by Maria Mutch
The Ice
The crackling voice in the receiver tells Byrd that the journey has begun. Poulter has devised a searchlight using scrap metal; the men, five of them in a tractor, are coming as soon as the weather clears. Excitement gives way to anxiety. Byrd vomits his hot milk and cereal as the temperature on the Barrier is falling. He climbs the ladder to look north, knowing no one could be there. Even as he feels hopeless, he can feel them coming over the Barrier, as deliberate as the sun but without the elegance, staggering forward at one to two miles per hour. And the Barrier, acquiescing, allows them through a few feet at a time.
Or so he believes, hauling himself up his ladder with a tin of gasoline to set on fire. But the horizon is empty, and the lights he sometimes sees are just the stars. He returns to his hut, haunts it like a frantic, fluttering, expiring moth.
He sends inarticulate messages, sometimes shooting them blindly into the night. Cranking the transmitter exhausts him, and he wants to smash the radio. The temperature touches down at minus 80° F, and the bottle of boric acid that he uses to rinse his eyes shatters. When he goes topside, the Barrier snatches his breath and temporarily blinds him. His sleeping bag contains a pillow of ice.
The first attempt doesn’t take. The Barrier wins, and the men return to Little America. Poulter reduces his team to three, including himself, and starts off again a few days later. Byrd, sifting the instrument data, decides that a hurricane is coming. But with his hut’s disarray, the frozen vomit and the tumbled books, it appears that he is the storm. Eventually there is word that the men have been confounded on the crevasses, were unable to navigate around them, attempt number two is aborted, and they have turned back once again.
Murphy’s voice is in the hut, asking him—directly—if he’s ill, if he’s hurt.
Byrd’s code: Nothing to worry about, only please don’t ask me to crank anymore.
provisions
Rescue, if it comes at all, can act like a cat ducking its head at the door of a storm. It is fallible and sometimes inconstant and relies on the one being rescued. The process is sometimes passive, and rescue is received the same way as force but interacts with its object through something like a conversation, or perhaps what is more akin to a balancing, like osmosis. It settles in one place and then moves, sometimes slowly, to another; gathers you in—if you say so—and moves you with it.
On the last morning of the year, Gabriel is finally asleep and I’ve gotten up for the day. A coffee mug is in my hand, and the cat is curled on my lap as I sit at my computer. A rescue is about to happen, except too late. At 6:30 a.m., the world is still dim and a man dies, perhaps a hundred yards from my house, on a road that runs perpendicular to mine.
What alerts me is the number of cars that are suddenly streaming by the house, and I become curious enough to put on my coat and head down the street to the corner. A police officer is conducting the oncoming traffic with a black-gloved hand, diverting it down my street and away from the lone maroon car and the white tarp with a body underneath. The body is just a shape, an abstraction, but among the debris where police officers are marking with small flags is a man’s black boot. Not far away, a wallet and some teeth.
The maroon car is on the other side of the road and unoccupied. Police cars and emergency vehicles are skewed in various directions, and it’s easy to imagine the urgency when they arrived, the sirens and lights, the sudden braking. An urgency that somehow I managed not to hear. Only a few hours after the accident, a blizzard will come causing a tractor-trailer to jackknife and countless cars to merge with trees along the roadside, but at 6:30 a.m. there is no sign of snow and not a trace of it left from the blizzard two weeks before. Rain between then and now has washed all of it away. The white sheet on the body seems heavy, like a lid, like it contains an ultimate quiet. The cold, too, the impending ice and snow, and the stopped ambulance render another heaviness, a struck string coming to rest and another just beginning to vibrate.
The mind tries to work out what death means and how it happens. The evidence is all around, but the moment of the collision has vanished, leaving the whole thing improbable. The impact has been tucked into the day already, scuttled away, and the scene is just that: a scene. I try to assemble what happened with the bits lying about, but there are only a few threads leading back to that moment when a portal opened and someone, shattering, stepped through. The man, whom I will learn later was thirty-one, is, in the figurative sense at least, long gone.
