Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me

by Bill Hayes

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.

I cannot take a subway without marveling at the lottery logic that brings together a random sampling of humanity for one minute or two, testing us for kindness and compatibility. Is that not what civility is?

Tough guys. New York guys. All devoted to one important task: making a baby smile.

“And if I hold you closely enough, I can hear your brain,”

“I don’t so much fear death as I do wasting life.”

You’re sadly mistaken if you think you’re in control when you go fishing.”

“I just want to enjoy your nextness and nearness,”

“I’ve suddenly realized what you mean to me: You create the need which you fill, the hunger you sate. Like Jesus. And Kierkegaard. And smoked trout …”

“When my mother died,” he tells me, “my oldest friend called up straightaway and told me three scandalously obscene jokes in a row. I laughed uproariously, and then the tears came.”

Pleasure can bring happiness, but happiness doesn’t necessarily give one pleasure.

Minute after minute passes as O and I watch out the window. I feel serene. I don’t have to ask; I know O does as well, his quietness speaking to it.

O: “I don’t know if a passion for symmetry is an intolerance of asymmetry. Do you?” I: “I think one can be passionate about both. I think one can embody both.” O: “Good. Very good.”

“I sometimes think things are not enough until they are too much. There is no in between for me.”

It is the enforced intimacy of being in a cab, an enclosed space, for a finite period of time, which makes such conversations possible. I’ve sometimes wondered if the screen between driver and passenger, not unlike that in a confessional booth, adds to this impression. You might say things you would never say otherwise, or do things you’d never do, knowing you’ll never see them again.

She mentioned that she’d inquired about buying the lighthouse. That didn’t work out, but she thought this was for the best. “A lighthouse is for everyone.”

Why is it hardest to write when there is so much to say? Let me rephrase: It is hardest to write when there is so much to say.

“A nature,” he repeated, as if that was the only way to say it. “He wasn’t this or that, fitted with so many labels, an ‘identity,’ like people today, but all aspects of him were of a piece—this is who he was, not what he was; a force of nature, I suppose.”

Reckon not upon long life: think every day the last, and live always beyond thy account. He that so often surviveth his Expectation lives many Lives, and will scarce complain of the shortness of his days. Time past is gone like a Shadow; make time to come present—’”

The sun was setting on the Hudson. Neighbors were enjoying themselves at nearby tables. The breeze was nice. The surrounding cityscape looked like a stage set for a musical. What is the opposite of a perfect storm? That is what this was, one of those rare moments when the world seems to shed all shyness and display every possible permutation of beauty.

to say you’re glad to be not dead requires a specific intimacy with loss that comes only with age or deep experience. One has to know not simply what dying is like, but to know death itself, in all its absoluteness.

After all, there are many ways to die—peacefully, violently, suddenly, slowly, happily, unhappily, too soon. But to be dead—one either is or isn’t.

One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause—to memorize moments of the everyday.

I’ve come to believe that a good cry is like a car wash for the soul.

I have this thing where sometimes I try to catch the moment when all the traffic lights on Eighth align and turn red, their number multiplied countless times by the brake lights from stopped cars and taxicabs. It doesn’t happen often at all, traffic lights seeming to have their own sense of time, and Oliver never quite catches it. So I watch for the two of us. Finally: “There, there it is, see?”

“They may not have read Euclid, but they know it all,” Oliver said.

I: “What else can I do for you?” O: “Exist.”

I watch his face as he speaks. He looks so peaceful and happy … on a planet where the sound of rain falling is like Bach…

It is hard to describe how tired I am. Noises hurt a little. I crave the quiet—my kind of quiet: the sound of skateboarders going uptown and taxicabs hitting the metal plate on Eighth. Nothing else.

New York repays you in time in memorable encounters, at the very least. Just remember: Ask first, don’t grab, be fair, say please and thank you, always say thank you—even if you don’t get something back right away. You will.

The trees, clearly overmatched by the combination of winds, rain and lightning, were not fighting this storm but yielding to it. This is just how they were built, how the species had evolved: to survive.

How is it that snowflakes, tinier than tears, can carry such weight?

“I see intelligence, and behind the eyes, a great probing.” I nodded slightly. This is a reading too, I began to understand.

In a world plagued by intractable problems—police shootings, Ebola spreading, spiraling civil wars, planes falling from the sky—lacking sufficient synonyms for a work of art seemed a good one to have.

No different from falling in love with a song, one may fall in love with a work of art and claim it as one’s own. Ownership does not come free. One must spend time with it; visit at different times of the day or evening; and bring to it one’s full attention. The investment will be repaid as one discovers something new with each viewing—say, a detail in the background, a person nearly cropped from the picture frame, or a tiny patch of canvas left unpainted, deliberately so, one may assume, as if to remind you not to take all the painted parts for granted.

Perhaps the best part about possessing art in this way is that what’s mine can be yours, and vice versa.

This made it no less hers.

“When you can’t tell where your body ends and the other’s begins, is that primal, or signs of an advanced evolution?” I pull him in close, his head on my chest. “A little of both,” I whisper.

Stories like the one I’m about to tell happen to me often enough that they no longer surprise me. Even so, I don’t take them for granted.

If you could take a drug to forget something, would you? I have thought about this many times in the years since, and my answer remains unchanged: No, I never would. Yet not wanting to forget something is not the same as wishing to remember it better.