I’ve recently developed this deep-rooted fear that I’m going to accidentally set something on fire.
Not that recent, I guess. My earliest memory of this was about three years ago, when I was in New York for work. They were putting on a team event where everyone made their own terrariums and ate pizza, two seemingly unrelated activities and ones which, when combined, could possibly be very annoying – little stones and dirt getting in all the pizza, giant glass orbs sitting very near the edge of table tops waiting to be knocked off and fill the pizza boxes with tiny shards of glass, etc. I’d finished my work early and the event didn’t start for half an hour, so I took the lift 38 floors down to the street to have a cigarette while I waited for everyone else to be done.
The trash cans in New York, or most of them anyway, are made of this kind of steel (steel?) mesh with giant holes in, meaning most of the trash falls out of them as soon as you put it in, something which probably contributes to the fact that the streets in New York are constantly covered in trash. It also means there’s nowhere on the side of the trash can to stub out a cigarette without hundreds of tiny flying fireballs depositing directly into a pile of very flammable rubbish. Which is what happened. I don’t know if I could actually see smoke coming out of the trash can, and also it was rush hour so there were hundreds of people walking past prepped and ready to call the fire department, and the trash can was decently far enough away from the building that even if I had set it on fire there would most likely be zero human casualties, but either way I spent about five minutes staring into the trash can, wondering if I cared enough about this to dig through other people’s waste to find… what? A smoking ember? The offending cigarette butt, presumably extinguished? After cringing with indecision for another minute or so I decided there was nothing I could do, and took the elevator back up to where the team was assembled in the office kitchen, wearing green aprons and politely receiving their terrarium instructions.
Halfway into filling my glass orb with small teal-coloured stones, I could wait no longer and excused myself, took the elevator 38 floors back down to the street to check on the trash can. It was not on fire. By the time I got back up to the office most of the terrarium moss had been claimed by other people so mine was just teal stones with a tiny cactus sitting in it. We attached strings to the loop in the top of the orb and my boss asked me to take a picture of hers, hanging from a fingertip in front of a white backdrop. As soon as I lifted my phone to take the picture the string came loose and the terrarium fell to the floor, smashing instantly. I burst out laughing for some sadistic reason and ruined our working relationship forever.
A month later, it was my last weekend in New York and everyone I knew had left because it was Thanksgiving. I’d been woken up at 4am because the corporate apartment I was staying in was directly opposite Macy’s, who, if you didn’t know, start practicing the music cues for their Thanksgiving day parade at, well, 4am. Alone in the city, I decided to go to the movies. I made myself some shit pasta and headed out to the Angelika theatre. As I stepped out of the subway, the mantra of all anxious people everywhere began ringing in my head like a gong: did I turn the stove off?
I stood in the middle of the street, paralyzed. The apartment block was twenty stories high. The movie was two hours long. These two facts combined meant that my flaming stove could kill many, many people by the time I got home. A fire engine drove past, siren blaring, and I flinched. Had it started already? Was that fire engine on its way to 34th Street to clean up my mess? And also, would the terrarium filled with small teal stones survive the blaze?
I forced myself to go into the movie theatre anyway and managed to sit through the credits before bolting, running back to the subway and then out again at Herald Square. From the street the apartment building looked fine. No sirens (or no more than usual), but perhaps the fire was still contained to my room. I can still save everyone else! my mind screamed, so I sprinted to the elevators and then down the corridor, threw open the door to find: nothing. The stove was off.
I sat on the bed for a while breathing heavily. Ridiculous behaviour, and now I’d missed the movie. I went back out into the night to buy a bottle of wine to calm myself down, got back: no corkscrew. I pushed the cork into the bottle with my apartment key and spent the rest of the night sipping wine with tiny pieces of gunk in, occasionally stopping to shake my head at my own idiocy.
I don’t know where this fear came from. General anxiety had bloomed in me like a toxic flower about five years ago, but why this specific fire-based anxiety? Why this anxiety that I was going to kill a lot of people by accident? Why do I have so much faith in the importance of my own existence that I think anything I do is going to affect anyone else’s life in any way? I see people throwing their lit cigarettes out of car windows into piles of scrub and my heart starts slamming itself against my ribs. Maybe it’s because we’ve spent our whole lives being assured of our own importance – your vote matters, your bamboo toothbrush matters, your opinion matters and everyone should hear it. By that token, my lit cigarette is important and has life-ending potential. I don’t know. I should quit smoking.
One good thing:
I took a day off in the middle of last week to celebrate one of my friend’s birthdays (a month late). I’ve only just made it back to the UK after eighteen months of being imprisoned in New York, so I missed her actual birthday (twice, I guess). The two of us plus another friend whose two birthdays I had also missed went to a hammam in Edgware Road. It was unassuming from the outside: we actually spent five minutes or so trying to force open a gate down some stairs that looked like they led directly to hell before a nice man who was seemingly demolishing the office on the ground floor came out and asked if we were looking for the spa. I don’t know if people are always trying to force open that gate or if we just really looked like we were going to a spa. We found it next door (duh) and were led down some marble steps into the underground spa, also marble. We were told to shower in a stall filled with red LED lights (weird) and then sat in a steam room while a lady rubbed olive oil ‘soap’ (grease?) all over us. We sat in our own filth for twenty minutes, occasionally shifting on the bench, our slick bodies making amusing farting noises by accident. When our time was up the lady returned and power-hosed us down like three prisoners in the Soviet Union and then told us to lay down on yet another marble slab, while she went nuts with an exfoliating glove. At one point she asked me: ‘Do you want to see the dead skin?’, to which I replied ‘No,’ even though I could see piles of disgusting little grey rolls inching up my arms towards my face the more she rubbed. I closed my eyes.
Down three layers of skin, we went and got lunch in Borough Market. Somehow we thought because it was the middle of the week or because it was my friend’s birthday or because we’d had a shit eighteen months are were due a break of some kind that meant we’d be able to get into Padella, but the woman on the door laughed us down the street, so we found an excellent pizza place in the market instead. Our friend who had flown in from Germany came to join us; I hadn’t seen her in at least two years since we all boarded a flight from Bologna after sleeping on the airport floor all night, and I hugged her and told her she looked gorgeous, at which she looked somewhat taken aback, because I’m not the sort of person who can pull off sentences like that. I drank two glasses of orange wine and a very patient waiter explained to us how orange wine is made, after the German friend asked and I said ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ assuming that the multiple times people have explained this to me before would somehow prevail, but I couldn’t remember a single thing after my grandiose announcement so I flagged down the waiter to do it for me. We went from there to the Tate Modern, where I did my best to spend more than half an hour looking through the whole exhibition but only managed my upper limit of 45 minutes, then fell asleep on a sofa outside while the three people who actually appreciate art consumed the exhibit in the way you’re supposed to. The shop downstairs was selling an Andy Warhol sketch of a man’s crotch for three pounds so I bought it and that was the good thing that happened this week.
One bad thing:
I’ve expended most of my word count and energy on the good thing (which is very unlike me), so briefly, the bad thing that happened last week was that my dad got angry at someone who brushed past him when we were at the theatre, because every day he wakes up and chooses violence.
One time I did walk away from ashing a cigarette that I thought I did put out, only to find a pretty large smoke stack right outside my apartment and kind neighbors running to dump water on it. I guess ashing into the crevasse of a long wooden beam during dry summer heat isn't a smart idea. I just thought it wasn't breezy enough to cause a fire but alas.