Know the Night Read online

  provisions

  Not long after I took Gabriel to hear jazz for the first time, I took him to hear an eighteen-piece swing band. They usually played in a black box theatre, but that night the theatre had been taken over by a party, so a little neighbouring café swallowed the band whole. Eighteen pieces filled the space, and the audience had to fit itself in and around the band. Gabriel and I ended up seated next to the barisax player, a guy who, when Gabriel threw his juice cup, handed it back to me, smiling.

  I knew that when the band eventually started to play, the sound would be concussive and charged, and it’s exactly that fullness that holds Gabriel in its embrace. But the band wasn’t playing yet; they were waiting for the stand-up bass player who hadn’t arrived.

  Gabriel was left then with the encumbrance of waiting. He could not tolerate the way time is malleable and unpredictable. He fell apart because he wanted to hear the music and couldn’t understand how to make it begin and possess him. He lashed out at me, swiped his hands through the air with a wild look. I caught his hand each time just before impact and moved it to the side, and prayed for the music. Waiting became for both of us a trick, a magical twist in the plot. But he could only be a witness to it, plead wordlessly for his music.

  Weeks later, I learned what had caused the delay. The bass player had put his sheet music on top of his car before driving to the café. He discovered in the café parking lot that he’d gotten there without his music, and when he drove back home to locate it, found it sprawled all over his driveway and lawn. Hundreds of pages of rippling sheet music. I imagined him, staring helplessly at the millions of musical notes stippling the ground at his feet, and many miles away the same tempest was swirling in Gabriel.

  * American audiences were entertained once a week during Byrd’s 1933–35 expedition by a program arranged by CBS correspondent Charles Murphy, who was stationed at Little America. The program was said to be responsible for keeping the Antarctic alive in the public imagination at a time when interest in expeditions was waning; people flocked to the CBS studios after dinner in their tuxedos and evening gowns to listen to twenty-odd minutes of live entertainment and seven of foolishness (Lisle Rose, Explorer). A singing group composed of men on the expedition was called the Knights of the Grey Underwear.

  1 a.m.

  desire

  PROVISIONS FOR BYRD’S HUT:

  Meat 360 lbs.

  Vegetables 792 ″

  Beverages 167 ″

  Soups 73 ″

  Fresh canned fruit 176 ″

  Dried fruit 90 ″

  Deserts [sic] 56 75 ″

  Tapioca

  Jello [sic]

  Mince Meat

  Staples & Cereals

  Tool kit

  Trail Equipment

  Mending kit

  Books—100:

  Philosophy

  Science

  Biography

  Novels

  Medical

  Meteorological Instruments:

  Double registering anemometer

  Inside and Outside thermometer

  Recording barograph

  2 minimum & maximum thermometers

  Smoke bombs

  The conduit between Gabriel and my waking is always sound. His clapping, his voice, or the disembodied flutterings and bangings. At one point in a film about Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, by Werner Herzog, biologists sprawl on the Ice and listen to the voices of the seals that are swimming underneath. As I lie in bed listening on some nights, Gabriel’s moans and calls have a similar haunting, sustained quality, as if the universe is humming through him. As if he’s expressing all of his desires at one time and the sounds have blended into a note that seems uncomplicated by meaning except to the initiated listener. The note is so big I can walk around inside it. I wait for him to take a breath. After he does, the sound continues again, hauling all of his desires with it. Effortless and complete.

  But this time the sound is different, having stops and starts and cadence. It’s like hearing subway passengers speak through the noise of wheels and doors. It seems as though it’s coming from his room, except that it can’t be. There is R’s breath against my ear, and beyond that, what sounds exactly like talking. An electronic toy malfunctioning, maybe, and the recognition that I’m squinting in the dark in order to hear better. Night is pulling a trick. I sit up with my heart racing: What is that? Do you hear it? What the hell is that?

