Bill Hayes’s boyfriend of eighteen years, Steve — “only forty-three” — had vanished, out of the blue and into a fatal heart attack, breaking Hayes’s heart. Hayes enters a ghostly dreamtime — liminal: not quite alive, not dead. “One day I met a man with the name of an angel,” Hayes writes. “We got to talking. Talking as balm. ‘You’re going to be fine,’ Emmanuel said right away. ‘Something bad always leads to something good . . . When my partner disappeared . . . ‘ and Hayes cuts in. ‘You said “disappeared.” ‘ He nodded. ‘That’s exactly how it feels for me.’ ”
Hayes is no innocent; he’s knocked around, but by disposition — and dint of vocation — he is open and vulnerable. He is a writer, a poet, a street photographer. He is fully feeling. “The night after he died, I found that a sliver of light from the streetlamp shone through the blinds just so and cast a single yellowy tendril across his pillow. It was the opposite of a shadow. Which is as clear a definition as I can come up with for the soul.”
”With morning, the light was gone.” Empty and agonized, soon it would be time to move to the next station. San Francisco was, New York City was to be: Insomniac City, where sleep goes to die, just the place for Mr. Restlessness. He lands in what New York criminally calls a “studio,” sized enough for a table, chair, and single mattress. Visitors sit on the floor: “This apartment should be illegal,” his friend Miguel says. “There must be some code somewhere that’s being broken.”
The city’s middle-of-the-night annoyances become Hayes’s sleepless familiars: the clip-clop of police-horse shoes, lovers’ sidewalk quarrels. “What is music to my ears may be intolerable to another’s. Life here is a John Cage score, dissonance made eloquent” (yes, he did say “music to my ears”). Hayes is still shell-shocked, but he’s a soldier, still damn-the-torpedoes open. He is grateful, courteous, and quick to tip his hat hello: “Kindness is repaid in unexpected ways,” he believes. “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.” He loves the 2 a.m. burble from the outdoor seating at the French restaurant six flights down. “I discovered a phenomenon heretofore unknown to me: Laughter rises.”
Hayes turns out to be that particular kind of big-city denizen, the irrepressible soul who treats the pavement like a cocktail party. He approaches strangers if they appear to be doing something that strikes him. In his mind’s eye, this is neither discomfiting nor suicidal. He gathers those incidents and accidents that most of us have only heard in a song, experiences missed by being wary or the fear of being uncool. Sidewalks and subways are his hunting grounds. From a guy carrying fishing poles he learns that there are sharks in the Upper Bay. He promises a virginal, Sri Lankan cabbie that sex is everything he dreams it will be. From a homeless poet he learns the transit of Venus is taking place that week, an event “that only six times in recorded history have humans witnessed.” Underground, he marvels how the random sampling — the mash — tests our kindness and compatibility. “Is that not what civility is?”
Hayes stops people in the street and asks to take their photo: a cop, a vendor, two sisters. His black-and-white photographs dapple the chapters — chapters that are quick though composed, sometimes simply snatches from his journals. “We are eating outside. All at once, ‘Oh!’ he exclaims, seeing a firefly, Tinker Bell-like at our feet. ‘Isn’t it amazing!’ ‘Yes, but don’t — as I have told you before — eat one.’ ‘Ah, the dreaded death by firefly . . . ‘ O nods his head very seriously.”
Enter O. Oliver Sacks — The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, Island of the Colorblind, Hallucinations: that Oliver Sacks — had sent Hayes a letter praising his book The Anatomist, a pitch-perfectly, disarmingly Sacksian card: “I meant to write a blurb [but] got distracted and forgot.” They subsequently met in New York and started a correspondence. Hayes looked him up when he got to New York, eight years ago now. Sacks exuded innocence and vulnerability, protected only by his aura of brilliance. He took Hayes to his favorite haunts — the botanical gardens, the mineralogy collection at the American Museum of Natural History — and told him stories about the periodic table. Sacks fell in love for the first time, well into his seventy-fifth year.
Sacks experiences his first passionate kiss on his seventy-sixth birthday. Hayes: “After I kiss him for a long time, exploring his mouth and lips with my tongue, he has a look of utter surprise on his face, eyes still closed: ‘Is that what kissing is, or is that something you’ve invented.’ ”
Their relationship is charming and charmed — words here stripped clean and in amplitude. Sacks is murderously shy, and to witness how he emerges from this cocoon is wonderful. He is pulsing with life, his curiosity on some faraway astral plane: “Do you sometimes catch yourself thinking?” he asks. “Those special occasions when the mind takes off — and you can watch it. It’s largely autonomous, but autonomous on your behalf.” Hayes takes him to see some skateboarders. “They may not have read Euclid, but they know it all.” They sip wine from the bottle on their rooftop. There is a moment when Hayes catches Sacks, who is slowly going deaf and blind, trying to snip an uneven edge off a sheet of paper. “He was missing it entirely, scissoring the air very, very gently.”
This is a memoir, so a lot of other things work their way into and out of the story: Ali and his head shop; Ilona, the ninety-five-year-old, orange-haired, foot-long-eyelashed artist who draws Hayes’s right eye (“She told me she’d drawn Tennessee Williams’s eye once.”); the moving man who never moves; incidents and accidents. And there is the “cancer arising from the pigment cells in his right eye,” a recurrence of a melanoma that had by this point metastasized throughout Sacks’s body. You both read and watch, from Hayes many portraits, the vanishing of Oliver. He is such a brick. A journal entry from four months before Sacks dies: “O, when I accidentally dropped a carton of cherry tomatoes on the floor. ‘How pretty! Do it again!’ So I do.” When all Sacks can eat is gefilte fish, they have a taste test between Russ & Daughters and Murray’s. And Hayes is a brick, too. There, and aware that he had not only fallen in love, “it was something more, something I had never experienced before. I adored him.” It’s the kind of adoration that glows invitingly, like a warm, lighted window passed on a nighttime walk through a sleeping city.
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Sig Nordal 