Know the Night (11 page)

The storm snarls overhead, and he is depleted but safe in the small dark space of his hut. There is no one to speak to, so he simply thinks it:
How wonderful, how perfectly wonderful
.

PROVISIONS FOR BYRD:

BEVERAGES

SPECIALS AND CANDY

I
have shovels and battering rams of my own. There are three ways for me to reach the safety and light of the symbolic fort. The first is running, as in the practice of going for a run, which I do in the mornings. And which lends itself to metaphor too quickly perhaps—that I am running from something or to it—when in reality the motivation seems to have something to do with present time, with feeling my body and its limits. I run sometimes on a forested trail that curves along a bay. The trail’s surface changes from sand to wood mulch to leaves, and in some places, the soil has been pounded hard by feet and horse hooves so tree roots appear to pull up the earth in fistfuls. The ground requires attention and it becomes a kind of study, how to land my feet without twisting an ankle. On a recent run, my mind was pulled between assessing the path ahead and thinking over words and desire—mostly desire—entwining them, pulling them apart, when my foot caught a tree root, hooked it. It was like being thrown to the ground by a giant. I was aware suddenly of torn muscles and scorched skin; I was aware
of being slammed into myself, tossed in there with the monsters and gravity and night.

There was a quiet, blinking solace while I sat on the ground and examined the soil mashed into my hands, my right hip, the spray up my legs. The ground beneath me seemed to be smoothing over its attempt to devour me, while the ache on the right side of my body had already begun. I got to my feet, took a few tentative steps, as though testing the ground, whether it would grab me again, and finished my run.

The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s, and the body shrinks from annihilation
, wrote Camus.

I run sometimes at night, because it’s another way of knowing the dark. I’ve run with groups of people after sundown, but I’ve also run alone, using a small headlamp to light the way on the bicycle path where there are no streetlamps and the surrounding area is all woods and wetlands. The night has its controversies. Running alone in the dark is something I’m told I’m not supposed to do, but that instruction feels negating to me, as though the only ones entitled to the night are men. It would seem to me that it is the killers and bears that should stay at home. But the returning message is that in the night, you get what you deserve. Step out alone and into it and, well. You’re really on your own then.

When Byrd set out for his hut, he had the right idea. The Barrier still had some light, so he could settle in and wait for the dark to gather around him, which is another thing entirely than marching headlong into the black. I tested this theory unintentionally when I went for a run as the sun was going down. As it grew dark, my headlamp lit the path directly in front of me but to the sides were amorphous margins full of possible creatures, too
many to count. At first, it wasn’t so bad. The problem arose after I’d gone three miles to a point where the path intersects civilization, where there’s a road and a streetlamp. I stood under the light for a moment, bathed in contrast, feeling relieved until I turned and saw that the trail to get back appeared to be a black cave. I would have to run straight into it for the same three miles to get back to my car, which I did, as fast as I could. The terror seemed to be fueled more by the suggestive area between what the headlamp illuminated and what it did not than by the black itself. The possibilities added a layer of terror to the terror, so that by the time I reached my car, I was practically incandescent with fear.

I went back on another night, because this seemed like something I needed to dismantle, or get inside of, or defy. But this time, when the sun dipped down and things turned black, instead of turning on my headlamp and igniting those peripheral ghosts, I let my eyes adjust. I ran as if I were invisible and limitless and one with everything I’m afraid of.

The second route home is jazz, because it collects Gabriel and brings him along, effortlessly. Because it can speak to both night and desire.

When jazz musicians would stop by the cathouse (so named because, aside from the jazz cats who came to call, over a hundred felines dwelled there), jazz lover Pannonica de Koenigswarter would ask them if they had three wishes what they would be, and she wrote down their answers. Sonny Rollins said,
To be able to do what I want to do on the horn
, Mary Lou Williams said,
To love God more
, John Coltrane wanted
three times the sexual power I have now
, Anita
O’Day
To be active until I die. You know! Up and at ’em like!
, and Stan Getz wanted justice, truth, and beauty. Bill Evans just wanted a wishing ring so the other two wishes would be unnecessary.

Gabriel and I have been out to hear jazz in various little spots in Rhode Island and Connecticut about two dozen times. Now we’re at a lounge in Newport having a listen. I see a guy at the bar glowering with the band’s dissonance, with one beer too many. He came into the bar in search of nothing but a drink, and so he soon rolls off his stool like he’s on a listing boat, shoves a folded bill across the bar, and gives a broad, disgruntled wave in the direction of the band. He’s had enough. If it’s about anything, jazz is the body, distracting or obliterating itself with sound. Love like a seizure. Desire and its accoutrements, its gowns and dresses, half-shredded on the floor. And it’s not for him.

