I Left My Wings on a Chair

Wittgenstein

8 w I t t g e n s t e I n my new apartment is next to the greek revival funeral home, where a curtain slants in the corner of a window, as if the dead are looking to see what is going on over here. who can blame them? The shoe artist comes out of the shoe art shop to smoke, copping peeks into the woman’s bedroom. she, the woman, walks the halls, following everyone. The enraged waiter looks like he wants to give the funeral home a little business. The pale recluse with the holiday door decor gets her meals delivered. The depressed finnish musician needs to talk. Upstairs, all-night-tV people watch dramas—histrionic music building until it cuts to commercial. The handyman is a retired fBI agent. You can’t reason with terrorists, he reasons, as I hurry to my car, past the window where the dead are watching. at the grocery store, the depressed musician tells me in aisle four that he could never be a teacher because he needs people to like him. when I get back, the woman who follows everyone asks me not to let in the man in the green trench coat. she owes him money, and she’s not giving it to him until he returns her pants. The enraged waiter is screaming into the phone that it’s not his fault. when the recluse has her meal delivered, I glimpse hundreds of pairs of salt and pepper shakers. In winter, I get stuck in snow and the shoe artist helps me out. The handyman comes to fix the dripping faucet. he tells me his son got into nyU, wears a t-shirt with the face of some famous german guy. he bets I know who it is. I say a name. Yeah, that’s it, he says. he laughs and shakes his head. The musician is at the grocery store with a man dressed like a sailor. The recluse comes down to the laundry room in her pajamas. we chat about the weather. The tV people move out. The handyman spends a month fixing up the place. a man with no vowels in his name moves in. when a woman visits there are two voices and two sets of footsteps, then a rhythmic scraping of furniture on the floor. The dead peel back the curtain a little more. ...