How We Live Now
For Nancy Miller,
and in memory of Wendy Weil
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
How New York Breaks Your Heart
Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me
The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s Anatomy
Sleep Demons: An Insomniac’s Memoir
Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Postscript
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Author
Afterimage: A Portfolio of 15 Photographs
Of course, it was hard not to worry, everyone was worried, but it wouldn’t do to panic, because, as Max pointed out to Quentin, there wasn’t anything one could do except wait and hope, wait and start being careful, be careful and hope …
—Susan Sontag, from “The Way We Live Now,” 1986
1
It is one year ago, and I am walking up Hudson Street near where I live:
I cross paths with a beautifully dressed young man with a long, pitch-black beard, and I ask if I can take his picture. He demurs immediately.
But we go on chatting. He tells me he’s a writer from Turkey, here to look for stories.
“So, have you found any?”
“Yes, this is a story now,” he replies, with a sideways glance.
I laugh. “For me, too.”
We shake hands and I tell him my name.
“I’m Yevgeny,” he says, and begins walking ahead of me at a faster clip. “Good day now.”
“Good day, Yevgeny.”
Tango Dancers at the Pier
July 10, 2019
2
Now, I think about:
The last time I shook hands with a stranger.
The last time I saw people dancing.
The last time I saw people smiling.
The last time I heard kids playing.
The last time I saw traffic on Eighth Avenue.
The last time I went to the gym.
The last time I went swimming.
The last time I took the subway.
The last time I took a plane.
The last time I went to a movie.
The last time I went to a play.
The last time I made someone laugh.
The last time I made someone dinner.
The last time I kissed someone.
The last time I slept with someone.
The last time I fucked someone.
The last time I let someone fuck me.
The last time I shared a joint.
The last time I took a taxi.
The last time I took an Uber.
The last time I took a bus.
The last time I went to a restaurant.
The last time I went to brunch.
The last time I went to a grocery store without fear.
The last time I got a haircut.
The last time I got a drink at a bar.
The last time I took a bath with someone.
The last time I saw food carts on Fourteenth Street.
The last time I saw a crowded sidewalk.
The last time I saw people sitting on their stoops.
The last time I saw Ali at the smoke shop.
The last time I saw anyone in my family.
The last time I saw friends in person.
The last time I saw Hailey.
The last time I saw my therapist at his office.
The last time I heard cars honking.
The last time I shared an elevator without worrying.
The last time I went outside without a mask or gloves.
The last time I wasn’t scared.
The last time I was as scared as this.
The last time I fell in love.
Eighth Avenue
December 10, 2019
3
It was Christmas, just last Christmas—the last time I fell in love. It was a temporary condition, true, but that doesn’t make it any less real. I am and always have been a love-at-first-sight kind of human.
I had made a deliberate decision to approach the holidays this time not as the holidays—which had made me blue for years—but just as work days. I had a project to keep me fully occupied, fortunately. I worked all day on Christmas and had no plans to go out. If someone had invited me to a Christmas dinner, say, I would have said no, no thank you. But by six, I was feeling restless and I decided to take a walk.
I wandered through the West Village, passed by a bar on Christopher Street, then, on second thought, turned around and went in to check it out. I was sure it would be empty—six thirty on Christmas night, come on—but it was not. There were lots of people there, mostly people like me, I guessed, which is to say people who don’t dig the holidays or believe in Jesus and don’t have family here or a menorah or a Christmas tree. To my relief, old-school disco, not Christmas music, was playing. I ordered a Corona and a shot of tequila—my way of celebrating a good day’s work—and settled in on a barstool. I didn’t plan to stay for long.
Sometime later—let’s say another beer later—the guy on the stool next to me talked me into playing a game of pool.
“The last time I played pool I was in high school forty years ago,” I warned him, but of course that was all the more reason for him to take me on. He beat me in what must have been record time—even for that bar, not known for pool sharks—which meant a round of drinks was on me. That’s when I spotted Jesse. He was leaning against the back wall. He was tall and muscular, but it was the Santa hat he wore with exactly the right amount of irony that caught my eye. Somehow it made him even handsomer. And then he smiled. I’m a sucker for a gap-toothed smile, I just am. He held my gaze and just kept smiling this sexy, gap-toothed grin.
The bartender returned with the beers I’d ordered.
