Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(5)

“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.