Know the Night (25 page)

The piano ain’t got no wrong notes
.

He folds his hands around my face, cups it, and I come into view. He sees me, but I no longer need him to see me. In a way, what happens to Byrd is a related circumstance; his sense of himself disintegrates without the defining gaze of anyone but his face in the mirror. He discovers that unequivocally we need other people; I’m just not sure we need the recognition of specific individuals. That Gabriel sees me, and I don’t need him to say
mama
to prove it, is certainly affirming, but when he is eclipsed, or I am, by the
long shadow of his episodes, it seems to me that love is still love. The themes are too large to be altered by the small us, by the weird transience of words and autism and knowing and unknowing. We exist and that’s all. At this moment, he is quiet and focused, and he sees me as if he’s always seen me, as if I never disappear; I kiss his face. Like the creatures discovered in the deepest parts of the ocean, we construct a light of our own.

O
n Gabriel’s thirteenth birthday, we’re in one of those long, underground spaces that seem hooked to jazz, descending another steep set of stairs and guiding his hands along the rails. The rabbit hole, the tumbling, the dark rooted smell. The spaces that contain the unpredictable and shifting and it’s all right. The support pillars are brick that’s been painted a glossy black, the floor is a red carpet with a crosshatch of amber lines. The ceiling is low, a velvet curtain behind the bandstand hangs from brass rings, and light glints off the trumpets and saxes on their stands, the silver on the drum set. It’s the same band that’s led by the emergency-room doctor. The bass player hooks his arm around the neck of the bass so the whole thing leans against him while he thumbs through a playbook. The sax player gives Gabriel five before going to the stage. The drummer’s itching to get going. They swarm casually, exchange
slight nods, a few words, and they start up. “The Sidewinder,” by Lee Morgan, and “Moanin’,” by Bobby Timmons, “Water from an Ancient Well,” by Abdullah Ibrahim, “Cape Verdean Blues,” by Horace Silver, various Monk. A woman gets up from the audience to sing a few tunes with them: “My Funny Valentine,” “All of Me.”

When the break comes, they play “Happy Birthday” and everybody in the place sings while the waitress brings out a cake for Gabriel, chocolate with vanilla frosting and yellow swirls. In the surrounding dark, the lit cake comes to him, and in the candle’s light there are the faces of a dozen of the people who love him best, including four who have worked with him, pressed him onward, stood by him, and love him so well they want to be there for this. He bounces in his seat and makes one of his short, happy shrieks. R has to blow out the candle for him, and we all wish on his behalf. Pannonica asking for the three wishes; what would they be? Whatever provisions we think he needs, he likely doesn’t. He holds his secrets close, and his smile in the candlelight is enormous as he gets high fives and pats on the back. What he wants now is the cake, and the music again. “Epistrophy,” “Ruby, My Dear,” “Body and Soul.” These small delicious things.

Rescue comes like this, one song at a time.

Last autumn, R and I took the boys to a large treeless field by the ocean that attracts kite flyers. On windy, sunny days, the sky is full of nylon planes, rainbows, and sharks, with their strings pinned to the ground, and the ground is full of people looking up. On the day we went, there was a noisy wind, the straining kites, and the water sparkling so hard you couldn’t look at it for long. One thing we’ve
gotten good at is finding the sun when it hovers just so. R and S launched a butterfly kite that looked like stained glass, and Gabriel and I kicked a soccer ball back and forth. Maybe because of the way the light was and how the wind filled my ears, I had one of those moments where time slows, just hangs there and then expands; we could have been there forever, I don’t know. The giant butterfly grew smaller as it flew and S let out more string. Gabriel was grinning and laughing as he loped to the ball and kicked it. He was another beam of light in a moment that was like a diamond. He smiled and smiled and waited for me to return the ball, and he was unbelievably beautiful.

T
he Barrier is unable, in the end, to make Byrd’s hut a coffin because three men arrive from the north and save him. But you knew that. Rescue needs an accomplice: the one rescued asks, finally, for just the thing he thought he didn’t need. Rescue comes to Byrd because, in code, behind the gestures of concern for his men, he pleads for it. People and light. Both, though they are known to take their sweet time, are inexorable when called upon.

He realises when the men make their third attempt that he can assist them by making light signals from the hut that will be visible for many miles and guide the men in. He has a large kite that he’s
been waiting to use, one with a paper tail he can set alight so a line of fire will fly high up on the end of the string. He gathers a dozen tins of gasoline and some magnesium flares with the kite and regards the lot. He considers it his last stand.

