Know the Night

by Maria Mutch

  Earlier that night as he gazed at the aurora, he thought how beautiful the serpentine curtain looked. He watched and recorded the way it slid over the stars, obscuring them, and then disappeared, leaving the stars in their place again. Yet even an aurora doesn’t prevent the mind from grabbing for the world of people, and so he was imagining that he was home in Boston, strolling Beacon Hill, 9 Brimmer Street somewhere in the background, his wife and his children. His study. He often imagines he’s elsewhere and sometimes gives ironic designations to the corners of his hut: one is Malibu and another is Palm Beach. Pins in the map from the known world, an ownership that keeps the ice from claiming everything.

  Except that now the aurora is gone, his sticks are gone, his way back is gone.

  Panic expands in Byrd as he searches in all directions with the beam of his flashlight. Using the stars to mark his way, he walks in one direction and then back, and then out in another.

  When Robert Rauschenberg created his white paintings and wrote about them to art dealer Betty Parsons, he referred to the plastic fullness of nothing. I think of this when I picture Byrd swinging around for his markers. Somewhere in the plastic nothing, there is a portal that is his hut, the hut where earlier he’s been playing Canfield and losing, and listening to Strauss on his Victrola.

  And then there it is: his bamboo sticks and line, the giant needles and thread, appear in his beam and lead him back.

  All well.

  He puts sugar in his soup and ladles cooked cornmeal onto his table thinking his plate is there. The pervasiveness of the cold has eaten snips from his nose and cheeks, the soles of his boots never thaw, and the surface of a glass of water that he sets down shuts with ice within moments. Headaches plague him, and wedged between days of serenity are waves of pain that command his body. His lungs are sore, and going topside sets him gasping. His enemy, he says, is subtle.

  As much as he is racked with pain, he is also racked with desire. Here, there is no one to touch him, and no voices, except for the crackling ones from Little America during the radio schedule. He doesn’t even laugh out loud because there is no one to share the joke. He longs for voices in another room, certain smells, the feel of rain, temptation itself. He even misses being insulted.

  Back on his first night alone when he discovers that his alarm clock and cookbook are missing, Byrd suddenly shouts, Great God! and is startled by his own voice, the way that his solitariness is underlined. The way that communication, if anything, implies other people, and the way that a lack of it suggests their disappearance.

  In the biography of Byrd by Rose, I find a photograph that intrigues me because it shows Byrd in his hut. It looks like a self-portrait, but the attribution says it was possibly taken later by one of his men as a reenactment. I stare at the scene, at the man and the ordinary objects that attempt to replicate some other place entirely, the place he had wanted originally to escape. He sits at a table, with a silver fork touched to the edge of his china plate. All around are the things he thought he would need, the ones that began their significance in his lists. In the absence of people to talk to at dinner, he reads to himself as he eats, and so in the image, a book lies open on his lap. More books can be seen piled under the table, almost as though they are holding it up. His hair is longish, combed straight back and bushed out about the neck as he grimly regards his food. The items around him, stacked up on shelves or hanging from nails, are evidence of the human will that has been able to contrive digging a hole in the Antarctic and bringing icons of the known world to fill it. On the table, there is an open package of Salada tea, a silver pitcher, a lantern, a teacup, small tins, and papers; a shelf above holds more tins and jars, and papers are pinned to the wall; hanging behind him is a pair of scissors and a hacksaw. Outside the frame of the picture, what you can’t see is the dangerous blank his belongings are meant to mollify. Even amid the isolation he deliberately sought, with his objects as symbols of his lost world, he tries to carry on as if he isn’t truly alone.

  It’s the middle of May and the voice of John Dyer at Little America comes through the radio receiver like cracked pepper, repeating Byrd’s call letters,

  KFY … KFY … Can you hear me?

