The Second Story
We live on the fourth story. On the third story there’s a family of four who don’t make much noise and don’t have a doormat. The second story is a psychoanalysis practice. The patients go in the door on the second story, which has a doorbell and an ornate peephole. The doctors have offices on the first story. When I unlock my bike in the morning, the lights are always on in just one office, where a small bamboo plant sits in a pale blue vase on the windowsill.
On the day I first met the family I now live with, I saw our building from the streetcar. Baroque, cream colored, red accents, steep roof. I thought it was a tall-and-narrow split level home – bedrooms stacked upon bedrooms stacked upon kitchen and living room – similar to what I lived in when I was in Bonn. I never saw the top floor of that home in Bonn – I was told on the first day I lived there not to climb that final staircase, and I never did – and I had quick fantasies about sitting with this new family and playing board games or singing ballads, high above Dresden in our isolated turret.
But on the twisted black fence there is this bronze, square sign: Psychotherapiepraxis Dresden.
In my hometown, houses are separated by fences and yards and hedges, differentiated by that new aqua trim that looks terrible and can you believe they used brick?, and granted to their owners by the grace of Jesus Christ and Jonathan Locke and the Founding Fathers.
So I had this big New York City fantasy that somewhere in the world people operated pizza parlors or coin-op laundry stores and lived above them, but I had no conception that Buddhist Germans could live two floors about a psychotherapy practice praised for its fusion of old (i.e. use of electric shock therapy) and new (i.e. dream parsing, cognitive behavioral therapy, bio-feedback) techniques in a hundred year old building that is in one of the only neighborhoods not destroyed in the bombing of Dresden during World War II.
But look, here they are, standing at the top of the stairs on the day I come to meet them and they are all wearing shower caps because everyone has lice and we sit at the table and drink coffee and we’re talking about where I can put my things when the father asks if this is a done deal, says he needs a day to think about it and maybe I do too.
So they thought about it and I did too and it’s funny because the psychotherapy practice didn’t enter into my mind again for a while. It became routine as quickly as it had surprised me.
The family that lives below us is either always at home or never at home – I don’t know. But the result is the same: I never see them in the stairwell. Thus, the people that I see coming and going are either People Who Live With Me or People Who Don’t Live With Me. And the people who don’t live with me are deliverymen, doctors, and patients. And I haven’t seen a doctor in six months. Just that bamboo plant, and that pasty fluorescent light.
Whenever I come back home and there’s a patient coming down the stairs, I take out the key for the mailbox and open it up. There’s nothing in there. But now it’s apparent that I live here. I’m not here for therapy.
I’m not sure why I go out of my way to show that.
One time I was on the landing outside the second story door and someone came out. I was pre-emptively nodding to greet him at the same moment he asked “Are you going inside?” He took my nod as a yes and he held the door open for me. And then, with some kind of strange smile, I said “Nein, nein. I’m not going inside.”
I reached out for the handle, pulled the door shut, and kept going up the stairs to our apartment.
Another time I saw a teenage boy coming out of the office and I wondered if he was as curious about what is upstairs and I am about the lives of those for whom the building may as well be two stories tall.
I imagined that boy standing on the second story landing and peeking up like I did in the house in Bonn. What the hell is up there?
But in my dream he’s courageous and he walks up the stairs, passes the third story where there is no doormat and comes around the corner where our little stretch of stairwell is covered in plants and statues and things that can only be described by the grab bag term knickknacks.
He passes our door that has tattered decorations from the last three international holidays and sees our shoe rack that’s a few heads taller than me and serves the dual purpose of a functional space to store shoes suitable for the current season (bottom two rows) and a chronicle of every other pair of shoes the family has ever worn (top six rows).
And then he opens the secret door that leads to the cellar.
He sees our laundry, but he also sees the ladder that leads to the roof. He climbs up, opens the hatch, and he’s at what’s considered a “high place” in a city whose only high places are steeples. And he can see everything from up there. And he looks down.
On New Year’s Eve, I stood on that same spot and watched as a sea of fireworks took over the sky. In every direction there were joyful screams, raucous whomps, and brilliant gleaming fading falling stars. Who could dream of dying? Who could dream of never having lived?
I went downstairs early on a Saturday morning to talk a walk along the Elbe.
The door to the second story office was open. Someone was vacuuming. I walked slowly and I heard the vacuum dragging across the floor, staples banging around inside the metal tube.
I remembered being home alone when I was younger, when every sound made me fear someone was coming in to the house to kill me. For some reason, my first thought was always how can I get to the kitchen to grab a knife? and my second thought was I wonder if I should keep a knife in my room for situations like this. But there was no one there. And there was no fire when I’d get up in the middle of night and smell phantom smoke and check every room in the house and see my parents sleeping.
Inside the office is a desk and next to the desk is a rack of brochures. I don’t know all of the German words for mental illness, but I know I’ve read those brochures in English, with comforting American idioms and bullet-pointed platitudes.
While I’m staring inside the door, the woman who is cleaning sees me and turns off the vacuum.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Sorry,” she says.
“Sorry?” I say. I don’t know why she’s sorry.
“The office is closed on Saturday.”
I don’t want to say that I’m not there for an appointment.
“Oh,” I say, “I’ll come back later.”
“Good luck,” she says.
And she turns the vacuum back on, smiles.