Insomniac City

by Bill Hayes

  When I woke the next morning, my sheets were stained with bits of blood and black ink from the tattoo. I stumbled into the kitchen for coffee and had to laugh at what I found left from the night before: At the height of my high, I had written lyrics from “Black Crow” on one of the blank white kitchen walls:

  My whole life has been illumination, corruption, and diving

  Diving down to pick up on every shiny thing

  _____________________

  Soon after, I decided to get away from San Francisco and spend a month in London. I subleased a flat in Camden from a friend for virtually nothing. Before leaving, I gave Luke keys to my apartment—not just duplicate keys, mind you, but Steve’s set—which seems bizarre in retrospect. I did so on the pretense that, since Luke and his boyfriend were going through a rough patch, he might need a place to stay now and then. But the truth was, I liked the idea of this über-Steve stand-in sleeping in my bed, inhabiting my space.

  London wasn’t an arbitrary choice. Steve and I had been there twice to do research for my last book and had fallen in love with the city. I thought that going back might cheer me. Boy, was that naïve. No sooner had the plane taken off than tears were streaming down my face. I might have turned around and left London in days had it not been for a single item I’d brought with me: a camera.

  Impulsively, I had bought a pocket-sized digital Canon the night before leaving San Francisco. If I had thought it through, I would have talked myself out of it; I was traveling by myself, after all, and wouldn’t be taking snapshots at tourist sites of or with anyone. But as I quickly realized, the camera itself was my travel companion. It gave me a reason to leave the flat every day and search for pictures in parts of London I had never seen before.

  The photos were not for anyone but myself, which in itself was new. All my writing over the past sixteen years had been, to a great extent, first and foremost for Steve (all three of my books were identically dedicated to him). Our life together had been challenging in many ways: He’d had HIV/AIDS; I was HIV-negative. We went through a lot together as he survived bouts of different AIDS-related illnesses and symptoms—chronic diarrhea, pneumonia, wasting syndrome, night sweats—as well as, bizarrely, a benign brain tumor that caused a condition called acromegaly (for which he had to have neurosurgery). When the protease inhibitor drugs arrived in the late 1990s, they saved his life, and he enjoyed several years of good, stable health. Which was but one reason his sudden death from a heart attack was so shocking; it was most likely triggered by an episode of ventricular fibrillation and had nothing directly to do with HIV, an autopsy confirmed.

  Although the pictures I took in London were not for Steve, they evoked him nonetheless. He’d loved everything about the London Tube system, for instance, and so I spent hours underground, taking trains, hanging out in stations, riding the steeply raked escalators, looking for photos.

  Couples captivated me—on the Tube, on park benches, arm in arm on the street. Couples so in love you could see it in their faces. But I couldn’t take pictures of their faces, and not because I was too shy to ask for a shot. Their smiles were heartbreaking. Instead, I took pictures of their hands, laced together as if in prayer, or their feet—the erotic dance that is a prelude to a kiss.

  Steve’s birthday fell while I was in London. He would have been forty-four. I decided to spend the day revisiting sights he had especially loved, such as the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum and a hole-in-the-wall comic book shop in Camden. But if I had been hoping somehow to pick up his scent along the way, all I found was that it was gone.

  I ended the day with a long, zigzagging walk across London’s bridges. I’d brought with me several small personal items that I had not been able to—but wanted to—part with. For instance, his contact lenses, which had just been sitting in the medicine cabinet at home in San Francisco. To me, his contacts were as much a part of his body, his life, as his eyes. Without them, he could hardly see. I tossed them into the Thames and thanked him for showing me a million things. Each subsequent bridge became an occasion for a ceremonial purging and a fresh round of tears. By the time I reached London Bridge, where I scattered the last of his cremated ashes, the only significant thing remaining of Steve’s that I had not thrown in was myself. Not that I didn’t consider it.

