The Best American Essays 2015 by Ariel Levy Page B

of voyaging. I prepare for this even before I switch off the light. So many phases, intervals. At different points I feel myself come awake. Sometimes I look at my watch, press the tiny button and see the hour light up—but in that moment my location on that grid connects with very little. I will have far more connection when the first birds start up, which they always do right at the touch of the first faint trace of light. Their warbling is a fantastic thing to listen to. What an indescribable state to be in, lying there, adrift, slightly awake, but merged enough in sleep that the bird sounds can somehow blend with the meander of thoughts and images in my head.
    The layers of the night are in fact the layers of the self; they offer the most random unfolding of the accumulations of experience—everything that happened and mattered and lapsed away as the next new thing claimed the attention. There is no way to guess what will suddenly surface in those hours. At times I need only to call to mind a specific person, place, or event and the images will rear up, imbued with a kind of radiance of meaningfulness—as if this moment of return had been the point all along. And then, granted a single flash of what I know is the extent of the past, I think,
There will never be time enough.
How to reckon it all? Right then I understand, as if I truly had forgotten, why we will always need art. Writing. The slow and greedy embrace of language.
    Where else but in the dead of night do we encounter the extent of it all? Life—the sport of insomniacs. Because the soul needs the arching vastness of the night as well as the edgy hovering that sleeplessness delivers. It needs long unsettled hours in which to lay out the strands, one after the next, and then follow them out, letting the memories and meanings overlap and crosshatch until the full force of the uncanny comes sweeping in.
    Awake in the dark, I engage with that other time—not the time of the sink’s faucet dripping or the blue jays tyrannizing the yard but the long-term tangle of meanings and connections. This is a different world, not so often present to me in the light. Lying there, eyes open, I will feel that great swinging shift, foreground to background. The day world is obliterated: I find myself, as I did the other night, for no clear reason thinking of my old school friend Mark—of him, but really of his parents—how friendly they were: they would greet me so warmly every time I came by. On my back, eyes now closed again, I fix them with such a clarity, a distinctness, that it shocks me—after all, it’s been forty years. I’m wondering, almost anxious, did I give any like response back then to their kindness and interest? I’m wondering, too, if they are still alive. I try to imagine what they might be like if they are (and why not, I ask,
my
parents are alive)—and then sensations, little details, arrive: like Mark’s father’s peculiar bent-back thumb, and his mother’s amazing involvement with her cats, her way of whispering to them, fussing with them, even as she was talking to us, remembering along with that the looks Mark would give me as we walked out of the kitchen and headed to his room, the flick of the brows that said, “If only you knew” . . . All this so starkly real to me at three or four o’clock in the morning.
    I’ve taken a pain pill. I’m lying here waiting to see if I can settle back into sleep. But now I have these people, and there is so much to remember about them. I realize I never gave them the thought they deserve. But have I given
anything
that thought? Because if there is so much here to do with these two people, what must there be of all the rest? I test myself. I cast around, I pick someone else, the manager of a bookstore where I once worked. And again, just like with Mark’s parents, I find the images—so clear—and then the layers. How quickly