by Maria Mutch
He will write that these are days of great beauty, shadowless days, and he will write that this damnable evenness is getting to me.
He will go to the calendar that is hanging on his wall, and because it is the end of the month, he’ll be about to turn over June like turning a page in a book: finished. Except that what he’ll do is measure the outside dimensions of the calendar instead. As if, in his cube of ice within ice, separated by more ice and a rift in his soul from any other human being, his consolation is this precise assessment of time in its little blocks. Imagine the delicate measuring, like a tailor or a coffin fitter, the focused attention: twelve inches along one side and then fourteen along another. He measures with no reward other than to know the scale. He notices that in June he crossed off some days but left the others blank.
After this, his spirit lightens. He gains strength to crank his phonograph and create a food cache near his bunk in the event that he weakens enough that he can’t get up.
He freezes an ear in his sleeping bag, and watches the ice climb the walls to within three feet of the ceiling. He sends a message to Little America, approving plans for their base-laying journey.
He reads The House of Exile.
The problem of getting into bed, feeling R’s warmth and the blankets, is that the pleasure of it is painful, the idea of having to relinquish it again. Every sound is heightened, and I circle inside my vigilance, anticipate the click of Gabriel’s light switch and his thump again onto the floor. There are times that I’ve heard a shriek or moan and staggered down the hall only to find him silent and sleeping and realise that I’ve dreamed the sound. Night is an amplifier, enlarging every vibration—the furnace turning off and on, hot air rushing in the vents, the metallic pings and ticks as the ducts adjust—as if each is worth being heard.
When Byrd talks about the sounds of the Barrier as it splits and shifts, it is as though he means the Barrier is trying to speak. The voice is like thunder but says nothing he can use. Words and sounds in his hut have been placed in containers—books, the phonograph, his radio receiver—but the containers are muffling bell jars, specimen cases. He receives language through a scrim and the result is mostly a diffusion of meaning. He is losing language.
R and I are so accustomed to Gabriel’s sounds that when we hear something we can’t identify, we’re inclined to let it go uninvestigated, New England being a stormy place with no shortage of rumbling. One autumn night a wind gust came through, according to the National Weather Service, at 50 mph and took hold of a backyard poplar, waltzing it straight to the ground and finding the only clear vector between a fence, the garage, a large spruce, and some cedars. What we heard around 2 a.m. was something like a pot being scrubbed, a hundred matches struck, and furniture moved. It was easy, since it appeared to have nothing to do with the boys, to let its mystery go—it seemed best to stay snug rather than uncover something unpleasant. It didn’t sound, for instance, like an entire tree lying down on the lawn. We forgot about it and slid back into sleep.
The next morning, R was munching his cereal when he suddenly remembered the sound and, looking out a back window, saw the problem. We put on our coats and went to stand by the base of the tree that was wrenched open, exposing blond plains of smooth wood. Like Gabriel watching his shadow, we couldn’t seem to get over it. I tried to remember what the sound had been like, the sheer layers of rushing and collapsing, but I could barely hold onto it. Standing among the branches was entrancing, and I could see the rents in the ground, the craters that revealed an earlier violence where now there was only quiet. I thought about the force required to take a tree that had staggered for fifty years toward the sky and simply make it: stop.
But it wasn’t the first time. There had been a winter storm when the boys were smaller, one that had snuffed out the lights and heat, and I’d bathed the boys by candlelight. I remember that I had a fever and when I looked out the bathroom window through the sheet of rain, I actually thought for just a moment that the small tree lying down across the snow wasn’t really there. The black leafless branches were eerie and like an undeciphered script. When I turned away from the window and looked at Gabriel sitting in the tub and at the candles flickering, I wanted to explain the power outage to him, describe the invisible. The outside forces. I wondered how to give meaning to his waiting for the lights to come back on, how to tell him what is change and shift and light and dark, and what is waiting, even as I believed that somewhere inside him he already had them figured out. Especially waiting.
Fats Waller said that if you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.
The neighbours walked over to circle the poplar and wonder, and when we explored the cracked trunk, we found a fungus traveling inside it in white plumes. When we thought back to the tree before it fell, we realised it had been giving us signs in the form of dropped branches and a subtly elegant lean, but we all stared at the downed tree with our hands jammed in our pockets, having nothing to offer it but surprise. A tree is just a tree until it’s sideways along the ground.
A boy is just a boy until his words disappear.
The Ice
Byrd has to rest on every other ladder rung when he goes topside for his observations, and eventually he is so weak that he simply approaches the polar night like a trapdoor spider, peeking out from a crack in the lid. A pain in his shoulder that he has been nursing worsens, along with the feeling that he’s drugged. He watches the temperature on the Barrier and in his hut fall and hover. He will only allow himself to run the stove for a short time, resulting in a piece of meat, that sits on his table for five days, refusing to thaw. He vomits milk, reels with exhaustion, and still he fills out form no. 1083.