The road where the body lies runs straight for ages, passes by fields that in summer are full of dahlias, corn, and blueberries, an evangelical church that looks like an auto body shop, a store that sells plants and guns, and another where you can buy figurines of wizards. It’s not a road where there are many pedestrians, and so I assume at first that the body was the maroon car’s driver, having flown through the windshield. In fact, the driver has been taken from the scene already, and the body belongs to a man who was crossing the road. (When spring comes, a wooden cross, painted purple, will appear close to the spot where the man was hit, and I will see a truck parked to the side and a woman kneeling, fixing a tangle of Mylar balloons to the cross.) The police officers catalogue, and a tow truck hauls the maroon car away, and the ambulance and fire vehicles eventually pull out slowly, one by one. The road recovers seamlessly, and within a couple of hours there is no trace that anything unusual has happened, no evidence that a man gestured toward Death without knowing it and that Death had been paying attention. It seems to happen so easily, so casually. There is Byrd in the Antarctic with an almost impossible rescue inching toward him, and the fact that he’s been poisoned by carbon monoxide for four months and is still managing to keep alive, and then there’s this, a man simply crossing the street and flying apart as he does. And there is rescue hovering all around, efficient and orderly and, like a bad guest, arriving much too late.
The thing is it feels like a visitation, like it means something in spite of elements that appear random or casual or out of the blue, and what is left is a reminder, a prod that suggests a choice is to be made between what is dead and what is living. You are not, after all, the man under the tarp. The white sheet is not yours. Not yet. You get to turn away from the curb, in the wind, clutching your coat lapels together, and walk past the cars that are turning. You get to head back to the house where the family and the cat and the cup of coffee are waiting.
So rescue comes. Sometimes it’s there all along and you have been oblivious, too absorbed in the conundrums to notice it standing at the curb, tapping its foot. Sometimes it’s just that you haven’t needed rescue at all. You can climb from the dark space, clutching what is inevitable and unbelievable, all on your own.
I can hear Gabriel stirring inside his room, his numerous sounds, his clicks and ticks and sighs and hums, his fingers along the skin of the door, along the other side of what separates us. I remember when night was different and not the one of broken sleep and parenting, but the one when I was young and carousing with R or with friends; night then meant a different kind of discordance, and a kind of freedom, one specific to the city. I remember seeing the streets being bathed by sanitation trucks and phantoms of steam from the storm sewers. The buses full of drunks and violinists that played in the underground tunnels when we went scurrying through. On the street corners, there were pimps with pins for eyes, and farther along, the brown humps of bodies sleeping on concrete or absorbing the hot, black breath of the subway, and there always seemed to be someone hollering to no one in particular in the acidic light. Night is another land entirely, full of suicides, heart attacks, and fevers.
Also evening primrose and jasmine blooming beneath the stars. I don’t repudiate night, any version of it, or disregard what is clearly its elegance and promise, its sheer size. Sometimes I can merge with the dark and float in it, not unconscious but keenly aware of it. When I had my first miscarriage, I remember the way that opposing forces seemed to come together, two streams feeding into one: I am so
alive and death is in me. It was the beginning of this story, the start of being born. I didn’t understand the night then; now I do.
I gather my robe around me and open his door. He is sitting on the floor with his legs out in front of him, and I sit down beside him. The air is cool, but it’s not so bad. I smile at him, stroke his hair, and he’s calm and watching me peacefully. There: his blue, impossible eyes, his person. I don’t often encounter people who think they are equal with him. I’ve even seen other people with developmental delays, no doubt defaulting to what they’re used to receiving, condescend to him. He is, as poet Donald Hall wrote of old people, permanently other. He’s so permanently other that his otherness obliterates the observer’s scary self-knowledge that if any of us lives long enough, we will take on characteristics that in some form or another resemble his. We will all become cautious when walking, we will need help with spoons and bath soaps and toilets and buttons, we will no longer be certain that a pen is called a pen. We will not always look at other people as if we know them. We will not always know. The membrane between him and the rest of the world is only a fallacy, a remnant of a dislocation that never happened. He has always been like everyone else, and we are utterly like him. Perhaps the sameness and seamlessness of Being are unpalatable to some, nevertheless it is the truth. Do you belong to a secret society?
