Know the Night

by Maria Mutch

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2014 Maria Mutch

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2014 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, a Penguin Random House Company, and simultaneously in the United States of America by Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Mutch, Maria, author

  Know the night : a memoir of survival in the small hours / by Maria Mutch

  ISBN 978-0-307-36337-4

  eBook 978-0-307-36339-8

  1. Mutch, Maria. 2. Mothers and sons—Biography. 3. Down syndrome—Biography. 4. Insomnia. 5. Books and reading—Psychological aspects. 6. Byrd, Richard Evelyn, 1888–1957. I. Title.

  PS8626.U885 K56 2014 C814’.6 C2013-900763-6

  Jacket design by Five Seventeen

  Image credits: (woman in snow) © Nancy Falso; (stars) pia12067, courtesy NASA/JPL/MPS/DLR/IDA; (map) David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com

  v3.1

  For R, G & S

  Night is only one-half of something and yet it contains all things, even light, even a boy who doesn’t speak. There is no sun without shadow and it is essential to know the night, according to Camus. It seems that knowing has a cost, and we are changed by paying it, though the result is rarely regret. I’m grateful for a truth amid what I’ve learned: commiseration is a kind of rescue.

  Gabriel is vastly different now. He slept little for a period of about two years, and I can say this about it: I slept little also, it was terrible (as Byrd would say, … in the way that things which are also terrible can be beautiful), and magic happened. This is the story of that period, of the characters who came to call, the ones who helped us through the night, and a number of incidents that seemed to express a parallel, even sympathetic, mysticism; they are as central to the passing of the small hours, and what the small hours had to teach, as the boy himself.

  If there’s one thing to be said about the night, it’s that companions are beneficial. No one should be alone.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  [the first crossing] a prologue

  Midnight

  spells

  1 a.m.

  desire

  2 a.m.

  soul

  3 a.m.

  white

  4 a.m.

  delirium

  5 a.m.

  rescue

  Notes on Quoted Material

  Credits and Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  The cell of the secret is white.

  —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

  It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass. It had been like the death of someone, irrational, that sliding down the mountain pass and into the region of dread. It was like slipping into fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering.

  —Annie Dillard, Total Eclipse

  provisions for Byrd expedition, Antarctica, 1933–35:

  6 straitjackets

  [the first crossing] a prologue

  A night in late July and the ferry that took us to Newfoundland departed North Sydney at midnight. R and I sailed the Cabot Strait, through the wet air of a black night. It was supposed to be a pleasure trip, but we were vagrants crossing the sea in a tangle of bald lighting, children’s cries, and the salt-tinged smell of fuel. People slept on coats under stairwells and in nooks, on patches of floor tile, while others claimed vinyl seats with the ferocity of dogs with bones. After R and I settled into our reserved bunks, I shut my eyes and hoped for sleep.

  I tumbled briefly into dreams, and an old man met me there. He drove a crooked finger into my abdomen and stirred. When I gasped awake, there was the static of people whispering, the shifting of the boat. I watched a moth exhaust itself on a bulb. I was two months’ pregnant.

  At 5 a.m., the great heap of Newfoundland swelled in the dark, and the ferry stopped at Port aux Basques, the cars exiting one by one. Elated to see the first light of morning, I nearly forgot the dream. The sun was pressing and by afternoon, we reached the lake in Gros Morne National Park where we set up camp.

  After pitching our tent, we sat on a pebble shore and marveled at the view of a crystalline lake against an emerald hill. We were not alone on this slip of beach. Two French children came along, a beautiful brother and sister. They wanted to play with us, tell us their stories, their words streaming as they tumbled over each other. They were the age when their play unconsciously implied the sexual and they would soon understand they couldn’t play in this exact way, the brother pinning his sister, but for the moment they were safe and oblivious. I thought how I would love to have children just like them. Their heavily accented English floated and darted around us as they stood together on the pebbles, panting, to tell us how they came up the St. Lawrence in a great ship, and saw porpoises and enormous birds.

  But I was unable to relax, to unclench my fingers from the thermos of tea. Fat cumulus clouds coalesced into the shape of a shark. We sat on the lip of a dazzling lake, and a few moments later, I would start to bleed.

  R drove me to the closest hospital, which was two hours from our campsite, in the town of Cornerbrook. The maternity ward was full, so the nurse placed me in a room with three other women and instructed me to remain lying down as she drew a beige curtain around my bed. I felt like a full bowl about to tip.

  When visiting hours were over, R was forced to retreat, checking into a motel. The darkness and silence of the ward were cut with pools of light and the wails of an elderly woman in the bed next to mine. She cried out for her left leg, now a phantom, and begged for another hit of morphine. Irritated by her suffering, I wondered what was wrong with me, where was my fucking compassion? I shivered, wanting her to be quiet.

  I waited three days for the ultrasound machine that would assess whether I was still pregnant. By the time it pressed its leaking eye to my skin and I had bled seas, it found no life at all.