  He tells Byrd the odd bit of news from the world, the one of people and countries and stock market crashes, but the significance cannot travel the distance. The words do not console Byrd or alleviate his solitariness and instead seem almost as meaningless and blurred as they might to a Martian. Though he can hear their voices over the radiotelephone, he has to communicate back to them by telegraph, which presents its own set of obstacles. The transmitter, sitting in his food tunnel near a ventilating pipe that leads to the surface of the ice, has to be powered by a generator, which in turn has to be warmed beside his stove before he can pour fuel into it and haul it back to the tunnel. In order to start the generator, he has to fit a cord around a flywheel and then yank on it to spin the engine, lawn mower–style, then he heads back to where the telegraph sits on his table to confront the lines of Morse code that he barely understands. If he knows what is going to be discussed, he plans out what he wants to say, writing the letters in vertical columns and then marking down the corresponding dots and dashes; he does this knowing that as soon as Dyer or Murphy or Waite says something unexpected, he won’t be able to keep up. Communicating, then, is a burden; it is difficult to say what he means, difficult to find the drive to do so. What he understands now is the creep of ice in his hut and changing the sheet on the barograph. He longs for the sight of trees, the sound of a foghorn. The temperature falls to -65° F, then -72° F, and the ink of the thermograph finally freezes despite being mixed with glycerin. The Barrier stops sending its messages.

  He’s digging in his Escape Tunnel when the anemometer cups start rattling. Wind on the Barrier has increased, so much so that it travels the ventilator pipe and snuffs the red candle that had been lighting his work. He goes topside to make his observations, and the wind blows out the fire in his stove. A blizzard is working itself up, so he makes a second trip onto the Barrier to check the wind direction. But the ravenous whiteout gulps his vision, his hearing, his reason. He pulls up on his trapdoor, but it doesn’t budge. As he tears at it, his mind hurtles through white space and his body is battered. Flailing about, he finds the top of his ventilator pipe. He looks down into it and sees the warmth and definition within that was so recently his.

  He remembers a shovel lying somewhere around him in the drift and begins a search. Holding onto the pipe or the edge of his door, he lies flat on the Barrier and kicks out with his legs until finally he hits the shovel. He wedges the long end into the door handle and heaves up until the door springs open.

  The storm snarls overhead, and he is depleted but safe in the small dark space of his hut. There is no one to speak to, so he simply thinks it: How wonderful, how perfectly wonderful.

  2 a.m.

  soul

  PROVISIONS FOR BYRD:

  BEVERAGES

  Tea 1 case

  Cocoa—prepared 1 case

  Sanka coffee 1 case

  Ovaltine 4 14-oz cans

  Torex 1 case

  Bovril 12 8-oz jars

  Malted Milk 2 cases—chocolate and plain

  SPECIALS AND CANDY

  Cheese 2 Limburger, 2 Roquefort,

  2 Swiss, 2 Old English,

  6 American

  Swedish Bread–Rye Crisp 5 cases

  Black Psylla Seed 5 cans

  Predigested glucose 6 cans

  Grapefruit juice 1 case

  Lemon in sugar 1 case

  Hard candy

  Peanuts 6 cans

  Popcorn 12 small cans

  Gum 3 boxes

  Marshmallows ½ box

  Saltines 10 cans

  Chocolates 3 boxes

  Bar Chocolate, Nestles

  Mixed nuts and pretzels

  White psylla 1 can

  I have shovels and battering rams of my own. There are three ways for me to reac
h the safety and light of the symbolic fort. The first is running, as in the practice of going for a run, which I do in the mornings. And which lends itself to metaphor too quickly perhaps—that I am running from something or to it—when in reality the motivation seems to have something to do with present time, with feeling my body and its limits. I run sometimes on a forested trail that curves along a bay. The trail’s surface changes from sand to wood mulch to leaves, and in some places, the soil has been pounded hard by feet and horse hooves so tree roots appear to pull up the earth in fistfuls. The ground requires attention and it becomes a kind of study, how to land my feet without twisting an ankle. On a recent run, my mind was pulled between assessing the path ahead and thinking over words and desire—mostly desire—entwining them, pulling them apart, when my foot caught a tree root, hooked it. It was like being thrown to the ground by a giant. I was aware suddenly of torn muscles and scorched skin; I was aware of being slammed into myself, tossed in there with the monsters and gravity and night.

