The yelling in the hallway started after 8 and closer to 9. The evening was coming to a close out the window, with the sun already sunken below the gray atmosphere. Most of the words were still obscured, muddled through the door and slurred from the source; but the few I could make out were nasty and racially charged, homophobic.

Not able to intervene before several doors slammed, I listen through the door. The yelling stopped, but two fuzzy voices mutter back and forth, quietly, across the hallway. 

"We got two of ‘em on this floor,” one deep, gruff voice said with distain.

The gruff voice exchanged some condolences with the other voice, conceivably the target of the yeller’s harassment from minutes ago.

"No problem, no problem,” the second voice said.

The doors shut, each voice shuffling back into respective rooms. The floor was silent for just a moment.

There was once a small homeless camp in an empty alley lot across the street. There are a couple empty lots, and construction is going on in a few of them. Filled with big, metal shipping boxes and stacks of wood building blocks. Although the site is close, I am high up in the air on the sixth floor, a block away. Two blocks away hotels, empty casinos and parking lots raise up from the ground and high into the sky, much farther up than me. Between us there was once a small group of some of Reno’s citizens, but they were trapped on the ground. In repurposed boxes, handmade tents, sheltered by stolen shopping carts, all curled up against a tattered, white, exterior wall.

There is a fence there now. It separates each of the empty plots; the construction sites, the soon-to-be construction sites, and one is a wide, now fenced off alleyway. Perhaps it is getting turned into a parking lot, but the homes that once were there are gone now. The people, their tents and lean-tos, their shopping carts full of belongings, are gone. The alley is empty.

These people are forced into nomadic existence in a world that is systematically stripped of its resources to be forked over to the highest bidder. Accessibility and public resources are mere legal terms, cold and removed from the people they are meant for.

This apartment complex used to be an old hotel and casino, I think. It’s been repainted and remodeled but the organs of the building remain the same. A large empty white sign protrudes from the building and faces the street, sitting atop an empty section of the complex with a non-operational door at its base. Windows covered with black plastic shield the incomplete renovations from the passing cars. 

I can imagine the casino in its glory days, dimly lit by neon flashing lights through thick cigarette smog. Perhaps they were unable to compete with the high rise, commercially recognizable casinos that popped out of the ground, several stories higher than this one. Maybe the customer base simply grew old, and the complex now serves their audience in a different way.

Walking through the lobby across the clean tiles, only a few cracks in the floor and scuffs along the repainted walls that frame the complex’s gleaming gym. Up elevators and through dimly lit hallways, a new smell hits my nose through a cloth mask as the thick, metal, elevator doors slide open. The hallway smells of everything from cigarette stains to microwaved TV dinners,  at least once a week like cleaning products, but it changes all the time.

Most peculiar is the laundry room. Each floor has a laundry room, and although I haven’t visited the floors, I can attest to the strangeness on this floor’s facilities. The room smells warm and wet, not yet tiptoeing into moldy, but unpleasant. Tucked between exposed pipes is a small can of cat food. Atop one of the dryer machines, the insole of a shoe and a forgotten laundry card sit abandoned. I know now which dryer not to use, because it shakes and squeals terribly.

“PEDOPHILE! PEDOPHILE!” Only a few minutes later the eye of the storm has past, and the yelling, now screaming, starts again, echoing up and down the dimly lit hallway.

All sound in a 5 mile radius resonates through my room. A sharp noise followed by an “oh fuck,” from a neighbor. A vacuum scraping across the floor that lined the other side of my ceiling. The ambulances as they race down streets toward Saint Mary’s Hospital a few blocks away. One tenet has a dog that barks and growls fearsomely at any residents it passes on the way out of the complex. The owner chuckles at his dog’s angry outbursts, and other neighbors chuckle nervously back at the small dog straining against its leash with gritted and gnarled teeth. At night, occasionally, drunken arguments from half a dozen floors below are spit like clouds of hot steam up the building’s walls, and they sneak in through holes in the window. Sometimes, a little closer, it would be drunken giggles and slurred humors between friends mumbled down the hall, late on a Friday night. I wonder if the other tenets down the hall could hear the fallout from the unbelievable amount of toe stubbing and head hitting that goes on in my apartment.

It feels a little like being on a plane; seeing the whole world below while cruising by. Too far away to touch it and much too scared to try.

The west coast is engulfed in smoke. I track the air quality by how many of Reno’s surrounding mountains are in range. Somedays only the nearby city buildings are visible through the smog. Friends live under orange skies only a few states away, but Reno’s sky is at worst an impenetrable gray. 

Walking home from class, the shadows on the ground are faint and orange, even though it is only 4 in the afternoon. There are no clouds in the sky, and if there were, the smoke would obscure them.

Classes started six weeks ago. At the end of the first week of classes the number of reported COVID-19 cases was 11. On Labor Day, it’s recorded to be 56. Some friends and family remain hunkered down, some were out on beaches, or enjoying friendly barbecues unaware of or unconcerned with a world outside themselves.

In February the numbers were like this, small, seemingly nothing to worry about. The first death in Nevada was in March, and the total number of cases hadn’t even hit 50 state-wide. From February, through the spring the numbers grew from a couple dozen, to a few hundred, to thousands. Then in the summer the country exceeded even those predictions. Now, the University is reporting over 200 cases.

I have one “Alternative Hyflex” class, created by the University to justify their profit and circumvent responsibility. On Wednesdays I walk to campus to attend the in-person half of the course. There are still students who don’t wear their masks on campus. There are students eating lunch, and studying, sometimes spread apart, in marked out zones on the grass. Before class starts one Wednesday I see a classmate hurry to the bathroom and try to hide my concern with using a public bathroom if not absolutely necessary, now of all times. The scenes should be normal, boring even, overlooking masks strung across faces, or hanging off ears and chins.

