Know the Night (22 page)

As morning gets closer, I start to feel more urgent. Maybe this is the most difficult time because night is almost over and I’ll have to officially get up and start the day. I’m not as sanguine as Camus claims Sisyphus to be. The begin-again is the most difficult part, anticipating it, feeling the opportunities for sleep that haven’t even arrived already slip away. This is the hour that I have sat and wept, not for Gabriel’s words (communication, he’s shown me, is broad) or fear of the future or even parental guilt but for the simple lack of sleep. Not every night has to be tackled in fragments, hour by hour, but most of them do, so that insomnolence has made it hard to grasp the one thing that energizes me regardless of day or night, which is meaning. I want the damn meaning, and it’s become difficult to
see. Without a clear head, there is very little that makes sense. Like Cherry-Garrard, I’ve begun to think that what I would give for a good night’s sleep is five years of my life. But I don’t mean it.

B
yrd has his first bath in a week and seeing that his skin hangs, estimates he’s lost perhaps fifty-five pounds in total since he came to Antarctica. It is Monday, July 9, and he signals into the night, trying to snag a response from his men, but nothing comes. Tuesday, again: nothing. He undoes the radio receiver and transmitter, unwinds them into their meaningless parts trying to find a problem he can amend; then reassembles the parts into beings that will reveal in the silence the presence of other people. And still: nothing.

His lust for light is so strong that, damning the fumes, he lights his pressure lantern and bathes in what he imagines is coming from the sun. The sun, which is stalling out of sight before swinging back for the south now that the Winter Solstice has occurred.

He combs the night for sounds, but nothing again until Dyer’s voice is there in the hut, a ghost-voice, and he keys back frantic:

And as he keys the words, he says them aloud, even though there is no one who can hear him.

Back at Little America, the continuity of the polar night has led to entropy. The men’s repeated bacchanals have forced Poulter to hide the liquor supply, moving it from one location to another, then another, before he surreptitiously empties the bottles into the Barrier. The men respond by draining the alcohol from compasses and pouring mouthwash through a homemade still. In their off-hours, they push steel rods into the snow, trying to divine the location of the missing liquor.

This is how the dark and the cold have played them. Some of them no longer believe in an edifying Antarctic mission. They accuse Byrd of various black arts: abandonments, ego trips, self-serving agendas. And when Poulter and Murphy argue for an early venture to retrieve Byrd, some argue against. They don’t know the extent to which Byrd has disintegrated because the information has been kept from them; what they do know is that his original orders, given when he left for his sojourn, stated that no one should come for him until light was on the Barrier. It would seem to them that the man needing rescue should indicate clearly that he needs it. Byrd will later write that
the caves at Little America seethed with dissension
. He didn’t know the half of it.

The arguments carry on until a vote is taken. After Poulter and Murphy narrowly win their case, a night watchman sees something out on the ice. A figure, dressed in furs, is discovered facedown in the snow. It would seem that Byrd has stumbled in from the Barrier and collapsed. Stumbled in from 123 miles away, having navigated blindly from one speck on the ice to another speck, in the dark, through walls of wind and crystals. And yet, in night’s logic, it appears that he is
there and so some of the men descend on the figure, haul him inside, all the while believing it’s Byrd until they try to revive him and discover it’s one of their own who has been playing a joke.

Just joking
.

Byrd doesn’t know any of this. I wonder if anyone ever tells him how a terrible joke was played, one in which he got his wish. Somehow, he has desired hard enough that another Byrd is born, a doppelganger that navigates the void and is lifted from the ice by numerous hands, finds freedom.

So I have wondered what
he
means, what is signified by Gabriel, even as I know the answer is really the question. The labels attributed to him, and the insistence of other people on keeping him in step with his designations, is far beyond the point, and yet I’ve rummaged the labels for a lost document, a sacred text with the thought that maybe the answer is inside what we say that he is. Even as I know better.

When Gabriel was about four years old, one of his eyes turned in, a strabismus due to farsightedness, so his ophthalmologist wrote a prescription for glasses. A burr was in my stomach as I wondered how we would convince the one who was inconvincible to place something on his face and keep it there. R and I joked darkly about staples. We fretted that if he rejected the glasses his ability to interact and to learn would be further compromised. We knew enough to pick a moment to introduce them when he was standing in front of the television, watching his favourite episode of
Bear in the Big Blue House
, so that once the glasses were perched on his nose, Bear was suddenly clear to him. It was as smooth as that, and he wore them well for a few years until his farsightedness corrected itself and the glasses were no longer needed.

