Fire Watch

The trouble of being an assistant property manager, between a myriad of other caveats, is responding to late night emergency calls without salary pay while the property manager is on vacation. After two failed fire system repairs, multiple false alarms soundings, and consistent after hours communications with the fire department, I was tired. The maintenance team divided the previous night’s duties into five hour shifts. Rebuilding rooftop AC units by day and roaming the halls during witching hours, they were exhausted. To my dismay, the repair would take another three weeks. We determined that each team member should complete a full night of fire watch until the situation concluded. In an attempt at diplomacy, I agreed to go first.

I stopped at home to change out of my pantsuit and scarf down a bowl of noodles. The building required hourly human surveillance, and I had hardly a moment to breathe or break character. I kissed my partner goodbye, and he watched with disappointment as I left with a pillow and a blanket tucked under my arm. I felt like a grade schooler leaving for a sleep away camp they didn’t want to attend. Circling the red, white, and blue midrise in my car, I expected to see flames emanating from the ten foot apartment windows. Instead of plumes of smoke, all I noticed was the tacky patriotic design element. After six years of ownership, the company hadn’t bothered to repaint the exterior. For such a pricey place to live, the aesthetic was undeniably ugly, but it certainly stood out against the other three brick midrises on the streetcorner.

With six floors, two wings, and eight hallways separated by a parking garage, the property had never seemed so expansive. It wasn’t late enough to feel out of place walking the halls yet, but sniffing the air as I wandered was an unexpected addition to my ever growing list of obligations to the corporate machine. My day job often entails issuing lease violations fines for things like noise, trash, and smoking. This has been described as “hall monitor behavior” by disgruntled residents. The statement never rang true until now. Many believed that I personally profited from the charges, but the money didn’t go into my pockets. It just filled a budgeting void.

The office was dark, and I wished it would stay that way. I didn’t want the residents to know I was there. I opened the door, and the motion censored lights illuminated a space unusually devoid of life. The only sounds were of people entering and exiting the building and the occasional bus rider at the Marta stop. For a place frequently trafficked by the neediest of community members, and leasing phones that rang incessantly throughout the day, the silence was eerie. I opened my laptop and tried to clear my mind, but the pressure of ensuring the safety of over 800 people was all consuming. This building of 342 apartment homes had never felt so daunting to manage.

My class assignment was due at six in the morning, and all I'd accomplished was over-thinking. I stepped outside the office for round two and locked the door. I immediately smelled smoke. My heart was pounding. I thought of the time 408 caught fire. It didn’t take much for one person to completely ruin a large sum of people’s peaceful dwelling experience. The tenant added a sprinkle of essential oils to her freshly cleaned linens before placing them into the dryer, and the appliance nearly exploded. I was home and reading a book when the fire alarms sounded. The hallways were engulfed with smoke, and the water from the sprinkler systems quickly flooded forty apartments. Instead of exiting the building like any human of sound mind, the woman locked herself on the balcony. The fire department had to kick the door down to save her from the flames.

 I considered dialing 911, but what if this wasn’t another 408? I couldn’t harass the fire department every hour simply because I was an anxiety riddled neurodivergent. I ran towards the west wing, through the lobby, and to the east side of the building and found nothing. I checked the clubhouse, the bathrooms, the garage, the stair wells, and nothing. I made my way to the top floor and still nothing. I felt aimless and stupid as community members passed by me in the hallways. No one seemed concerned about anything other than my untimely presence. 

I greeted a girl I’d just moved in that morning. How terrible it would look if she knew that I was the building’s fire alarm. I smiled and waved, trying to disguise my panic. She was probably questioning why I was roaming the halls in a frenzy, wearing sweatpants and a hoodie at nine in the evening. I stepped inside the elevator, and it became clear. Someone had lit something on the way down. I wasn’t sure what, but the enclosed space smelled like burnt paper. Was I the only one who cared if the building burned to the ground? I went back to the office, and hit my vape out of view of the cameras, a stress induced habit I’d tried breaking many times over the last few years.

During the third patrol, I greeted a handful of residents that I had already seen on my earlier rounds. No one knew I was on fire watch duty, and I didn’t want to tell them. There was no need to insight mass panic, but the mystery of it all made the interactions even more awkward. I did my best to pretend that these encounters were normal even though we all knew they were not. Maybe it would have been passible if I still lived onsite, but everyone and their mother decided to gawk at my personal belongings as the movers carried them away in early September. Too many of these people know that I own a golden dance pole.

 The ring cameras on every door frame lit up as I passed. I wondered if people were receiving notifications of my meanderings and watching from their phones. I turned my face towards the ground and moved faster. Each floor level offered a unique line of late night fragrance essentials. Some smelled of burnt incense and tobacco, others of weed and food, but nothing was stronger than the scent of the trash sitting out, waiting to be collected by the valet.

