My Neighbor

Abstract

My Neighbor Tom Whalen (bio) My neighbor Christine Wendig lives alone in the apartment above mine. At night her feet set off rhythmic muffled thuds on my ceiling like distant thunder, though she is a slender twenty-six-year-old graduate student in American lit at the local Universität. One class a semester she teaches, a so-called Übung course, not required for graduation. For lunch she eats, unlike the typical German, salads of leaf lettuce, olive tomatoes, carrots, avocado, and pumpkin seeds, or yoghurt with nuts and raisins. When she is troubled, whether about her neighbors or colleagues or lovers, she can drink up to three pots of Ceylon, Assam, or Formosa Oolong a day. In a month she'll purchase on average six hundred grams of tea, approximately eighteen euros, at the Hochland on Königstrasse. Favorite CD: Getz/Gilberto. Last month she wanted to write a dissertation on James Ellroy, the month before on T. C. Boyle, two months before that on Paul Auster. What attracts her to these popular American authors? This month she's changed direction again and begun to research Richard Matheson. I'm afraid my neighbor will never decide on a subject and simply muddle along until she looks up at thirty-six and wonders what's happened to her life? Why have I never married, she'll ask herself? Why did I ever believe I could become an academic? Marriage, yes—certainly compared to Swabians she is beautiful. Nothing exceptional in, say, the Languedoc region, but amongst the trolls that bulb up from the hills of Stuttgart she glides as gracefully as Milla Jovovich amongst monsters. Her eyes are a shade darker than her hair. I like to see her wear red. Sometimes she cries out in her sleep, but I do not go to her or even think about it. I've my own worries, after all. [End Page 252] I am sixty-five, a widower, my German, even after ten years, mostly only good for negotiating purchases of the essentials. She wants to talk about Richard Matheson and America of the 1950s, when I was a teenager. She watches Corman's Poe cycle written by Matheson. She watches Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man. What does the mist symbolize to you? she asks. Mist, I say. She begins an essay on Matheson's first novel, I Am Legend, but can't decide which theory to apply. Semiotic? Gender? Post-colonial? What did you read in the fifties? she asks. Thompson? Dick? Bradbury? Comic books, I tell her, though this isn't strictly true. She nods but does not reply. She believes that the truth of my former country can be discovered by studying its films and fiction. I do not tell her that there is no truth to my or her country. That luck is all there is, and bad luck the final reward. More tea? She lifts the glass pot from its holder beneath which a candle burns and pours the dark strong Assam into my giraffe cup, the handle the giraffe's head and neck. The skin on her hands is dry, even though on the shelf behind her are lined the half-emptied bottles and jars of six different kinds of skin cream—Nivea, Sanct Bernhard Noni-Creme, Ringelblumen Creme, Schwedenkräuter Creme, Arnikasalbe, Ziegenbuttersalbe (goat butter salve). She dips a forefinger into the latter, rubs her hands together, then up her arm, pushing back the loose sleeve of her wine-colored blouse. Ah, she said, when we first met after she had moved into the house, an American. I hope you'll let me ask you some questions. Of course, I said. But now I'm afraid I'm not being very helpful. The tenor sax fades out, the Portuguese stops. She moves into the backroom to start the music again. Out her front room window this early November evening I see a Magritte backdrop—blue sky, pearl clouds, below darker than above. In Intro to Philosophy I was asked on a test: What is mind? I answered, if I recall, that for Berkeley the world was mental but not for that a dream...