As I worked my way through the archive, I kept thinking about what it means to be the generation that comes after, growing up with the knowledge that there are legions of missing persons, that one’s tribe is full of ghosts. What are our responsibilities? Are we witnesses or voyeurs to someone else’s incalculable losses? I don’t have answers to these questions, but I turn them over all the time.

Towards the end of my stay in the library, I ordered up David’s audio journals. Over the past few years I’d grown accustomed to picking through the most intimate papers of the dead, but nothing prepared me for the intensity of listening to those tapes. Many were recorded on waking, or in the middle stretches of the night. Often you could hear car horns and sirens, people talking on the street outside. Then David’s deep voice, struggling upward out of sleep. He talks about his work and his sexuality and sometimes he walks to the window, opens the curtains and reports on what he sees there. A man in the apartment opposite, combing his hair beneath a bare bulb. A dark-haired stranger standing outside the Chinese laundry, who meets his eyes and doesn’t break the gaze. He talks about what dying will feel like, about whether it will be frightening or painful. He says he hopes it will be like slipping into warm water, and then on the crackling tape he starts to sing: low plaintive notes, rising and falling over the surf of morning traffic.

One night, he wakes after a bad dream and switches on the machine to talk it out. He’s dreamt about a horse being caught in some train tracks, its spine broken, unable to escape. ‘It was very much alive,’ he says, ‘and it was just so fucking upsetting to see this thing.’ He describes how he tried to free it, and how instead it was dragged into a wall and skinned alive. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what it means for me. And I feel horror and a very deep sadness about something. Whatever the tone of the dream carries it was just so sad and so shocking.’ He says goodbye then, and shuts the machine off.

Something alive, something alive and lovely caught and damaged in the mechanisms, the gears and rails of society. When I think about Aids, when I think about the people who have died, and the conditions they experienced, when I think about those who have survived and who carry inside themselves a decade of mourning, a decade of missing people, I think of David’s dream. When I cried while listening to the tapes, which I did periodically, surreptitiously wiping my eyes on my sleeve, it wasn’t just out of sadness, or pity. It was out of rage, that I lived in a world in which this kind of mass death had been permitted, in which nobody in a position of power had stopped the train and freed the horse in time.

At Broadway and 39th I passed a man sitting in a doorway, crying. He must have been in his forties, with cropped hair and big cracked hands. I went over to ask if he was OK. He said that he’d been sitting there three days and not a single person had stopped to speak to him. He told me about his kids – I got three beautiful babies on Long Island – and then a confusing story about work boots. He showed me a wound on his arm and said I got stabbed yesterday. I’m like a piece of shit here. People throw pennies at me. It was snowing hard, the flakes whirling down. My hair was soaked already. After a while, I gave him five bucks and walked on. That night I watched the snow falling for a long time. The air was full of wet neon, sliding and smearing in the streets. What is it about the pain of others? It’s not like it’s infectious, is it?

And then everything righted itself again. It felt important spiritually to go to weddings: to give balance to the wakes and memorial services. People shouldn’t have been set in motion on this planet only to grieve losses. And without weddings there were only funerals. I had seen a soccer mom become a rhododendron with a plaque, next to the soccer field parking lot, as if it had been watching all those matches that had killed her. I had seen a brilliant young student become a creative writing contest, as if it were all that writing that had been the thing to do him in. And I had seen a public defender become a justice fund, as if one paid for fairness with one’s very life. I had seen a dozen people become hunks of rock with their names engraved so shockingly perfectly upon the surface it looked as if they had indeed turned to stone, been given a new life the way the moon is given it, through some lighting tricks and a face-like font. I had turned a hundred Rolodex cards around to their blank sides. So let a babysitter become a bride again. Let her marry over and over. So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time.

The weekend her father left – left the house, the town, the country, everything, packing so lightly I believed he would come back – he had said, ‘You can raise Nickie by yourself. You’ll be good at it.’

And I had said, ‘Are you on crack?’

And he had replied, continuing to fold a blue twill jacket, ‘Yes, a little.’

[...] If you were alone when you were born, alone when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead, why ‘learn to be alone’ in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tyres, the wind in your hair. You didn’t have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.

[...] Everyone had brought food and it was spread out on a long table between the house and the barn. I had brought two large roaster chickens, cooked accidentally on Clean while I was listening to Michael Jackson on my iPod. But the chickens had looked OK, I thought: hanging off the bone a bit but otherwise fine, even if not as fine as when they had started and had been Amish and air-chilled and a fortune. When I had bought them the day before at Whole Foods and gasped at the total on my receipt, the cashier had said, ‘Yes. Some people know how to shop here and some people don’t.’

Spring in Canada can be an unconvincing season. In Montreal, where I used to live, the weather will suddenly turn warm, and the sun can seem like a youthful idiot shouting THERE’S HOPE, THERE’S HOPE to an audience of corpses. On a day like that, I drove to a place that changed my life.

I was approaching forty. I was madly in love. I was daily aware of the inadequacy of words to describe the joy and ache I felt, and at the same time I had no need for words. I went to a lousy therapist and told her how good I felt and she said she had heard the same from a number of men recently: adultery had done them good. I was in the middle of a divorce, and had done some truly shitty things to people I loved. My son was born in the midst of my failure to stay married. Regret had left bruises behind my eyes.

Having read so much about chimpanzees I had to adjust to them as animals when I met them, as flesh and blood rather than abstractions. Study after study presents them as embodiments of data: they are sensitive communicators; they remember sequences of numbers; they get depressed in middle age. The data are often wonderful and telling, but they somehow collect in a corner – that place we look when we are searching for random facts and cute coincidences, those moments when the ‘natural’ world might amusingly reflect our own. The further we get from having to find our own food, the less awareness we have of our nature. Understanding these individuals at the sanctuary as animals meant adjusting to myself as an animal. I was not finding an ape within. I was realizing that the whole of me is an ape, that our genes, our biology, our behaviour in groups are not just coincidentally related to other apes but inescapable facts that I arise and go to sleep to. That I dream with.

We all embody a range of contradictions. Chimpanzees and humans hate to see injuries, and cause them all the time. Chimps and humans choose their factions, betray their friends and use enemies to consolidate friendships. While I hate the violence that humans have inflicted on chimps, I’ve seen chilling and deplorable fights between chimps themselves – capricious acts of bullying and murder which show that they can have as much disdain for life and kin as we can.

Lana, the joyful, curious chimpanzee who learned how to use the computer to talk to Tim, ended up being kept in the lab at Yerkes and became part of the breeding programme. I recently met a woman who worked with her on that original language study. She had returned to Yerkes and met Lana again, forty years later. She said that Lana clearly remembered her. Lana had had several kids at Yerkes, all of them taken away from her for various studies. The woman said that Lana’s eyes were distant, and sad.

We can’t keep pets here. It’s one of the rules and is strictly enforced. No one cares. I mean no one tries to smuggle a pet in. They don’t feel the lease violates their rights. Several years ago there was a tenant with a Great Dane who went off one morning and shot up his nursing class at the university because he’d received a bad assessment, killing his instructor and two fellow students before killing himself. There was not one mention of what happened to the dog afterwards, not a single mention. Information about the dog is unavailable to this day. I sometimes think of this guy who wanted to be certified as a nurse, and not only what was he thinking when he set off that morning to murder those people but what was he thinking leaving the dog behind with its dog toys and dog dishes and dog bed? What did he think was going to happen?

Tortoises spend half their life in burrows, from October into April. Should you see a tortoise outside its burrow in the winter months it’s not well and veterinary assistance should be sought.