Know the Night (23 page)

All of this bears little resemblance to the developmental notions that existed when I was little (and which probably accounts for my embrace of the later one), which, coming only a couple of decades after the lobotomy was thought a viable response to psychosis, seemed to concentrate on rectifying physical aberrations like curving spines and club feet with restraints that only a dominatrix could love, and leaving the brain to its mysteries. One of my sisters had muscle tone so low that she didn’t walk until well into toddlerhood
and, according to the evidence, had to be propped up with pillows for photographs. There wasn’t a physical therapist in sight, and likely no such thing where we lived, only the family musings later on. Similarly, when I developed a stutter at age four, there were no speech pathologists and forms to fill, and the stutter vanished by age six, another family legend about the uncanniness of child development.

We were nearing the end of the paperwork when the social worker asked,
What age do you think he is developmentally?
As long as I’ve been asked it, I’ve found this a difficult question, largely because it wants to render experience irrelevant. It’s a question that suggests, for instance, that a forty-year-old woman with minimal language, difficulty relating to others, and a doll tucked under her arm, but who also holds a job, has been to Paris with her sister, and, let’s not forget, has experienced the opening and closing of day and night for forty years, is the same as an eight-year old. I told the social worker that it was impossible to say. I couldn’t answer it.

She asked me again, as if she hadn’t heard me.

I don’t really know
, I told her. We went back and forth. She appeared unflustered, though curious. She pressed forward, spurred on by the twinkling blank on her assessment, and it seemed to me impossible to place him there. He could fit, on the other hand, inside the complicated rooms of jazz, where he could tolerate a spectrum of sound that many adults found difficult to bear. He’d had to endure seizures, and countless strangers’ stares, and learn the interior of waiting, the grey space of the outsider. He’d had to wear spectacles, have his tonsils out and tubes put in his ears. He’d had pneumonia and been in a hospital’s isolation ward during a meningitis scare. He was master to a thousand storms and hurricanes, and helpless to another thousand. He’d traveled over borders, on
oceans, and in skies (a homeless woman in Bermuda would grab his hands and cry,
I feel the heat off him—I feel the heat!
). He loved his peanut butter and jam sandwiches, and also Thai and Indian food. He’d watched his words go. He’d spent time in the hot cell of inarticulate longing, or rage, or sadness, without the key of words. Imagine when he wakes and remembers his life, how his freedoms are small and nuanced and his boundaries so heavily guarded. You have to imagine, also, the inverse of this, since every tension has an opposing one. You have to imagine a joy in him so profound that boundaries fall away. You have to imagine acceptance.

So the difficulty, then, as this woman was patiently waiting for me to say something she could write down, something other than
I don’t know
, was stuffing his experience into the notion of a toddler. I took the toddler’s primal edginess, the snuffling prickliness, and laid it against the Gabriel I knew, and I could see qualitatively, they were not the same.

But the void has a way of drawing toward it anything that hasn’t been nailed down. It wasn’t her fault. I liked her, and she was, as they say, just doing her job. It was very possible that she hated asking the question as much as I hated answering it. There was Dr. P, in his speech right after his son died:
 … there is a goodness, kindheartedness, humanity, and magic in our children that must be protected and never be betrayed
.

But with very little words, I betrayed both Gabriel and me. Little words.

He’s two
, I said to the woman holding her black pen to the white space on the page.

When he turns eleven, we have a party at a café where we go to hear jazz. Thirty of his school friends come, and some of the parents stay, too, because the music is swinging. There is a sax player and a drummer, both family friends, and they play while the kids, and Gabriel too in his own way, dance wildly. When the cake comes, loaded with candles, the lights are dimmed and the sax and drums get going on a wild, looping version of the birthday song with thirty singing kids, and I can’t help but think how when Gabriel was born, he should have been met with a celebration. But none of us were ready, least of all him.

I don’t know the recipe for making yourself ready. Like the guys joining Miles Davis in 1959 for the recording of the album
Kind of Blue
, you get a set of suggestions and you’re just told to play. You should know how by now, right? One morning before Gabriel gets ready for school, he and I sit on his bedroom floor, listening to “Flamenco Sketches” on his stereo. He sits on the hardwood in his pyjamas, and I sit facing him. “Flamenco Sketches” began in the studio with Davis as a bunch of note suggestions by Bill Evans:
Play in the sound of these scales
. That was all. Davis, Coltrane, Adderley, Chambers, Cobb, Evans, they were all ready, ready to take a loose guide like that and make something of it. Something iconic. Something that a boy who doesn’t talk can fit inside. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the tune before, it would be many, but I don’t know that I have ever really listened, or listened in the way that Gabriel is listening. He opens a door for me, and I step inside. Is this what it’s like to be him? Or what it’s like to be him at least some of the time? I am never ready, I am never ready. I am ready.

