Know the Night (10 page)

Mornings, he writes, are difficult. He does not want to get out of bed. The black is now so pervasive, he runs through a series of questions when he wakes, who he is and why he’s here, in this place, in a sleeping bag, until the sounds of the wind register and the thermograph remind: order, duty, the little world outside his bunk. Ice has begun to creep from the floor and up the walls. After he forces himself into the cold and dresses, he makes tea so hot it scorches. He emerges from his hut to check the day and notes how thinking of a separate day and night has become inane. As if day still existed, and as if night hasn’t sprawled over everything.

Water is even more essential than words, so intrinsic that it’s easy prey for compulsion when in short supply, and so Byrd is haunted by his need for it. Using a saw, he cuts small blocks of hardened snow from his escape tunnel, and then heats them in a metal bucket on his stove, noting that two gallons of snow converts to only two quarts of water. It is an irony of his situation that he is nowhere near accessible water and yet dwells in its simulacrum. Aside from his unceasing need, it is the stove that imposes, being the source, he believes, of headache-inducing fumes (later, he will believe the source of the fumes is his generator). But the stove doesn’t attract his malice, it’s the hapless bucket that does. It is a greedy open mouth in perpetual need of feeding; in lieu of a human being, a presence who wants something from him.

He is out on the surface of the Ice, hovering in an unmarked space he hadn’t intended. The problem of the Barrier is that there are no barriers, and without them, the self opens, expands, and keeps going. Nothing to bump against, nothing to stop the self from sailing straight away from the planet into the limitless universe. He had been out for one of his strolls, that was all. The two-foot bamboo sticks he’d wedged in the ground and strung with line so that he could lead himself back to his hut through a storm have vanished. The extra sticks he’d brought with him to jam along his extended route are also gone. Twirling himself around in all directions gives him nothing but the same unmarked view. His world has vanished; he has vanished. The Barrier owns him.

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.