Know the Night Read online

  Gabriel, I say to him after I’ve been lured back to his room by his sounds. Gabriel. He scrunches his eyes at me as he’s shrieking, as if he’s trying to bring me into focus, but I still don’t think he sees me. Not really. He bounces, waving his hands back and forth by his sides, vibrating the wood floor. I imagine the reverberations through each of the rooms, the joists of the house accustomed to the nightly rumbling. Gabriel, and the sound is swallowed by his so that when my lips move, there is nothing but his high-pitched squeal. Gabriel: the name that arrived long before he was born. When I was about six months’ pregnant with him, I had a list of names, most of which I’ve forgotten, that I’d been mulling when the Gabriel arrived. The problem with knowing what his name should be was explaining that to R. Perhaps he didn’t want to challenge me when I seemed so certain, or maybe he’d already figured his chance would come next time, but either way, he acquiesced. When I became pregnant with Gabriel’s little brother, R would be the one to decide his name.

  Anyway, Gabriel: the shifting, volatile one. We are both lost at the moment, and there is nothing to do but retreat. I pull his door shut as I go into the hall, walk through the chilly air back to bed. R is warm, and undisturbed by the commotion; he, too, has decided, somewhere in the black of sleep, there is nothing to be done. I shut my eyes and try to find something like solace and the passage back into unconsciousness.

  Some people count things; I prefer lists, the most mundane kind, the tallies of things left to be done, the groceries and errands, because they are not really mundane. They’re about survival. Not only that, but if the most disconnected ideas (compassion, Walmarts, kumquats) are ordered into a list, there is alignment and a semblance of stability, or a chance at them anyway. I think of the polar explorers. I’m fascinated by the lists of what they took with them (in the 1700s, James Cook’s expedition brought fearnought jackets—imagine having one of those) for living, for hunting, for finding their way—and what they ate. Especially what they ate. Like the lists of Gabriel’s words, the intention says something, though the idea is to gather things rather than lose them.

  I have read over and again Byrd’s lists of provisions, what he stores in the snow tunnels that lead out from his hut. They hold, in their ordinary arrangements of ordinary objects, the secrets of preparation and daily rhythms. They say nothing exactly about the impossible weather conditions and the unpredictability and danger of the Ice, and yet they are only about these things, with superstitions and desires thrown in, and the suggestion that the dangers can be mitigated if only a person has certain stuff in his possession. When I encounter the lists in the right frame of mind, they are transporting. One of my favourites contains, laid against the crystalline blank of the land Byrd inhabits, the incendiary:

  350 candles, 10 boxes of meta tablets, 3 flashlights, and 30 batteries, 425 boxes of matches …

  along with kerosene and gasoline pressure lanterns, fire bombs, and luckily, a Pyrene fire extinguisher. Add also a five-gallon can stuffed with toilet paper, writing paper, decks of cards, oilcloth, pieces of asbestos, and toothpicks.

  The means, Byrd says, of a secure and profound existence.

  I’m not sure the irony is intended. I can imagine him taking stock of what he’s managed to bring with him, illuminated by the suspended flashlight that he says makes his possessions seem bigger. Leaving the house with Gabriel requires similar assessment; it requires lists. And clutching the bag full of diapers, wipes, clothing, juice, snacks, picture symbols, storybooks, the spoon with the fat handle, and the stuffed bear with the green hat, I have felt, for a moment or even two, invincible.

  Robert Scott’s tragic expedition brought ponies, sled dogs, and three motorized sledges. Also reindeer bags, backgammon, and chess. Playing cards, which they rarely used, and books. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, in his firsthand account, The Worst Journey in the World, listed Thackeray, Dickens, Kipling, Browning. Says they should have brought some Ibsen.

