Know the Night (15 page)

Autonomy finds a way. Gabriel’s autonomy expanded with his discovery of willful sitting. Or the plop-and-sit, if we’re out walking somewhere. He’s been known to settle to the ground in the middle of parking lots, sidewalks, beaches, and dirt trails. Or if he’s already sitting, he can refuse to stand. It seems when he does it that there’s an essential
honesty, not because he isn’t capable of subterfuge, or can’t understand mischief or sleight of hand, but because his alternative language, in the instance of rebel sitting, uses his whole body; he embodies defiance with a whole note. I know its power because both R and I have stood in impotent rage before it, panicked to find ourselves unable to move him, have him do what seems so important at that moment for him to do. Like Monk, he can cause an unraveling all around him.

Gabriel and I listen one night to Monk’s “Blue Bolivar Blues” in R’s and my bedroom, and I sit down on the bed with him, being careful to stay close to the edge. As much as silence is a function of his being, so is space, and he sometimes needs a good deal of it. The bed, when he’s listening, is his. It is possible for me, faced daily with his interior rules, to want to flout them—sometimes you just want to sit on the bed. My presence beside him intrigues him, then it seems to disturb him. It’s a familiar scenario, with the usual loops and repetitions, set to Monk’s upbeat tune (which Monk also named “Bolivar Blues” and “Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are”; one of the places his friend Nica lived was the Bolivar Hotel). His focus shifts from Monk to me, as he reaches across the white duvet to my leg and touches it, gently at first, stroking my pant leg, before starting to try to move me. The white space is an ice floe that has gone unnoticed until he indicates it, shows me it’s there. I stay a moment, despite knowing he’ll be held in the grip of one of his thought circles until I get up. Typically, I try to keep him out of the loops or break them as soon as possible by distracting him—anything simple will work: singing a song, giving him a drink, moving him to another room, or in this case, if I simply get off the bed, he’ll stop. But I stay there a bit longer, watching his eyes, which have become black, and his
electrified focus while Monk plays in our ears, in part because I’m having a moment of my own—I’m tired and just want to sit on the damn bed—and because I want to examine the space and his reaction, find what they mean. That there is possibly no meaning to be found doesn’t seem to bother me. Somewhere in the tiniest particles of the space is the secret.
Okay, Gabe, okay
, I say.
I’m up
.

Did Monk control the silence, or did it control him? Perhaps it was both. His father spent the last years of his life in a mental institution, suffering from some of the same things that afflicted Monk. But Monk had his music, a way of conversing with the silence. Sometimes he would get up during a gig and dance around, which meant he thought the band was swinging. And he had Nellie, his wife and support. He would sweat when he played, and so Nellie made him large white handkerchiefs with which he could wipe his face, and sometimes when he got up to dance, he’d unfurl one of these flags. His surrender.

I
t is the last day of May, and Byrd has a radio schedule with his men, which means running the generator in his tunnel. Listening to the distant voices on his radio receiver, he conducts business with Little America for an hour and a half, sending back his hesitant code until it occurs to him that the engine doesn’t sound right.
Wait
,
he spells, and goes to check. He is snuffed like a flame. When he regains consciousness, he reaches for the telegraph key and through a heavy veil, signs off, though he can’t get the earphones back on his head to know whether Little America has responded. Dizziness and nausea rumble through and his heart surges.

In the scramble of memory and time, he finds himself lying on his bunk. He wakes enough to understand that the engine is still running. Crawling under the exhaust clouds, he is finally able to reach it and shut it down; crawls again to his stiff sleeping bag and shifts himself in.

Later he will write,
 … the illusion of being a thin flame drawn between two voids
.

When I’m here in the dark, I wish on the stars for what seems like their detachment, their delicious remove. What looks like a kind of freedom. But the twinkling is a bit of a ruse, attached as it is to a thread that stretches back into a sink of millions of years. Somewhere back in time their cores rage. Night’s ancient blasts and fires that are now so refined the cacophony is lost, combustion turning cold and clean and inscrutable. I want, sometimes, a night like this.