  _____________________

  Going through grief is not a uniquely human experience. The fact that fellow primates—chimps, orangutans, lemurs—manifest grief-like behavior is beyond dispute, scientists agree. Upon the death of an infant, for instance, a rhesus monkey mother will carry her dead baby in her mouth for days and days—as if in a fog of sorrow, literally unable to let go—until only skin and bones remain.

  For wild geese such as greylag, which, like swans, tend to bond for life with a single partner, the loss or disappearance of a mate triggers equally heartrending behavior. First, the bird anxiously attempts to find the lost one. Scarcely sleeping or eating, it moves about restlessly day and night, flying great distances and visiting all the places where the missing might be found.

  In its frantic searching, the searcher often gets lost and can’t find its way back to its colony. It may succumb to the elements. But if the bird does return, it is clearly changed; it becomes shy and fearful, fleeing even the youngest and weakest geese. The bird develops a tendency to panic and hence becomes accident-prone. No matter the age, its rank in the colony sinks to the lowest level. What’s more, the bird undergoes a physical transformation.

  “Just as in the human face, it is in the neighborhood of the eyes that in geese bears the permanent marks of deep grief,” notes Nobel Prize–winning ethologist Konrad Lorenz. “The lowering of the tonus in the sympathicus causes the eye to sink back deeply in its socket and, at the same time, decreases the tension of the outer facial muscles supporting the eye region from below. Both factors contribute to the formation of a fold of loose skin below the eye which as early as in the ancient Greek mask of tragedy had become the conventionalized expression of grief.”

  In one respect, however, the greylag, like the grief-stricken chimp or dog or crow, differs dramatically from the bereft human; it does not weep. An animal’s eyes produce tears for lubrication, but don’t shed tears of sorrow. At least, so far as we know. I sometimes wonder if this simply has not been, nor ever will be, observed by humans. Instead of searching for their lost mates, perhaps those lonely, broken birds, not unlike myself in London, are purposely flying into the coldest headwinds and just letting the tears fall.

  Subway Love

  O AND I

  He wrote me a letter. That’s how we met. He had read The Anatomist in proof, and enjoyed it. (“I meant to provide a blurb,” but “got distracted and forgot”—an admission I found charming.) This was when I was still in San Francisco—early 2008. This was when people still wrote letters regularly (which was not that long ago), and when one got a letter sat down and wrote a letter back.

  “Dear Mr. Hayes—”

  “—Dear Dr. Sacks …”

  Thus, a correspondence between O and me began.

  A month later, I happened to be in New York and, at Oliver’s invitation, paid a visit. We had lunch at a café across the street from his office: mussels, fries, and several rounds of dark Belgian beer. We lingered at the table, talking, well into the afternoon. We found we had something other than writing in common: He, too, was a lifelong insomniac—indeed, from a family of insomniacs. (“It was understood at an early age that one could not sleep without sedation,” he told me wryly.)

  I had not known—had never considered, as far as I recall—whether he was hetero- or homosexual, single or in a relationship. By the end of our lunch, I hadn’t come to any firm conclusions on either matter, as he was both very shy and quite formal—qualities I do not possess. But I did know that I was intrigued and attracted. How could one not be? He was brilliant, sweet, modest, handsome, and prone to sudden, ebullient outbursts of boyish enthusiasm. I remember how O got quite carried away talking about
nineteenth-century medical literature, “its novelistic qualities”—an enthusiasm I shared.

  We stayed in touch. I sent him photographs I had taken in Central Park of bare tree limbs. I thought they looked like vascular capillaries. With his neurologist’s eye, he felt they looked like neurons.

  “I am reminded of how Nabokov compared winter trees to the nervous systems of giants,” he wrote back.

  I was sort of smitten, I had to admit.

  Even so, that was that—for then. There was an entire country between us, not to mention thirty years’ age difference. My decision to move to New York more than a year later really had nothing to do with Oliver, and I certainly did not have a relationship in mind. I had simply reached a point in my life where I had to get away from San Francisco—and all the memories it held—and start fresh. But once I moved, O and I started spending time together and quickly got better and better acquainted.

