Know the Night (13 page)
Authors: Maria Mutch
After drying him off, I dress him in fresh pyjamas and feel something like triumph. The term
closed circuit
comes to mind. Later on, I will look it up:
An electric circuit providing an uninterrupted, endless path for the flow of current
. So says
Oxford
.
Under
care
, it states,
1 worry, anxiety. 2 an occasion for this. 3 serious attention; heed, caution, pain
. Care, it seems, keeps accounts of its weight, what happens if there is a lapse in attention. On a separate occasion when I had been about to wash his hands, I had turned on the tap and his hands were in the stream. Except that my hands are always in the stream covering his, so that I can gauge the water temperature. This time, in one of those sliver-sized but haunting moments of parental negligence, I was preoccupied with something I don’t recall and my hands weren’t in the water. When I touched the stream, I realised it was too hot and pulled his hands away. His responses were working slowly, and so his face was blank and unfeeling at first. It seemed a fire ant was strolling languidly up his arm and over his shoulder before finally latching his brain. I remember bracing, waiting for what came: the grimace, and a soft, nearly silent cry.
Serious attention; heed, caution, pain
.
Gabriel isn’t making any sounds as I take him back to bed. He shuffles his feet along the floor and has the loose saunter of the freshly bathed, as if the events leading to his washing never happened. I turn out lights as we go, or close them, as my Italian friends say. Gabriel’s and my night language is a patchwork of signals and sensations, and the opening and closing of light. He tilts his head as he
walks, opens and closes his mouth as if he’s speaking softly. I’m too tired to speak, too finely drawn. The garbage bags and heaped blankets sit outside his room and he appears not to see them. He gets into bed, lying down as always on his stomach, and he seems heavy, as if he’ll go to sleep quickly. If he does, it’s likely that he’ll curl his right arm under his head in exactly the way he did as an infant; exactly. Experiences accumulate within him, and not just the ones to which he is passive or held captive but the ones that fully belong to him, to his own awareness. He is aware of me. He regards me from his pillow with his one available eye; he is a casually breaching whale taking a last look before slipping under.
It is possible to feel that cleaning up shit is noble because he needs me to do it. It is possible to feel, at the same time as depletion, gratitude that is as big as the dark. I go to write
I am his mother
, except that what I write is
I am his other
.
B
egin again.
I tend to think that if he spoke, the night, too, would be different. The spell broken. Night would seem cold and clean and beautiful again. I have stood on the lawn in November wearing five layers of clothes to watch the Leonid meteor showers, or bathe my face in moonlight, or simply to see how immense the sky is and experience that twinge of becoming tiny in its indifferent embrace as it twirls unstoppably. I’ve witnessed aurora borealis, too, when I was twenty-one and floating at night on an Ontario lake in a small row-boat. I slipped over the side to swim in black water, drifted on my back, the dark rim of pines seeming very close. Above me drifted the smudged galaxy, and Leo, Hercules, and Cassiopeia. I floated there, felt myself being erased in the lake’s black ink. And there it was, a brilliant green rolling over the Earth’s magnetic arc, one stream after another. And along with it, a physical presence, a silence, enveloping and dark and honed.
Counterpoint to the darkness is the image in my mind of the
huge expanses of white that surround Byrd, but even these are unreliable, or maybe full of possibility. White, in the ice world, is white simply because it’s expected to be—look again. Snow in darkness is quite often blue. The ice moves and shifts, and what appears white in daylight often isn’t. That expert on the void, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, wrote about his expedition with Scott,
A White Day is so rare
. Light breaks inside the crystals, unleashing shades of
blue and mauve and green, and Cherry added: rose-madder. Pink where snow algae blooms. Red where seals and penguins have been slaughtered.
A man comes to replaster the stairwell walls, and he shakes slightly. I didn’t think he was coming, would ever show up in fact, but weeks after the initial quote he appears, smiling and ready to work as if this has been the plan all along. He is thin and wrinkled and makes me think of Keith Richards. I imagine that in his other life, when he isn’t plastering, he wears sunglasses.
The walls’ solidity isn’t in doubt, but the surface is a wreck. At one time, there was an angry floral wallpaper that stretched from the bottom of the main floor to the top of the second, and finally I had gotten around to removing it after taking down the other ornate wallpaper in the house. Because it was daunting, I’d saved this area for last, and had perched on scaffolding to work at it, only to find that underneath the paper were thick areas of old paint that possibly date back to when the house was built in 1973. The patches, coloured an inoffensive café au lait, lift around the edges but won’t otherwise budge. When the plasterer speaks, gesturing at the islands of paint and tilting his head back to look up toward the ceiling, there are long pauses where he appears to visit some distant planet before resuming. He seems frail and smells of cigarettes. His brother, who worked on our bathrooms and discovered under the vanity that the builders had written in red marker
this house built by a bunch of pot smoking clowns
, is fat and robust and prone to commenting on my skirt or my hair.
The plasterer props the front door open, goes to his truck and hauls out buckets and drop cloths, arranges his tools while clomping about in his work boots. Once everything is in place, there is a pause, the master inhaling before he gets to work. Then he begins mixing and sweeping fresh plaster over the walls and I don’t want to disturb him. I leave the house and when I return hours later, he is gone and there is just the crisp white of drying plaster. Two days later he comes to sand the walls, which he does entirely without a mask. He heats his foam coffee cup in the microwave. He drifts off in his speech again, appears to go missing, flickers back into view, and is gone again.
