If you missed the first chapters here’s where it begins... CHAPTER 01
Without further ado here’s...
In the tenement hallway, smoke particles wafted underneath the door to apartment #9.
Mioko lay in REM cycle as the room became thick with grey. A detector in the hallway began to bleat. She was stuck, still disembodied inside a dream. After what had seemed like days of intense and prolonged pain, a tiny object which looked more like an heirloom tomato than a human being had spewed from her uterus. Overwhelming her with waves of joy. Her intense delight cut short when she noticed the needle in her arm. Months of the drug routing her veins, crossing the placental lining, had filled the tiny fetus with euphoric waves of transcendent bliss before this being even had a chance to experience daylight. The minuscule preemie lay at her breast, peering into her eyes, longing with junk-sickness--as a series of nurses and doctors chastised Mioko on low birth weight, hypoglycemia, intracranial hemorrhaging, the likelihood of imminent infant death. Their words bounced off delivery room tile. None of it mattered. Mioko was in love.
"Are you awake?" she asked her neonatal son. His tiny hazel eyes peered open, staring up at her with an ancient wisdom.
"Yes," he whispered back.
She inhaled a rich cloud of fulfillment--but her breath filled with black carbon. Her abdomen pulled taut as her lungs exploded. Her newborn was gone. Her bed was engulfed in a think grey fog. Another coughing wave hit before she knew for certain where she was.
She stood, but her knee joints buckled. Her lizard brain pleaded for attention, supplicating one leg in front of the other, to move away from oblivion. But her evolved mind invited a little lie down; breathe in a few more lungfuls of monoxide. She'd heard that death from drowning was the best way to go. How bad would asphyxiation be?
And then she saw the flickering glow of flames. She pictured them sucking her chalky white remains up with an industrial vacuum. And then an entirely more gruesome thought occurred: the photographs.
Mioko leapt to find her life's work already half consumed. She cursed herself for never buying a fire extinguisher. Too late for the prints. All that mattered now where the negatives.
Wrenching the front door open, Mioko jammed her key into the neighboring apartment. So far her darkroom was untouched, the air arctic in comparison to her roasting living room. She ripped open drawers, prioritizing eras, unfinished projects, lovers, friends, family, and endless streets filled with strangers; a long overdue spring cleaning in the space of a few life threatening seconds.
She grabbed up as many binders and sheets as she could. Thousands of hours of work spilled from her arms as Mioko ran for her life.
In #21, Dorian cautiously opened his door. Thick smoke poured up from the stairs. He hacked a cloud of alveoli cells before slamming the door.
"Althea, get up. We gotta go."
Climbing from Dorian's loft bed, Althea slowly came to.
With another devastating cough, Dorian stumbled towards the windows and yanked up the bamboo blinds, revealing the retractable concertina grille secured to the sill. He grabbed at the padlock, suddenly panicked.
"Baby, where's the goddamn key?"
She pointed in the vague direction of the other window.
Despite his dread, Dorian couldn't help but use up precious seconds to pass judgement on his sporadic consort. Not only could her tar-caked lungs withstand this carbon onslaught, but in her latest homicidal exercise in chain smoking, she’d misplaced the key to their escape.
Dorian grabbed at a change bowl on the far ledge and dumped it. Dropping to his knees, he fished through the nickels and dimes.
Althea knelt over in spasmodic contractions. Maybe her hardened lungs weren't so unsusceptible after all.
Dorian finally produced a key and leapt up. He tested it in the padlock, but it took solid seconds for him to realize that he was trying to push it in upside-down. Pulling apart the lock, he wrenched the grille aside.
The fresh air recharged his heroism, so he helped Althea climb out the window first onto the rickety bars of the ancient egress. As his eyes struggled to absorb shape in the black air, Dorian became aware of the sirens blasting all around.
"What about the art?" Althea asked as they wound their way down the layers of metal stairs.
"Let it burn," he said.
Letting go of the ladder, it shot upwards, slamming into the metal platform above. Dorian wheeled around to find himself in the abandoned garbage heap at the rear base of the building. He was surprised by the mass of it, the countless years of trash piled in a towering jigsaw. He realized that he'd been looking down into this mountain of detritus for twelve years but never properly seen it. Maybe it was just the adrenaline, but there was something oddly satisfying about experiencing it up close for the first time.
That fucker Ivan had finally done it. Morris just knew. Hoarding eight foot piles of ancient newspapers, religious pamphlets and who knows what else in foot-wide trenches, squirreling his way from one end of the apartment to the other. The guy was a blatant fire code violation. This jackass with an entire pulp and paper mill jammed into four hundred square feet on the top floor of a residential structure. The hell was he thinking?
Morris stood in a damp nightgown outside Cake Shop, staring up at the smoke funneling off the roof.
He'd even complained to the landlord, that useless fucker, Moshe Axlerod. In writing no less. Quoting him the Uniform Fire Code. Detailing the many ways the contents of Ivan's apartment could obstruct, delay and hinder the operations of the fire department with language he’d taken the time to look up on library computers.
Bottom line is, from a safety perspective, the combustible loading in Ivan Hershber's dwelling is a clear hazard.
