clutches. Once he traveled to Passau with his sister because his father had convinced him that Passau was a beautiful town, a restful town, a remarkable town, but the minute they arrived in Passau they saw that Passau was one of the ugliest towns imaginable, a town over-eagerly imitating Salzburg, a town bursting with helpless and ugly and repulsively gauche ambition, which has the perverse arrogance to call itself Three River City. They took only a few steps in this Three River City before they turned around and, because the next train to Vienna didn’t leave for hours, took a taxi back to Vienna. After their experience in Passau they renounced all travel plans for years, I thought. In later years, when his sister expressed a desire to travel, Wertheimer merely said to her: remember Passau! thereby nipping any travel debate in the bud. A desk from the age of Joseph II now stood where his auctioned Bösendorfer grand piano had been, I thought. But we don’t always have to be studying something, I thought, it’s perfectly enough merely to think, to do nothing but think and give our thoughts free rein. To give in to our philosophical worldview, simply submit to our philosophical worldview, but that’s the hardest thing, I thought. Wertheimer wasn’t up to such a feat when he had the Bösendorfer auctioned off, not even later, unlike me, I was up to it, I thought. This capacity also allowed me to vanish from Austria one day with just a small travel bag, at first to Portugal, then to Spain, and take up residence in the Calle del Prado, right next to Sotheby’s . Suddenly, overnight so to speak, I had become a philosophical worldview artist . This sudden verbal invention of mine made me laugh out loud. I took a few steps toward the kitchen window although I’d already realized I couldn’t look through the kitchen window because, as already mentioned, it’s covered with filth from top to bottom. Austrian kitchen windows are all totally filthy and we can’t look through them and naturally it’s to our greatest advantage, I thought, not to be able to look through them because then we find ourselves staring into the mouth of catastrophe, into the chaos of Austrian kitchen filth. So I reversed the few steps I had taken to the kitchen window and remained where I had been standing the whole time. Glenn died at the perfect moment, I thought, but Wertheimer didn’t commit suicide at the perfect moment, whoever commits suicide never commits suicide at the perfect moment, whereas a so-called natural death always occurs at the perfect moment. Wertheimer had wanted to compete with Glenn, I thought, to show his sister, to pay her back for everything by hanging himself only a hundred steps from her house in Zizers. He bought himself a train ticket for Zizers bei Chur and went to Zizers and hanged himself a hundred steps in front of his sister’s house. For several days they couldn’t identify the body. It took four or five days after finding the body until a hospital official in Chur was struck by the name Wertheimer , he connected the name Wertheimer with the wife of the chemical-plant owner, whom he knew previously as Frau Wertheimer, and, puzzled, inquired in Zizers about a connection between the suicide victim Wertheimer lying in his morgue and the wife of the chemical-plant owner in Zizers. Wertheimer’s sister, who hadn’t even known that someone had hanged himself a hundred steps from her front door, drove straight to the morgue in Chur and identified the body, as they say. Wertheimer’s calculation worked perfectly: he thrust his sister into a lifelong guilt complex through the means and place of his suicide, I thought. That calculation is just like Wertheimer, I thought. But in doing so he made himself ridiculous, I thought. He had already left Traich with the intention of hanging himself from a tree a hundred steps from his sister’s house, I thought. Suicide calculated well in advance, I thought, no spontaneous act of
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