“Bring the waters out! Pass them on, pass them on! Bring the waters out!”
Disoriented from the pressure of sleep squeezing against my temples, it took me a moment to realize that the shouting was not in my dream but in this world.
“Aid, what time is it? And do you know what’s going on?” I called out to her after realizing that her side of the bed was empty. 8:30am, came the response, and they were bringing out water bottles. What?, I thought silently.
I flung the duvet and sprang to my feet, approaching the blinders to peek outside. A truck was parked in the parking lot separating our apartment building from the inn across. It was pink, with two of its side doors slid up, revealing packs of water bottles stacked on top of each other. The sight didn’t amuse me for much longer, especially once I remembered that we were going to have cereal for breakfast (because one must have a particularly old soul not to get excited at the prospect of having cereal for breakfast). As a personal ritual of many years, I made the bed, placed the head pillows at the head of the bed, and the toy Endeavour Space Shuttle right in between facing upward, as if about to launch. And I walked out of the bedroom ready to take on the day.
It was barely noon when, having knocked out the series of morning calls and emails, the commotion outside caught my attention once more. It was the third day that a group of persons, each with a folder under their arms and a badge on their chest or a tag hanging from their necks, all wearing masks and mismatched uniforms, listened quietly to a person who seemed to be giving instructions. Over the past couple days, the same scene had transpired, with certain episodes including a fire truck idling in a corner, police officers standing by under the shade, or an ambulance slowly entering the lot with its lights on but sirens off, parking diagonally yonder, and then circling back and leaving the way it had come.
Yesterday, while they were talking, the left-most room on the first floor of the inn was emptied out, and I mean the mattress was brought out; today, a metal machine with the height and width of the front door of the room was being hauled inside, scraping past through the entrance. The day before, the circle had broken out into groups, apparently huddling to make a point or recap a topic, and then grouping once more to make a circle and debrief. And throughout all the days, random people would walk into and out of that left-most room on the first floor of the inn, as if taking turns in playing musical chairs – with the single chair being inside that room.
It was baffling, and all we could do was speculate what was this new venture in our backyard. Had someone died in the left-most room of the first floor? Was it a natural death? Had there been a crime? Seeing the masked team in mismatched uniform huddle and disburse and huddle once more, we started to wonder if this was some kind of drill. Was a hospital prepping its staff for a particular situation? And what was the ringleader saying, voice muffled due his covering?
As the day progressed into the afternoon, tents started to spring up across the lot and the team doubled and tripled in size. Tables were set underneath the tents, and chairs were lined up behind the tables – three chairs per table, and one team member per chair. Right under our balcony, one tent provided shade to a middle-aged man who leaned against what appeared to be a metal box on wheels. Minivans came, doors slid open, people and stuff stepped out and in, the doors closed, and the minivans left the same way that they had come.
Aida and I would take turns walking to the balcony door every twenty minutes to check up on the progress the people a floor below us were making. There’s a new tent, one of us would say to the other. Was this van here earlier?,the other would respond at the next check-up.
It was around 1:45pm that we made the decision to investigate. “This may be our last chance, they might not be here tomorrow,” Aida warned with the somber tone that we pick up as children from action cartoons. Not losing any more precious time, we found ourselves breathing through masks again as we made our way to the building entrance.
There were four people under the tent right in front of the left-most room on the first floor. The tent on the far-right side had another five people huddled near the table. In between was the middle tent, which provided shade to a sole man in his late fifties, seated behind the table with his hands connected and resting on his belly, wearing sunglasses and a hat.
“Let’s approach him,” Aida said. I agreed by not suggesting otherwise.
I made first contact.
“Hi! We live right across here,” I motion to our balcony, “and couldn’t help but notice the work you’ve been doing here for the past few days. We’re curious what this is.” The man pauses for a deliberate moment – which makes me wonder even more – before responding, “you should talk with him,” nodding toward a man wearing a white shirt under the tent on the right, “I don’t know all the details.”
Later that evening, it would click in my mind what a smooth, inoffensive way it is to deflect a question to someone else… “I don’t know all the details.” He probably did, but wasn’t sure if he should share it, or how much of it he should share, or how to share it. Anyway…
We approach the man in the white shirt. Aida takes the first step this time. “Hi! We live right across here and were wondering what you guys are doing” she manifests. “We’ve been looking out every now and then over the past few days and had to come down and ask,” I add.
“Oh, the suspense!” the man in white laughs beneath his mask. We join him in the moment, while I can only feel the suspense rise with each additional minute the answer is delayed. “Yeah, I hear you guys. We’re setting up a shelter facility for people who have the need for a place to stay. The inn rooms will be their home during this… time. Nothing to do with the coronavirus, we here have all been tested.”
Aida and I follow intently, nodding as he explains and occasionally fixes his drooping mask, and I feel the need to jump in when he mentions the coronavirus by assuring him that it’s alright and that we’re not worried about that. He says that they’ll be using only fifty of the rooms, not sure if that makes up the whole inn; I confirm that that’s the case, joking that I’ve had way too much time to study every detail of this building from my window. He says his name is Kendrick, and I don’t feel obliged to share our names, instead pointing to our balcony and saying that if they every feel like getting a shout-out, they can let us know. He throws his head back in laughter, once again fixing his mask that has slipped off his nose. We thank them for their important work as we start turning around to head back inside.
Through the late afternoon hours, Aida and I continued our circle of regular check-ups until at around 4:00pm, when the lot was fully covered by the shade provided by our building, the elderly started arriving. They would arrive in minivans, approach one of the tables in a walker, take a seat. During our next casual look-out, the occupants of those chairs would have changed, with the previous ones nowhere in sight. Instead, the lights of the rooms of the inn – having remained dark for almost two months now – were turning on one by one.
The chatter and commotion continued and got louder and louder as the early evening hours progressed. For the first time in a long time, our balcony dinner chit-chat was interrupted not by the revving of an engine down Colorado Street or the opening-shutting of the neighbor’s window, but – like an orchestra preparing for a performance – was joined by the voices and joys and worries of humans like us, dreaming and hoping just like us, living their lives like us.
And as I type in this last sentence, seated on the sofa next to the balcony door, I look outside once more, and the tents are still there, and the light in the left-most room on the first floor still shines. The life on the lot, however, is now gone. Not away, but inside, into the inn that laid lifeless for too long.
Chronicles 