He wakes with a start, knowing that Poulter, Demas, and Waite are coming for him (of course, one of them is named Waite). Shortly after 7:30 a.m., he hauls his kite topside, soaks the tail with gasoline, and stands the kite up in the snow before lighting the tail. He isn’t able to run, so he jerks the kite and it flies up to sit in the night sky, the tail blazing for what he estimates is five minutes. He will later write,
It was my first creative act in a long time
. He lights two cans of gasoline. He’s exhausted and sits in the snow. The night sky is quiet, there’s no response from the men, and he estimates he has about four hours before he has to do it all again.

Later afternoon, and Murphy’s voice is telling him that Poulter is then ninety-three miles south of Little America and will reach him in approximately eight hours. Byrd collects his thoughts, which are racing.
It was like knowing in advance that you would be reborn again, without the intermediate obliteration of death
.

At 5:00 p.m., he sets off a gasoline can.

He tries to read
Java Head
and can’t concentrate.

At 6:00 p.m., he sees something on the horizon, a light beam that rises and falls, scoring the dark, before it goes out.

He sends up another kite with a fiery tail and watches it until it dies. Then sits in the snow for half an hour, just sits. Imagine him there, folded on the snow, a little like a child, like Gabriel; the waiting. How time must close for him, a black hole with a remembered
trace of searching light. How he must want to say, if only he could form the words,
I am here
.

I am still here
.

He lights a gasoline can, a flare, another can. Nothing in response. He crawls inside his hut and briefly hears Murphy before he lets his earphones fall away. He sleeps for an hour and a half, and when he wakes, decides that he needs stimulants. The instructions on the bottle of strychnine say to mix one teaspoon with a glass of water; he puts three teaspoons in a cup of strong tea and drinks it down.

Another flare, which rages and dies, and then Byrd can see, sweeping over the night, the beam of Poulter’s searchlight. And more than that, a second, stronger beam that he figures is a headlight.

He is close to collapse, and rescue is coming for him, but in the logic of his situation, it occurs to him that what he should do is prepare supper for the men. He heats canned soup on his stove, and returns topside to see the beam, stronger this time. Sitting in the snow, he can hear, though they are still an hour away, the horn of the tractor beeping. When I read this, I want to stop, stop everything. The Barrier has a new noise. I can almost hear the
beepbeep
, and the pounding of the heart that hears it, too.

No one comes for us in a tractor, sweeping a beam of light along the horizon to find our location; no one rumbles in. There are no sirens or voices carried on the Barrier to mark the silence and make it go. But rescue does come, in a way, in the form of two words.

Stop struggling
. At some point, which is now lost, those are the
words that arrive. Sharp and unattached to anything. A transmission, suspended in static.

The moment that I understood that Gabriel’s desire to push over the lamp was something he was doing not to get a reaction out of us but because the impulse was overwhelming him was the moment that I received a lesson in relinquishing. Except that I didn’t get it, not fully. It was one lesson of many. It’s a daily practice to meet the oncoming force by calmly stepping aside. It makes me think of S’s tantrum and the way his brain suddenly overrode his rage, allowing him to go limp on the floor so he could do the one necessary thing, which was breathe.

Stop struggling
. Two years of waking to reach a phrase that seems absurdly insufficient. There is only its quiet construction: sibilant, abrupt. It calls to mind the Chinese finger puzzle that strangles the fingers more when they struggle apart.

But here is the problem, of course: how to stop an attachment to what is familiar. The struggle is interesting and vivid enough that it has become its own entity, as though it’s grown a vascular system and a brain. The struggle is ruggedly handsome, and I can be myself in its arms. It doesn’t expect me to be dolled up or remotely presentable. It expects my sniveling, weakened self. Yes, it’s possible to say, the struggle loves me. And it’s possible to be attached to its place in the hierarchy because a struggle confers importance. Sisyphus, before his rock, was the king of Corinth, after all. I have been attached to his, and Gabriel’s, cycles, the close, dark space. His reliability and maybe what I perceive to be his nobility, a kind of power. He wouldn’t have pissed off the gods if he weren’t important to them. He stole their secrets, so says Camus. I think of Gabriel this way, as someone who holds secrets, but I don’t think he stole them; he was
born with them. At any rate, the mountain, the rock, the eternity, all of it a kind of power. Sisyphus accepts his fate, he stops struggling, and Camus calls him happy.

I probably don’t need to tell you that when the moment comes, it’s almost midnight, that time of transformations, the culmination of spells. Byrd sets off a flare and a can of gasoline, and when they finish burning, he sees the tractor with his men, stopping about a hundred yards away. He can’t move toward them, so he just stands and watches them, the three men in furs coming for him. They come for him. He remembers shaking hands; it is Waite who will say later that Byrd invited them to come inside and eat soup.