  Once they had reached the Ice and began living in their hut, Scott’s men covered their table with a white oilcloth, and on Sundays, they draped one in dark blue. At dinner, they drank lime juice cut with water that sometimes tasted suspiciously of penguin. Out exploring, they came upon Shackleton’s preserved tents from his Nimrod expedition two years before, and within them Rowntree’s cocoa, Bovril, Brand’s extract of beef, sheep’s tongues, cheese, and biscuits—all open to the snow and quite good. Imagine them standing there, the Antarctic sprawl and the suddenness of a manmade structure—everything within it suspended, as if insoluble molecules, essentially unchanged; provisions that someone had collected, after mulling what a body would need in this place, and hauled in, leaving what remained for other explorers stumbling by or for the drift’s consuming appetite. Either way, knowing that someday a blank would come.

  The ponies, said to be somewhat savage, died one by one.

  There is more here in the night than a mesh of silence, shrieks, and spaces where words are supposed to be. Gabriel’s love of music gives us a different kind of to-do list and an actual language. It’s the reason that Louis Armstrong is on his wall. The first time I took him to hear jazz, at the suggestion of a stranger, he was nine years old, and we sat in front of a trio: keyboard, stand-up bass, and drums. He’d heard recorded jazz standards many times by that point when R and I played them on the stereo: Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, and so on to Miles Davis and John Coltrane. But the listening was, in many ways, cursory because the music was in the background, because it was recorded, because none of us was really paying attention.

  Gabriel causes a ripple wherever he goes, and this was no different. We sat at a small café table, perhaps less than fifteen feet from the band, and some of the musicians who were waiting to jam and were seated around us had trumpets and saxophones; one guy had sticks. The keyboard and bass traded solos with the drums, the sound of the trumpets came and went, and something in Gabriel expanded. He shut his eyes tight and started to rock, and it was the first time I’d seen him respond to anything, never mind music, as though it were his. Music, of various kinds, especially kids’ tunes from the Wiggles and Sesame Street, has always gotten him going, but this was like watching an ascent, like watching him understand calculus. He moved through each piece the band played, rolled with it, and the audience could see, too, what was happening in him. They started responding not only to the musicians but also to the way that Gabriel moved and shouted his approval with short, happy shrieks. They hooted and clapped louder when he shouted, they slapped the tabletops.

  That was the first time; there have been many since. The irony of his hearing experience is that his ear canals are tiny and twisted, and that at the age of five, he had temporary hearing loss. The surgeon who discovered its origin revealed that between fluid building up on one side of his eardrum and wax hardening on the other, sound wasn’t well conducted. Later on, his vision was complicated by significant farsightedness, causing one of his eyes to turn inward; perhaps a consequence was a greater reliance on his other senses.

  Whatever the reason, he found one of the things that makes sense of night, and so sometimes when the dark comes, I put him in the car and we drive across bridges strung with lights, and head for a little, nondescript building on a street between a hospital and a police station. Picture him in a Newport jazz lounge where a group of musicians is going to jam.

  The waitress has brought him French fries and when he’s finished eating, he turns his attention to the band. The notable elements are always the same: the waitress, his fries, his spot, his chair, his shoes removed so he can fold up his legs. The musicians know him, know he’ll rock back and forth at certain points, and that he’s been learning to clap. Musicians line the bar, some with saxes and trumpets. The players shuffle, play again, discuss chord changes and solos. Somebody asks the bartender for a shot. People stroll in from the street. The guitarist glances up from making adjustments and greets whoever it is, the musicians decide “Isn’t She
Lovely” or “C Jam Blues,” and Gabriel shuts his eyes tight, rocks back and forth. Commiseration, or surrender. In the coiling of one element with another—the texture of the tenor sax with the mottled floorboards, the luminous trumpet with the rope lights pinned to the wall—the sound is smudged one way, sharpened another. The musicians exert and the lounge speaks back, presses in. The door to the street keeps swinging open and closed, people go in and out, and there is snow and ice at the curb. Someone smells of diesel and wet wool, and somebody else heads for the back where the washroom doors say us and them. And there is the waitress, too: her bare shoulder. A glass of pinot noir appears at the table for me, and the music turns to strands, all sinews and muscle. Gabriel listens with his body, he is in it, and he shuts his eyes again.

  He rocks back and forth in his chair, making a soft, high sound of approval when the sax solo comes. At the break, the guitarist says they’ll play “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” and the girlfriend of the trumpet player claps and shouts All right, and Gabriel knows he’s in for something.

