Three in the morning, can’t sleep. I get up and go into the living room, take my perch at the window and survey the scene. I count at least twenty apartments that are unmistakably awake and wonder for the millionth time how people live with overhead lighting—I get a headache just thinking about it. A few banks of lights flicker in the Hearst building, off then on then off then on then off and then they stay there. There are plenty of cars and cabs, some cabs with their light on, others occupied or off duty and heading home. Sometimes, late night, cabs will leave their light off but pull over anyway and, if they don’t want to go where you do, claim to be off duty and pull away—I don’t see any such tomfoolery as I watch but I’m sure there are plenty of negotiations going on right now all over this city.
A couple of dudes in heavy coats and knit caps, hauling big plastic bags of bottles and cans, approach the 24-hour Duane Reade on the corner. There are two automatic-door entrances to this DR, one just three steps around the corner from the other, and since one set faces south and the other west they create a nasty swirling vortex of either cold or heat if people are going in and out both at the same time. Maybe a year or two ago, the DR people got fed up and locked the south-facing doors. I got a lot of mileage out of watching people process that situation—I found I could predict exactly what they would do next based on where they looked to understand why the doors wouldn’t open. After a while a hand-printed “USE OTHER DOOR” sign went up, but that was pretty ineffectual, so finally someone moved the pile of wheelie-carts in front of the southern doors and that solved the problem immediately: people saw the wheelie-carts, knew they couldn’t enter past those, but didn’t lose confidence as to whether the DR was open so just stepped around the corner and used the other set of doors. There’s a lesson here about affordances and how to signal how to navigate the world but since it took like a year for them to figure this out I wouldn’t hold up my local DR as a paragon of urban planning.
The first guy with the big plastic bag of bottles and cans goes in while the second loiters for a minute outside. I don’t have a line of sight into the store so I can’t see what happens, but eventually the second guy goes in, too, leaving his bag o’bottles and cans behind, then a minute or so later he comes out and grabs that bag and goes back in. After a while, maybe five minutes or more, both guys emerge, bagless, and head purposefully south on 8th Ave, so…somebody on the graveyard shift buying back recyclables, $0.04 on the nickel?
A Pepsi truck has been idling outside this whole time, casually infringing on the bus lane but who cares at three in the morning. One of the Pepsi guys is out there leaning on his dolly, smoking a cigarette and serving as an audience for another guy wearing the tell-tale many layers of a street person who is carrying on what looks like a very emphatic monologue, at least as far as I can infer from his gesticulations and the way he’s rocking side to side, not drunk, just warming to the rhythm of his message.
Eventually the Pepsi guy gets in the truck and it pulls away. I see one apartment light go out. Another garbage truck comes by, maybe the third or fourth since I’ve taken up my post. The distinctive whooshing hollow noise they make gave me strange, anxious dreams when I first moved here—dreams of terrifyingly slow, inexorable serpents winding closer and closer. Last night I dreamed I found a tank of fish that I had forgotten about—the fish were so neglected they had been eating each other but they weren’t dead yet, just swimming around missing big chunks of flesh, trailing intestines and blood, and, yes, thank you, I can cook up a good anxiety dream. It’s usually about an animal or animals that were my responsibility but I have forgotten them until I come upon them in some unspeakable emaciated state, or flopping in a puddle bleeding and gasping, and the nice thing about these dreams is that they don’t bother to see the plot through—once I’ve found the tank of half-dead fish or the bone-thin cat left trapped in a closet for who knows how long, the point is made and my brain moves on. It’s not about saving them, my brain says, it’s about the fact that you let this happen. I usually wake up like, yeesh, subconscious, okay, I’ll go check the mail—enough already!
A person wearing shorts plods by, headed maybe to the Gristedes? I can see it from my window but I’ve only gone in once so though the lights look on I have no idea if it’s a 24-hour joint or not. The Link NYC kiosk I can see—and join the free wifi from, should I dare—tells me it’s 34 degrees and I think about the guy who has taken up residence in the doorway of an empty storefront just down the block. He puts up cardboard signs with different variations on the theme of “Only God can judge,” and I once overheard him turn down the offer of some hand warmers by saying he had so many pairs he didn’t think he’d be able to use them all by spring. I wonder where he is right now.
The guy closing up the karaoke place has come outside. He’s smoking a cigarette and pretending to sweep the sidewalk. Soon enough he goes back in and more garbage trucks roar slowly by. There are people—not a lot, but at least one or two always in view from where I sit. Some are going up the avenue and some are going down and nobody looks particularly worse for the wear plus it’s Monday, so…where are they going? Where have they been?
Sudden shrieks of laughter and I crane my neck but they must be around the corner. It sounds like a group of 3 or 4 people and then as I watch a cab pulls out heading north and its light goes from on to off.
3:30 now and more cabs, more cars, more delivery trucks. My eyes are gritty and my eyelids flickering, but I still don’t feel tired. Now there is a light on deep inside the Pick-A-Bagel, someone in there opening up and and preparing for the morning. The quick whoop of a siren—some cop moving somebody along—and I let it prompt me away from the window and back to my bed. I keep the blinds in my bedroom cracked just enough that a little light seeps in and whether it’s my fellow insomniacs or the lights from the office buildings or the Duane Reade or the reflected whirling glow of the traffic going by, I’ll hope the pulse of the city will finally lull me to sleep. Nothing to see here, everything to see here, and tomorrow another day.
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