But did Axlerod listen? And now look. The fucking building was up in flames.
Well good riddance, he thought.
Morris wondered where he'd go if the fire reached his and mom’s place. He’d rather haul up at the Bowery Mission than stay with The Lawyer--that cocksucker of a brother, on the Upper East. Even if Brent's legion of asshole qualities weren't all his own creation. Their hyper critical shit of a father hadn't done either of either of them any favors before he got himself locked up for wire fraud. Of course he didn't do their mother any favors either, with 208 bones in the human body, he'd manage to break ten percent of hers on six separate occasions. And even when their father did finally get released, he climbed into a bottle and was never heard from again, till he turned up frozen one night in a ditch off route 95, a half-mile from Stamford.
Morris had been wide-awake when the alarms had started sounding. He could never nod off when his upstairs tormentor had a female over. Dorian, that sexual deviant. Morris could hear every torrid squeak, every nail in the artist's loft loosening as he pounded his latest pushover. Morris had taken to submerging his head in the bath, face first, and exhaling slowly as possible till the sounds of bubble exploded on the surface drowned out the foul business above. He stayed like that till he choked on a mouthful of dirty bath water or till the water got so cold and his skin so pruned that he felt his entire hide begin to dissolve off. But he knew he wasn’t supposed to think like that.
A couple hours in the tub, and the lewd sounds upstairs had finally abated. But the vanished waves of Dorian grunts and female screamscapes had suddenly been replaced with an even more highly-pitched menace; the shrieking alarms.
It appeared now that Morris had been one of the first ones out of the building. How difficult would it have been to wedge a beam in the front door and trap his neighbors inside? His shoulder started to tingle, which he recognized as a warning, and he tried to ignore the new thought that was vying for the front page now. His breathing quickened. He stated to count… One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. One, two, three, four, five… but he couldn't stop the thought…
Six, seven, eight… your place burns, even if you didn't do shit, who are they're gonna blame? They’ll lock you up again …nine… ten… They'll dose you. five. Chlorpromazine. six. Haloperidol. seven. Perphenazine. eight. Fluphenazine. nine. Risperidone. ten. Ziprasidone. one. Therapy art. two. And giant shared birthday cakes. three. As they prod you. four. And make endless belittling insinuations. five. And Brent won't pay his share of the Demetrakas fees. six. And mommy. seven. Mommy. EIGHT. MOMMY WILL BE DESTROYED FOR ETERNITY JUST LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE THAT WAS GOOD IN THIS GODFORSAKEN NINE… HELL… TEN… HOLE…
That's when he saw Mioko come out the font doors of the building. ELEVEN… Her hands filled with a pile of her photography crap.
She looked even more unglued than usual.
Morris stared at her as she crossed the street, then followed her eyes as she craned her neck up, and he realized that it wasn't Ivan at all.
The smoke was seeping out from a third floor window.
Her window.
The goddamn junky had done it.
CHAPTER 02
CHAPTER 03
CHAPTER 04
CHAPTER 05
CHAPTER 06
CHAPTER 07
UPDATE - LOOKING FORWARD - CHAPTER 08
BEHIND THE KEYBOARD
When I started writing Dwelling, heroin was an issue in New York City still, but it’s hayday had been the 70’s and 80’s, now with the novel finally hitting the chain, the opioid crisis in America is in full swing. Mioko’s use of street heroin is just a statistic when lensed with the insane prevalence of synthetic opioids in our society, the bulk of which were proscribed by medical professionals.
An image from my old stomping grounds taken with my YASHICA 124-G medium format camera.
It’s interesting to note how much society can change in a decade, and how engaging in making art and writing stories changes along with it. I often find myself chasing news and facts and it can be somewhat defeating precience as a creator is outrun by events in the real world. In this case it’s more fascinating than defeating. Telling stories in a changing world is a wonderful way to keep in tune with what’s happening, reflect on it and try to make a difference.
Yours In The Chain,
Doug Karr
SPECIAL THANKS to my wife @zenmommas for years of support during the writing process, @ericvancewalton for his trailblazing, inspired collaboration and incredible guidance, @andrarchy for his mind blowing insight and friendship, @bakerchristopher for being an inspiration as a human artist and bro, @complexring for his brilliance and enthusiasm, Masie Cochran, Taylor Rankin and @elenamoore for their skillful help in editing the manuscript, and to @opheliafu for the fantastic illustrations she created exclusively for the novel's launch on Steemit and to Elena Megalos for her wonderful character illustrations. I’d also like to thank Eddie Boyce, Jamie Proctor, Katie Mustard, Alan Cumming, Danai Gurira, Stephan Nowecki, Ron Simons, Dave Scott, Alden Karr, Missy Chimovitz, my dad Andy Karr and late mother Wendy, and everyone else who helped lead me to this moment.
I am a Brooklyn based writer, film & commercial director, and crypto-enthusiast, my projects include @HardFork-series an upcoming narrative crypto-noir and my novel Dwelling will soon be premiering exclusively on Steemit, and you can check out more of my work at dougkarr.com, piefacepictures.com, and www.imdb.com/name/nm1512347
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