It was around Day Four that I stopped talking, or started offering the bare minimum so as not to arouse suspicion or concern. What the people on the outside didn’t know, or couldn’t know, was that I was no longer a person but a room. My name was Room 715, address Hannah Lees. Facing a large apartment building, roughly twelve metres from my window to theirs, I had become a member of a half-living wall facing another, slightly more living wall. One apartment inhabitant fed birds at 11.05am each day. Theirs was the only astro-turfed balcony of the lot, a plastic strip of novelty green fast disappearing beneath a busy knot of pigeons. On the twelfth floor lived a black cat and on the tenth lived small twins wearing matching yellow tee shirts. The twins ran a giddy relay between two walls then wrestled each other for possession of a fly swat. Another inhabitant set a foam squab down just inside their balcony doorway, lay down and proceeded to smoke one cigarette after another, staring vacantly at ninety degrees to the world.
Auckland was in another round of lockdown in order to eliminate community transmission of Covid-19. Everyone in the apartment block was home-bound, save for the likes of the security guard that stood surveying the city in his uniform before and after each shift took him down to street level. Everyone in my building was in a hotel turned government-managed isolation facility, having arrived from various overseas ports into New Zealand. We were room-bound for fourteen days, save for 30 minutes each day to walk up and down the tarmac deliveries ramp or around and around the conference venue. I didn’t mind the rules. I liked them. Before I became a room I had enough arrival night adrenaline to gasp out a series of ecstatic fragments to family members. IT’S SO NICE HERE. NICE AS IN COMPETENT. NICE AS IN CARE. CARE! COMMON CARE! I couldn’t believe that people here hadn’t been allowed to die. I couldn’t believe that the people here were paying for me to stay alive for two weeks in a hotel. I couldn’t believe that I was somehow treated both as a potential bio-hazard and as a precious room child in need of food and sleep and care.
At first I could not see outside the window to the apartment people because my new room self was too busy making circle upon circle, not yet ready to flump down in the divot that all the animal circling was producing. My room mind wanted to wrap itself in a bathrobe, but it was not that kind of hotel. I tried yoga but got stuck in corpse pose at the end, seeing no reason to get up, eyes out of focus, in some other place that was no place. I vaguely registered a change in the light but the light precipitated no change for the pose. The only thing that eventually got me up off the floor was the meal-delivery knock at the door - room service! - the two words sung in the same upward interval as the opening line of “So Long Farewell” from The Sound of Music. I was a room, and I had received service! It was for me! Upon hearing the corpse pose story a friend told me that I had not failed to get up but had succeeded to lie still. Oh.
Maybe the place that was no place was somewhere I could be still, wherever I was on earth! Maybe this was the little divot and all my circling had been for something! Stillness was a happening thing. The room was having a good influence on me, which meant that I was having a good influence on me, because I was the room. Even a glass of wine was too much for the room. In the night the angels came to claim the unit of alcohol and I could feel it leave my body. Day Seven was the day I wobbled and wondered how I could live another week as a room. Like this, the room said to itself as it sat in the corner chair sipping a glass of soda water with a small wedge of lemon saved from a meal - room service! - and watched the sky above the apartment block turn momentarily pink and then grey. In my soda seat I also had access to a small wedge of view that was not apartments but was the national television broadcasting building.
At six o’clock I turned on the news to feel closer to the people broadcasting from the building, and to feel more of what it might mean to join in with some fellow feeling. The people were using the first place names and first words of this place with more ease and normalcy than when I was last here. The live cross from the studio to the street required a flourishing unmasking ritual, the roaming reporter waiting to be introduced before using their left hand to remove the right ear loop then pulling the mask open like a door on the hinge of the left loop before discreetly tucking it in their pocket, the right hand holding the microphone steady all the while. Wearing a mask here also appeared easy and normal. I had mean thoughts about the hubris of believing the atmosphere to be so small as for the contents of one’s breath to matter so mightily in the wide wonder of the outside. But then I remembered the arrival night exclamation. CARE! COMMON CARE!
At all other hours I selected the live hotel rooftop camera channel on the television in order to feel closer to the view that I could not see. The orientation was all wrong: the camera faced north to the harbour bridge, but the television faced south. At first the colours were all wrong, too, or I was all wrong for the colours. I didn’t belong here with the ultramarines. Day after day the Waitematā preened up an impossible teal for the screen, nothing like the grizzly North Sea and its greys. Still, the camera did orientate me. Traffic moved predictably across the toy town harbour bridge, while gulls and rain drops proved too fast for the resolution, sending pixel trails streaking across the screen. Beyond the bridge smoke huffed up from the salmon pink sugar factory, too neatly gothic a guardian of the colonial harbour, its sugar chuting down to waiting ships for passage to who knows where.
On Day Nine there was no daily press briefing. I wanted so badly to be on the receiving end of the Prime Minister’s soothing announcements and smooth question-taking. I turned to the astrology app instead as a joke but it wasn’t very funny, telling me to be forthcoming and to avoid secrets. I was withholding my presence in New Zealand. I told people I was there then clammed up, or I didn’t tell people I was there and kept talking to them about matters devoid of personal geography, or I couldn’t communicate at all and kept the new things to myself, thus becoming new only to myself, others possessing only the outdated version that was not a room. I didn’t know how to make it all cohere. The movement across the earth had been so simple (two wakeful flights, four trays of meals, eight feature films) but being here wasn’t turning out to be a simple fact.
The room self didn’t know how to take questions smoothly. The information had been divvied out without a clear filing system and gradually became less retrievable, or else faded from information status entirely. I didn’t know the answers to the questions, or else the things I knew the answers to I didn’t care deeply for, or didn’t have the energy to pass comment on. How’s the food? What are you doing with your time in there? Where will you live when you get out? For how long will you be here? I wanted an interlocutor for Room 715 that wouldn’t ask about things that needed simple facts to travel in a single direction. Instead they would ask only unanswerable but mutually ponderable questions like what colour is the inside of a pipe dream? I wanted the future to show up of its own accord, without intervention or control. I wanted someone to set me a pointless assignment that I would complete with disproportionate vigour and aplomb while I waited for the future to turn up. The next morning a sudoku puzzle arrived with breakfast - room service! - and that was more than good enough.
Until next month,
H x
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