Know the Night (21 page)

I picture him slumped there in a chair beside the receiver when he hears Charlie Murphy’s voice:

Oversleep, Dick?

Maybe Byrd pauses here, takes a breath before tapping his code:

No
.

Busy
.

It’s June 28 and Tom Poulter is sending his voice from Little America across the ice to Byrd’s hut. He is making a proposal: that he and a few of the men come to the hut to observe meteors, and that
Byrd, if he wishes, could return with the tractor to Little America. The journey out to him, barring storms, crevasses, breakdowns, and navigational issues, would take a few days.

Since Byrd began disintegrating, there has been a dance between him and Poulter, one in which he tries to lead and then pulls back. His rough Morse code tangles his meaning, but he speaks in code, too, when he holds back how ill he’s become, how sleepless, how he forces himself to eat. How he’s dying. He thinks he’s got Poulter and Murphy fooled, but because the messages scattering in from Advance Base show gaps and confusion, they have their suspicions. Instead of asking him directly if he needs rescue, which they know he would have to refuse because of the dangers involved and the lack of light on the Barrier, they have decided on this approach: a proposal. Meteor observation. What is, for their part, a rescue in disguise, planned for clear weather sometime between July 23rd and the 29th. In the fumes and cold of his hut, the idea elates him at the same time that it rocks him with remorse. He is a pendulum. Poulter’s voice comes again in the hut,
Well, what do you think of it?
Byrd taps out
Wait a minute
, then tells him to make trial runs and let him know the results. After he signs off, he continues to mull and vacillate, long into the night.

He will write that these are
days of great beauty, shadowless days
, and he will write that
this damnable evenness is getting to me
.

He will go to the calendar that is hanging on his wall, and because it is the end of the month, he’ll be about to turn over June like turning a page in a book: finished. Except that what he’ll do is measure the outside dimensions of the calendar instead. As if, in his cube of ice within ice, separated by more ice and a rift in his soul from any other human being, his consolation is this precise assessment of time in its little blocks. Imagine the delicate measuring,
like a tailor or a coffin fitter, the focused attention: twelve inches along one side and then fourteen along another. He measures with no reward other than to know the scale. He notices that in June he crossed off some days but left the others blank.

After this, his spirit lightens. He gains strength to crank his phonograph and create a food cache near his bunk in the event that he weakens enough that he can’t get up.

He freezes an ear in his sleeping bag, and watches the ice climb the walls to within three feet of the ceiling. He sends a message to Little America, approving plans for their base-laying journey.

He reads
The House of Exile
.

The problem of getting into bed, feeling R’s warmth and the blankets, is that the pleasure of it is painful, the idea of having to relinquish it again. Every sound is heightened, and I circle inside my vigilance, anticipate the click of Gabriel’s light switch and his thump again onto the floor. There are times that I’ve heard a shriek or moan and staggered down the hall only to find him silent and sleeping and realise that I’ve dreamed the sound. Night is an amplifier, enlarging every vibration—the furnace turning off and on, hot air rushing in the vents, the metallic pings and ticks as the ducts adjust—as if each is worth being heard.

When Byrd talks about the sounds of the Barrier as it splits and shifts, it is as though he means the Barrier is trying to speak. The voice is like thunder but says nothing he can use. Words and sounds in his hut have been placed in containers—books, the phonograph, his radio receiver—but the containers are muffling bell jars, specimen cases. He receives language through a scrim and the result is mostly a diffusion of meaning. He is losing language.

R and I are so accustomed to Gabriel’s sounds that when we hear something we can’t identify, we’re inclined to let it go uninvestigated, New England being a stormy place with no shortage of rumbling. One autumn night a wind gust came through, according to the National Weather Service, at 50 mph and took hold of a backyard poplar, waltzing it straight to the ground and finding the only clear vector between a fence, the garage, a large spruce, and some cedars. What we heard around 2 a.m. was something like a pot being scrubbed, a hundred matches struck, and furniture moved. It was easy, since it appeared to have nothing to do with the boys, to let its mystery go—it seemed best to stay snug rather than uncover something unpleasant. It didn’t sound, for instance, like an entire tree lying down on the lawn. We forgot about it and slid back into sleep.

