what kate's afraid of

Caitlin Leah Keeler
Fiction Writing 2
Chris Rice
6 February 2006
What Kate’s Afraid Of

So the first thing you need to know about Kate is that she’s not scared of anything. I knew from the first moment I saw her I wanted to be her friend—she was just so confident as she threw her hair back and leaned over her guitar. Everything in my life seems built around fears. I'm afraid of muggers so I walk in groups. I'm afraid of people hassling me, so I don’t wear short skirts. I'm afraid of being alone, so I surround myself with friends, everywhere I go. I'm still a little afraid of the city, I think. Kate isn’t at all. I imagine if you’d take her out to the country and put her out in the sunshine she’d just whither away anemically, like the end of E.T. She lives by herself, in this amazing artist’s studio—or at least she used to… but that’s the story that I'm trying to tell.
So anyway, I was telling you about Kate. How she doesn’t seem to need a boyfriend to take care of the mice or cockroaches in her kitchen. I think she actively likes spiders; she won’t knock down their webs and says they eat nasty bugs. She’s not scared of small spaces, she couldn’t really be and live in her building- the elevator is so small and cramped and decrepit. Even people who aren’t scared of elevators will take the eight flights of stairs if there are too many light bulbs burnt out in Kate’s elevator. But she’s not scared of open spaces either, I don’t think. There aren’t any really open spaces in Chicago, but she loves modern sculpture, and she gives visitors downtown tours of the Calder and Picasso in their big open plazas. She must not be afraid of crowds, cause I know she’s been to big protests on those same plazas, and she rides her bike in critical mass rallies.
She’s not scared of anything really weird either, like water or traffic or the color red. She’s not even scared of normal things. She was mugged a year or two ago, some guy put her in a headlock, stuck a gun to her back, and told her to give him all her money. She didn’t want her ID and stuff stolen, so she calmly opened her bag, took out her wallet, and gave him her cash out of it. I think I would have nightmares for the rest of my life, but she just shrugs, and says, “hey, it’s part of living in the city. You’re gonna get mugged sometime. I feel like I’ve gotten it out of the way now and can get on with my life.” She doesn’t think her fearlessness is that extraordinary. If you ask her, she’ll say, “Sure, I'm afraid of stuff. I'm afraid my grandma’s gonna die before I get a chance to see her again. I'm afraid Bush is gonna win re-election. I'm afraid we’re gonna run out of drinkable water before the end of my lifetime.”
She does have one sort of common, fear, I guess. She calls it a fear, but I always thought it was more of a quirk. She lives in her sort of run down high-rise because all the utilities are electric. She says she’ll never cook on a gas stove because she’s scared of fire. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal, I mean, she burns candles and lights incense sticks. But she says she’ll never smoke because of it, and she doesn’t even like campfires very much. It’s a really big thing for her, but I think it’s because all of her energy focuses on that one fear, unlike people like me, who have to spread their attention out over a whole litany of fears and worries.
So now that you know this about Kate, you’ll understand the impact of the story I'm trying to get around to telling you here. So it’s 1:30am on February 1, and Kate suddenly wakes up, and she’s a little paranoid, she thinks she smells smoke. Now she’d had insomnia a lot lately, but the waking up in a panic was new. There was a quiet buzzing noise in the hallway, she thought she better get up and investigate. She sighed, got out of bed, and put on her house shoes. As she stood up, the smell of smoke seemed to be stronger. “Maybe I'm not making this up,” she thought. She went to the bathroom and got her bathrobe off the hook on the door. She remembered all her fire safety classes in elementary school—don’t collect possessions from a burning building. How ridiculous—it wasn’t really a burning building, probably someone just burnt their midnight snack. Still, she was prepared. Keys, wallet, cell phone were all in her coat pocket, which she grabbed and flung over her fuzzy arm. She cinched the bathrobe belt tighter and touched the front doorknob. It was cool. She took a deep breath and opened the door.