  The West Village

  ON BECOMING A NEW YORKER

  I had gotten here just like millions of others before me and since: on a one-way ticket and with only vague notions of how I’d make it. I had no savings, and all my belongings were packed into a few suitcases. I’d landed at Kennedy Airport, bought my first MetroCard, and put ten dollars on it. Had I known about unlimited-ride passes, no doubt I would have splurged on one, but even so, unlimited was how I felt: freed from what was, unworried about what came next.

  From Kennedy, I took an A train headed for Far Rockaway. That was the wrong direction for getting to Manhattan, as New Yorkers will recognize and as I eventually figured out. But taking wrong trains, encountering unexpected delays, and suffering occasional mechanical breakdowns are inevitable to any journey really worth taking. One learns to get oneself turned around and headed the right way.

  On my first night in New York, I stayed with a friend of a friend on the Upper East Side. The next morning, I went out and bought a mattress and arranged for it to be delivered that day to the tiny apartment I’d already found in the West Village. I remember sitting on the floor in my empty bedroom waiting for the truck to come when I got a call on my cell phone from a number I didn’t recognize. It was the sister of my downstairs neighbor from my apartment building back in San Francisco; she wanted to notify me that her sister had died.

  Jeffie, a tough old bird with a young boy’s name, had had lung cancer. I’d spent a good bit of time with her before I left, helping her out now and then, or just talking. She had bright blue eyes. She was scared to die. She was happy that I was moving to New York City. She did not want me to grow old and alone in that building, as she had.

  When I went down to say a last goodbye to Jeffie, she insisted I take something of hers with me. Anything I wanted, it could be. I had always loved her dusty old table lamp—a mid-century piece actually bought at mid-century. “It’s yours,” she said, and so it is, sitting now on my desk as I write this. The lamp’s shade casts the softest, warm amber glow, as if suffused with her; indeed, it is tobacco-stained from her years and years of cigarette smoking.

  After getting the news about Jeffie, I dashed down the six flights in my building and went straight into the German restaurant across the street. I ordered a beer and stood by the window, so I could watch for the truck delivery. I got to talking to a man standing there. Larry was his name; a big guy in a well-worn gray suit. He was waiting for his wife. I told him I’d just moved here, and without another word he gestured to the bartender.

  “Patrón,” he said.

  We clinked shot glasses.

  “Welcome,” Larry said, “welcome to New York,” and the tequila tasted as clean and bright as metal—like an element with a name I couldn’t pronounce.

  I hadn’t finished half my beer when the truck pulled up.

  “There’s my bed.”

  “Now you’ve officially got a home. Tab’s on me, go for it.”

  He gave me his card and told me if I ever needed help, help of any kind, give a call. After all this time, almost ten years later, I still have it: Lawrence H. Stein, Attorney at Law.

  _____________________

  I had visited New York many times over the years but living here, as I soon discovered, is a whole different ballgame. On the other hand, one doesn’t become a New Yorker by virtue of having a New York address. For me, the moment came the first time I left the city. I flew back to Seattle for Christmas to see family. No sooner had the plane lifted off than I felt a pang of regret. To be a New Yorker is to be away from the city and feel like you are missing something, I wrote on a cocktail napkin. By this I didn’t mean missing the Rockettes at Radio City, New Year’s Eve in Times Square, or some amazing exhibition at the Met. In New York, there is always something amazing happening somewhere that one ends up hearing about only later.

  What I meant instead was missing the evanescent, the eavesdropped, the unexpected: a snowfall that blankets the city and turns it into a peaceful new world. Or, in summer, the sight of the first fireflies in the park at twilight. The clop-clop of horses’ hooves on cobblestones in the West Village, mounted police patrolling late at night, or a lovers’ quarrel within earshot of all passersby. Of course, what is music to my ears may be intolerable to another’s. Life here is a John Cage score, dissonance made eloquent.