  There was a quiet, blinking solace while I sat on the ground and examined the soil mashed into my hands, my right hip, the spray up my legs. The ground beneath me seemed to be smoothing over its attempt to devour me, while the ache on the right side of my body had already begun. I got to my feet, took a few tentative steps, as though testing the ground, whether it would grab me again, and finished my run.

  The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s, and the body shrinks from annihilation, wrote Camus.

  I run sometimes at night, because it’s another way of knowing the dark. I’ve run with groups of people after sundown, but I’ve also run alone, using a small headlamp to light the way on the bicycle path where there are no streetlamps and the surrounding area is all woods and wetlands. The night has its controversies. Running alone in the dark is something I’m told I’m not supposed to do, but that instruction feels negating to me, as though the only ones entitled to the night are men. It would seem to me that it is the killers and bears that should stay at home. But the returning message is that in the night, you get what you deserve. Step out alone and into it and, well. You’re really on your own then.

  When Byrd set out for his hut, he had the right idea. The Barrier still had some light, so he could settle in and wait for the dark to gather around him, which is another thing entirely than marching headlong into the black. I tested this theory unintentionally when I went for a run as the sun was going down. As it grew dark, my headlamp lit the path directly in front of me but to the sides were amorphous margins full of possible creatures, too many to count. At first, it wasn’t so bad. The problem arose after I’d gone three miles to a point where the path intersects civilization, where there’s a road and a streetlamp. I stood under the light for a moment, bathed in contrast, feeling relieved until I turned and saw that the trail to get back appeared to be a black cave. I would have to run straight into it for the same three miles to get back to my car, which I did, as fast as I could. The terror seemed to be fueled more by the suggestive area between what the headlamp illuminated and what it did not than by the black itself. The possibilities added a layer of terror to the terror, so that by the time I reached my car, I was practically incandescent with fear.

  I went back on another night, because this seemed like something I needed to dismantle, or get inside of, or defy. But this time, when the sun dipped down and things turned black, instead of turning on my headlamp and igniting those peripheral ghosts, I let my eyes adjust. I ran as if I were invisible and limitless and one with everything I’m afraid of.

  The second route home is jazz, because it collects Gabriel and brings him along, effortlessly. Because it can speak to both night and desire.

  When jazz musicians would stop by the cathouse (so named because, aside from the jazz cats who came to call, over a hundred felines dwelled there), jazz lover Pannonica de Koenigswarter would ask them if they had three wishes what they would be, and she wrote down their answers. Sonny Rollins said, To be able to do what I want to do on the horn, Mary Lou Williams said, To love God more, John Coltrane wanted three times the sexual power I have now, Anita O’Day To be active until I die. You know! Up and at ’em like!, and Stan Getz wanted justice, truth, and beauty. Bill Evans just wanted a wishing ring so the other two wishes would be unnecessary.

  Gabriel and I have been out to hear jazz in various little spots in Rhode Island and Connecticut about two dozen times. Now we’re at a lounge in Newport having a listen. I see a guy at the bar glowering with the band’s dissonance, with one beer too many. He came into the bar in search of nothing but a drink, and so he soon rolls off his stool like he’s on a listing boat, shoves a folded bill across the bar, and gives a broad, disgruntled wave in the direction of the band. He’s had enough. If it’s about anything, jazz is the body, distracting or obliterating itself with sound. Love like a seizure. Desire and its accoutrements, its gowns and dresses, half-shredded on the floor. And it’s not for him.

  Gabriel, however, is finding his way. Maybe you really have to want something in order to comprehend the sound. He leans right into it, into the night, and shuts his eyes. Candles glow from little caves high up in the wall, and overlooking the room is a pop art depiction of a near-naked woman glancing over her shoulder. The waitress slides by with her hard braids and hips, and the musicians’ eyes flicker when she passes, and passes again. The drummer pounds out something loaded and visceral, a rhythm of sacrificial rites and sex and breathing.

