Know the Night

by Maria Mutch

  So S spoke, and then he spoke eloquently, vividly, and began to wonder out loud if there were any treasure chests hidden in the basement or in a closet somewhere, and he went through a period of telling lame knock-knock jokes and roaring with laughter, but there was still Gabriel and his lack of speech. Desire is so persistent a thing that if Gabriel won’t speak in the waking world, then we conjure him speaking in the dreaming one. We shut our eyes, slip under, and there he is, talking. It isn’t just R and I who have the dreams but a litany of friends and relatives. Even one of Gabriel’s school chums dreamed that a meteor landed and when Gabriel touched it, he was able to speak. And because this is the dream world, sudden reversals make perfect sense, so that when he speaks he doesn’t just mumble a few approximations but is clear and elucidating and, really, goes on at length, as if he’s spoken all along. When I’m the dreamer, my mind races with what I want to ask him—there’s so much to know. I want to take his face in my hands, Tell me everything, knowing that in this place there’s a good chance he will. In my most recent dream, though, the exchange was succinct. He simply told me that he was cold. And in the dream, simple as that, I got him a blanket.

  I have agreed to be a ghost. I walk the night hall and think how damn cold the house is. Nothing like what Admiral Byrd has to contend with, but still: cold. All winter I run outside, and yet still find my skin reacting to the air, reacting to the fact that not so long ago I was curled under the duvet. There’s something about our house, too, having been built in the seventies and rattled by Gabriel, that it now feels somewhat porous, like an old bone. Night’s chilly, slow-moving molecules are simply decanted into the rooms, unimpeded. Our house has breathed in mice and wolf spiders, a squirrel, a chipmunk, and once, a honeybee colony. The hive was in the chimney, and first the odd bee appeared in the upper floors of the house, and then suddenly great numbers of them all around the laundry. One of the basement lights near the washer and dryer has a dangling pull string, which during the time of the bees became covered in them, and turning the light on or off required considerable care. While we worked out what to do with them (we had hoped, before we knew where the hive was, that its position was accessible, and the hive could be extracted whole by a beekeeper, but it was not the case), I got sort of used to their presence and learned to gently brush them off the clothes in the laundry pile in order to do a wash. Their docility turned something in me, and I found myself grieving when the exterminator drove up in his truck.

  I climb into bed and watch R, who is sleeping so deeply, almost professionally; it’s obvious he’ll rumble this way straight to dawn. He is possibly the wisest person I know and his persistent unconsciousness is proof. It’s not so much that he is leaving me to it, as I have claimed this patrol as though I am guardian of it. There is a single-mindedness at work in me that excludes everything but the dark, even sex. We collide in daylight, when the rising or falling sun warms the room sideways, when there is a kind of peace, and not here in night’s wreckage. Here, I am trying to hold myself together against what Byrd calls the loneliness of a futile routine; he writes that cold does queer things. So does night. So does desire.

  I desired R the first time I saw him, when I was nineteen and walking with friends in the arts district of Toronto. He was wearing combat boots when he slid by on a skateboard. I don’t suppose I extrapolated from there two cats, four pregnancies, two children, and a silver minivan with a crystal heart dangling from the rearview, because it was actually another month or two before we would formally meet and another few years before we would date, another three after that before we would marry; in the meantime we were busy with other people. When we did finally go out, it was just a puff, and again we were taken up by others, but we had the same friends and went to the same parties. When it finally hit, the steady gaze that is R, we kissed by a subway entrance on a busy street and I felt not only like I’d arrived home but that I had found that ingredient vital for love, which can be best described, I think, as conspiracy. And so we conspired.

  Now many years later I’ve wondered if at times the night has made me remote, impossible. He experiences my crying jags and outbursts philosophically, empathetically—he can make me laugh in the middle of them or soften the atmosphere by taking my hands; he’s the only person to try to hold me when I rage—he is after all caught in the same vortex. His night is broken, too, if not to the same extent. It’s an ancient language, and he’s the only other one who knows it. He tries to lure me back from the edges of the void where I spend too much of my time dabbling, or alternatively he joins me. The trouble is, more often than not, he is asleep, and I’m unaccompanied. He has said, Wake me, just nudge me, and I’ll get up, but I have both resented his ability to sleep through many of the sounds and wanted to protect him from the things I’m seeing. I have wanted, too, the ownership of the odyssey. The night is mine, the dark sea is mine, the boat is mine, the Sirens, monsters, and riches—mine. The space around me can sometimes turn the presence of others into nothingness and I worry that, for periods anyway, I become estranged from people I love, and even from myself.