Later in the year I would find myself unable to return to campus, a consequence of my own untrustworthy impulse control and deeply ingrained need for some justice in the world. 

I was merely walking home from class, feeling defeated over the decline in my Spanish skills, when he strutted just a little too close and a little too confidently past me. He was short, much shorter than me, and if there’s one thing I truly believe in this world, it’s that you should know the limits of your own physical capabilities. For me, that’s avoiding the need for endurance based running, for someone of this person’s stature, it maybe should’ve meant doing what the much taller person tells you to do, in that moment. Instead, the scrawny, shorter man’s response to my request to “Put your mask on,” was “We’re outside, dude.” Perhaps that is ultimately what made my eyes narrow, and my brain short circuit, because I proceeded to shower him with demands, growing more irate and impatient with each spoken word, to put his fucking mask on. I was ignored. Now this was the first remotely smart thing this character had decided to do in our interaction. Unfortunately my rage-filled brain decided to take the wheel, as I launched forward and slung an abnormally large arm around his abnormally small shoulders, holding him in place. 

In middle school, when all the girls were told we were no longer able to dress comfortably for ourselves, our school counsellor addressed the concerns of the taller population of female students, that our arms were longer, making the infamous “finger-tip rule” unfair to us. The finger tip rule of course being that a girl’s shorts must be longer than where her fingertips reach when one’s arms are at their sides, a ridiculously objectifying and patronizing thing to subject children to. Nonetheless, the school counsellor insisted those of us girls with long gangly arms had other advantages in life, like “being good wrestlers,” every 13-year-old girls’s dream.

I wouldn’t have time to reflect on the irony of the memory until long after I made it home from the incident. After a stranger ten or fifteen feet away called out “everything alright?” Clearly, no, but thank you for pulling me back into reality, and not instead starting an inequitable and unnecessary fist fight. So after I locked my opponent into a weak chokehold, grabbed the mask he held so mockingly in his hand, and shoved it back into his mouth, I shoved him aside like some sort of cartoon bully, and continued my depraved march home.

The people drive me insane. A man hooked to an oxygen tank on a motorized scooter zooms through sliding doors, with no mask. It’s possible he’s dead now. Another man, rotund and pink, roams the isles cradling a slice of pizza between a pudgy hand and an uncovered and greasy maw, mask hanging uselessly from his ear. An elderly woman using her cart like a walker scoots down the isles, heavy breathing soaking the area around her in tiny, wet particles. Mothers with their children, ignorant to the danger of an unseen threat, and the vulnerability their unmasked children possess. 

Few people wear face coverings in my building. Perhaps, like many, my neighbors believe their home is untouchable by the virus. I can hear coughing from the hallway, and never leave my comfortable cube of an apartment without a mask strapped to my face. A group of older gentlemen are often gathered adjacent to the front door of the complex, chatting, smoking, enjoying the afternoon warmth. One is my neighbor across the hall who always politely says hello when we cross paths. He is maybe in his 30s but could be younger. He sits in a motorized chair next to another man on a walker with a seat. A third man usually accompanies them. He is bald, and usually talking without making much time for breathing when I pass by the three of them, offering polite greetings.

Looking out the peephole in my door, I can only see across the hall to my neighbors door. My vision is limited to about a foot in either direction of the mirrored door.

"KILL THIS MAN. KILL THIS MAN.” The man screamed, horrible demands, and unrepeatable slurs, and attacks on his neighbors down the hallway. He slammed his body against the walls as he screamed. It’s impossible to know who he was demanding these actions of. Maybe it was really himself he was so enraged with, unable to interpret his own actions.

A few days after the screaming man’s rampage, I refill my laundry card in one of those little metal boxes that turns paper into imaginary numbers on a blank white plastic card. Initially intending to do laundry the night of my neighbor’s tantrum, the executive decision was made to put it off a little longer to avoid any unpleasant interactions.  

The blank white plastic card got stuck. Wedged all the way into the slot of the machine, the card was not shooting back out after finishing my transaction. Having just putting $20 onto this meaningless piece of plastic that I would now have to replace, my motivation and ability to do laundry was fading again. 

Alas, apparently this is a common problem, solved with a pair of tweezers and a little luck. A friendly lady in the front office pops out of the glass doors of the front office, shielded by beige curtains on the other side of the glass, a pair of tweezers in hand, explaining this is a common occurrence. I now know not to use that machine to refill my laundry card, because it will eat the small rectangle of plastic.

As the short plump woman victoriously returned the card in fingers adorned with acrylic nails, the elevator doors slide open. I recognize the man from my floor, we had taken the elevator up to the 6th floor earlier that week. In hushed tones with eyebrows pushed together, he pulled the employee away and back towards the front office. 

While patiently waiting for the elevator to return down to the first floor, my neighbor on the 6th floor speaks quietly. Climbing into the elevator, the concern in his voice carries farther than the words, but as the elevator doors begin to come together I catch the words “…security issues last night…” before the metal box raises me up, six stories high.

“KILL YOURSELF. KILL YOURSELF.” Chanted through the hall now. Through the door again I can hear a brave young woman yelling back, scolding the yeller from the far end of the hallway. Then stomping down the hallway, past my door, and all the yelling congregated at the end of the hallway where the laundry room is. 

I turn on a familiar show and slip on noise cancelling headphones, a christmas gift from a few years ago, and wait for the tantrum to end before fading into sleep.