  Turn back to the lake, its hard beauty. Our tent somewhere behind us and in front of us silvery water and a green mountain. Two French children sidle up and tell us how they traveled the St. Lawrence on a great ship.

  II

  Pause for a moment on the dark sea and call to mind Robert Falcon Scott’s ship, Terra Nova, in 1910 making its way to Antarctica from New Zealand, where he had collected nineteen unfortunate ponies, two of which would die before ever reaching the Ice. Water soaked from the top deck into the sleeping berths where the men had rigged chutes to channel the water away from their heads. They flew lines of cobbler’s thread off the stern where albatrosses gathered to collect food scraps thrown from the ship. If a wing happened to brush the line just so, the bird would flip and ensnare itself in a sudden loop of the twine, find itself being hauled in for photographing, a dose of ether, skinning, and transformation into a museum specimen. One of the caught birds, a beautiful black albatross, walked the deck and regarded the admiring men with contempt. Perhaps he knew his power as a mistreated omen, knew that some of them would never make it home.

  Midnight

  spells

  Begin again.

  Orion is hunting, and black holes drink the
universe while Gabriel’s squeals and bouncing rock the house. He was born three years after my miscarriage in Newfoundland. He is eleven, but it’s been years since R and I have heard him speak. In the absence of speech, then: spikes of sound, vortices, a repetitive soul-splitting screech. Not rage or frustration, not right now, but a wild laughing shriek. Speech pulled to its breaking point. Speech eviscerated. It’s just after midnight, and I walk the cold hall to his room, pulled by a loop of auditory fire.

  When I open his bedroom door, I find him, small and beautiful, standing in the middle of his room. Autism is one of his diagnoses; there are others. He is capable of communicating—he uses picture symbols to let us know what he wants—but at the moment he’s lost, so consumed with laughing and shrieking that the sound itself begins to augment. He disappears this way, erects walls of sound around him as he scurries down internal corridors, leaving the shuddering, sirening body in place for his return.

  Gabriel, I say to him. Gabriel. He looks at me with blue eyes that contain chips of white, like ice in a sea, but he doesn’t see me. When he stops screaming, the air is still but seems marked by the sound. The question is there, too, of how we got to this place in the night and how to get back. How to return him to the other boy he is, the one who looks me in the eye and smiles, the one who loves storybooks and hands me another so I’ll keep reading, the one who loves music, especially jazz. The boy in the dark is only one version of Gabriel, one aspect of the night. At the moment, it is impossible to catch and hold him, impossible to define him or put boundaries around him so that he’s knowable, though I can comb his vital statistics: four feet nine inches tall, ninety pounds, his sun in Gemini, lover of stuffed bears and applesauce, fearful of dogs, oblivious to cats. When he wakes in the morning, he’ll be unironically sweet and calm as he receives his oatmeal and buttered toast, his watered-down juice. He’ll wear khakis and a tidy polo shirt, and sneakers he’ll try to remove before long. A special-needs bus will pull into our driveway and take him to school, and once there, he’ll sparkle some more for the teachers and aides whose adoration of him borders on the ferocious. He has a talent for surrounding himself with loving lions.

  But that morning is still far away, and the unpacking of night has just begun. There’s a picture on his wall of Louis Armstrong on stage, smiling and holding his trumpet, and it’s almost hard for me to look at him in the version of night where he’s been playing a gig. I’ve become envious of him because the night I’m in, the one somewhere in 2008, could as easily be the year before or the year before that. The dark hours have become more or less the same, and midnight is simply the place where we start waking, where we’ve been waking for two years.

  Night used to be different. R and I enjoyed oblivious, unbroken sleeps, even as the parents of two young children—Gabriel’s little brother was born four years after him—because both boys slept well. Then, at the age of nine, Gabriel broke one of his nights into pieces, and then most nights after that into more, and then more. Now I go to bed knowing that R or I will be lifted out any time before morning by the sound of clapping or humming or shrieking. Finding him coiled in sounds has become normal, or at least familiar, and it has made me wonder, there in the dark, moving the cat from my legs, about the other parents who are up. I picture them shuffling through hallways toward speechless children, the ones vibrating with the sound of the dark. A reversal happens, and the uninterrupted night becomes the curiosity.

  The potency of midnight, when anything can happen, is where our waking begins. Now is the change, the start or end of the spell. We’re given a paradox: that in the indisputable presence of night is day’s origin, a quiet, winking birth so obscured by flooding ink and our dreams that we barely feel the transition. Midnight, and a corner is turned, and what is gorgeous is also sinister, but mostly we are unconscious or bathed in artificial light when it comes.

  Thelonious Monk wrote the tune “ ’Round Midnight,” to which someone later added lyrics, though it didn’t need any. I do pretty well ’till after sundown … But it really gets bad ‘round midnight. The thing about Monk, apparently, was that he would just stop speaking for a while, just decide; days without talking, without explanation. Or sometimes he’d be playing and stand up and stop. Just stop.