  It had been going on for hours one afternoon, Gabriel’s laugh-shriek. He had been jumping and flailing his arms and opening his mouth so wide we had a clear view to the back of his throat. Many of the shrieking episodes have merged into new creatures with seams and connecting points, but it’s possible that this was the day that R and I drove him around in the car, aiming for somewhere along the ocean—a usually reliable remedy when we have needed quiet—and it didn’t work, so that we were then trapped with the sound, belted in and caged until we could get home. I don’t remember how we tried to distract him, what songs we sang, toys we dangled, food we offered. No doubt, we also tried to ignore the sound, going about straightening the house, folding laundry, preparing meals. I do remember that at one point S was upstairs in his room with the door shut, still young enough to nap and enjoying one of his fabulously deep ones, the kind he was so expert in, well schooled as he is in the art of tuning out his brother. So one of us was comatose and the rest were performing the enslavements to which we’d grown accustomed. Except that this day was different; it was more taut. We put Gabriel in his room and closed the door, isolating him as if he weren’t isolated enough already. Somehow, the force of his shrieking and jumping were barely contained by his room, as if the walls, floor, and ceiling didn’t exist. Even downstairs on the main floor, it was as if we were pressed up against him, our sore ears close to his face.

  R, who is normally so calm and slow to anger, bounded up the stairs and into Gabriel’s room, yelling for him to STOP PLEASE STOP. Gabriel continued and R yelled more, and as I stood in the hall, I could hear the disintegration in R’s voice. He was begging. Finally, as Gabriel didn’t let up, R understood the futility and joined me in the hall, exhaustedly shutting the door behind him. Gabriel usually trumps everyone else in line for my compassion, but not this time. I thought, See what you’ve turned your father into? Even as I knew that none of this has ever been Gabriel’s choice. And I thought, too, about why we were so alone, why no one seemed to be helping us, though much of the answer to that lies in the way we have kept the dark sea, the boat, and the Sirens to ourselves.

  There was another incident around that time, except in this one the person being pulled apart was me, and it was R who was calm, like someone who knew just what to do. Perhaps this is how we manage, take turns at being dismantled, and it was my turn to wonder how a noise like that could possibly emanate from a child and for such a sustained period. It was apparent that Gabriel needed saving and neither R nor I knew how. He was in his room, screaming and laugh-shrieking his brains out, and I stood in the hall, unable to help him in any way and unable to move. Parenthood delivers with it an assumption of strength, knowing what to do, how to rescue. How not to hate him. How to reach in and find a boy, and yet the knowledge wasn’t there. Just paralysis, guilt, a breaking heart.

  R took my hands and led me into the bedroom, our bedroo
m, and shut the door. He kept his eyes locked on mine as he guided me to the bed, and I thought, Now? Are you kidding me? And then the next thought, as I stared back at him—Why not? If we could not rescue Gabriel, we could find each other, and I wanted to be found, made real. Back in university, when we were just beginning, R received his master’s in a branch of mechanical engineering called finite element analysis. I understand virtually nothing about it, but the name sticks and I’ll use it here for my purpose, to describe what needs to be done when there are whiteout conditions. Sometimes the edges of the void can be felt for, grasped, and it is then that the void ceases to exist or nearly so. Bring in Camus again, What I touch, what resists me, that is what I understand.

  provisions

  His desire for something like a toy or a drink was the very thing we used to lure him out from behind his walls. Gabriel learned to use the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS), which was developed for people with speech and language problems. Through workshops, I learned how to use the program so I could implement it at home, and then his staff at school learned as well. He was taught to assemble pictures of the things he wanted on plastic strips, forming I-want statements. I want pretzels, I want a drink, I want cheese, I want a show. A child using the method learns to make requests first by using a single picture, then constructing sentences. One level involves commenting: I see a blue car; I hear music; I feel angry.

  The upper levels involve a nuance of desire, however, that remains elusive to Gabriel—he doesn’t feel the need, maybe, to communicate he saw a blue car rather than a red one—and he’s unable, so far, to comment (or perhaps, in the way of astute politicians, prefers not to). But he is a master of I-want, able to extend unexpected significance to a plastic strip with pictures. In the process of learning the method, he was made to seek out his target, the person who would answer his desire, and present them with the strip. Now he’ll travel through the house to deliver his message, sometimes throwing the strip to the ground in a huff if we’re occupied. I was in the basement when I heard something thwack on the concrete floor beside me: I want a sandwich. I looked up to see him standing at the top of the stairs, expectant and shifting from foot to foot. Like any kid, he was too lazy to bother coming down. There are moments like these when I wonder about the minuteness of communicating, the ability of the tiniest movement or expression to convey, and how he must want to be funny or sardonic or ironic. I picked up the plastic strip and suddenly realised what else he intended. Gabe! I started to laugh, I get it—you yelled!

  But in the simplicity of the I-want strip: the longing for embellishment. It’s easy, seeing how expressive he is with his face and gestures, to imagine how deeply he must want to do what everyone else does: pull the loose threads in a sentence and unravel limitless asides, create the unspoken territories outside of our words. We say blue and yellow, and green hovers there unsaid but as palpable.

  There was S, too, expanding his creative influence through provocations and mutterings: the day he stood at the top of the stairs, with his eyes shut tight, yelling I can’t see! I can’t see!, or deadpanning to his father, I have some bad news. I’m going to annoy you for the rest of the day. He invented a fromagus, a creature whose provenance we’ve never been able to determine but of which Gabriel appears to be an example (You are being a fromagus!), and called a bit of white paper he saw on the ground lightning. One day, watching me help Gabriel in the bathroom, he informed me, I can’t stand the meaning of pooh anymore. On another, he woke up to find that I had dismantled the blanket fort he had constructed the day before.

