He told me that the owner of the smoke shop had bought the stationery supply store next door. Now he owns three shops on the block.
“The King of Eighth Avenue,” I said, kiddingly.
Ali nodded.
“But you’re still the mayor.”
Ali pointed out shops across the street—three of them had For Lease signs in their windows. The organic bakery had just closed. “It was a good neighbor, they were here many years.” He paused. “Fifteen people lost their jobs, too, when he had to close the shop—fifteen people who will have a hard time getting another job.” He pointed out that most of them were students or undocumented workers. He shook his head. “It’s not right.”
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6-3-14:
Sunday, O nuzzled his nose, dog-like, into the side of my head, brushed it up and down and back and forth against my buzz-cut hair (“It’s like a meadow,” he said) and then he did so with the top of his head.
“Now, why does one do that?” O said, suddenly the scientist in him coming out.
“Because it feels good,” I answered instantly.
He laughed; it was such a simple and seemingly simplistic answer.
“But that’s very interesting,” O said, picking up this thread. “Does feeling good—does feeling—influence all of our choices as animals? Something feels good, so we do it again—this is how we learn about pleasure. Or it doesn’t feel good, so we learn that it carries a risk, a danger …? Are our lives ruled by feeling?”
“Mine is,” I responded.
He didn’t seem to hear me.
“Do plants feel?” O said.
He looked at me like I held the answer, but continued on: “Certainly they do, but they cannot respond to feeling as quickly as we. Plants are rooted in the ground. They can move, yes, but not at the speed that an animal can. It may take years for a tree to grow, days for a flower to bloom. Is it speed then that differentiates us—this capacity for speed? You could do time-lapse photography of a vine crawling and see that it does, indeed, move, but one would have to speed it up a thousand times to match the speed with which an animal can react to threats or changes in the environment the way a human can.”
O tilted his head, seemingly focusing on a corner of the room. “Yes, perhaps speed is at the essence…”
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6-15-14:
O: “I like having a confusion of agency, your hand on top of mine, unsure where my body ends and yours begins…”
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7-22-14: I was standing in the kitchen last night making dinner for the two of us and a thought came to me: This is the happiest I’ve ever been.
I stopped myself: Is that true?
I kept doing what I was doing, making dinner, sort of testing the feeling; O was talking all the while; and I thought, Yes, yes, it is true.
PART III
HOW NEW YORK BREAKS YOUR HEART
Couple Under Glass
MY AFTERNOON WITH ILONA
I rang the bell for Ilona’s apartment at exactly three o’clock, the time we’d arranged for my visit, and she buzzed me in. “You’re almost there,” she called from up above the stairwell when I’d reached the second floor. Her building had no elevator. At ninety-five years old, Ilona goes up and down the three flights several times a day—“Keeps me young,” she had told me.
Ilona had called me a couple of days earlier, saying she wanted to give me a gift—a thank you for the photographs I had taken of her and the prints I’d given her. “It will only take a half hour,” she had said.
The door to her apartment was open just a crack, and she peeked out, her face like a bouquet of oranges, blues, and greens, a ribbon of red at the lips. “Come in, come in, make yourself at home.” I squeezed through the narrow opening; the door was open just a crack because it could only open that far—stacks of things behind it prevented the door from opening fully.
Ilona had told me her place was very tiny—like herself (she stands about four foot ten, and weighs no more than ninety pounds). She added, “Don’t be surprised by anything you see,” which sounded at once like a warning and an invitation.