The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.
He folds his hands around my face, cups it, and I come into view. He sees me, but I no longer need him to see me. In a way, what happens to Byrd is a related circumstance; his sense of himself disintegrates without the defining gaze of anyone but his face in the mirror. He discovers that unequivocally we need other people; I’m just not sure we need the recognition of specific individuals. That Gabriel sees me, and I don’t need him to say mama to prove it, is certainly affirming, but when he is eclipsed, or I am, by the long shadow of his episodes, it seems to me that love is still love. The themes are too large to be altered by the small us, by the weird transience of words and autism and knowing and unknowing. We exist and that’s all. At this moment, he is quiet and focused, and he sees me as if he’s always seen me, as if I never disappear; I kiss his face. Like the creatures discovered in the deepest parts of the ocean, we construct a light of our own.
provisions
On Gabriel’s thirteenth birthday, we’re in one of those long, underground spaces that seem hooked to jazz, descending another steep set of stairs and guiding his hands along the rails. The rabbit hole, the tumbling, the dark rooted smell. The spaces that contain the unpredictable and shifting and it’s all right. The support pillars are brick that’s been painted a glossy black, the floor is a red carpet with a crosshatch of amber lines. The ceiling is low, a velvet curtain behind the bandstand hangs from brass rings, and light glints off the trumpets and saxes on their stands, the silver on the drum set. It’s the same band that’s led by the emergency-room doctor. The bass player hooks his arm around the neck of the bass so the whole thing leans against him while he thumbs through a playbook. The sax player gives Gabriel five before going to the stage. The drummer’s itching to get going. They swarm casually, exchange slight nods, a few words, and they start up. “The Sidewinder,” by Lee Morgan, and “Moanin’,” by Bobby Timmons, “Water from an Ancient Well,” by Abdullah Ibrahim, “Cape Verdean Blues,” by Horace Silver, various Monk. A woman gets up from the audience to sing a few tunes with them: “My Funny Valentine,” “All of Me.”
When the break comes, they play “Happy Birthday” and everybody in the place sings while the waitress brings out a cake for Gabriel, chocolate with vanilla frosting and yellow swirls. In the surrounding dark, the lit cake comes to him, and in the candle’s light there are the faces of a dozen of the people who love him best, including four who have worked with him, pressed him onward, stood by him, and love him so well they want to be there for this. He bounces in his seat and makes one of his short, happy shrieks. R has to blow out the candle for him, and we all wish on his behalf. Pannonica asking for the three wishes; what would they be? Whatever provisions we think he needs, he likely doesn’t. He holds his secrets close, and his smile in the candlelight is enormous as he gets high fives and pats on the back. What he wants now is the cake, and the music again. “Epistrophy,” “Ruby, My Dear,” “Body and Soul.” These small delicious things.
Rescue comes like this, one song at a time.
Last autumn, R and I took the boys to a large treeless field by the ocean that attracts kite flyers. On windy, sunny days, the sky is full of nylon planes, rainbows, and sharks, with their strings pinned to the ground, and the ground is full of people looking up. On the day we went, there was a noisy wind, the straining kites, and the water sparkling so hard you couldn’t look at it for long. One thing we’ve gotten good at is finding the sun when it hovers just so. R and S launched a butterfly kite that looked like stained glass, and Gabriel and I kicked a soccer ball back and forth. Maybe because of the way the light was and how the wind filled my ears, I had one of those moments where time slows, just hangs there and then expands; we could have been there forever, I don’t know. The giant butterfly grew smaller as it flew and S let out more string. Gabriel was grinning and laughing as he loped to the ball and kicked it. He was another beam of light in a moment that was like a diamond. He smiled and smiled and waited for me to return the ball, and he was unbelievably beautiful.