I am finishing my run on a paved trail that leads away from a refurbished train station and there he is, a big brown-and-white boxer, bounding along, stopping and waiting, wanting to play, wanting something. He is like the frayed end of an electrical charge. When I started out, two teenage girls were walking a pair of whippets, slight as needles, matchsticks. Weaving behind them was the boxer. I assumed at first that he belonged to them also, but it became apparent that they were trying to shield their dogs from him. Later on, two men asked if I was missing a dog, and there was something premonitory about this; he was already attached to me, invoked as missing.

Being untethered means coming apart. He halts when he sees me. I pass him at a slower pace, then hear him galloping on the pavement behind me, feel the buzz of instinct brighten and burst. I wheel around with my hand up,
Stop!
And he stops.

Maybe there’s something about being fatigued to which neediness is anathema. I want to flee his size, his strangeness, and what seems like his predicament. He is nothing if not coming apart. I wasn’t always like this, strung out and unwilling to help a poor dog, but there he is, lost, in need—and I can’t abide it. That and the dirty bandage on his ear.

I turn and walk this time, afraid that if I run, I’ll morph into
prey. He follows me again, and again I turn and yell
Stop!
And turn away from him, try to shut him out, get to my car. But we continue on this way, stopping and starting, a rhythmic push and tug as he draws me closer and I try to disentangle. I tell him for what I hope is the final time,
Go away!
, but he just plants himself on the pavement and tilts his head. He even looks like his feelings are hurt. We watch each other, and I have a moment to take in his size fully. He is dense and muscular and weighs, I think, not so much less than I do. Black eyes and erect ears, all the better to predict in me every agitated shift. Worse, though, is the loop he has drawn around me, he is so terribly lost.

Oh all right … Goddamn it, all right
. He sits closer to my feet while I feel for the tag on his collar. I find it and then start to laugh.
Goober … Jesus
. He drenches my hand as I pull away. There is a phone number, and so I decide to take him to my car to call it, reach what will turn out to be his mistress. Her voice on the phone will sound frantic, and she will say how she’s been looking all over for him, and then she’ll speed to the train station to collect him. And he will turn and look at me before leaving so I can tell him,
It was nice to meet you
.

But for now, I head to my car and hear his nails on the pavement behind me. It occurs to me that maybe from his view I am the one who is missing. Maybe it’s me who, like words and colour, has wandered from one space into another, has been lost.
C’mon boy
, I say, and as I walk through the parking lot, he follows at my side, brushes his body against me.

The image of Antarctica, the one in my mind, has the clarity of a glass bead. It’s not the continuous night where Byrd sits but an empty plateau, sparkling, without a trace of pack ice. We’re at the centre of the place, no fringe elements here. Just a single line of horizon and an upper segment of sky almost the same colour as the ice. It’s only an image, so it has elasticity—it could be the size of a rice grain or the actual Antarctica. There are no markers to give away what year it is or who has been here, who has not. It’s hard to imagine someone suffering inside such an image. There is no impatience in it, no malevolence, famine, or traffic lights or huts. Just one idea, something like indifference. I can see, then, the source of the problem: that this is where human longing begins. We can misunderstand a place and, believing it’s empty, want to fill it.

The other essential point about the image is the sun, the way it imbues the picture without being directly there. And that’s what I’m waiting for, the approach of light, which will find us different from the day before. We’re a different combination of molecules, or ideas, or notes. But the light when it comes will be exactly the way it has always been, unstoppable and complete. Its approach, the tiny idea of it now, feels a little like death, something like a god, like rescue. It comes and I know that it does, that it will.

I open Byrd’s book to a page that S, when he was younger and wielding a blue pen, had scribbled on. Underneath the scribble (like wires and brain waves), Byrd is experiencing his sixty-first day since the one that he fell to the floor of his tunnel. He writes,

Gorgeous signal pots. Exactly.

S will be up soon. After his long slumber, he emerges from his room, swinging his door wide open and grinning. Sometimes his introduction to the day is a little slower, and he wraps a blanket around him, curls up on the floor with the cat outside the bathroom, and will sleepily say,
Hello, Mom
, when I walk by. If I stand outside his room right now, I’ll hear his deep breathing.