Running around the edge of the pond, I see the hunched form of the fox, exposed in daylight as though sleeping in grass. A few flies thread the air around her as I look more closely to assess how still she is, how dead. I watch and wait, wondering the protocol. Do you speak to the dead? Say a prayer? I whisper, and improbably the fox lifts her head, carefully turning her small painted face toward me, her eyes shut tight as fists. She is not yet dead. I feel like Alice, like I’ve grown larger and larger until I’m forced to back away and slip around the other side of the pond, taking my presence and intrusions with me. I walk in an arc, sitting down on the grass many yards away, obscured by foliage. But after I watch her dying for a while, she lifts her head in my direction, smelling where I am, so I pull away again. She is not to be watched, and I run back to the path, slip back into the forest.

S is afraid of the dark. There is a sharp glow around his door that illuminates the end of the hall. He sleeps under the glare of his ceiling light and not one but two bedside lamps, which R and I sneak in to turn off before we go to bed. At some point during the night, he gets up and turns them back on. But all this is fairly new; when he was a baby and toddler, he slept fearlessly in the dark. There are no streetlamps or neon signs here to leak in. Only a low full moon, especially if there’s snow cover, will spill inside so that it’s possible to move around without a light. Otherwise, the black is a palpable element. Once he reached a certain age, it seemed that he understood that he entered his dreams alone. How vulnerable the sleeping body is, how left behind. Paralyzed and private. He could no longer float trustingly into sleep with everything dark around him and so in order to go to bed, he arms himself with light, layers of it in every lamp around him. He has nearly unbroken sleeps, and R and I don’t hear from him until morning. When I told my therapist about his impervious slumbers she said,
He knows who has the night
.

Of course, I’m afraid of the dark, too. The problem is the range of possibility, the way exploration has to be done by feel before finding the lamp. My recurring dream as a child: feeling through a dark room for the light switch and finding that it doesn’t work. The dark is the sovereign country of the unknown, and a borderless one, at that. The guards are just glimpses and shapes. Striking a light is only so helpful when the light is artificial, an intruder. The dark
hunkers down in the self-satisfied comprehension that it is the one, and the only one, at home.

But what I’m afraid of now, aside from the dark, is interruptions in the dark. I wake even when Gabriel sleeps, just because I’m anticipating getting up. The anxiety becomes too large, almost as if the interruption arrives not from him but through him, as if the universe is transmitting its own impatience, the primacy of its need. When he breaks the night or hovers expectantly in daylight, it’s electric and impossible to ignore. He’s a tsunami of interruption, a forty-foot wall of it. We can only allow him to pass over, loaded with boats and houses and drifting people, awash in the force of him and the resulting debris to which we’ll have to attend.

And then I think I must have it wrong. Byrd, even in his misery, looks out to the night around him, in which he is entirely alone, and he watches the sky. The aurora unfolds, both sinister and beautiful, and he feels a harmony with the things that normally lie beyond his attention; he is lifted out of himself and spends a moment or two where he understands all that he needs to before he begins again to forget. The dark is the fulcrum for that harmony—the aurora is invisible without it. So, too, the stars.

It took years to see that Gabriel was unlike anyone we knew, until we finally understood that no one was either so magical or so lost to behavioural repetitions. Bound by increasing cycles and loops, he would repeat an action without seeming to tire of it. Aside from shrieking episodes and night waking, he would throw or bang an object, or rock back and forth, or jump up and down for long periods, and like the disappearance of his words, the accumulation was gradual and almost lulling.

There was a space when he was very little where we caught our breath. The seizures were gone and the crying, too, and he emerged from that spell a round, beaming baby, one year old. There were the first ripples of conversation, the first sightings that we took to be him, the authentic him (which was erroneous, of course, because he has always been the authentic him). I remember that in the autumn of that year, R and I took him camping to Algonquin Park, a huge Ontario forest, and how extraordinary and ordinary this seemed. We showed him moose standing in streams, enormous beaver dams, the lit halls of hemlock cathedrals, and lakes old enough to be dying. We hiked under beech trees where black bears had nestled in the branches and feasted on the seeds. At night, guides organized wolf calls so that the humans could converse with the wolves, but it was just a distant, floating language. The wolves were peripheral and cloaked, and we never caught a glimpse of them. Two weeks after returning home, we read in the
Globe and Mail
about a couple and their toddler camping just a few miles from where we’d been; a wolf had lunged into their camp, grabbed the child by the abdomen, and tossed him in the air before fleeing. The boy had escaped injury. I wondered about him, about the story he would have to tell when he grew up, how a wolf had grabbed him, and he flew.