But it was picking up the glasses from the optical store in the first place that was a seminal moment in the meaning of labels. R and Gabriel and I went together to the store, which was tightly serene. Layers of glass and mirrors on desks where customers leaned in to be fitted, a quiet carpet, and wood pillars. R and Gabriel didn’t go in but stayed on the sidewalk, Gabriel walking ahead of his father. Back and forth. I sat inside, on one of the chairs along the wall as I waited to pick up our order, and there was a woman seated nearby. Various customers were choosing frames or waiting to pay. The woman watched the window where Gabriel and R went by in one direction and then turned and went in the other. The woman announced,
There’s a little boy with Down syndrome
. Just that. Her friend was standing nearby and widened her eyes to signal that the mother was sitting right there, but the woman who spoke didn’t understand. The room was crackling and I seemed nearly invisible.
There’s a little boy with Down syndrome
. She had said so, and it meant something. Was it like seeing a rare bird and letting the other birders know—or was it more like a car crash? A boy! With Down syndrome! He had entered, been objectified as small talk, and I wondered if she would mention him that night at dinner. I felt like I was watching people undress, like I was spying on a world I was no longer privy to. I had had my suspicions that maybe these small pronouncements were what happened when I wasn’t in earshot; as the parent, I had been subject to different kinds of remarks. (If you want to burn the britches of a mother of a child with special needs, tell her that God only gives special children to special people. Yes, it’s true. In the most secret parts of the secret society, this is viewed as probably the most condescending aphorism there is, even as it’s made poster-sized or written on a coffee mug. We’ll nod and smile
when someone inflicts it, and then some of us will go home to smash things.) I often wondered at what point people realised his difference, because in those days, when he was still a preschooler, the characteristics were occasionally less clear, he could shape shift. His autism and his darkness were, and are, invisible to the passing gaze. But she had seen, and I wanted to know the secret. There is a boy with Down syndrome, and then what?

I was irritated by the woman who knew my identity and was trying to give me away. I wanted to be, if only for a moment, not his mother, not his other, but one of the people inside the shop (because I wasn’t one of them, not really, and this was, after all, a shop of seeing). But it would seem that the ones in the shop were not in a better position than I, just a different one. As this woman was snagged on Gabriel’s difference, so was I fascinated by hers.

If there was more, it wasn’t said; the woman who had spoken looked uneasily at me and knew.

Four years later, a woman who was a social worker employed by Gabriel’s school came to the house with a brimming satchel of papers and books. Gabriel was mysterious enough and delayed enough that she came to fill out an assessment about his development, which would be filed with the school district in order that he would continue to receive appropriate services. In other words, he had to be categorized. Assessments like these are a periodic occurrence in the realm of special needs, which is nothing if not well documented, and services often depend on them. Where the child falls in relation to every other child is probed and charted and filed. Gabriel confounds the usual tests (which might require the child with special needs to give verbal responses or to complete puzzles
and games), and even the ingenious ones developed for children exactly like him. He was an uncharted coastline, and so she had to rely on me to draw him out on paper.

We sat at the kitchen table and she filled the surface with forms and white binders that she rummaged through for various slips of paper, the metal rings snapping and unsnapping like tiny bear traps. She used a black pen to make a few notes, the satchel sagging like a giant toad on the floor by her feet. It appeared to be gulping not just reams of paper but some toys, too. The toys in these circumstances are never just toys, but tests. She took a long hit of the coffee I’d made for her while she read a form.

She asked about his birth (philosophically complex), other diagnoses (how long is the form?), where we’ve lived (Canada and the US), how he slept (oh my), what was his favourite colour (R and I, feeling fraudulent, have sometimes picked blue when asked this), what he liked to eat (most things). We combed through the developmental milestones of the past years, tabulating and calculating. It was difficult, it seemed, to add him up. Typical child development filled a chart with age-markers down the sides, the kind of thing that gives parents of children with autism, for instance, chills. You know that the number of children, with or without disabilities, that fall within the confines of the chart is in the many millions and yet your particular child floats in an unmarked area somewhere out on the tabletop, where there’s a jam smear and some crumbs.

At one time in our house, the charts and the ideas that belonged to them enjoyed incredible power. The going theory, which is still going in many parts, was that the brain had something like a time-limited plasticity and had to be stuffed with as much information as possible before the age of five or six, after which it was
considered too late. If the child was left staring off into space at age seven, it was likely caused by insufficient effort on the part of the surrounding adults, the ones responsible for packing the brain. That the learning process was more flexible than the current paradigm was left unconsidered in favour of unquestioned, panic-inducing timelines—after all, nobody wanted to take the risk when it was their own child at stake, certainly not me. Montessori exercises, word cards, classical music—all were welcome in large doses. When a study—not that it showed anything my mother friends and I didn’t already intrinsically know—turned up that London cabbies, who take years to learn the city’s routes, have experienced brain growth in the hippocampus, not much attention was paid. (When interviewed, one of the cabbies said,
I never noticed part of my brain growing—it makes you wonder what happened to the rest of it
.) I knew a good opportunity to enslave myself when I saw one. Gabriel had to be saved, and it was up to me to do the saving, and so I waded, dragging R along with me, through therapies and books and workshops, and ticked through activity lists for each area of development—speech, gross motor, fine motor—that I tacked up on the fridge. R was somewhat more lighthearted, and the term
gross motor
made him laugh his guts out.