There was a wall of smoke. She couldn’t see the door across the hallway. She couldn’t see anything but the thick grey smoke. It seemed so solid, not like air at all. She crouched over and started to run left down the hallway to the fire escape. There was just one apartment between hers and the door to fresh air. But then, as she passed that apartment, she saw something through the smoke—a faint glow—no, the whole door of the apartment next to hers was glowing red. “Ok, wrong choice,” she thought, turned around and started back toward the stairs by the elevator on the other side of her apartment. She drug her coat behind her as she ran as fast as she could, all hunched down. “ I wonder if I should be crawling?” she thought. “It seems like running is better, faster. The floor doesn’t look all that smoke-free.” At the top of the stairwell there was a mess of foam, like a small fire extinguisher had exploded. Water was shooting out of the smoky fog, getting her robe and house shoes wet. The buzzing noise that was so hard to hear in her apartment was quite loud here; it must have been a defective smoke alarm. Why didn’t the one in her apartment go off?
The door to the steps was propped open, but they were less smoky. She hadn’t realized how hot it had been until she felt the cool air of the stairwell. She ran down the steps—down, down, down she spiraled, running clockwise. On seven the smoke cleared significantly. On five there was no sign of it. On four a woman stuck her head into the stairwell as Kate ran by. “What’s happening?” she asked.
“There’s a fire on eight,” Kate said, “call 911.”
“Oh, I think someone already did,” the woman said and went back to bed. But Kate kept running down.
Kate didn’t know her neighbors very well; as I told you before, she lived alone and didn’t need anyone’s help. But when she got to the lobby there were all the people she had nodded to on the elevator, her fellow eighth floor dwellers. She recognized the student across the hallway, the old couple with the bikes from the east end, and the cute guy with the dreadlocks from around the corner. She didn’t know who lived on the other side of her kitchen wall. She wasn’t sure which of these pajama-ed strangers had run down stairs away from flames instead of just smoke.
There were sirens going off outside, and firemen came through the front door. They had all their gear on—the big coats with reflective tape, neon hard hats, big black boots and canisters of oxygen on their backs. They walked right past all the neighbors and went to the—this is the part of the story that is hardest for me to believe—they went to the elevator and pushed the up button. This was when Kate thought, “Well, the fire can’t be that bad, if the FIREMEN are taking the elevator. What happened to all the ‘in case of fire, do not use elevator, use stairs’ signs?”
Some of the neighbors were talking to each other, but Kate didn’t know any of them. Her feet were cold and wet. All the adrenaline she had while running had left, and now she was shivering and her throat hurt. She thought about how she had to be at work in 6 hours. She turned to the student from across the hallway, and told her, “I'm going to a friend’s house to get some sleep. Tell them I’ll be back in the morning.” She put her coat on and left.
So now it’s about three am on a Tuesday morning, and Kate’s walking the streets of the city in her wet house shoes, robe, and overcoat. I can’t imagine what I’d do—but it would probably include flipping out. But not Kate. She calmly made her way through the deserted streets to my dorm. The guard at the front desk wasn’t going to let her up, because it was so late. That was when Kate started to cry and told them about the fire, so they called me and woke me up, and I told them to let her in.
I’d put on water for tea as soon as the guard called. When Kate arrived at my door she looked smaller than I’ve ever seen her before. I gave her a big hug and she started to cry again. I was a little freaked out—one thing I never expected to see was Kate crying. I didn’t know what to do first, but she kept sobbing that her feet were wet, so first I got her a pair of sweatpants and thick socks, and she put them on while I made tea. Then we sat on the couch, and she told me the story of what happened, just like I told you here. It was really scary, but I just kept petting her on the back and telling her how brave she’d been.
It was kind of strange. I mean, I didn’t like seeing Kate so weak and vulnerable. It seemed like one of the absolutes of life was broken. But at the same time, it was nice that I could do something for her. I never expected to have that opportunity, since she was more grown-up and independent than I ever hoped to be. I was happy, though, that when awful stuff happened, it was me she thought of. I like being the person people can count on to make them tea and give them a place to sleep. Kate had done stuff like that for me often enough. So even though I didn’t like learning she really was human, and had fears just like everybody else, I was glad I had a place she could stay until they assessed the damage. I knew that even though she was as weak as me tonight, tomorrow morning she’d be back to her fearless independent self, and who knows—maybe after living with us a few days, some of that would rub off on me.