I keep coming out to the stairwell to feel the white walls’ entirely new presence. There isn’t a seam anywhere, crevice or trowel mark. Just this astonishing white surface.
People keep asking what colour I’m going to paint the walls. I abandon all the colour cards I’ve collected and go back to the paint store. It seems obvious to me what I should do, as the blank, this intriguing silent elegant blank, seems to call for more of the same. But you know by now that white isn’t really white, and ice isn’t just ice, and that a blank, like flypaper, gathers things to it, and so you look, and look again, and there is always more. I gather up the variations of colour slips, stuffing them into my pockets: Frost, Snow, Rice Paper, Studio White, Popcorn, Whitecap, Journal, and Goalpost. Also: Brilliance, Lightning, Fresh Start, and Nirvana. Possibility. Whipping Cream and Whitewash. Whiteout.
T
he books about Antarctica turn up on the steps or are wedged in the storm door by men from UPS trucks, typically after 4 p.m. I recognise the purr of the trucks as they pull in and then away. Ordering the books has become a bit of a ritual, a way of receiving this distant but vivid place, a way to govern its presence by summoning them one or two at a time, the books that tend to have a penguin or a berg or a ghost-ship on the cover.
The problem with this sort of exploration, aside from the way that it can communicate only certain aspects of the experience of being there, is that the books tend to hew to the periphery, which is generally where the animals and plants are, because how, really, do you write a book about a blank? The periphery is cold enough but almost baroque with detail: lichens and mosses and stout flowers, cacophonous birds and seals, and icebergs that tour the seas like cruise ships, except bigger (much bigger). There is an algae that turns the snow pink and a fish with white blood. The coastal water’s comparative warmth seeps into the cracks in the ice, causing its disintegration, frills the berg bottoms with enough sustenance for creatures to dwell, while the entire collection of pack ice turns in ancient rotations propelled by ocean currents. Add to this the absurdities of contrast: huge ice shelves composed of tiny crystal prisms and the whales that sustain themselves on krill.
It is the blank to the south, though, its sameness and lunar severity, that haunts us, though students of ice will list the variants they find, the rub of proximity that cleaves tabular bergs from shelves, growlers from bergy bits. They will rattle off: frazil ice, congelation ice, infiltration ice, undersea ice, ice cakes, pancake ice, ice bastions, shore ice, ice that is vuggy or rotten or fringed; blue ice, green ice, dirty ice, and brash ice; ice in rinds and folds and pinnacles. Ice that looks like pencils, or bullets. Ice that basically keeps its minute distinctions endless under a curtain of simplicity.
The South Pole, reached by calculation, is a figment of a beating heart. The universe comprehends itself through its living beings, extending only a few humans onto the ice, nudging the filthy, clumsy, and slow-moving creatures deeper into the landscape to reach the centre. Endpoints here are achieved by celestial calculations and tallies and reckoning. The humans say,
hereabouts
, and stick their pins. Roald Amundsen, in December 1911, was the first to do this, arriving a month ahead of Robert Scott. He left nothing to chance, making a radius of twelve miles around his guess of the Pole’s exact location, so he could say with some certainty:
we are here
. When he and his men were getting close to the Pole and about to be the first humans to claim it, they made a stop where the dogs sniffed toward the scentless South as though, Amundsen wrote, there was
something remarkable to be found there
.
Robert Scott did not follow Amundsen’s example and use dogs on his journey—some of which, with painful hearts, Amundsen’s men had finally eaten—but had starving, depleted men instead, and they came upon the Pole about a month later, only to find Amundsen’s dark flag already there. It is an ironic idea that the Pole can be claimed, because what else is there to do but reckon a spot and
run toward it? The first to see is the first to own, except that in this place, everything moves in its invisible rotations, the cycle of crystals from the interior out through the ice pack, as the ice heads blindly but unceasingly to the distant sea, hauling any pins in the map with it.
Prior to Byrd’s second expedition, in 1933, the pack ice was the scene of entrapments and slaughters. The ravaging of fur seals in the early nineteenth century was a long red gash over the Ice that nearly extinguished the species and left other wounds behind it. Sailing southwest of the Antarctic Peninsula, the crew of the
Belgica
in 1898 became ensnared in the pack and wintered over, suffered the night with scurvy and madness. On the expeditions of Shackleton and Scott, ponies and sledge dogs perished or were killed by their owners for food; Amundsen was mesmerized by the cutlets of what were once his dogs being trimmed and laid out on the snow. Curious seals and penguins that wandered too close to the men’s camps met a similar fate. And faced with the Ice’s simplicity, the Nazis flew their planes over it and shed a black rain of swastika flags. The flags, no doubt, suffered the same fate as everything else, buried in drift and moved inch by inch to the sea.
So there is Byrd in his suffering, on the Barrier, and all around him a moat of crystals.
The periphery’s elaborations, the exposed rocks and wild seas and trapped ships, are long gone, and even the crammed world he tried to bring with him and store in his hut is dwindling. The place he inhabits now is a honed one that doesn’t refer to humans but to the general absence of them. An absence, in turn, that could be investigated only by a single person.