Within his bending sickle’s compass come
Victor Barall On the last day of his life, Marty Haberman got out of bed a little late. He was ninety-three years old, and it had been quite some time since he had been able to sleep through the night, although he drank nothing after nine p.m. and emptied his bladder immediately before getting into bed and extinguishing the light at about eleven. It was always at about one-thirty that his body demanded that he pull his feet over the side and rise and make another set of urinations, following which he was generally able without difficulty to go back to sleep. But when, at about four, his body implored him to rise again, he would produce just a few dribbled drops, and then he would sleep no more. Returning to bed, he would briefly attempt to bore himself to sleep, counting backward in random leaps from the number two hundred, or stringing together the names of famous composers whose dates aligned, the death year of one matching the birth year of another. It was no use, and so he would try then to fill his sleeplessness productively, by going over in his mind a memory of his younger days or a melody that during the day he had been in the middle of formulating. As the darkness began to lift and the dawn began to spread her rosy fingers over the East River, the residua of a series of vivid dreams would convince him that he must have slept after all, if only briefly. Then, for another hour, sometimes two, he would remain supine, his eyes closed, because the pillow was soft and the