  R shifts from his sleep and raises his head, strains to hear. He says it as if it’s reasonable. It’s Gabriel … He’s talking.

  So he is, talking in his sleep. Not speech exactly, but speech if intention counts; the roll and rhythm of sentences. Here is what we’ve been waiting for, the elusive thing we’ve been hoping would eventually find us. Desire can be potent enough to make the object of the wish substantial, and the mind, desperate to organize what it hears, will break a code whether or not the code exists.

  Maybe he speaks for just a few seconds, but in the night, everything is pliable, especially time. Beyond the warp of furled bedcovers and the slim light of the hall, he seems to go on for minutes. We stare into the dark, waiting. I feel a momentary panic, too, at the way meaning seems to be shooting away from us, scattering. Somehow, a portal has swung wide during sleep, if only briefly, and yet we still can’t see into it and learn what he means. Here are the words and we can’t understand them. We can’t understand him.

  And then it’s over, the torrent stops. The night, the dark, the cool air reassemble. Another sound comes and it’s Gabriel laughing, a deep long chuckle. The curtains on the windows glow faintly as my eyes are adjusting. I look at R’s form in the bed and can tell that he’s smiling. I think, he says, that he’s telling a joke.

  Perhaps if he had never spoken in the first place, the desire might be different, less acute. He was a child who spoke and became, somehow, one who didn’t. Which said that reliable processes were actually tenuous, that his ordinary need to convey a thought could be obviated by something unseen. He likely remembers little about speaking and signing, but whether or not he does, he’s certainly aware that he isn’t able to do what everyone around him can. And whether or not he remembers, we do.

  I gave him a shower recently and was toweling him off when he tried to tell me something. While looking into my eyes, he made a sound with two distinct syllables, ones it was clear he was trying to shape. A small occurrence to the outsider, but to people familiar with him any sound has significance, coming as it does with the opportunity to interpret. (As Margaret Atwood wrote, using stoplights as an example, … if we didn’t interpret, we’d be dead.) The mind wants so badly to understand, to get it, that it will chase meaning relentlessly, pursue it straight through the dark. The listener can’t help but stop and wait for more and adjust to a slight flurry: did he just speak? what did he say? moreover, what does he want? In those moments, I think that if I knew what he wanted, I would give it—anything. But the sounds, as soon as they were made, disintegrate.

  The mind guts the sound archives but comes up with nothing but a guess; the code falls to the floor.

  The second-to-last time that he spoke, he was six years old. Bye. He said it when we were visiting his grandparents and I was at the door putting on my coat to go out. He had been standing watching me with our relatives, who were arranged in the living room like actors in a tableau. (I picture, even before it happened, everyone frozen in place.) When a child speaks who hasn’t said a word in more than a year, then we are not ourselves. I buttoned my coat as I stood in the foyer and waved to him, Bye, Gabe—see you in a bit! He stepped forward, locking eyes with me, and memory slows this frame-by-frame so that I’m ready for it when it comes, except that I wasn’t. He said, Bye, and waved, casually, with his right hand as if he did this all the time. So simple: Bye, a step, a wave. I think it’s fair to say that, as hyperbolic as I want to be about it, the effect was atomic: a mushroom cloud and obliterating silence. None of us spoke. A version
of Gabriel—the one who speaks—had suddenly made an appearance, and there was paralysis all around because we’d been through this before—the wondering what to do because we didn’t want to frighten away this particular Gabriel. I knelt down so he could see that I was looking at him, listening, waiting for more. But nothing more came. There was no stopping then the tears that I wanted to hold back. I kissed him, stood up, and adjusted my coat. Bye, Gabe, I said. See you in a while.