  What did you learn here? I heard him say to himself quietly.

  Always guard your fort.

  IMPORTANT THINGS, AS LISTED BY S AT AGE SIX:

  musics (sic)

  monsters

  tape

  wires

  bathrooms

  dart

  spiked ball

  dart (again)

  food

  The Ice

  I go downstairs without turning the lights on, past Gabriel’s room where he’s now snoring, and down the stairs. I turn on my computer and watch its weirdly secret glow as it boots, the way it seems in the dark like an opening door. But my tendency is to drift aimlessly to the news headlines, the tragedies that are lit and magnified, even glossy. So after several minutes, I shut the thing off again and the blank screen returns with an audible click. Mostly when I can’t sleep, I read Alone. I want to find the fort, locate Byrd in the void. Pin us both down.

  To open his book is to find the hut palpably configured; it seems like it’s always been there. I imagine a box of smells in what is reportedly—if far from the edges of the continent and animal life—an aroma-less place, the scent of the hut’s fresh beams, the data machines and the alcohol used to keep their ink flowing, soup, seal meat, and the smell of Byrd himself. I imagine the repeated expansion and shrinking of the hut—as if it’s breathing—as it warms and cools, how skin can be easily sliced by the proliferating sharp edges, how the sky lights have turned from bright indigo to black to ice-covered, how the Antarctic licks noisily at the hut like it’s trying to remove a tick. How wanting hangs tangibly in the air, and perhaps it’s the wanting that energizes the scene for me, because that, really, is the point of intersection between me in 2008 and the man in the hut in 1934. What he wants is to survive, and so do I.

  The hut, and my observation of it, is a landmark, as if I can draw lines in the dark and note the coordinates; I have something to lead me back. The enclosed feel of the room with the contrast of the Ice bears some resemblance, if only in a symbolic way, to my childhood forts in the woods behind the Nova Scotia house where I grew up, forts that were highly imaginary in nature. As in, there were downed trees and logs that served as perimeters, and the rest I imagined, rather than built. I played at being a spy, or made mud pies with garnish of pine needles, or used the forts as staging areas for my explorations. The magic of my favourite one was that I could still see the house from it, and yet I was firmly in the woods. I tended not to bring friends there, and my sisters were much older, so these were mostly solitary haunts. I understand Byrd’s decision to stay alone in the hut, to have complete ownership and feel utterly enclosed. His original idea was that the hut would contain three men, but he eventually decided that he would be the sole occupant. He understands the nature of this place, the night and the void, and that only he has been invited to this particular spot, these exact coordinates. (It is true that, whatever the justifications we may use in selecting our cohorts, we are often compelled to bring some people along with us and leave others firmly behind; we say the knowledge is for us, with the us being so narrowly defined it can become a unit of one. I know this because I, too, have fallen victim to this way of thinking, erecting a fence around my piece of the night, even as I say I want companions.) I can see him there, hunched at his machines or stirring his tea or preparing to climb his ladder, as if I could just about touch the fur of his coat, pet the animal that he is becoming. This, too, is a kind of desire, one grown from loneliness now that it is night and we are all laconic.

  Mornings, he writes, are difficult. He does not want to get out of bed. The black is now so pervasive, he runs through a series of questions when he wakes, who he is and why he’s here, in this place, in a sleeping bag, until the sounds of the wind register and the thermograph remind: order, duty, the little world outside his bunk. Ice has begun to creep from the floor and up the walls. After he forces himself into the cold and dresses, he makes tea so hot it scorches. He emerges from his hut to check the day and notes how thinking of a separate day and night has become inane. As if day still existed, and as if night hasn’t sprawled over everything.

  Water is even more essential than words, so intrinsic that it’s easy prey for compulsion when in short supply, and so Byrd is haunted by his need for it. Using a saw, he cuts small blocks of hardened snow from his escape tunnel, and then heats them in a metal bucket on his stove, noting that two g
allons of snow converts to only two quarts of water. It is an irony of his situation that he is nowhere near accessible water and yet dwells in its simulacrum. Aside from his unceasing need, it is the stove that imposes, being the source, he believes, of headache-inducing fumes (later, he will believe the source of the fumes is his generator). But the stove doesn’t attract his malice, it’s the hapless bucket that does. It is a greedy open mouth in perpetual need of feeding; in lieu of a human being, a presence who wants something from him.

  He is out on the surface of the Ice, hovering in an unmarked space he hadn’t intended. The problem of the Barrier is that there are no barriers, and without them, the self opens, expands, and keeps going. Nothing to bump against, nothing to stop the self from sailing straight away from the planet into the limitless universe. He had been out for one of his strolls, that was all. The two-foot bamboo sticks he’d wedged in the ground and strung with line so that he could lead himself back to his hut through a storm have vanished. The extra sticks he’d brought with him to jam along his extended route are also gone. Twirling himself around in all directions gives him nothing but the same unmarked view. His world has vanished; he has vanished. The Barrier owns him.