 I prayed that I wouldn’t run into 513. Always demanding every detail of every minute happening, it was impossible to evade her line of questioning. I remembered the time she screamed at the dryer vent cleaners for leaving a spec of lint in the trap. She filed a corporate complaint in an attempt to destroy their humble careers. There was also the time she blew up the office line until I showed up to her apartment with a bucket and a broom. She was convinced there was a rat in her HVAC closet, and I had to prove to her that it was just maintenance working on the unit above. Then there was hurricane Helene. She stood over my coworker and I as we wet-vacced the halls of the first floor on our hands and knees. The rainwater kept pouring in from an underground drain system, and she kept asking what we were going to do to stop it. How the hell does anyone stop a hurricane?

As the night grew later, the halls became quieter and less pungent. I fought the feeling that someone was following me. I kept turning back to check, but it was only the echoing of my own footsteps. For the first time, I was completely alone. The off white walls and cool gray flooring made the place feel more like a prison than a community. The lack of windows or any indication of a connection to the outside world made the place feel like an unpleasant dreamscape, holding me captive. I resigned to get some fresh air and took an alternate route through the parking garage. 

Known for reporting pebbles in his parking spot and photographing explicit content on the rooftop, 615 was conveniently exiting his vehicle with a bag full of camera equipment. Only last week, I agreed to deliver a package to his apartment. He said he’d be out of town for ten days, so the request was oddly reasonable. I opened the door to a disturbing poster of a naked woman hanging at the entry. There were crude polaroids of women covering every inch of the studio. Caught in the lie of an extended “business trip,” I spotted him in the package room the next day. I had to escape before the pervert tried to intervene.

 We nearly made eye contact when I slipped through a side door and ran down the stairs. I decided that I had been spotted too many times and my cover was blown. I collected my things from the office and set off for the model apartment when a vision came to me. Days earlier, our maintenance supervisor confronted a houseless person for breaking into vacant apartments and storage closets. He burst into my office crying, yelling, and spitting. He said he’d lived in the building for the last five years, and I believed him. I’d seen him plenty of times, but never realized he wasn’t actually a resident. I tried to calm him, and he only became angrier. He kept reaching into his coat and trying to grab my arm. He was escorted from the grounds.

I cracked open the door to the model home, remembering that we placed a pad lock on the balcony after finding hair in the beds and showers. Maybe this was where he had been living. “Hello. Is anyone there?” I jumped at the sound of the AC kicking on. I turned on the lights and cautiously checked the beds, bathrooms, closets, and window locks before breathing a sigh of relief. There was something unsettling about a staged home. It was meant for viewing, not habitation. It was too pristine, too unused. I was too perturbed to bother stealing snacks from the fridge, another stress response I’d developed over the years. I was afraid of leaving chip crumbs on the carpet, and I didn’t want to deal with restocking the supply either. I pulled out my laptop and got back to work.

The dangers of being alone began to feel more imminent, and I wished I was someone who carried a weapon. I poked my head out the door and scanned the hallways, trying to shake the thought of running into the man from the day before, or anyone else with a vendetta. A previously evicted tenant had recently vandalized the office front overnight. He was caught on camera ripping the flowers from the planters, dumping bags of trash around the building, and breaking handles off of the entry door. He wrote, “I’m still here,” on the glass in red lipstick. He was one of many that had been set out by my request to the Fulton County Marshals. 

Regardless of the building’s controlled access deterrents, with enough determination, there were still plenty of ways to get inside. Someone had even stolen two iMac computers from the clubhouse only a few months ago. I called the elevator and immediately aborted when I heard what sounded like a body slamming around inside of it. I didn’t know what it was, but I didn’t want to find out. I sprinted in the opposite direction. I couldn’t bring myself to walk the whole building. I peeked around the corridor and quickly returned to the safety of the model home.

It was four thirty in the morning, and I was running low on adrenaline. I could hardly hold my eyes open. I set an alarm, dimmed the lights, and laid on the couch with my pillow and blanket. After what felt like five minutes, I awoke to find that my alarm had been sounding for half an hour. I raced out the door in fear that the building had caught fire in my sleep. At 6 a.m., the community was already buzzing. Gym goers and those making their morning Starbucks runs filtered through the halls. I gathered my things before completing one last round. Wearing the same clothes as the night before, I crept around corners and only took the stairs. My partner was awake when I returned home. We embraced and shared a coffee as I tried to detail the night’s events, but none of it made sense. I was too wired to sleep.

The following day, I arrived at the office to discover that fire watch had concluded. The part that was meant to arrive in three weeks was deemed no longer necessary. Mine was the first and last fourteen hour patrol.