My sister used to live across the street from a firehouse in Manhattan. The first time my mother — a longtime reporter and editor — visited, she would race to the window every time the fire siren went off. Remembering that led me to this story, which is definitely not about my mother.

Sirens

By Nancy Jane Moore

A firehouse sealed my choice of apartments in Manhattan. While the agent was showing me the place – two tiny rooms, loft bed, shower in the kitchen – a siren went off. I got to the window in time to see two firetrucks and an ambulance take off from the firehouse across the street, and signed the lease on the spot.

It was a big one on Sixth Avenue, with at least half a dozen full-sized fire engines, serving the Village, Soho, Little Italy and Chinatown. I soon learned the siren went off seven or eight times a day, though most of the time only one truck was dispatched. A big city gets lots of false alarms.

My third night in the place, four trucks left the station after one alarm. When I opened the window and leaned out to see where they were going, I smelled smoke. So I threw on a dress, grabbed my 3G, raced down the six flights of stairs, and ran two blocks up the street.

It was your typical fire scene: barefoot folks in bathrobes standing on the sidewalk, hoses shooting vast streams of water at the building, a cop keeping the spectators back – even at three in the morning you get spectators in the city that never sleeps. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a dark-skinned woman with a head full of greying braids, leaning on a cane and staring down at the river of water running into the gutter.

I’d been recording sounds as I ran down the street. Now I started running the camcorder, catching the flames and flashing truck lights reflected in the water. The woman with the braids was still staring at the gutter. When I got cold standing on the sidewalk, I repaired to a nearby 24-hour diner and uploaded the files to my blog.

The blog is anonymous.

My first job was as the only reporter on a small town weekly. Whenever the siren went off I clicked on the police band radio to get the location, then jumped into my VW Bug and raced to the fire. Sometimes I got there ahead of the volunteer fire department.

But even before that – back when I was a little kid – I always stopped and listened when I heard a siren. Fire alarm, the weekly test of the emergency warning system, any siren. It was one of the little quirks in my personality that got me classed as an oddball early on. Being odd is hard on any child, but being odd in a small town is worse – there’s no group of other outcasts to hang with.

Even after I grew up, I didn’t exactly fit in. Thus the move to New York City, the ultimate destination of all small town oddballs.

I didn’t race out every time I heard the alarm, or even every time a lot of trucks went out. After a few weeks, I found I could tell from the tone of the siren whether it would be an interesting fire or not. A certain tremolo and I would be out the door in a flash. Eventually I realized the woman with the grey braids was at every fire I went to, always staring at the water slooshing through the gutters. She frightened me – too big-city odd and exotic for a small town girl new to NYC, even an oddball – but she drew my eye. And my camera. One night – a night when I’d been coming home half-lit from a club when the right siren went off – Dutch courage made me walk over to her.

“Soon, you say. I know it’s soon. But how soon?” She appeared to be talking to the water. “Inconstant,” she added, and swirled the end of her cane in the water. She looked up at me. “I’ve been waiting for you. Shall we go for a drink?” A touch of the Islands in her speech.

I followed her to a neighborhood bar that hadn’t even bothered with a neon sign. We could still smell smoke as we settled into a booth.

“So you like fires, too,” I said.

“I read water, and fires are the best place to find it.”

“But Manhattan is an island. There’s tons of water. The Hudson, the East River, the reservoir in Central Park.”

“The rivers are too big to read, and the reservoir too still.”

The words sounded nutty, but she said them in an ordinary voice. “And you,” she went on, “do not come for the fires themselves. You are called.”

“I just hear the siren and want to know what’s happening.”

“You hear the siren. It doesn’t matter what’s happening. You don’t just come to make a record for your blog.”

“How do you know about the blog?”

“Surely it doesn’t surprise you that people you photograph find your work?”

Truth is, it hadn’t occurred to me that people would find unlabeled pictures. Or that an older woman from the Islands might spend time online. I changed the subject. “What do you see in the water?”

“Disaster.”

Of course. What do portents always portend?

“And you will be there,” she added. “The siren will call you.”

I shivered, and decided I didn’t need to know any more. “I have to work tomorrow,” I said, gulping the rest of my drink and tossing too much money on the table.

For a couple of weeks, I managed to stay inside when the siren went off, even when I detected the tremolo. But it was hard, and when multiple trucks left in the middle of a cold Sunday afternoon, I gave up resisting and followed them. The old woman wasn’t there.

I fell back into the old pattern, rushing out every time I heard that added note in the siren. One frosty morning I followed the trucks all the way to a warehouse on fire near the Brooklyn Bridge.

I never saw the woman again. At first I was relieved, but after several fires I began to worry. Had something happened to her? Had I just imagined her? (But no, the pictures were there, on the blog.) Suddenly I wanted to know more about the omens she saw in the water, but I didn’t even know her name or where she lived, had no way to track her down.

“Has anyone seen this woman?” I wrote as a caption to one of the pictures and posted it. No one responded. I got so jumpy I went to three fires even though I hadn’t heard the tremolo.

Two AM one Wednesday morning, every siren in Manhattan began to scream. The firehouse emptied. Some trucks went north, some south, and a couple even went east.

Once I reached the street, I couldn’t decide which way to go. Skyscrapers were ablaze in midtown, a great glow emanated from downtown. All the smoke in the air made me cough repeatedly. When I finally caught my breath, I could small a variety of burning things – wood, plastic, an unusual scent I hoped wasn’t flesh.

I looked up, saw my own building engulfed in flames. People were streaming out, some screaming, others helping the children and the older people. A man came out of the firehouse and darted across all six lanes of traffic, carrying a hose on his shoulder. He hooked it into the hydrant, and began to spray water at the building. A volunteer of some kind; he was far too old to be a firefighter.

It didn’t look like it was doing much to stop the fire from spreading, but I had to admire his effort.

Under the cacophony around me I could hear one siren that sent a different message from the others. A purer, clearer sound, more insistent than any I had ever heard before. Not an alarm. It wasn’t alerting emergency personnel. It wasn’t warning people. It was calling me.

I took one last look at my building. Everything I owned was going up in smoke. I found I didn’t care.

I walked past burning galleries in Soho, huge police barricades at city hall, and a score of tiny streets left impassable by huge fire trucks. I stopped for none of them. At the southern tip of Manhattan, the Staten Island Ferry terminal was on fire. Standing on the pier, I saw a sailboat in the water. The woman with the braids sat at the tiller.

“Come on,” she said. “It’s time for us to go.”

The siren screamed in my ears, but I hesitated. “I don’t want to end up shipwrecked.”

“You won’t. I steer the boat.”

“But won’t you be seduced by the sound as well?

She laughed. “I am immune.”

I hoped she was telling the truth. The pull of the siren was too strong to resist. I got in the boat.

“What’s happening to the city?” I asked.

“The destiny the water foretold.”

I could see I would get no more explanation. “Where are we going?”

“To find your destiny.”

I felt something give way inside me – a muscle I’d held tense for thirty years, a breath I never realized I was holding.

A strong wind caught the sail.

The End

Copyright © 2009 by Nancy Jane Moore

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