  I don’t look anymore for the reason, how a boy goes from reveling in sleep to simply dabbling in it. His waking, more than the shrieking, has seemed unsolvable, and sometimes I have wondered if the fault is mine. Hubris punished, as in fables. I probably took the unbroken night and the sound of words for granted, and considered them, despite knowing better, as inviolate and maybe even commonplace. In the way that a person can appear to possess what happens out of sheer coincidence to be available, I must have thought they were mine.

  When I was in my midtwenties and feeling that something was missing, I started wishing for him. Except that the wish was entirely open-ended—I didn’t even specify a him or a her—I simply wanted to be pregnant, and I got my wish, becoming pregnant three times before I was able to carry to term. I had gone to art school, but my mind was concerned with writing, not painting. I had been attempting novels since the age of ten. I completed a full draft of one when I was twenty-one, but by the time I was pregnant with Gabriel—and considering the loss of his words, this is prescient—I suffered a seemingly intractable writer’s block. R and I had been married for three years at that point, and I had left my job at a bookstore in downtown Toronto in an anxiety-soaked attempt to keep the pregnancy and to write. I did the latter unsuccessfully, though not for lack of trying; one memorable seven-hour period in front of my computer culminated in a single word on the screen: jesus. And I did the former with all the determination I had, as if life can be willed, gritted into being.

  Overseeing the first half of my pregnancy with Gabriel was a fertility specialist whose methods for staving off miscarriage involved, among other arcana, the taking of progesterone, a ban on coffee, and no sex. Imagine carrying a raw egg on a spoon, and you have the effect. Imagine the metaphysical equivalent of threads and veils and thumbtacks. But being pregnant with Gabriel was also like being a radio receiver, and I became especially sensitive to my body and knew that I was pregnant before taking a home test, and further that something unusual was happening. When I was five weeks’ pregnant, there was a heated point on the left side of my abdomen that felt like an ember hit with air. I curled fetally on the bed for hours on an autumn evening as the tiny pulse of alarm grew, until it was almost midnight and R took me to the emergency room.

  We didn’t wait long for my examination. I had brought a book with me, imagining that somehow I’d be able to focus on it. The attending doctor, looking to the chair where I’d placed my jacket and the book Memories, Dreams, Reflections, by Carl Jung, said, Whose is that? While he examined me, he murmured how he admired Jung.

  I was admitted, given a bed where nurses hovered and checked and spoke about the results of my blood and urine tests behind the curtain. One nurse said to another, This woman is really pregnant. Really, really pregnant. The intimation of excess, of hormones streaming in uncontrolled fountains, was both frightening and reassuring. An ultrasound was scheduled for the morning, and until then time crept. I badly wanted something to drink, but the nurse told me I couldn’t drink, or eat, or even brush my teeth, because I’d possibly be operated on due to an ectopic pregnancy. Ectopic, meaning that the embryo had rooted in a fallopian tube instead of the uterus, meaning that the pregnancy could possibly be excised. A sensation, then, like teetering. Pinpricks of waiting, coloured chips on the terrazzo floor, the hospital gown’s ties like spiders along my spine, and thirst. I waited under buzzing lights until dawn with the faint hope that this pregnancy was not what they thought.

  In the morning, an attendant wheeled me through corridors to the dim room where the ultrasound machine stood. Its vision passed coolly through me and glimpsed, there on the uterine wall, a speckling of light and dark. All was well, and the source of the pain was hypothesized to be th
e spot on the ovary, now a cyst, where the egg that would form Gabriel had made its exit. It had left behind a tiny, fiery explosion. The pain faded, and I shakily dressed in my own clothes again and pressed the gown into a bin. I staggered out with R into the early morning, surprised that I was pregnant; still.

  Gabriel wasn’t born at night, but on a day in June that was a bright blade. There was the python clench around my abdomen, and the measuring of time in intervals I wanted only to be over. There were the hospital corridors, blank as laundry chutes, and clocks with enormous numerals on the walls. I saw the forms of other mothers moving through the halls wheeling drips, or else propped on beds, and some were talkative or focused, and others seemed not entirely there, as though floating away, like zeppelins. There was R, smiling and coaching me, and the growing feeling within me that all the birthing classes were really just an attempt to give him something to hang on to as I disappeared into the crevasse.

  Finally, Gabriel emerged. He arrived lit as lightning, with white-blond hair, and hunched around the hand of the doctor who pulled him free. I can see him perfectly: he arrived as though backing in, facing away. He arrived with his twenty-first chromosomes dangling a third copy.

  His Down syndrome surprised me only because I could see then that I’d been right. When I had reached the seventh month of pregnancy, and had been passed from the fertility specialist to my primary-care doctor, I had gone to the library to find books on parenting the typical baby I was expecting. Secretly, I was already concerned. Sometimes the rocking baby inside me would become so still that I would lie down and inwardly beg him, please move. So an unease had begun to tingle, and when I walked into the library and started to examine the titles, there it was: Your Down Syndrome Child. The spine of the book didn’t say The Down Syndrome Child or Children with Down Syndrome, but Your. Mine. The book was old, having been published decades earlier, and full of misinformation. It sat dust-covered on the shelf, as though waiting for me. Your.