Chapter 4Watching Them Burn From Paradise

For days, that exposed, frayed copper wire lay nestled in the mountain of dry cardboard.

Every now and then, when Martha yanked her charging cable too hard, the raw wire would scrape against the corrugated paper, spitting a tiny, bright shower of sparks. She acted like she didn't even see it. If anyone pointed it out, she'd just wave her hand dismissively. "Kyle rigged it. It’s fine."

A few of the early-morning commuters noticed the sparking and warned her to unplug it. But Martha would either play dumb—"Sparks? Your eyes must be playing tricks on you"—or turn hostile—"Mind your own business, Kyle said it's perfectly safe."

Eventually, people stopped trying to help.

The hallway became an obstacle course.

One morning, Gary, the sweet older man from the second floor, was rushing to an appointment and tripped hard over a stray box. He barely caught himself against the wall to avoid a broken hip.

Panting and shaken, he looked at Martha. "Could you please push this stuff back a little? You can't even walk through here anymore."

Martha bristled, her eyes narrowing suspiciously. "Did Harper put you up to this? She's too much of a coward to face me herself, so she sends you? It's sitting in front of my own door. If you don't know how to pick up your feet when you walk, that's your problem, not mine."

Gary flushed a deep, embarrassed red. But feeling the eyes of the other neighbors on him, he swallowed his pride, shook his head, and walked away without another word.

Watching from thousands of miles away, I couldn't help but laugh out loud.

Martha’s obsession with me bordered on pathological. Everything that went wrong in her life was somehow a conspiracy I had orchestrated.

The Chicago winter had been bitterly dry since the last snowstorm. The air inside the building was heavily heated, leaching every ounce of moisture out of the cardboard until it was basically tinder.

It was late afternoon, Hawaiian time. I was lounging on the lanai, sipping an iced tea, when I pulled up the camera app just to check the feed.

The moment the video buffered, I saw Martha carrying her heavy power brick, aiming for the rigged socket.

Her hand slipped.

The metal prongs of the charger struck the exposed copper wire directly.

CRACK.

A violent, electric hiss echoed through the hallway audio. A jagged spray of blue-hot sparks erupted from the wire, raining directly down into the dry crevices of the cardboard mountain.

Martha gasped, dropping the charger. She reached out, trying to frantically bat the sparks away with her bare hands.

But it was too late.

The sparks caught the frayed edges of an old packing box. Within a fraction of a second, the paper blackened. A ribbon of bright orange flame unfurled, slithering deep into the air pockets between the boxes.

Thick, acrid black smoke whooshed outward, carrying the terrifying stench of burning plastic and roasted pulp. It filled the narrow corridor instantly.

Martha shrieked, stumbling backward. Her heel caught on a flattened box, and she went down hard on her tailbone. She scrambled backward like a crab, waving her arms wildly at the ceiling. "Fire! Oh my god, FIRE! Help me!"

The smoke thickened into an impenetrable, suffocating gray wall. It began pouring out of the open hallway window, staining the exterior of the building like a bruised sky.

Panic erupted. I could hear muffled shouts of "Help!" from the surrounding balconies. The frantic pounding of fists against heavy security doors. The chaotic stampede of footsteps echoing through the stairwell.

Through the lens of the camera, I watched the flames leap from the cardboard pile, licking hungrily up the painted drywall and curling around the wooden handrails of the stairs.

I sat there, perfectly still, watching the destruction of my own floor, feeling absolutely nothing at all.

About ten minutes later, the wail of sirens bled through the audio feed, growing deafeningly loud until the fire trucks slammed to a halt outside the complex.

Heavy boots pounded up the stairs. Firefighters, weighed down by their heavy turnout gear and dragging thick hoses, charged up to the third-floor landing.

And then, they stopped dead in their tracks.

The hallway was entirely impassable. The flaming wall of compacted cardboard was wedged so tightly against the walls that they couldn't advance a single foot.

"Clear a path!" a muffled voice roared from beneath an oxygen mask.

A firefighter swung a heavy halligan bar, smashing through the remnants of a doorframe, before taking an axe to the burning wall of boxes. He hacked violently at the burning mass, fighting just to carve out enough space to maneuver the hose line.

The fire roared, the sound of exploding cardboard and splitting wood cracking like gunfire.

They finally got the high-pressure hose through the gap. A massive jet of water blasted into the heart of the inferno, scattering the soggy, blackened remains of the boxes. Beneath the debris, the warped, melted remains of the power strip and the charred copper wire lay completely exposed.

The sirens wailed into the evening.

It took until nightfall for the flames to be fully extinguished, leaving only a haunting, toxic haze lingering in the air.

The firefighters trudged back out, hauling the heavy, dripping hoses. As the incident commander passed the group of shivering, soot-stained neighbors clustered in the cold courtyard, his face was dark with fury.

"Whoever was hoarding all this combustible material in an egress route is going to answer for this. This is criminal negligence."

Martha stood frozen in the center of the crowd, the blood draining completely from her face.