Tenemental by Vikki Warner

Author:Vikki Warner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936932221
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2018-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

That fire hazard business, by the way, is not a hypothetical; it’s not something I say to my tenants just to get them to cooperate. By my count, I’ve witnessed six house fires on the blocks directly adjacent to mine. Usually they erupt in the very early morning; usually they are detected by my subconscious in deep sleep—silent, shocking. Some of the houses were empty; some were filled with sleeping people. No one was badly injured in any of these fires, but the experience of having just escaped your burning home must flip an internal switch that can’t be deactivated. One fire happened on a top-three coldest night of the year; Seth and I quickly layered up and went outside to offer clothing to the stunned tenants in their sweatpants and T-shirts, their bodies still warm from bed and adrenaline as they expelled vaporous, swirling breath clouds. The flames shot through the roof, stretching into the sky, as we stood with them, watching the firefighters’ counterattack. There wasn’t much to say.

It seemed the neighborhood had surreptitiously signed up on an installment plan to burn itself down, and my mind was infected by it. The fires were drawing closer, circling around PennHenge. In daylight hours, I knew it was silly to assume the flames were coming for us, but in sleep, my brainwaves uncontrolled, I was haunted. I frequently woke up smelling phantom smoke, my teeth ground together, my tongue lumpy and numb from being bitten. To soothe myself, I checked the smoke alarms; I installed more. I begged my tenants not to smoke in the house. I ran to the window to scan the block at any unexplained sound or siren.

A friend who is a heavy dabbler in real estate once said to me, “Landlords burn down these dime-a-dozen triple deckers all the time.” I was so insulted by his intimation that my house—the site of so much of my time and money—was one of many, a faceless blob not worth his notice, that I didn’t parse the rest of the thought. Landlords burn these buildings down. It’s a well-known tactic for collecting insurance money and displacing tenants from rent-subsidized apartments. (Rhode Island doesn’t have a rent control program—though it should—but the state’s Section 8 program offers housing vouchers and subsidies to landlords in order to create pseudo-affordable housing for low-income families.) This is literally eviction by fire. I’ve heard about it, I know it happens. It’s still shocking to live in the center of a scorching epidemic of it.

The probability of an accidental fire is not all that much greater in the Hill than out in the suburbs—otherwise average suburbanites are often on the news here in Rhode Island for using a grill in the house or a blowtorch to melt ice off the gutters. Many miles of outdated wiring are to be found in the area’s aging houses. There are risks, but not to the tune of six houses on three blocks. That’d be some serious bad luck.

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