Gabriel, however, is finding his way. Maybe you really have to want something in order to comprehend the sound. He leans right into it, into the night, and shuts his eyes. Candles glow from little caves high up in the wall, and overlooking the room is a pop art depiction of a near-naked woman glancing over her shoulder. The waitress slides by with her hard braids and hips, and the musicians’ eyes flicker when she passes, and passes again. The drummer pounds out something loaded and visceral, a rhythm of sacrificial rites and sex and breathing.

Some of the visiting musicians stop by the table and press Gabriel’s hands like they are rubbing a buddha. He continues to rock and sway, following wherever the players want to go. He is let in on the grown universe, how adult desire is rendered. The sounds are relaxed, then turn tumultuous. The saxophonist snatches rage from the air and squeals it out: a grown man’s supplication or a
baby’s terrible wail. Jazz is about the body, or having to take out the garbage; the sex that was had, or wasn’t, the guy washing the streets with his grief, oranges tumbling from a grocery sack, or the edge of a chemical high; a flirt, or a flirt with suicide, or the way cigarette butts line up against the curb.

The third way riffs on the pictorial language of Gabriel’s
I-want
strips. My impulse is to collect images for a sentence I can’t otherwise say. When I learn that there is an exhibit of polar landscape paintings at a museum in Massachusetts, a couple of hours away, I don’t just want to see it, I
have
to see it. I have to see the Ice through the eyes and hands of others, see the place in my mind refracted through exterior lenses. Because this isn’t just about the place, but also about the people who have found themselves alone in it.

When I tell R that I want all of us to go to Peabody for the exhibit, he’s not surprised and he’s always game for a family expedition, so soon enough the four of us are in the museum during February school vacation week. As I stand in a room with some of the polar landscapes, Gabriel is behind me, pretending not to see. He does this sometimes. He’s never appeared to notice an airplane overhead or a kite. He won’t turn and look when we point out a shark in a tank, an African mask, a mummy. Or perhaps he sees so much that he has to protect his autonomy, give every appearance of receding if it means slowing the pace of the newly revealed. So he fades his gaze as if he’s standing in an empty room, and on the walls are pictures of snow, variations of empty. He lingers nearby, and parents and children flow in noisy streams around him. The parents look away, but the children sometimes stop in the din to stare at him, at the way that he is the
same as them and yet—they seem to decide—not. I used to think the differences in his facial features and the way he walks and stands were subtle, but time has made them less so. The younger ones hang their mouths open for a few beats and then stagger away. He pretends he can’t see them either. I press my face close to his and say,
You’re so beautiful. You’re so utterly beautiful
. He makes a clicking sound, which means he’s satisfied—it is, I think, aside from his laughter, my favourite of his myriad sounds—and I turn back to the paintings.

Many of them were created when the edges of the polar regions were first being explored, and most have elements of the fantastic, are renderings based on captains’ descriptions or approximations the painter could only have imagined and put together in the relative comfort of a studio. The repeated motif, painted in light that makes me think of Monet’s Rouen cathedrals, is the crushed boat on vast floes and the survivors left to writhe out their existence under brooding, sometimes violent skies. But I’m not interested in their calamities, the fracturing black boats, and the suffocating closeness of men, and it’s powerful to have the freedom to turn away.

I walk past images of the aurora, pulses of light held on heavy indigo paint, created long before anyone knew the sun could hurl solar winds at the Earth, make curtains of coloured light hundreds of miles high. There are refracting suns along horizons, haloes and parheli, and ice in shades of turquoise, azure, and a bottle green that stop me, even crimson. Finally, I see it:
Icebergs, Davis Strait
, 1930, by one of Canada’s Group of Seven painters, Lawren Harris. A depiction of the other end of the world from where Byrd was at more or less the same time; its near—but distinctly different—twin. The icebergs are striated in blues and whites, hold a muscular, totemic quiet. When Harris painted this, having been to the Arctic on a
supply ship, he was married but in love with another woman; add to his dilemma the cusp of the Depression, coming war, the human furies then outside this view. The implied roar. I stay in front of it, this silence colliding with the noise of history and of schoolchildren, for a long time. The nights have been broken for so long at this point that I can’t seem to locate the words for how tired I am, how inside myself. How I want to find my way out. I turn and look at Gabriel, his blue eyes with the bergs in them, and he looks straight back.