Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me

by Bill Hayes

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

I have come to believe that kindness is repaid in unexpected ways and that if you are lonely or bone-tired or blue, you need only come down from your perch and step outside. New York—which is to say, New Yorkers—will take care of you.

Björk’s “Hyperballad,” “Unravel,” and “Undo,” Radiohead’s “There, There,” and Joni Mitchell’s “Black Crow,”

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.

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

O: “Every day, a word surprises me.”

O: “It’s really a question of mutuality, isn’t it?” I: “Love? Are you talking about love?” O: “Yes.”

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

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—’”

One can be alive but half-asleep or half-noticing as the years fly, no matter how fully oxygenated the blood and brain or how steadily the heart beats. Fortunately, this is a reversible condition. One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause—to memorize moments of the everyday.

I thought about how few people nowadays really value getting good directions from someone, how they’d sooner believe their phone, and how few of us have really nice handwriting anymore, how this is no longer valued, because we communicate mostly by e-mail and text, and rarely write letters or postcards or in handwriting on fogged-over windows.

“I hope I get a good night’s sleep and then have a rush of thoughts, as I did this morning,” says O. “It is very delightful when that happens—all of them rushing to the surface, as if they have been waiting for me to become conscious of them…” I help him get ready for bed—“de-sock” him, fill his water bottle, bring him his sleeping tablets, make sure he has something to read. I: “What else can I do for you?” O: “Exist.”

A meteor has fallen to earth, I hear on the TV news. It’s good to be reminded that we’re not in charge. That we live in a solar system.

It requires a certain kind of unconditional love to love living here. But 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.

There is a quiet moment and then, seemingly apropos of nothing, O says: “I am glad to be on planet Earth with you. It would be much lonelier otherwise.”

A copy of Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer caught my eye in the window of Left Bank Books.

This is when I let each girl in on a secret: It can be yours. 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.

This was my cue to lead Oliver to another gallery on another floor and steer him toward an early, rose-tinted Picasso. He smiled a smile that even Edvard Munch might have wanted to paint. And he stayed and stayed and stayed, a self-appointed sentinel to Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse. “It’s yours,” I said. “Congratulations.”

While there’s nothing wrong with navigating straight to the old masters, I believe it’s far nicer to lose your way in a labyrinth of galleries and suddenly find yourself, as I did one Saturday evening, face-to-face with an Odilon Redon bouquet looking so fresh I could have sworn the paint was still wet.

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

We took a right onto Christopher. Soon we were pushing open the door to McNulty’s, one of my favorite places in the world.

His eyes are closed, and for a moment I think he has fallen asleep, but no: “When you can’t tell where your body ends and the other’s begins, is that primal, or signs of an advanced evolution?”

O: “The most we can do is to write—intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively—about what it is like living in the world at this time.”

O reads an article in New Scientist about a study showing that when dogs look into their masters’ eyes (and vice versa), oxytocin (the “love hormone”) is released; this helps explain, in part, the bond dog owners may feel with their animals.

Nicky looked out the window, where he saw a large, bearded man lying on the grass in the garden. “What were you doing?” Nicky asked once he came indoors. “I was wondering what it is like to be a rose,” replied Oliver.

Yet not wanting to forget something is not the same as wishing to remember it better.

O, proudly, playing a new Schubert piece, and with great flair demonstrating how it requires “crossed hands.” I am quite amazed and impressed, and I clap.

This morning: A bowl of blueberries for breakfast. “Each one gives a quantum of pleasure,” O says with delight, then reconsiders, “if pleasure can be quantified.” _____________________

“Do you know why I love to read Nature and Science every week?” I turned. “No,” I shook my head. I was almost confused; this seemed such a non sequitur. “Surprise—I always read something that surprises me,” he said.

O no longer wants any visitors to the apartment unless he expressly invites them: “I don’t have time to be bored!” When he is not resting, he is working on new pieces nonstop.

“I say I love writing, but really it is thinking I love—that rush of thoughts—new connections in the brain being made. And it comes out of the blue.” O smiled. “In such moments: I feel such love of the world, love of thinking…”

If moving to New York at age forty-eight taught me anything, it is that I am capable of starting over in a new place.