"Serves them right," the neighborhood yawned the next morning. They were drug dealers,
those squatters. If anyone knew that to be true, it was me. My window was center
stage to the madness and I'd seen all sorts of people come and go from there
since moving in. Men in business suits, bikers, priests, scantily dressed
females, it was a drug haven and I wrote about it regularly in emails to friends
back home. Once, when two friends were visiting me from Los Angeles (and teasing
me for being "an American in Paris", as in, someone with so little space, she
was forced to close one drawer so as to open another), they suddenly spotted a
tall, elegantly dressed blond man exiting the abandoned dwelling. "It's true!"
they exclaimed, pointing out my window. Closing the drawer with the knives to
get to the draws with the plates, I frowned with insult. Hello! What am I, a guy
at a carnival? I told you people…
Even with the lack of space, Parisians simply do not believe in the unsightly. Thus, the
lack of smoke detectors in the kindling they call houses. To the French, smoke
detectors are definitely unsightly, as they ruin decors and make horrible
sounds, ugh, just, never. All well and good if you have a back-up plan, I
argued, but unlike in America, there are no building codes here; no safety
inspectors flashing badges and writing citations. I dare you to find an exit map
or a fire escape outside of a tourist hotel room, I bellowed. But my concerns
fell on deaf ears as their response was consistent and clear: in Paris, décor
rules.
Somehow, I slept through the second fire. I was leaving my apartment one day, when I saw
the same building with twice the burned out windows and a new gaping hole in the
concrete wall. Apparently, the firemen had added it to their penchant for broken
glass. Upon noticing it, I gasped so loudly that the locksmith next door laugh.
Sitting on the hood of his car, smoking, no desperate locked-out customers in
sight, he winked and called me "Sleeping Beauty" in French. Only one floor
burned that night, he informed me. I walked away feeling uneasy and ill.
The night of the third fire, when the cats hid and I finally awoke to
the full knowledge of what why my African neighbor was screaming about, I didn't
want to pull back the curtains. Except for her shrieking, the streets were too
silent and that terrified me the most. But pull them back I did, only to
discover…an inferno. This time, the fire was not playing games as all five
floors were ablaze and the flames were threatening to cross the street.
The neighbors hovered, beaten back by the heat; the screams of those
trapped inside escalating. Cell phones flickered as people dialed the police. I
picked up my phone, too. My French was better now, I could call, too. I barely
had time to focus on the key pad, when a man on the roof decided not to wait for
help. Instead, he jumped, and landed head-first into the street below. His crown
split in two complete halves and blood flowed.
I hung up the phone and began my own screaming.
Much to my chagrin, I was no novice to witnessing suicide. In fact, this was to be my
second in eight months. The first had come that previous December, as I stood
waiting at a train station in Osaka, Japan. He was a kindly looking gentleman,
about fifty, stout and unassuming with shopping bags full of Christmas presents.
The platform was scattered with waiting Japanese, and three Americans: me, my
friend, Susan and her boyfriend, Martin. At the time, I thought we were the only
things odd about the entire scene, but then I recalled the gentleman's feet.