  The thing about mercy is that you have to call it down with a certain élan. The original “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” was recorded in 1966 by saxist Cannonball Adderley. It’s a live recording and as the first chords are being played, Adderley speaks on top of them, expounding on the concept of adversity—because if you’re going to plead your case, you might mention the thing that got you there—to a crowd that calls back, whistling and hollering when he pauses.

  We don’t know exactly how to handle it when it comes up … sometimes we don’t know just what to do when adversity takes over. He sounds like a preacher, and the crowd is drunk and happy and not at all unsure what to do. They holler some more, clap, and stomp their feet. In the version that’s happening in the Newport lounge, the audience is doing the very same thing and Gabriel is right there with them.

  The experience of jazz, its immediacy when it’s played live, gives him quiescence. In the lounge, and in spite of the rocking, he acquires a kind of stillness, or being, or communion. Recorded jazz, played at home on a stereo, will induce this quality for a time. He’ll sit cross-legged on the bed, twirl a small stuffed animal between his fingers, and listen; he’ll begin to sway. But sometimes the effect can be ephemeral and fickle, so that you never know how long you have before he stirs again and makes his need to explore a room equal with his need to deconstruct it. The thing of disappearing words and bouncing in the night and pervasive developmental delay is that Gabriel’s desire to make himself known, and to know himself, catches the flints in his physical environment, the ordinary objects that to him have disturbed, or flashed, or winked. In this mode, he sweeps clear tabletops and desks, shoves to the floor clattering spoons and unbreakable cups, a magazine that was splayed open, or a newspaper that sheds countless fluttering parts. And once, a new computer that had just been pulled from its box.

  His production of chaos is an exploration of the random and yet, right in front of him is also the order that he’s just rendered: the polished tabletop. Like Camus’ Sisyphus, he has a moment of consciousness and surveys where he is. At this point, Gabriel sometimes smiles; he’s just turned a world in his hands. He’ll shift back and forth on his feet, savouring the way he’s extended himself through his fingertips. I know, or I think I know, why he does this, but his tempests often pulse into the surrounding audience as waves of insecurity and doubt, and so R and I will still ask of him, Why do you do this, Gabriel? Why?

  On the kitchen floor, then, the remnants of breakfast, the triangles of toast, the casual arrangement of jam along the chair seat, the printed pages R or I had tried to read in a quiet moment. And then this from Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, in the paperback edition I’ve had since university: What I touch, what resists me—that is what I understand.

  The urge to touch is notorious for winning out. I had taken Gabriel and S to a grocery store, something I almost never do if I can avoid it. The huge vacant aisles and freezing air. I knew better, that I was outnumbered, and that S, being four and a half years younger than Gabriel and intensely curious, would only add to the tangle of elements. I don’t remember what it was that I needed to get, or thought was so important, but it drew us through the aisle where the balsamic vinegar sat, nine types of it, in darkly glinting bottles. Gabriel had suppressed his urges until he couldn’t suppress them any longer. He pulled on one bottle and then another, and somehow the first landed intact on the floor, but it was the second that fascinated all of us. It collapsed and exploded at the same time: the dead thunk of impact, and the almost musical splintering of glass. I was wearing a skirt, and the vinegar splattered up my legs and looked like blood when it dried. A woman pushing a shopping cart stopped a few feet away. She wanted to tell on us so badly, she was vibrating. And there he was: Sisyphus. Except that I could see that I had taken up his position, that having seen so many disasters like this one, I was also caught in a repetition I couldn’t escape. Days later, when I was sitting with my therapist in her office, she asked, So what did you do?

  While I thought it over, she watched me, waiting. Her office is like a removed world, almost submerged. There’s a throw on the sofa and enough pillows to build a fort. Tissue boxes and books on meditation line her shelves, and there’s a space heater on the floor that faces the client. When she sits, she puts her small feet on a small stool in front of her chair. She has long, slightly unruly hair and the eyes of a lion, and she’s prone to saying things like, The interventions are small, and It’s not one or the other, it’s both. She also possesses a knack for timing; there was the day that I walked in to find her standing, holding an open book; she looked at me over her spectacle rims. Second line in Hamlet, she said. Stand and unfold yourself. She smiled, snapped the book shut.

