Know the Night (24 page)

It is an incident involving him that calls rescue to mind. Apart from fearing the dark and snakes in his bed, he is afraid of swimming, and so, despite numerous weeks of lessons during the summer, he still hasn’t learned. His ability to passively resist the lesson while giving an appearance of participating in it is astounding. No swimming teacher yet has been able to crack his code or get him to swim unassisted. His fear has to do with rescue, whether or not it comes, but I imagine it also has to do with the way a person has to struggle badly to warrant it.

One set of lessons took place at a university swimming pool that could only be found by navigating a labyrinth of unmarked corridors. At the end, surrounded by glass, were three large pools in a row like turquoise lozenges, parents towing kids and bath towels and looking disarrayed from the trek. Muffling, chlorinated air. I sat on a bench with the other parents while S walked tentatively to where the instructors, holding clipboards and ticking off names,
were gathered. A woman sat beside me with a robust baby girl whom she breast-fed while cajoling her two sons toward the instructors; the boys wore turtle-shaped goggles she said they refused to shower without.

The classes were small, and two of them were being conducted at the same time. Foam noodles were brought out for S’s class, but the kids clung hard to the pool’s tile edge. It seemed they all had a refined fear of wetting their faces, and their first instruction, to dip their faces in the water, provoked grimaces. S held the tile rim with one hand and brought the other to his lips, which were already turning blue.

There was a kind of suspension, or held breath, while we parents sat and watched. Swimming, once a person knows how, seems so natural that it’s easy to forget the reality of that glossy, unstable surface, how the body is expected to float through it and under it. I don’t remember much about learning to swim, only that I swam among jellyfish and crabs in the ocean off Prince Edward Island without care, something I couldn’t do so easily now. It occurred to me while watching S’s lesson how difficult it can be to do what is natural and elemental, even primal, once fear has moved in. It seems a simple enough instruction: return, partly anyway, to that calm wise being you once were.
Become
something that floats instead of sinks. Regress, basically, to when all the world was dark and you didn’t mind.

The lessons had been under way for ten minutes when a boy in the preschoolers’ class went under and didn’t come up. He went under and didn’t come up and none of us, not even the lifeguard, seemed to notice his struggle. The pool was shallow, with three
small platforms for the preschoolers to stand on; he had stepped off and into a gap between two of the platforms while the instructor, helping another child paddle to the ladder, faced the other way.

Something about the number of adults and the presence of the lifeguard and life preservers, and the shallow depth of the pool itself was obscuring. We could see the boy’s hands thrust up through the water’s surface, begging, and the agitation beneath. He was becoming a blur, being erased, and the meaning escaped us. It seemed that he was just playing, that the froth of his thrashing was really just another version of the children kicking and blowing bubbles just a few feet away; for a long moment his motions seemed to fit.

At last, attention focused on this roiling point in the pool so ferociously that screams erupted and the instructor turned around. She grabbed the boy, pulled him clawing and vibrating from the water, and held him until he gasped and bawled. Born again. His mother came to stand like a slim line at the pool’s edge. Everyone watched him being consoled as he clung, dripping, to the instructor’s neck. Within moments, everything seemed to right itself, and no one said anything about it. There was not a word, just a few hard looks, and the mother receded. The lessons continued, and S’s class turned back to dipping their faces.

In order for rescue to come for you, not only will you have to struggle but someone has to notice you doing so. And when rescue comes, it is often in a single movement bound by a beginning and an end—I have wondered what happens when the rescue, as in Gabriel’s case, has to be sustained. Perhaps the rescue becomes something else, or assumes a subtlety it can perpetuate. Perhaps Gabriel doesn’t need me to save him in the larger sense, or perhaps
the many smaller, nuanced rescues taken together point to something else. Perhaps, as when he stripped his mattress and gathered his twirlies to face him, what he wants is someone to bear witness. Someone to see him. And there is this, too: by keeping me out of the shallows, Gabriel is the one who has saved me.

As for rescue, in the end both it and the struggle can be so slick that they slide from the hands; they can seem not to exist. The mother receded. And if you ask S about the boy in the water, he will say that he doesn’t remember him.