  The very last time that he spoke, R and I were not there to hear it. He was in kindergarten. He was two years older than his classmates, who were five-year-olds, as he’d been kept back, against R’s and my wishes, by his preschool teachers (special education often seems to be a push and pull between family desire and institutional theory). The end of the day was gaining momentum, and maybe something about this caught his attention. The teacher was packing up, and as she did, said, All done. I have wondered how those words crystallized in him, what synaptic leap occurred in his brain that made the idea all done form as pure sound in his mouth one last time. It seems like he picked his moment. So he repeated loudly and with the clarity of the previous visitations, All done! I like to imagine what has been described to me, the twenty-five heads turning toward him, the engulfing silence. His classmates had never heard him speak and were under the impression that he never had. Jaws went slack in one enormous, synchronized hesitation before the children let out a roar, began jumping and hollering that Gabriel had spoken. It became the talk of the school day. One of the staff, who was also one of his most passionate teachers, called to tell me, Oh, you won’t believe this but …

  But I would. I would believe it, knowing full well that his affliction is really that he’s so goddamn succinct. So we waited, as with the other times, hoping that the All done! was not a finale but the indication of more, and more.

  In his baby pictures he’s usually laughing. There are so many images of the very round face with toothless grin—he didn’t get his first tooth until he was two—that he appears to have been a jovial baby. But what the photos really attest to is my desire to catch and hold his laughter, which was fleeting. Low muscle tone caused his smiles—electric, stunning—to erupt from a flat expression and then vanish, leaving him deadpan again, the changes quick enough to make those of us around him wonder if the smile had really happened.

  There is a photo of him that I took when he was too young to smile and anyway seemed to be shrinking from the environment in which he’d found himself; he was just five days old and staying in the hospital’s special care nursery. A nurse named Maggie (the spitfire kind, the tough-love kind, the kind you would want if you were mortally wounded) holds him in a plastic basin as she washes him. A feeding tube trails from his nose and his face, with tightly closed eyes, appears to collapse in her supporting hand; white-blond hair in a tuft shoots from his scalp. It’s plain that the trading of the dim, watery world for the overly lit one has been harrowing, that he is being engulfed in a sensory assault so profound that there’s nothing to be done but give in to it. Time has gotten it all wrong, he is geriatric, and my eldest sister has already pointed out that he resembles our grandfather. You can sense, then, looking at his image—and this is not so easy to do without feeling that a curtain has been parted and the viewing is illicit—that while frailty pervades him, he is a sorcerer, gathering silence with his pink fingertips, drawing it in like a tide.

  Several years ago when one of my sisters married, after the ceremony and the partying and the sun went down, she had us all traipse with lanterns through a cemetery that was close to four hundred years old. As we wound around the markers, remarking on the names and wondering about the people, we looked at the numerous stones that were broken, lopsided, or sinking into the earth. Some had been smoothed blank by age, suggesting the persistence of the void no one wanted to mention. Inside the disappearance of Gabriel’s words, then, the erasure of us.

  When he was still very little, when he still said Mama and Papa, an older man, who had meant to be commiserating even as he was minimizing, had said to R and me that at least Gabriel knew us, and I thought, Of course, he knows us! His intelligence was, and still is, much greater and more nuanced than his small vocabulary would allow. But with the exodus of his words, the burden of proof would lay itself more and more in R’s and my hands. We would find ourselves having to defend his intelligence, what amounts to character and essence and being, to argue the obvious: that a mind is much more than words. Still, there is something in the ability to say, to name, and more than that, there is something in hearing a child’s voice, in bearing witness to the grasping and shaping of language and desires, in detecting the wildly small but gleaming planets of early words and being taken up in their orbits.

  Thelonious Monk said, You know what’s the loudest noise in the world, man? The loudest noise in the world is silence. And so here we are, in the night, in the unstopping resonance of a loss.

  When I check on S, he’s asleep in his pyjamas but lying on top of his covers because he’s developed a new, exquisitely felt fear that if he pulls his quilt back, he’ll find a bed of snakes. At age seven, he’s old enough to know that anything can be turned into a Pandora’s Box if approached just so, and he’s been experimenting heartily, to the point that now the bed is full of snakes. Nevertheless, on top of it, he’s in a deep sleep.

