Wailing the Work

The front door of someone’s apartment sits right outside our kitchen window located at the rear of our building. You can see the stairs ascend to the front door while sitting at our dining table. The apartment is inset deeply into the rectangular residential block formed by Noe, Duboce, 14th and Walter streets, requiring a building-length walk to gain access. A man who lives there practices the trumpet. His horn blows in filling our rooms. It’s loud enough to touch each nook and corner on a quiet day, but faint enough to remind your subconscious that you might be in a movie. It’s a movie about a lonely man who lives in a city. He spends most of the film in his apartment, and most of the time he’s there the sound of the horn spills into his home, breathed from the life of some faceless musician. It’s the director’s attempt at representing heartbreak through art. The man does not have a TV. He does not play music. Pictures spot the walls and are too dark to distinguish. He does not talk to anyone and when his phone rings he does not answer. He does not have an answering machine. He has white t-shirts and pants that aren’t sweatpants, but only look like sweatpants. He keeps the blinds open, but the sunlight seems to stop just inside the window. A shot of a stovetop flame clicking and lighting. A shot of a boiling pot of red. A shot of the man leaning back against the counter, hands resting on its edge, head bowed. A close-up of his hand. Whichever. The man sits in silence, before a steaming bowl, unshaven, with sags under his eyes, and stares. Sometimes I’ll leave while the trumpet is wailing and when I return, hours later, I can still hear it. The commitment is relentless. Scales. Songs. Piercingly string like instrumental sounds, like sudden wailing exclamations of a violin. Again and again. His lips are swollen and meaty pink. His cheeks ball out from his face. His throat breathes differently than yours or mine. He wails the work of the horn. He wails the work. I listen imagining.