(no subject)
Each couch or empty bed I sleep in comes with a different room in a different neighborhood, with different sounds keeping me awake at night.
In Park Slope, it's a knocking radiator at what must be eighty goddamned degrees. In Flatbush, their radiator makes a gnawing sound, like a rat. The girl whose bed I'm in is gone tonight, sleeping on a tugboat moored somewhere off the East River. Her mattress, with its mounds of clean white sheets, is the only thing filling her empty, wood-floored room. I don't think that she fully appreciates this room. I really do believe that it should be mine.
In the roach motel on 103rd and Broadway--it's a dormitory, really, a cross between a homeless shelter and a hostel--there's loud reggaeton plus early-morning housekeeping. There, I'm kept awake not by noises but by the thought that at any time, any combination of the people sharing this room with me could main or kill me with impunity. If I am paranoid, it's because I've just come from work, at a play in which an unbalanced girl hangs herself in a room in Morningside Heights. And now I'm sleeping in a bunk bed at the Malibu Hotel in... Morningside Heights.
In Crown Heights, Mark and Dan are out of town and I'm by myself. It's Saturday night. It's so quiet. I have an early copy of the Sunday paper, and sit reading at the end of a long, wood table.
Another night in Park Slope, I'm either dreaming or half-awake when I feel a body crawl onto the fold-out bed and put their arms around me from behind. I have no idea who this could be, but it's so comforting that I let myself fall into a deep sleep. When I finally force myself awake to answer the question of the figure in my bed, I'm genuinely surprised to find nobody there; of course, there never had been. Not quite a dream, but a highly palpable figment of my own imagination, or, perhaps, an equally lonely ghost.