The Ice
The Barrier is unable, in the end, to make Byrd’s hut a coffin because three men arrive from the north and save him. But you knew that. Rescue needs an accomplice: the one rescued asks, finally, for just the thing he thought he didn’t need. Rescue comes to Byrd because, in code, behind the gestures of concern for his men, he pleads for it. People and light. Both, though they are known to take their sweet time, are inexorable when called upon.
He realises when the men make their third attempt that he can assist them by making light signals from the hut that will be visible for many miles and guide the men in. He has a large kite that he’s been waiting to use, one with a paper tail he can set alight so a line of fire will fly high up on the end of the string. He gathers a dozen tins of gasoline and some magnesium flares with the kite and regards the lot. He considers it his last stand.
He wakes with a start, knowing that Poulter, Demas, and Waite are coming for him (of course, one of them is named Waite). Shortly after 7:30 a.m., he hauls his kite topside, soaks the tail with gasoline, and stands the kite up in the snow before lighting the tail. He isn’t able to run, so he jerks the kite and it flies up to sit in the night sky, the tail blazing for what he estimates is five minutes. He will later write, It was my first creative act in a long time. He lights two cans of gasoline. He’s exhausted and sits in the snow. The night sky is quiet, there’s no response from the men, and he estimates he has about four hours before he has to do it all again.
Later afternoon, and Murphy’s voice is telling him that Poulter is then ninety-three miles south of Little America and will reach him in approximately eight hours. Byrd collects his thoughts, which are racing. It was like knowing in advance that you would be reborn again, without the intermediate obliteration of death.
At 5:00 p.m., he sets off a gasoline can.
He tries to read Java Head and can’t concentrate.
At 6:00 p.m., he sees something on the horizon, a light beam that rises and falls, scoring the dark, before it goes out.
He sends up another kite with a fiery tail and watches it until it dies. Then sits in the snow for half an hour, just sits. Imagine him there, folded on the snow, a little like a child, like Gabriel; the waiting. How time must close for him, a black hole with a remembered trace of searching light. How he must want to say, if only he could form the words, I am here.
I am still here.
He lights a gasoline can, a flare, another can. Nothing in response. He crawls inside his hut and briefly hears Murphy before he lets his earphones fall away. He sleeps for an hour and a half, and when he wakes,
decides that he needs stimulants. The instructions on the bottle of strychnine say to mix one teaspoon with a glass of water; he puts three teaspoons in a cup of strong tea and drinks it down.
Another flare, which rages and dies, and then Byrd can see, sweeping over the night, the beam of Poulter’s searchlight. And more than that, a second, stronger beam that he figures is a headlight.
He is close to collapse, and rescue is coming for him, but in the logic of his situation, it occurs to him that what he should do is prepare supper for the men. He heats canned soup on his stove, and returns topside to see the beam, stronger this time. Sitting in the snow, he can hear, though they are still an hour away, the horn of the tractor beeping. When I read this, I want to stop, stop everything. The Barrier has a new noise. I can almost hear the beepbeep, and the pounding of the heart that hears it, too.
No one comes for us in a tractor, sweeping a beam of light along the horizon to find our location; no one rumbles in. There are no sirens or voices carried on the Barrier to mark the silence and make it go. But rescue does come, in a way, in the form of two words.
Stop struggling. At some point, which is now lost, those are the words that arrive. Sharp and unattached to anything. A transmission, suspended in static.
The moment that I understood that Gabriel’s desire to push over the lamp was something he was doing not to get a reaction out of us but because the impulse was overwhelming him was the moment that I received a lesson in relinquishing. Except that I didn’t get it, not fully. It was one lesson of many. It’s a daily practice to meet the oncoming force by calmly stepping aside. It makes me think of S’s tantrum and the way his brain suddenly overrode his rage, allowing him to go limp on the floor so he could do the one necessary thing, which was breathe.