“One for him, too,” I said, gesturing at the tall young Black Santa with the irresistible lips. “Whatever he’s drinking, tell him it’s on me.”
He came over and thanked me and asked if he could play pool, too. “Teams—we’ll do teams,” he suggested.
“You do not want me on your team,” I said.
“Yeah, I, uh, I picked up on that,” he said.
He found another guy to be his pool partner and we played more games than I clearly remember. My guy and I lost each one, that I do know. Somewhere in there, maybe after someone had bought the first round of shots, Jesse and I exchanged phone numbers. The chemistry between us, with alcohol speeding up the process, was palpable. I remember thinking, This is the most fun I’ve had on Christmas in I do not know how long.
But then things started to get fuzzy. I can drink—up to a point—but the last thing I wanted was to get wasted. I decided I had to get myself back home while I still had my wits about me. So I split. I put my pool cue aside and, with no goodbyes, slipped out the door. It was only about nine thirty or ten. The fresh, cold air felt bracing, sobering. I was halfway home when I got a text:
“What happened to you? Where are you?” It was Jesse.
“On my way home, time for bed,” I texted.
There was no response for a couple blocks, then: “Bed? This is where you’re supposed to invite me over,” he texted back.
Oh, right. Right. I did a quick calculation, weighing the pros and cons, and within a few seconds, What the hell, it is Christmas after all won the argument in my head. I texted him my address.
Those long legs of his got him to my place in half the time it had taken me. I’d barely had time to brush my teeth when my doorbell rang: There was Jesse leaning against the door frame, still wearing his Santa hat and now with a string of Christmas lights around his neck.
“I swiped these on the way out,” he said.
“I like your style, let’s find a place to plug them in,” I said.
4
One of the realities of living in New York is that you cannot become too attached to specific places any more than you can become attached to certain people in your life: the waitress you chat with every weekend, the parking garage guy, the newsstand vendor from whom you buy a paper. Often, they disappear, and you may never learn why. Why did that bar close so suddenly? Whatever happened to their bartender? And what about Mohammed? He was here yesterday.
We have always known this, those of us who’ve lived in New York a while.
What’s happening in the city now, though, is that it’s not just one or two people you notice have gone missing. It feels like it’s everyone. Everywhere. Except for a few people remaining in a few places—the gas station guys, the liquor store, the pharmacy—everyone has disappeared.
My apartment building, where I’m sequestered by myself at my place, is less than half full. Many residents have moved to their second homes in the Hamptons or upstate; some younger ones have gone back home to live with their parents. There are no children left in this entire eighteen-story building. One of my neighbors on another floor, Margo, died from Covid-19 a few days ago. Almost every day, I hear about someone else who’s gotten it.
In the past week alone, I’ve seen the city itself change before my eyes from my apartment windows. In the daytime, Eighth Avenue—stretching from Fourteenth Street to Central Park South, nearly fifty city blocks—is so empty that couples are walking hand in hand down the middle of the street. Skateboarders and bicyclists ride where cars used to be.
It’s lovely in a certain, dreamlike way. But then I notice the surgical masks on faces, the distance between pedestrians, and I have to look away. It’s just not right. It’s just not right. I lie down.
Eighth Avenue
April 6, 2020
5
As the days pass, one blurring into another, I find I often wonder what my late partner, the British-born neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, would say. Had he lived to see this, Oliver would be in what we now know is one of the most vulnerable categories: the elderly. (He’d be eighty-six today.) Oliver was also, by his own admission, a hypochondriac, a prodigious hand-washer and nail-scrubber long before it became de rigueur. But then, he’d also lived through the Blitz, and AIDS, and 9/11; as a young doctor, he’d treated survivors of the encephalitis lethargica pandemic that swept the world in the early twentieth century, killing or incapacitating five million people—his Awakenings patients, as they’d come to be known. And he had faced his own impending death from cancer with uncommon grace and clarity. So I am pretty sure I know what his response would be. A few months before he died at eighty-two in August 2015, Oliver looked up from his notepad one evening—in this apartment, while sitting at this desk—and said the following to me:
The most we can do is to write—intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively—about what it is like living in the world at this time.