  Some of the visiting musicians stop by the table and press Gabriel’s hands like they are rubbing a buddha. He continues to rock and sway, following wherever the players want to go. He is let in on the grown universe, how adult desire is rendered. The sounds are relaxed, then turn tumultuous. The saxophonist snatches rage from the air and squeals it out: a grown man’s supplication or a baby’s terrible wail. Jazz is about the body, or having to take out the garbage; the sex that was had, or wasn’t, the guy washing the streets with his grief, oranges tumbling from a grocery sack, or the edge of a chemical high; a flirt, or a flirt with suicide, or the way cigarette butts line up against the curb.

  The third way riffs on the pictorial language of Gabriel’s I-want strips. My impulse is to collect images for a sentence I can’t otherwise say. When I learn that there is an exhibit of polar landscape paintings at a museum in Massachusetts, a couple of hours away, I don’t just want to see it, I have to see it. I have to see the Ice through the eyes and hands of others, see the place in my mind refracted through exterior lenses. Because this isn’t just about the place, but also about the people who have found themselves alone in it.

  When I tell R that I want all of us to go to Peabody for the exhibit, he’s not surprised and he’s always game for a family expedition, so soon enough the four of us are in the museum during February school vacation week. As I stand in a room with some of the polar landscapes, Gabriel is behind me, pretending not to see. He does this sometimes. He’s never appeared to notice an airplane overhead or a kite. He won’t turn and look when we point out a shark in a tank, an African mask, a mummy. Or perhaps he sees so much that he has to protect his autonomy, give every appearance of receding if it means slowing the pace of the newly revealed. So he fades his gaze as if he’s standing in an empty room, and on the walls are pictures of snow, variations of empty. He lingers nearby, and parents and children flow in noisy streams around him. The parents look away, but the children sometimes stop in the din to stare at him, at the way that he is the same as them and yet—they seem to decide—not. I used to think the differences in his facial features and the way he walks and stands were subtle, but time has made them less so. The younger ones hang their mouths open for a few beats and then stagger away. He pretends he can’t see them either. I press my face close to his and say, You’re so beautiful. You’re so utterly beautiful. He makes a clicking sound, which means he’s satisfied—it is, I think, aside from his laughter, my favourite of his myriad sounds—and I turn back to the paintings.

 
; Many of them were created when the edges of the polar regions were first being explored, and most have elements of the fantastic, are renderings based on captains’ descriptions or approximations the painter could only have imagined and put together in the relative comfort of a studio. The repeated motif, painted in light that makes me think of Monet’s Rouen cathedrals, is the crushed boat on vast floes and the survivors left to writhe out their existence under brooding, sometimes violent skies. But I’m not interested in their calamities, the fracturing black boats, and the suffocating closeness of men, and it’s powerful to have the freedom to turn away.

  I walk past images of the aurora, pulses of light held on heavy indigo paint, created long before anyone knew the sun could hurl solar winds at the Earth, make curtains of coloured light hundreds of miles high. There are refracting suns along horizons, haloes and parheli, and ice in shades of turquoise, azure, and a bottle green that stop me, even crimson. Finally, I see it: Icebergs, Davis Strait, 1930, by one of Canada’s Group of Seven painters, Lawren Harris. A depiction of the other end of the world from where Byrd was at more or less the same time; its near—but distinctly different—twin. The icebergs are striated in blues and whites, hold a muscular, totemic quiet. When Harris painted this, having been to the Arctic on a supply ship, he was married but in love with another woman; add to his dilemma the cusp of the Depression, coming war, the human furies then outside this view. The implied roar. I stay in front of it, this silence colliding with the noise of history and of schoolchildren, for a long time. The nights have been broken for so long at this point that I can’t seem to locate the words for how tired I am, how inside myself. How I want to find my way out. I turn and look at Gabriel, his blue eyes with the bergs in them, and he looks straight back.

  Byrd calls flying in the Antarctic flying in a bowl of milk. I read this when I’m in bed, tucked beside my lamp with Exploring with Byrd, about his first expedition to the Ice, in 1928. He’s been flying his plane in what he describes as a porcelain bowl, or this, which stops me: Only a milky, trembling nothingness (and I doubt that he consciously intends a sexual inference, but there it is). Eventually, he sees a mountain, and then a total of fourteen peaks, counts them out knowing that they will fill a blank on maps of Antarctica.