  So she asked me what I did in the grocery store. There is a line in Camus’ essay that says it, the description of what Sisyphus does when he is standing at the top of the hill and sees his rock roll to the bottom again: He goes back down to the plain. It’s a moment of consciousness. More than that, the place that awaits Sisyphus, rock and all, a place at an even deeper level of the underworld than where he now stands, constitutes an expanse. Between that and his acceptance, there is the vaguest hint of freedom.

  Back at the grocery store, I had taken the boys quietly to the front of the store to let someone know about the mess. But when my therapist asked me what I did, I had to search for the words. I went back down to the plain. Submit, I said. Utterly.

  provisions

  Sometimes I’m overtaken by one of those urges that afflict the tightly strung, the need to order one small piece of my environment, no matter how neglected and hoary. I decide on the space beneath the fridge, the magnetic pole that swallows so much of what Gabriel launches into the air. Removing the front vent, I can see the shroud of dust and cat fur, and the forms of numerous objects. I pull out the clumps: a purple twist-up crayon and a blue one, several chocolate chips, a mauve jellybean, three bite-sized squares of buttered toast, a Lego brick, and a profound assortment of glass shards, from tiny slivers like ice crystals and tears to a hefty chunk in pale green—the exact green that I’ve seen in certain photographs of icebergs. All the evidence of Gabriel’s coming undone, or mine. I can see when I press my cheek to the floor that something else is waiting and I slide my hand in as far as possible to catch the edge and drag it out. I sit there, looking at it, and wipe its surface. It’s a plastic ruler, in clear blue, with the words written in black, shatter resistant.

  The Ice

  On the morning of April 5, Byrd has been alone for eight days. About to make his morning observation, he climbs the ladder to the door that he designed to open both inward and outward and finds himself sealed in. Banging against it or hanging his body weight from the trapdoor’s handle gives him nothing. Topside, the Barrier expands while he is sealed into a room with a Primus stove, a radio receiver, weather instruments, his mukluks, his books. On the surface, katabatic winds thick with ice crystals roar with unbounded f
reedom while he pounds at the trapdoor with a two-by-four in a burning closet of anxiety.

  Let him keep trying to press himself out of what is fast becoming his coffin. The ice desert sprawls above him in its reductive, obscuring simplicity, concealing a world of secrets, from the intricacies of its crystals to the mountains that are tucked unseen beneath the lid of ice. The ice is so imposing that it squashes the form of the Earth into what has been described as a pear shape. Surrounding him is a presence so powerful it transcends any attempts to believe it inanimate; the lid of ice invites a mind, tricks a mind, is a mind.

  After twenty minutes of battering, he cracks the lid enough for him to fit through and see that accumulated ice and drift have been the problem. He decides then to construct a new tunnel, leading out from his food stores, with an emergency escape hatch. He has only just arrived, but it has begun to happen: the first ideas of escape, its theory, are beginning to form, settle in.

  He cuts the silence with his phonograph and the strange, pulled sounds it makes as it begins to wind down. He tries to wash his dishes in the length of a song, makes a game of it, until the notes and words are distorted, tugged like hardening taffy. The cold creeps into the music and is so pervasive it can burrow into the sounds, freezing them from the inside. Silence again, except the clink of his dishes. He clears his throat. Says nothing, however, as there’s no one to listen; he is not even on speaking terms with himself.

  He writes in his diary, My table manners are atrocious.

  He thinks the coming of the polar night is not the spectacular rush some imagine it to be. By mid-April, the dark pushes the sun entirely below the horizon. He goes for a walk on the Barrier and becomes sensitive to the artful arrangement of the aurora and the shine of Venus. There is transformation in the night, a turning point in a grand ritual, and quiet. The potential dangers all around him are as obscured by the silence as the crevasse that opened twenty-two years earlier in 1912 and soundlessly swallowed an explorer (E. S. Ninnis, who had been traveling close behind Douglas Mawson), sledge dogs and all. What emerges for him now is something that he decides is harmony.