The next morning, R was munching his cereal when he suddenly remembered the sound and, looking out a back window, saw the problem. We put on our coats and went to stand by the base of the tree that was wrenched open, exposing blond plains of smooth wood. Like Gabriel watching his shadow, we couldn’t seem to get over it. I tried to remember what the sound had been like, the sheer layers of rushing and collapsing, but I could barely hold onto it. Standing among the branches was entrancing, and I could see the rents in the ground, the craters that revealed an earlier violence where now there was only quiet. I thought about the force required to take a tree that had staggered for fifty years toward the sky and simply make it: stop.

But it wasn’t the first time. There had been a winter storm when the boys were smaller, one that had snuffed out the lights and heat,
and I’d bathed the boys by candlelight. I remember that I had a fever and when I looked out the bathroom window through the sheet of rain, I actually thought for just a moment that the small tree lying down across the snow wasn’t really there. The black leafless branches were eerie and like an undeciphered script. When I turned away from the window and looked at Gabriel sitting in the tub and at the candles flickering, I wanted to explain the power outage to him, describe the invisible. The outside forces. I wondered how to give meaning to his waiting for the lights to come back on, how to tell him what is change and shift and light and dark, and what is waiting, even as I believed that somewhere inside him he already had them figured out. Especially waiting.

Fats Waller said that if you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.

The neighbours walked over to circle the poplar and wonder, and when we explored the cracked trunk, we found a fungus traveling inside it in white plumes. When we thought back to the tree before it fell, we realised it had been giving us signs in the form of dropped branches and a subtly elegant lean, but we all stared at the downed tree with our hands jammed in our pockets, having nothing to offer it but surprise. A tree is just a tree until it’s sideways along the ground.

A boy is just a boy until his words disappear.

B
yrd has to rest on every other ladder rung when he goes topside for his observations, and eventually he is so weak that he simply approaches the polar night like a trapdoor spider, peeking out from a crack in the lid. A pain in his shoulder that he has been nursing worsens, along with the feeling that he’s drugged. He watches the temperature on the Barrier and in his hut fall and hover. He will only allow himself to run the stove for a short time, resulting in a piece of meat, that sits on his table for five days, refusing to thaw. He vomits milk, reels with exhaustion, and still he fills out form no. 1083.

He writes,
This is habit carrying on, not you. You are through
.

B
yrd is right: we can be half-dead and still resort to our habits. Sometimes the habit is the only thing that seems real, or reliable. At the very least, it is familiar. Maybe this is the thing that makes Sisyphus go. It
is not just the gods that force him, but habit. He is so charged with his repetitions that he becomes the essence of the place that he’s in.

There is a night when my eldest sister is visiting and sleeping in a room across from Gabriel’s, and he has started laughing and shrieking shortly after midnight. He has never been quite as wild as this with a guest in the house and I feel panicked, wanting him to stop. I still want to hide just how bad this gets. The hours surge and rock like boats, his squeals traveling the house in bursts, the night in fragments again as I try to contain him (and in the morning my sister emerges, stunned at what has gone on because experiencing the sounds is different from hearing us mention them, and I say to her, even though this is old hat,
Welcome to autism …
). The small hours pass and dawn finally comes. At around 7 a.m. I crawl into bed beside R, who hasn’t heard a thing. He wakes and, realizing that I’ve been up all night, wants to know why I didn’t get him up, he would have taken over. But I don’t know how to explain, how to say that Gabriel and the night have affected me, made me different; the molecules are still in my skin. I’m full of nebulas, dying stars, solar winds, and substorms. Night is in me.

Byrd is transmitting:
Ok here
.

OK, OK, OK
.

But he is keying into the wild, blindly. Two days before, his gasoline-driven radio generator failed and he dismantled it so that it sprawled in bits across the table. Back when he was learning to fly and he had taken apart his first airplane engine, he had been amazed at how the components, loosened from their former whole, seemed
dead. No matter how he aligns the radio generator parts, he cannot make them live. Now he is using the battery-powered unit, with its two handles for cranking, which he finds exhausting. There is a copper switch he can throw one way for transmitting and the other for receiving. His obligation to send his signals, as jumbled as they are, weighs on him, the fact that he is responsible for his men and that not hearing from him could cause them to come for him without proper planning. Days before, on July 5, he sent his signals over different frequencies but received only silence. At last, Dyer’s voice sprinkled in, delighting him. Murphy came on and spoke about the journey out to him, how they were weighing the challenges and not to expect them until late in the month. Byrd felt the discomfort that he’d given himself away, that despite knowing how treacherous the journey would be, they were going to do it anyway, because of him; and he reveled in the hope that he might get out of this place alive.