Know the Night (19 page)

I am thirty feet away from him, wedged in between people at the bar to pay our bill, and when I glance over at him, I can see that it’s beginning to happen: the opening of that secret world.
Do you belong to a secret society?
The signal isn’t like crying or a crumpling face; instead, his eyes flash and he begins to bounce, first a little and then more, and then he starts to laugh and shriek, his expression suddenly vacant. There is no stopping the tempest once it starts, and whatever connections he has formed with other people and the music are lost. As I hurriedly pay the waitress, a man goes up to him and puts his hands out so Gabriel can give him a high five, and I think,
Don’t fire him up
. The space that I have to cross to get to him suddenly seems like the one in dreams, dark and dense. Gabriel clouts the guy merrily, once, then again, and the guy just laughs, and he does it again. A flurry of hands and shrieking. Heads turn and the whole place is beginning to see him coming apart. I finally reach him, apologize to the man, saying,
He needs some space
, and turn to grab our coats from the rack. In the seconds of doing so, it begins again, the guy teasing him and more flailing and shrieking. I suddenly hear myself hissing
Just-back-off-give-him-some-room!
and taste something like kerosene in my mouth. I grab Gabriel’s arm and pull him toward the door while trying to put his jacket around him. He is so charged I can feel him almost shimmering. Night flies open in a buzz of streetlamps when we hit the sidewalk.

The car is quiet as we start over the bridge with its sequence of lights: sequins. Gabriel watches the night out the window and he’s calm again, settled into his seat, and after a while makes a small chirping sound.
That’s right, Gabe. You’re all right
. Remorse courses through; I wish I had protected him. Home, all I want is to be home. The streetlights begin to disappear, and we go farther into the dark until we are the only car on the road.

PROVISIONS FOR BYRD:

W
hen I open Byrd’s book, he is having nightmares. Sleep eludes him, too, or otherwise comes with terrors. Pains stab his head, his body, and dizziness brings him to his knees when he attempts to climb his ladder to check the aurora. He notes the irony that extreme cold is not really what is undoing him, but carbon monoxide poisoning. His enemy has become just another element in the polar night that slinks and blinds and, moreover, is locked inside the hut with him. Ice climbs the walls at what he estimates is an inch a day. The aurora unravels with or without him.

He sleeps intermittently, performs his tasks methodically, as if in a slow-motion film. Desire no longer nudges at music or books—his phonograph takes too much energy to wind, and he can’t concentrate on his reading—but grows within a rotation of other needs: faith, warmth and, especially, thirst. He’s too weak for his usual ice retrieval and resorts to getting on the ground of his food tunnel, where his footsteps have loosened a trough of dirty snow, and pulls some into his bucket. He can’t wait to melt it on the stove, so he heats it with alcohol tablets instead and drinks it down.

How the body deflects exactly what it has invited: he vomits. He tries again, convincing his body with very little sips, and returns to his sleeping bag. He makes the simple plea that has been my own on so many nights: he begs for sleep.

When he is lucid, he records the day’s actions as a defence against his increasingly gauzy memory. Tending to the thermograph and register, he is bitter and thinks,
Without me they could not last a day
. Between the scholars back in civilization and the night’s wilderness, he is just a data collector taking the Barrier’s pulse, even as it is costing him his life. The machines’ rhythms have become emphatic—he cannot let them down; they connote being. He calls his thermograph and register resolute and faithful, also remorseless. His stove is a villain, and his bucket greedy. The flames of two red candles are—and here his tenderness is almost unbearable—friendly. Inside and out, the ice creeps and invades. The dark is an increasingly present companion, a houseguest he is afraid to repel with his lantern because it uses gasoline, but he lusts for light.

His appetite has been meager, but he eats a piece of chocolate
(whatever explorers deem vital to survival in Antarctica, they never seem to fail to include chocolate) and an Eskimo biscuit before passing out again. When he comes to, it is as if during sleep he has been somewhere else, maybe home, and so he is newly confronted with his situation, wakes to see that he is still at a small table in a small hut on the enormous Barrier. He slumps forward, sobbing.