He writes, This is habit carrying on, not you. You are through.
provisions
Byrd is right: we can be half-dead and still resort to our habits. Sometimes the habit is the only thing that seems real, or reliable. At the very least, it is familiar. Maybe this is the thing that makes Sisyphus go. It is not just the gods that force him, but habit. He is so charged with his repetitions that he becomes the essence of the place that he’s in.
There is a night when my eldest sister is visiting and sleeping in a room across from Gabriel’s, and he has started laughing and shrieking shortly after midnight. He has never been quite as wild as this with a guest in the house and I feel panicked, wanting him to stop. I still want to hide just how bad this gets. The hours surge and rock like boats, his squeals traveling the house in bursts, the night in fragments again as I try to contain him (and in the morning my sister emerges, stunned at what has gone on because experiencing the sounds is different from hearing us mention them, and I say to her, even though this is old hat, Welcome to autism …). The small hours pass and dawn finally comes. At around 7 a.m. I crawl into bed beside R, who hasn’t heard a thing. He wakes and, realizing that I’ve been up all night, wants to know why I didn’t get him up, he would have taken over. But I don’t know how to explain, how to say that Gabriel and the night have affected me, made me different; the molecules are still in my skin. I’m full of nebulas, dying stars, solar winds, and substorms. Night is in me.
Byrd is transmitting: Ok here.
OK, OK, OK.
But he is keying into the wild, blindly. Two days before, his gasoline-driven radio generator failed and he dismantled it so that it sprawled in bits across the table. Back when he was learning to fly and he had taken apart his first airplane engine, he had been amazed at how the components, loosened from their former whole, seemed dead. No matter how he aligns the radio generator parts, he cannot make them live. Now he is using the battery-powered unit, with its two handles for cranking, which he finds exhausting. There is a copper switch he can throw one way for transmitting and the other for receiving. His obligation to send his signals, as jumbled as they are, weighs on him, the fact that he is responsible for his men and that not hearing from him could cause them to come for him without proper planning. Days before, on July 5, he se
nt his signals over different frequencies but received only silence. At last, Dyer’s voice sprinkled in, delighting him. Murphy came on and spoke about the journey out to him, how they were weighing the challenges and not to expect them until late in the month. Byrd felt the discomfort that he’d given himself away, that despite knowing how treacherous the journey would be, they were going to do it anyway, because of him; and he reveled in the hope that he might get out of this place alive.
As morning gets closer, I start to feel more urgent. Maybe this is the most difficult time because night is almost over and I’ll have to officially get up and start the day. I’m not as sanguine as Camus claims Sisyphus to be. The begin-again is the most difficult part, anticipating it, feeling the opportunities for sleep that haven’t even arrived already slip away. This is the hour that I have sat and wept, not for Gabriel’s words (communication, he’s shown me, is broad) or fear of the future or even parental guilt but for the simple lack of sleep. Not every night has to be tackled in fragments, hour by hour, but most of them do, so that insomnolence has made it hard to grasp the one thing that energizes me regardless of day or night, which is meaning. I want the damn meaning, and it’s become difficult to see. Without a clear head, there is very little that makes sense. Like Cherry-Garrard, I’ve begun to think that what I would give for a good night’s sleep is five years of my life. But I don’t mean it.
The Ice
Byrd has his first bath in a week and seeing that his skin hangs, estimates he’s lost perhaps fifty-five pounds in total since he came to Antarctica. It is Monday, July 9, and he signals into the night, trying to snag a response from his men, but nothing comes. Tuesday, again: nothing. He undoes the radio receiver and transmitter, unwinds them into their meaningless parts trying to find a problem he can amend; then reassembles the parts into beings that will reveal in the silence the presence of other people. And still: nothing.
His lust for light is so strong that, damning the fumes, he lights his pressure lantern and bathes in what he imagines is coming from the sun. The sun, which is stalling out of sight before swinging back for the south now that the Winter Solstice has occurred.
He combs the night for sounds, but nothing again until Dyer’s voice is there in the hut, a ghost-voice, and he keys back frantic:
Heard you. Have had radio trouble. Come in.
And as he keys the words, he says them aloud, even though there is no one who can hear him.
Back at Little America, the continuity of the polar night has led to entropy. The men’s repeated bacchanals have forced Poulter to hide the liquor supply, moving it from one location to another, then another, before he surreptitiously empties the bottles into the Barrier. The men respond by draining the alcohol from compasses and pouring mouthwash through a homemade still. In their off-hours, they push steel rods into the snow, trying to divine the location of the missing liquor.
This is how the dark and the cold have played them. Some of them no longer believe in an edifying Antarctic mission. They accuse Byrd of various black arts: abandonments, ego trips, self-serving agendas. And when Poulter and Murphy argue for an early venture to retrieve Byrd, some argue against. They don’t know the extent to which Byrd has disintegrated because the information has been kept from them; what they do know is that his original orders, given when he left for his sojourn, stated that no one should come for him until light was on the Barrier. It would seem to them that the man needing rescue should indicate clearly that he needs it. Byrd will later write that the caves at Little America seethed with dissension. He didn’t know the half of it.