  It’s in the subway where I find the essence of this. Every car on every train on every line holds a surprise, a random sampling of humanity brought together in a confined space for a minute or two—a living Rubik’s Cube. You never know whom you might meet, or who might be sitting next to whom. I prefer standing to sitting and would never doze or read while I ride. To do so would be to miss some astonishing sights—for instance, when two trains depart simultaneously and, like racehorses just out of the gate, run neck and neck for a time.

  If it’s late at night, I try to get into the first car and stand up front, so I have a clear view through the windshield. As the subway barrels ahead, star-like lights flickering on either side, I feel as though I am on a rocket hurtling through deep time, with no idea where we will land, or how, or when.

  The Dry Cleaner’s Daughter

  SUBWAY LIFER

  During my first year in New York, I took the A/C line to work each day. I had a full-time job raising money for a global nonprofit dedicated to developing an AIDS vaccine. The West Fourth Street station was five minutes from my apartment. My favorite time was early morning. The station wasn’t crowded yet, riders weren’t rushed. People did not talk but read or listened to iPods. The smokers hacked their smokers’ coughs. Water drops—rusty tears in winter, I’d imagine, beads of sweat in summer—leaked from the steel I-beams overhead. The air was soft, as if unfinished dreams still emanated from everyone’s skin.

  Waiting, however, can be a delicate business. Patience can turn to impatience in a flash and prompt a stance I’ve come to call the lean-and-look. This involves standing on the yellow strip at the edge of the train platform, one foot firmly planted, the other extended back, and leaning out far enough (but not too far) to see if a subway is coming. It’s one step away from being either suicide or a minimalist dance move. One after the other, people would come forward and do it, myself included, as if collectively we could coax a train out of the tunnel.

  Sometimes it actually worked and, on rare occasions, brought forth not one train but two: an A on one side of the platform, a C on the other. At such moments one realizes that even the smallest choices matter. Both trains went to my stop at Fulton, but the A was an express and the C, a local, was poky. Each attracted different riders, different personalities. Which am I this morning, I would think, an A or a C? And what might happen in the extra minutes gained by the express? Will I bump into my next love as I exit, or trip and break my leg?

  On weekends, I tended to take the red line; a 1 stop was just down the street. Other than Oliver, I didn’t know many people here, which suited me fine. My primary relationship was with the city—like an Mbuti pygmy’s is with the forest. We got to know each other via long subway ride
s—through Harlem and Washington Heights, Brooklyn and the Upper West Side. I would always carry my camera with me, and I took to approaching people on the street who caught my eye—strangers—whether because they looked interesting or attractive or unusual or, perhaps, utterly ordinary. “Can I take your picture?” I’d simply say.

  After a day of exploring the city, one night I ended up in Midtown at Lincoln Center. I stood for a long time in front of the Metropolitan Opera House, watching the luminous dance of the fountain at its entrance. I got a ticket, last-minute, to an opera just about to begin. The lights dimmed and the crystal chandeliers made their silent retreat into the ceiling. I found myself shedding a few tears as the overture started. Did I wish there were someone with me? Perhaps. So I wasn’t shy about sharing my joy with others at intermission.

  For some reason, there were no subway trains at Columbus Circle that night. I didn’t have money for a taxi, so I started walking. Eventually I stopped at the Fiftieth Street station. It was empty save for a blind man tap-tap-tapping a jagged line on the platform. I watched him for a while, then, worried that he might fall to the tracks, steered him toward a back wall. We introduced ourselves; his name was Harold. It was past midnight and we were both going home—I to Christopher Street, Harold to 155th.

  Now, I still didn’t know a lot about subway lines at the time but felt pretty sure that if Harold wanted 155th, he was headed the wrong way, and I gently told him so. He responded with a seeming non sequitur: “Sometimes, Billy, you have to go down to go up.” Just then a train came and we rode together to Forty-Second Street, where Harold got off and disappeared into a crowd. It was only then that I understood he hadn’t been dispensing sage advice about weathering the ups and downs of life in New York. The uptown station at Fiftieth Street had merely been closed.