Oliver was a man of many enthusiasms but none more so than for the power and poetry of words. When I say he loved words, I don’t simply mean within the context of being a writer of numerous classic books. Even if he had never written a single one, I am sure Oliver would still have been that funny fellow who took giant dictionaries to bed for light reading (aided by a magnifying glass). He delighted in etymology, synonyms and antonyms, slang, swear words, palindromes, anatomical terms, neologisms. He could joyfully parse the difference between homonyms and homophones, not to mention homographs, in dinner table conversation.
It was this love of words and of the act of writing—which he considered a form of thinking—that led Oliver to tell me one day shortly after I’d moved to New York in the spring of 2009, “You must keep a journal!”
It was not a suggestion but an instruction.
I followed his advice straightaway, writing that exchange down on a scrap of paper, which I still have with me. I hadn’t kept a journal since I was a teenager, but I began chronicling impressions of life in New York and of my encounters with people I’d meet by chance on the street or subway—a practice I have continued to this day.
Oliver at Home
March 6, 2015
6
As with Christmas, I had made no plans for New Year’s Eve this year. I just worked that day and expected to work the next day too. Unlike Christmas, however, New Year’s is a holiday I kind of like—a chance to put one year behind you and to celebrate what-may-be, 365 days open to all possibilities. I felt optimistic. Two major writing projects I’d been working on—one of which I’d spent a decade on—would be coming to fruition over the next six months. I’d also completed a new body of photographic work and looked forward to editing down the pictures and possibly putting together a show. If nothing else, I would pour a glass of wine before midnight on the thirty-first and watch TV and toast to new beginnings.
But then I got a text from Jesse. His plans for the night had fallen through and he wondered what I was up to.
“Having a date with myself,” I texted.
“How about I join you?”
He arrived around ten thirty. I took his backpack for him as he took off his coat; it was unusually heavy. He unzipped it and pulled out a magnum of sparkling rosé.
“Are you shittin’ me?” I said with a chuckle, already imagining the hangover this much sweet wine could bring. But I was touched, truth be told. The last time I’d celebrated New Year’s Eve with someone was with Oliver. Jesse popped the cork, I plugged the Christmas lights back in, and we got our little party started. I had to take a shelf out of my refrigerator just to accommodate that bottle of rosé, large enough for a party of six.
We smoked a joint and lost track of time but were in bed before midnight. The only reason I know this for sure is because, seemingly by chance, we both happened to glance at my clock at the exact moment it turned from 11:59 to 12:00—from 2019 to 2020. We looked at each other, our mouths agape. “Oh my God,” we said in unison, and then we kissed. And kissed. And kissed. A flush of good feeling washed over
me, a sensation I remember clearly; it was almost like having a premonition: The year ahead is going to be such a joyful one.
Boy, did I get that wrong.
7
It’s strange to try to retrace one’s steps, thinking about where you were at what point in this pandemic while still in the midst of this pandemic—and whether or not you’d ever been or had put yourself at risk. Things have changed so quickly in such a short time. I look at my 2020 calendar now and I can see—by the various appointments and dates on it (I obsessively write everything down)—how I, like most everyone else on the planet, was living as if everything were perfectly normal throughout all of January and February: going to the gym, going for a mile-long swim, going out with friends, going to therapy, going out for dinner, going to the doctor, and so forth. How oblivious I was. How oblivious we all were to how your entire life can change in a few days.
8
The last time I traveled by plane was in late November. The filmmaker Ric Burns had completed a powerful full-length documentary about Oliver’s life and work, which was screening at a festival in Los Angeles. I joined one of the producers for a post-screening Q-and-A at a theater right off the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We had a full house, and I looked forward to doing more—screenings at festivals scheduled throughout the spring, one in Martha’s Vineyard in March, for which I already had flight tickets, one in Portland, Oregon, and others. But by March, the year’s remaining film festivals had been canceled and movie theaters were shutting down. I wondered if and when I would ever travel again, and why—why would I want to?
Even under the best circumstances, travel can be a grind—the lines, the waits, security; long, crowded flights, crammed into economy. But I’ve always enjoyed the trip to and from the airport; each provides a different form of anticipation. Whereas on a plane I feel like human cargo, in a long cab or Uber ride with a skilled driver, I feel like a passenger, free of any responsibilities, free to daydream or doze if I like or to strike up a conversation, if the vibe is right. A certain driver on a certain night a few years ago comes back to me now as a welcome reminder.