T
he crackling voice in the receiver tells Byrd that the journey has begun. Poulter has devised a searchlight using scrap metal; the men, five of them in a tractor, are coming as soon as the weather clears. Excitement gives way to anxiety. Byrd vomits his hot milk and cereal as the temperature on the Barrier is falling. He climbs the ladder to look north, knowing no one could be there. Even as he feels hopeless, he can feel them coming over the Barrier, as deliberate as the sun but without the elegance, staggering forward at one to two miles per hour. And the Barrier, acquiescing, allows them through a few feet at a time.

Or so he believes, hauling himself up his ladder with a tin of gasoline to set on fire. But the horizon is empty, and the lights he
sometimes sees are just the stars. He returns to his hut, haunts it like a frantic, fluttering, expiring moth.

He sends inarticulate messages, sometimes shooting them blindly into the night. Cranking the transmitter exhausts him, and he wants to smash the radio. The temperature touches down at minus 80° F, and the bottle of boric acid that he uses to rinse his eyes shatters. When he goes topside, the Barrier snatches his breath and temporarily blinds him. His sleeping bag contains a pillow of ice.

The first attempt doesn’t take. The Barrier wins, and the men return to Little America. Poulter reduces his team to three, including himself, and starts off again a few days later. Byrd, sifting the instrument data, decides that a hurricane is coming. But with his hut’s disarray, the frozen vomit and the tumbled books, it appears that he is the storm. Eventually there is word that the men have been confounded on the crevasses, were unable to navigate around them, attempt number two is aborted, and they have turned back once again.

Murphy’s voice is in the hut, asking him—directly—if he’s ill, if he’s hurt.

Byrd’s code:
Nothing to worry about, only please don’t ask me to crank anymore
.

R
escue, if it comes at all, can act like a cat ducking its head at the door of a storm. It is fallible and sometimes inconstant and relies on the one being rescued. The process is sometimes passive, and rescue is received the same way as force but interacts with its object through something like a conversation, or perhaps what is more akin to a balancing, like osmosis. It settles in one place and then moves, sometimes slowly, to another; gathers you in—if you say so—and moves you with it.

On the last morning of the year, Gabriel is finally asleep and I’ve gotten up for the day. A coffee mug is in my hand, and the cat is curled on my lap as I sit at my computer. A rescue is about to happen, except too late. At 6:30 a.m., the world is still dim and a man dies, perhaps a hundred yards from my house, on a road that runs perpendicular to mine.

What alerts me is the number of cars that are suddenly streaming by the house, and I become curious enough to put on my coat and head down the street to the corner. A police officer is conducting the oncoming traffic with a black-gloved hand, diverting it down my street and away from the lone maroon car and the white tarp with a body underneath. The body is just a shape, an abstraction, but among the debris where police officers are marking with
small flags is a man’s black boot. Not far away, a wallet and some teeth.

The maroon car is on the other side of the road and unoccupied. Police cars and emergency vehicles are skewed in various directions, and it’s easy to imagine the urgency when they arrived, the sirens and lights, the sudden braking. An urgency that somehow I managed not to hear. Only a few hours after the accident, a blizzard will come causing a tractor-trailer to jackknife and countless cars to merge with trees along the roadside, but at 6:30 a.m. there is no sign of snow and not a trace of it left from the blizzard two weeks before. Rain between then and now has washed all of it away. The white sheet on the body seems heavy, like a lid, like it contains an ultimate quiet. The cold, too, the impending ice and snow, and the stopped ambulance render another heaviness, a struck string coming to rest and another just beginning to vibrate.

The mind tries to work out what death means and how it happens. The evidence is all around, but the moment of the collision has vanished, leaving the whole thing improbable. The impact has been tucked into the day already, scuttled away, and the scene is just that: a
scene
. I try to assemble what happened with the bits lying about, but there are only a few threads leading back to that moment when a portal opened and someone, shattering, stepped through. The man, whom I will learn later was thirty-one, is, in the figurative sense at least, long gone.

