire door.”
In October of 2009, when I was living in St. Louis Missouri, I was awakened by a hammering on my door. I heard someone bellow, “Fire department! Everybody out!” I opened the door to a hallway filled with smoke, and the sound of an urgently ringing bell. I turned back into my apartment and gathered my laptop and camera and swam through the smoke to the stairway, where I joined other evacuees on the way to the first floor. The fire had started on my floor, the seventh, and the man who started it did not live, so when I was huddled with my brother behind the fire door, I was considering strategies to move his stubborn butt down the six flights of steps. But we were lucky: It was a false alarm.
In a short while, firefighters issued an “all clear,” and Cliff retired to his bed and his puzzle book. I looked out of his sixth-floor window and below, saw a firefighter striding toward two others, who stood guard at an exit door; where an exhaust fan hummed. I remembered a fan like that working to blow smoke from my apartment in St. Louis, and worried about my brother, who lives alone, leaning on his cane and patiently waiting in the stairway without knowing that death may accompany the incessant ringing of the bells.
cjon3acd@att.net