In Camus’ version, Sisyphus, who has woken up to find himself in the underworld, convinces Pluto to let him make a brief return home under the pretense of having to chastise his wife and so Pluto lets him go.
But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness
. Eventually, of course, he is hauled back to the underworld where his rock is waiting. He sheds his rebelliousness, turns forever to begin again, and, alongside scorn and resignation, he is said to experience something else; Camus leaves off with the line,
One must imagine Sisyphus happy
. It seems to me that when Byrd starts sobbing, he isn’t just breaking down but actively rebelling because
the smiles of earth
are still with him—unlike Sisyphus, he retains hope of getting home.

Here in the comfort of my house, I can watch him in the intimacy of his hut, in the glow of the stove or some candles, as if his rebelling is not my own and I’m indifferent to him. But I’m not indifferent. The home I want to reach is the one where night has returned to its slippery, silvery self, where my child isn’t governed so much by waking. I’m not indifferent to Byrd’s suffering because I recognise it. I can almost reach out and touch him on the shoulder, as if to nudge him out of his nightmare. He is sobbing while fear consumes him at the thought of what will happen to his wife and children should he not make it out of this place. I know how his story ends, and I want to tell him that he’ll be safe.

His sleeve freezes to a spot on the table where earlier he spilled some water, and after freeing his arm, he gets in his sleeping bag. Writing letters to his wife and children, he thinks of Scott’s dying words,
Last entry. For God’s sake, look after our people
, and places the letters in a green metal box that he stores on a shelf. Instructions to two of his men he ties to a nail that would normally suspend his lantern. Sleep comes and goes, as does a flickering of gratitude that he is still alive.

He is awake and feeling lucid. He lets the beam of his flashlight linger on a bottle of sleeping pills, then takes the bottle and pours the contents into his hand. Sleep and death, perhaps they are the same here. Like the snow crystals that surround him, the pills are white and minimal enough. They can be tamed in the hand, held on the tongue; they connect to a region of obliterating white. Taken collectively, they are a door.

There is an alternative, however: he sees a piece of blank paper lying on his bunk. It is another kind of portal. He writes on it,

The universe is not dead
.

It is early spring and I’m running through wetlands from which the colour has been drained. Trees are still bare, and the ones in the middle of the marsh spike up headless and limbless. But activity under the water’s surface belies what appears on top to be a still frozen quiet; everything is actively becoming something else. Tufts of grass burst up among the dead leaves. The trees farther along the trail, where the marsh isn’t digesting them, are alive and bud-covered. Several days of rain have soaked the bark through, soaked everything so that the forest is black.

My feet hitting a small wooden bridge cause a great egret to burst out of the trees. The scene unlocks suddenly, the black trees snapping out this flag of white. The sky is a slope of white, too, banked and solid, into which the egret vanishes.

The door’s the thing. Gabriel opens the night with it, pounds on it, and the sound is like a giant wanting in. His bedroom door shudders and the sound comes for me, as if the giant is there in my ear. The pounding wrecks the heart. If R and I have been in a deep sleep, we feel the burst of adrenaline, start panting before our feet hit the floor. If R is the one answering the terrible drum, he’ll remember it in the morning; if I’m the one to get up, he’ll go back to sleep within seconds and in the morning will often remember nothing about the giant in the night.

When Gabriel gets out of bed, he’ll sit on the floor behind the door with his legs straight out in front of him. He’s so flexible that when drowsy enough, he’ll simply fold his torso down to rest between his legs, his cheek against the floor, and has been known to sleep in this position for several hours. His legs have begun to turn outwards from so many sessions of sleeping this way that we try as much as possible to get him back into bed and lying prone. If he’s sitting on the floor and doesn’t fold himself and go to sleep, but instead sits there and wonders what to do, well, there is the door.

In the metaphysics of autism, doors have significance for him. He bangs them, drums his fingers on them, runs his nails lightly along them, pounds them so the hollow interiors of the cheap ones fill with sound. (He has been given actual drums, but he doesn’t engage them the same way.) He pulls and yanks and thrusts them, and his favourite: he slams. He swings them open wide before the push, so they fly shut, look like wings in midflap. The door in the night is his communication device, his conduit and sounding board, a tribal drum signaling haste, come running—now. Listen to Philly Joe Jones on the drums at the start of the Bill Evans Trio’s “Night and Day”; it is the sound of Gabriel playing his door.