The light through the window

From Kevin Brockmeier's Things That Fall From The Sky(2002). Read by Ruochen(Carrie) Wang.

There was once a window who lived on the seventy-first floor of a great glass building. Each morning he donned his jump suit, his boots, and his sky-colored cap, then climbed from his bedroom window onto a wooden platform with taut wire rigging. He turned the heavy steel winches that, side by side, reminded him of the infinity symbol - the one that lowered and raised him, the other that trolleyed him along each floor - and all day long he washed the window of his building. He sprayed them with his misting hose as sun rose through the morning and sank through the afternoon. He planed them dry with a rubbered-edge blade as the curtains behind them slid open and shut. This was in the days when motorcars flowed through the city like a river of silver mercury, and he often listened to the gust of the traffic as he rubbed at a gummy spots with a cotton rag. The high wind went drops of water rolling up the glass. His shadow slanted away beneath him. If he worked diligently, he could complete three and a half floors by late afternoon, and when the window went orange with the setting sun, he would remove his cap and hoist himself home. Once he left his window open to a spring breeze in order to air his apartment, and when he returned that night to his bed, he found a robin trapped besides him in the sheets. It thrashed and struggled there like a heart, and when he freed it, it flew into a wall. He carried it to the wastebasket on the end of a dustpan. Afterward he always sealed the window tight behind him.

Sometimes at night, unable to sleep, the window cleaner would sit at the edge of his platform and try to count the lights of the city: he watched them sailing red and white through the streets, twinkling from lampposts and porches, hanging in the blackness of tall buildings - so many lights, and within each one a life. The window cleaner wonder how it would feel to be in the thick of them, to be some other person, in a restaurant drinking with friends or in a bed with his arm around his lover. The thought that he had never married or fathered children often filled him with a quiet sadness, and on Sunday afternoons, with little else to do, he imagined himself in one of the small, glistening motorcars on the street, driving across the river with his family. They would go to a carnival, perhaps, or a shopping mall, and the boys would fight with each other in the back seat, and he would feed them hot dogs and french fries until they were groggy and quiet.

Soundtrack:

When you wish upon a star-Disney original soundtrack

Blue Sky-Tom Waits

Here comes the sun-Nina Simone

Rain-Patty Griffin

Vaga Luna-Cecilia Bartoli

Walk away-Tom Waits

If I have to go-Tom Waits