“Secret Chorus” was published in the March 2013 edition of SPACER zine.

Secret Chorus

A new apartment, and with it new sounds, new rhythms to accompany my waking, sleeping, eating, thinking, vegetating, scribbling, musicking, somnambulating. A heat-pipe alarm clock and its spastic proclamations; amorous neighbors (he is louder); the cat crooner that lives (mysteriously) in the shaft between mine and the neighboring building outside my bedroom window: These are always the members of the secret chorus that wait to welcome a new tenant, unknowable until the lease is signed and the mattress in place. But then there are those members who, you later realize, would have required but the smallest bit of sleuthing to reveal themselves before it was too late.

I didn’t give much thought to the red SUV outside my new abode-to-be, and even less to the garage that stands behind it. Folly! I now cry as my once restful dawns are shattered by emergency’s toll. Blast you! My faux-British inner monologue grumbles as I crank the volume on my speakers when a tense and crucial moment of Breaking Bad is interrupted yet again by someone else’s incendiary catastrophe. FUCK THIS! I shout, when the near-perfect rendition (fifth attempt) I am recording of a new song gains an unwanted and out-of-tune addendum… and on to the sixth.

In my new apartment, time passes not just to the tick of the second hand of the clock that I have buried deep beneath time-muffling blankets in the bedroom closet. Here, above the fire station off of Washington Avenue, I learn of a new rhythm, irregular, unpredictable in its occurrence, but reliable in its inevitable arrival. In this space, I become attuned to the endless return of local emergency — or at least to my local fire precinct’s (hopefully prompt!) response to emergency (of the fiery sort). Of course, there’s always the chance that the clanging bell that accompanies breakfast, that bids me goodnight, that whispers loudly and obnoxiously to me in my dreams, is the result of some good Samaritan’s concern for a stranded feline who climbed higher up than it could climb down. But the more selfish (and possibly sadistic) part of me likes to think that the ever-lurking alarm is at least indicative of something slightly more serious. Not that I wish ill upon anyone — just that there is some solace in believing that the perpetual irritant whose potential always inhabits my living space is a stand-in for someone else’s far greater tragedy. It’s a reminder that, stressful and trying as my own life can be at times, the trials I face pale in comparison to the smoky woes that befall my neighbors everyday. It also serves as a reminder to purchase fire insurance.

Here, in my apartment above the fire station off of Washington Avenue, time passes to the rhythm of flames, to the beat of firemen, to the misery of mishaps spawned by a burning cigarette butt, by dodgy landlords and their poorly wired renos. In my living room, where the alarm rings every time that garage door opens, I become fire, I become fear, I become savior and victim, adrenaline surging as I vicariously live the life of both fireman and escapee. When that bell rings, no matter what I am doing, I live in the space that the alarm affords, a space both happily separate from and somehow intimately tied to the emergency that it signifies. It is a rhythm in my life now that I have almost become fond of — but not so fond that I don’t plan to seek out the sounds of a new secret chorus when my lease is up.