Night Walk
Notes from an insomniac.
You think walking at night will be different, helpful. So many bouts of insomnia are spent in that state of strained inertia, forcing yourself to lie down and just… be… still, which of course only agitates you further. Maybe the opposite will work. Maybe you can lull yourself to sleep by giving in to what your body desires—movement. Maybe walking will solve everything.
You throw on some sweats, a sweater, sneakers. You grab your keys, your phone, anything else? You leave your wallet. You don’t need to be identified tonight.
You head south down 6th Avenue. You wonder why you haven’t tried this before. You’re a man, and you’re white, and you might as well have been voted “most likely to fade into the background” in your high school yearbook. You can take a walk around lower Manhattan at one a.m. on a Tuesday night without a hitch. What’s there to be afraid of?
Oh, the rats.
One shoots by you, from underneath a dining shed into a gutter, and then two companions follow him. They’re harmless, frightened of you, you remind yourself. (Yet, you can’t help but think that if that were true, they wouldn’t be scampering mere inches from the feet of their apex predator.) Still, for the rest of your stroll, you find yourself looking down more than up.
You’re walking fast. Why? It’s not just the rats that have you antsy. The city tends to do that. It’s kind of its defining scheme, to keep its inhabitants on their toes while running them into the ground. Even at night, when the sidewalks are clear and the streetlights cast an ugly pale glow across the asphalt, you feel as though you’re both wasting time and missing something.
In your day-to-day life, you walk with noise-canceling headphones on mostly. To quell the hullabaloo, yes, but also as an act of affect control. Choosing the music you listen to determines the mood you want for your journey. Sometimes you want it revved up (lately, brat), slowed down (Simon and Garfunkel maybe?), or emptied of any importance whatsoever—sometimes a walk is just a walk (top 40 on shuffle). You think about twelvefour, the album by the Paper Kites, entirely written and recorded between midnight and four a.m. over many weeks. The lead singer said he found a strange sense of creativity pour out of him in those hours—something to do with the energy that arises when the body is sluggish but the mind alert. You used to feel these were your most productive hours as well. You would swear that you could only get your best writing done in the middle of the night, when there were no distractions. When everyone else was asleep, that was when you could be most alive. Part of you still believes this. The other other part grew up.
Tonight, you leave the headphones at home, and you listen. Mostly, you hear the rumbles of machines: generators whirring, garbage trucks lurching by, subway wheels screeching. These sounds are heavy and harsh and remind you that the city is a city of machines, at its core. Things that keep the city—stacks of brick and concrete and people on a static island—moving forward.
But then, you are surprised to hear crickets. Many of them. There’s so little greenery around, just a few small triangle parks you pass. You never realized the city could get quiet enough to hear crickets.
You’re not the only one out. A man walks his dog. A trio of women in heeled boots stomp by, each looking at her phone. An adult family of tourists passes by as you cross Canal Street. The father sings, “New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made of.” The son corrects him: “it’s ‘wet dream tomato.’”
At this point, you’re becoming irritated that your body is speeding up but your mind is slowing down. The intervals between any remotely worthy thoughts or observations are growing longer, but your legs have reached a brisk, steady pace.
You reach a park that gives you a pang of sadness. There’s nothing remarkable about this park; a smattering of benches, a placard you don’t read, a handful of trees—oh, that’s someone peeing. But a year ago you stopped at this park, sat on that bench right over there, and drank coffee with Austin. You didn’t discuss anything you can remember, didn’t observe anything noteworthy. You just sat with him. It’s sad and cliched to realize that even the least exceptional of spaces can be haunted by memories of your time there with an ex. Bitterness washes over you. Is there a way to ever erase the associations?
Part of you wishes you didn’t know where you are. Your first time in New York seven years ago, you and your friend were constantly lost. Apple Maps drained your phone batteries; you walked several blocks in a row before you realized you were supposed to go in the opposite direction; you emerged from subway stations and peered around helplessly like groundhogs—which way do we go? It was giddying, feeling as though the city were swallowing you. The skyscrapers blocked the sun and scrambled the cardinal directions. You were never on the corner of Reade and Church, never in Tribeca or FiDi or Batter Park City. You were simply in New York, somewhere within its mouth. Now you know that Chambers Street is one block south of Reade and that Tribeca leads to FiDi and that knowing these things is less exciting than not knowing them. Orientation is the enemy of wonder.
Whenever you pass by the Jenga Building, you think about two things: that Beyoncé lives there and that Gustavo Arnal, the former CFO of Bed Bath & Beyond, jumped to his death from his eighteenth-floor apartment there. You can’t help but think about the violence of the act. What happens to the cranium when it hits concrete after falling two hundred feet? It’s horrendous, as most suicides are. Jumping, hanging, gunshots, overdosing. You think that maybe, in a twisted way, it’s good that so many methods of suicide are so gruesome and painful. Maybe if they weren’t, more people would attempt to die.
And then you pass by the World Trade Center, and you walk around the sites of the Twin Towers. You think about how the land you’re walking on could have been the land where someone who did not want to end their life but who chose the lesser of two excruciating ways to die had hit the ground. On that day twenty-three years ago, you watched on television these bodies fall to the earth, until finally your kindergarten teacher realized this was not appropriate viewing for a five-year-old. Sometimes you forget—or at least fail to consider—how much witnessing this at that age affected the person you’ve become. Someone who can’t sleep at night.
Oddly, you haven’t seen any rats in a while, or maybe you’ve stopped looking for them.
The streets get narrower in this section of the city, and the buildings taller. You’re almost at the end. A woman to your right steps into a nook in the exterior of a building, drops her pants, and urinates. You pretend everything to your left is the most captivating thing you’ve ever seen. She, like we all do, deserves privacy. You pass a man sitting in a small park playing the recorder. When he notices your presence, he stops. You suddenly feel like you don’t belong here, that you’re an imposition.
Maybe you should have stayed in bed.
At the edge of the island, you look out at the bay, spot Lady Liberty across the water. No one is around. You’re tired, but not tired. You don’t know if this little experiment worked or not. You won’t know until you get back, flop into bed. Either way, you’ve decided the walk has come to an end. You’ll take the subway back. So you head there alone, in the quiet. Just you, the machines, and the crickets.