The arguments carry on until a vote is taken. After Poulter and Murphy narrowly win their case, a night watchman sees something out on the ice. A figure, dressed in furs, is discovered facedown in the snow. It would seem that Byrd has stumbled in from the Barrier and collapsed. Stumbled in from 123 miles away, having navigated blindly from one speck on the ice to another speck, in the dark, through walls of wind and crystals. And yet, in night’s logic, it appears that he is there and so some of the men descend on the figure, haul him inside, all the while believing it’s Byrd until they try to revive him and discover it’s one of their own who has been playing a joke.
Just joking.
Byrd doesn’t know any of this. I wonder if anyone ever tells him how a terrible joke was played, one in which he got his wish. Somehow, he has desired hard enough that another Byrd is born, a doppelganger that navigates the void and is lifted from the ice by numerous hands, finds freedom.
So I have wondered what he means, what is signified by Gabriel, even as I know the answer is really the question. The labels attributed to him, and the insistence of other people on keeping him in step with his designations, is far beyond the point, and yet I’ve rummaged the labels for a lost document, a sacred text with the thought that maybe the answer is inside what we say that he is. Even as I know better.
When Gabriel was about four years old, one of his eyes turned in, a strabismus due to farsightedness, so his ophthalmologist wrote a prescription for glasses. A burr was in my stomach as I wondered how we would convince the one who was inconvincible to place something on his face and keep it there. R and I joked darkly about staples. We fretted that if he rejected the glasses his ability to interact and to learn would be further compromised. We knew enough to pick a moment to introduce them when he was standing in front of the television, watching his favourite episode of Bear in the Big Blue House, so that once the glasses were perched on his nose, Bear was suddenly clear to him. It was as smooth as that, and he wore them well for a few years until his farsightedness corrected itself and the glasses were no longer needed.
But it was picking up the glasses from the optical store in the first place that was a seminal moment in the meaning of labels. R and Gabriel and I went together to the store, which was tightly serene. Layers of glass and mirrors on desks where customers leaned in to be fitted, a quiet carpet, and wood pillars. R and Gabriel didn’t go in but stayed on the sidewalk, Gabriel walking ahead of his father. Back and forth. I sat inside, on one of the chairs along the wall as I waited to pick up our order, and there was a woman seated nearby. Various customers were choosing frames or waiting to pay. The woman watched the window where Gabriel and R went by in one direction and then turned and went in the other. The woman announced, There’s a little boy with Down syndrome. Just that. Her friend was standing nearby and widened her eyes to signal that the mother was sitting right there, but the woman who spoke didn’t understand. The room was crackling and I seemed nearly invisible. There’s a little boy with Down syndrome. She had said so, and it meant something. Was it like seeing a rare bird and letting the other birders know—or was it more like a car crash? A boy! With Down syndrome! He had entered, been objectified as small talk, and I wondered if she would mention him that night at dinner. I felt like I was watching people undress, like I was spying on a world I was no longer privy to. I had had my suspicions that maybe these small pronouncements were what happened when I wasn’t in earshot; as the parent, I had been subject to different kinds of remarks. (If you want to burn the britches of a mother of a child with special needs, tell her that God only gives special children to special people. Yes, it’s true. In the most secret parts of the secret society, this is viewed as probably the most condescending aphorism there is, even as it’s made poster-sized or written on a coffee mug. We’ll nod and smile when someone inflicts it, and then some of us will go home to smash things.) I often wondered at what point people realised his difference, because in those days, when he was still a preschooler, the characteristics were occasionally less clear, he could shape shift. His autism and his darkness were, and are, invisible to the passing gaze. But she had seen, and I wanted to know the secret. There is a boy with Down syndrome, and then what?
I was irritated by the woman who knew my identity and was trying to give me away. I wanted to be, if only for a moment, not his mother, not his other, but one of the people inside the shop (because I wasn’
t one of them, not really, and this was, after all, a shop of seeing). But it would seem that the ones in the shop were not in a better position than I, just a different one. As this woman was snagged on Gabriel’s difference, so was I fascinated by hers.
If there was more, it wasn’t said; the woman who had spoken looked uneasily at me and knew.
Four years later, a woman who was a social worker employed by Gabriel’s school came to the house with a brimming satchel of papers and books. Gabriel was mysterious enough and delayed enough that she came to fill out an assessment about his development, which would be filed with the school district in order that he would continue to receive appropriate services. In other words, he had to be categorized. Assessments like these are a periodic occurrence in the realm of special needs, which is nothing if not well documented, and services often depend on them. Where the child falls in relation to every other child is probed and charted and filed. Gabriel confounds the usual tests (which might require the child with special needs to give verbal responses or to complete puzzles and games), and even the ingenious ones developed for children exactly like him. He was an uncharted coastline, and so she had to rely on me to draw him out on paper.
We sat at the kitchen table and she filled the surface with forms and white binders that she rummaged through for various slips of paper, the metal rings snapping and unsnapping like tiny bear traps. She used a black pen to make a few notes, the satchel sagging like a giant toad on the floor by her feet. It appeared to be gulping not just reams of paper but some toys, too. The toys in these circumstances are never just toys, but tests. She took a long hit of the coffee I’d made for her while she read a form.