The road where the body lies runs straight for ages, passes by fields that in summer are full of dahlias, corn, and blueberries, an evangelical church that looks like an auto body shop, a store that sells plants and guns, and another where you can buy figurines of wizards. It’s not a road where there are many pedestrians, and so
I assume at first that the body was the maroon car’s driver, having flown through the windshield. In fact, the driver has been taken from the scene already, and the body belongs to a man who was crossing the road. (When spring comes, a wooden cross, painted purple, will appear close to the spot where the man was hit, and I will see a truck parked to the side and a woman kneeling, fixing a tangle of Mylar balloons to the cross.) The police officers catalogue, and a tow truck hauls the maroon car away, and the ambulance and fire vehicles eventually pull out slowly, one by one. The road recovers seamlessly, and within a couple of hours there is no trace that anything unusual has happened, no evidence that a man gestured toward Death without knowing it and that Death had been paying attention. It seems to happen so easily, so casually. There is Byrd in the Antarctic with an almost impossible rescue inching toward him, and the fact that he’s been poisoned by carbon monoxide for four months and is still managing to keep alive, and then there’s this, a man simply crossing the street and flying apart as he does. And there is rescue hovering all around, efficient and orderly and, like a bad guest, arriving much too late.

The thing is it feels like a visitation, like it means something in spite of elements that appear random or casual or out of the blue, and what is left is a reminder, a prod that suggests a choice is to be made between what is dead and what is living. You are not, after all, the man under the tarp. The white sheet is not yours. Not yet. You get to turn away from the curb, in the wind, clutching your coat lapels together, and walk past the cars that are turning. You get to head back to the house where the family and the cat and the cup of coffee are waiting.

So rescue comes. Sometimes it’s there all along and you have
been oblivious, too absorbed in the conundrums to notice it standing at the curb, tapping its foot. Sometimes it’s just that you haven’t needed rescue at all. You can climb from the dark space, clutching what is inevitable and unbelievable, all on your own.

I can hear Gabriel stirring inside his room, his numerous sounds, his clicks and ticks and sighs and hums, his fingers along the skin of the door, along the other side of what separates us. I remember when night was different and not the one of broken sleep and parenting, but the one when I was young and carousing with R or with friends; night then meant a different kind of discordance, and a kind of freedom, one specific to the city. I remember seeing the streets being bathed by sanitation trucks and phantoms of steam from the storm sewers. The buses full of drunks and violinists that played in the underground tunnels when we went scurrying through. On the street corners, there were pimps with pins for eyes, and farther along, the brown humps of bodies sleeping on concrete or absorbing the hot, black breath of the subway, and there always seemed to be someone hollering to no one in particular in the acidic light. Night is another land entirely, full of suicides, heart attacks, and fevers.

Also evening primrose and jasmine blooming beneath the stars. I don’t repudiate night, any version of it, or disregard what is clearly its elegance and promise, its sheer size. Sometimes I can merge with the dark and float in it, not unconscious but keenly aware of it. When I had my first miscarriage, I remember the way that opposing forces seemed to come together, two streams feeding into one:
I am so alive and death is in me
. It was the beginning of this story, the start of being born. I didn’t understand the night then; now I do.

I gather my robe around me and open his door. He is sitting on the floor with his legs out in front of him, and I sit down beside him. The air is cool, but it’s not so bad. I smile at him, stroke his hair, and he’s calm and watching me peacefully. There: his blue, impossible eyes, his
person
. I don’t often encounter people who think they are equal with him. I’ve even seen other people with developmental delays, no doubt defaulting to what they’re used to receiving, condescend to him. He is, as poet Donald Hall wrote of old people,
permanently other
. He’s so permanently other that his otherness obliterates the observer’s scary self-knowledge that if any of us lives long enough, we will take on characteristics that in some form or another resemble his. We will all become cautious when walking, we will need help with spoons and bath soaps and toilets and buttons, we will no longer be certain that a pen is called a pen. We will not always look at other people as if we know them. We will not always know. The membrane between him and the rest of the world is only a fallacy, a remnant of a dislocation that never happened. He has always been like everyone else, and we are utterly like him. Perhaps the sameness and seamlessness of Being are unpalatable to some, nevertheless it is the truth.
Do you belong to a secret society?