occasionally, the electricity in my apartment building goes out for short periods of time. when it does, my smoke detector makes an intermittent beeping sound as it would if its battery were low. it happened again at 3 am last night and woke me up. i tried to disconnect it but gave up after five minutes or so and shortly after that the electricity came back on.

this morning, i was reading and smoking my pipe and took a break. i decided to again try to disconnect the smoke detector so i stood on a chair and started twisting and pulling on it. i got it off its wall bracket but there were these red and blue wires coming out of the wall that were attached with a plastic buckle to wires coming out of the unit. i briefly tried to unhook the buckle but then thought i might have live electrical wires hanging loose, i didn't know what all, and so abandoned the idea.

at that point the alarm went off for real right in my face, that loud continuous, panicked, wail. it so startled me i almost fell off the chair. i started pushing the reset button and gave another tug on the plastic buckle but just gave up.

when you don't know what you're doing, you don't know what the outer limits are when things go awry and so in an instant, in the way the brain works in these situations, i thought of all sorts of apocalyptic outcomes. is this setting off alarms in all the apartments in the building? will the fire department automatically be called? will the building have to be evacuated? will a petition be circulated to force me to move?

i stepped off the chair and an instant later it stopped and i realized that i had been trying to disconnect a smoke detector while smoking a pipe.


-benjamin harris