  He was born when Gabriel was four and a half years old. An easy, robust pregnancy, followed by an easy, robust baby. A labour through the night, and his birth right at dawn, on his due date, on a winter day with a pink and orange sunrise that we all exclaimed over before turning back to the baby that R still swears had his eyes wide open. The nurses brought a heaped tray of pancakes and waffles, and the pediatrician pronounced him Marvellous! He had one perfectly shaped elf ear, his left, that would stay that way for two weeks before transforming into the usual kind, and nobody said a thing about that.

  He was vibrant, and though he would become a boy so loquacious I would suffer the irony of wanting him to be quiet, he would not say one word—not one—for his first two years. It was as though, arriving in our family, he took a look around and concluded that this is what you do: baffle everyone in near proximity with your glittering, merry silence. There was a day when I was in the kitchen with the two of them, S the toddler who said nothing and his six-year-old brother who also said nothing. They sat side by side, blinking their round innocence at me, and it was as if we were having a committee meeting, a consultation. One of you, I said, is going to have to say something.

  And I don’t care which one it is.

  As jolly as S was as a baby, around the age of two, and when the words were just starting to come in a trickle before the sudden rush of fully formed and intricate sentences (one of his first utterances was the seven-word, I don’t know where the ball is), he had a brief period of tantrums. He entered the kitchen one time like a siren, full-volume, scoring the air. He’d been playing with toys and was, figuratively speaking, cracked wide open because his father was eating dinner instead of playing with him. The idea of it was engulfing him (here I picture an octopus clamped hard over a giant scallop), he was twisting in a tourniquet of toddler rage so profound, it began to cut him off. I was seated at the kitchen table and he staggered, bawling, toward it, like someone in a play who’s just been shot, so that all I could see momentarily, before the tabletop obscured him, was the crest of his head covered in delicate, almost translucent strawberry waves. The sound emanating from him seemed ancient, fermented, something dug up. His roar was communicative—I got the picture, neatly, that he was wild with perceived neglect. Until that is, the rage choked him off as he was gasping, his eyes wide, and the siren was abruptly cut short. He passed out, just like that, on the ceramic tile, went limp and quiet.

  The next moments were a strange mix of knowing that he was fine, that his brain had just saved him by shutting him down, and watching myself frantically nudging him, wondering if this would require CPR and an ambulance. Seconds ticked by
while he stayed on his back, unconscious. Finally, he blinked awake, took a moment to peer at us hovering over him, and got to his feet. We clucked and checked and pressed him to make sure he was okay, half thinking of course he is and half thinking o jesus. He took a few steps, taking in his surroundings, and began again to remember it all. He picked up just about exactly where he’d left off, tuned up his fury, and continued a long wail as he staggered again around the house.

  The absence of speech, it seems, begets rage. On the other side is the power of a word to make real. One of S’s first words was mama. When I initially heard it, I was standing in the kitchen. He was upstairs, calling me. He and I were the only ones home, and he must have been about two and a half, meaning that I’d been a mother for close to seven years. He came down the stairs, looking for me, and called out Mama? and Mama? again. No doubt, he’d said it before, but the combination of the word with being searched out made me realise that I’d never experienced this particular sensation, being found by one of my children.

  I wanted to drag it out and hear the word again, so I stayed perfectly silent in the thrill of hiding; the Mama sounded so potent. There was nothing quotidian about it; it was all bigness and importance. I think I’d been waiting for that moment, anticipating a kind of being-ness that I’d been trying to conjure since the first attempts to get pregnant (because procreative desire has, attached to its utility, a B side of mysticism; and so there it is, a waiting to be transformed). Each time he called for me, I became present, and more fragile, until I thought he might be worried, and so I called out, I’m in here! I heard his footsteps down the hall and he appeared in the kitchen, Oh dare you are, Mama! and, not for the first time, I burst into tears.