Know the Night (7 page)

Let him keep trying to press himself out of what is fast becoming his coffin. The ice desert sprawls above him in its reductive, obscuring simplicity, concealing a world of secrets, from the intricacies of its crystals to the mountains that are tucked unseen beneath the lid of ice. The ice is so imposing that it squashes the form of the Earth into what has been described as a pear shape. Surrounding
him is a presence so powerful it transcends any attempts to believe it inanimate; the lid of ice invites a mind, tricks a mind,
is
a mind.

After twenty minutes of battering, he cracks the lid enough for him to fit through and see that accumulated ice and drift have been the problem. He decides then to construct a new tunnel, leading out from his food stores, with an emergency escape hatch. He has only just arrived, but it has begun to happen: the first ideas of escape, its theory, are beginning to form, settle in.

He cuts the silence with his phonograph and the strange, pulled sounds it makes as it begins to wind down. He tries to wash his dishes in the length of a song, makes a game of it, until the notes and words are distorted, tugged like hardening taffy. The cold creeps into the music and is so pervasive it can burrow into the sounds, freezing them from the inside. Silence again, except the clink of his dishes. He clears his throat. Says nothing, however, as there’s no one to listen; he is not even on speaking terms with himself.

He writes in his diary,
My table manners are atrocious
.

He thinks the coming of the polar night is not the spectacular rush some imagine it to be. By mid-April, the dark pushes the sun entirely below the horizon. He goes for a walk on the Barrier and becomes sensitive to the artful arrangement of the aurora and the shine of Venus. There is transformation in the night, a turning point in a grand ritual, and quiet. The potential dangers all around him are as obscured by the silence as the crevasse that opened twenty-two years earlier in 1912 and soundlessly swallowed an explorer (E. S.
Ninnis, who had been traveling close behind Douglas Mawson), sledge dogs and all. What emerges for him now is something that he decides is harmony.

N
ot long after I took Gabriel to hear jazz for the first time, I took him to hear an eighteen-piece swing band. They usually played in a black box theatre, but that night the theatre had been taken over by a party, so a little neighbouring café swallowed the band whole. Eighteen pieces filled the space, and the audience had to fit itself in and around the band. Gabriel and I ended up seated next to the barisax player, a guy who, when Gabriel threw his juice cup, handed it back to me, smiling.

I knew that when the band eventually started to play, the sound would be concussive and charged, and it’s exactly that fullness that holds Gabriel in its embrace. But the band wasn’t playing yet; they were waiting for the stand-up bass player who hadn’t arrived.

Gabriel was left then with the encumbrance of waiting. He could not tolerate the way time is malleable and unpredictable. He fell apart because he wanted to hear the music and couldn’t understand how to make it begin and possess him. He lashed out at me, swiped his hands through the air with a wild look. I caught his hand each time just before impact and moved it to the side,
and prayed for the music. Waiting became for both of us a trick, a magical twist in the plot. But he could only be a witness to it, plead wordlessly for his music.

Weeks later, I learned what had caused the delay. The bass player had put his sheet music on top of his car before driving to the café. He discovered in the café parking lot that he’d gotten there without his music, and when he drove back home to locate it, found it sprawled all over his driveway and lawn. Hundreds of pages of rippling sheet music. I imagined him, staring helplessly at the millions of musical notes stippling the ground at his feet, and many miles away the same tempest was swirling in Gabriel.

PROVISIONS FOR BYRD’S HUT:

Staples & Cereals

Tool kit

Trail Equipment

Mending kit

Books—100:

Meteorological Instruments:

T
he conduit between Gabriel and my waking is always sound. His clapping, his voice, or the disembodied flutterings and bangings. At one point in a film about Antarctica,
Encounters at the End of the World
, by Werner Herzog, biologists sprawl on the Ice and listen to the voices of the seals that are swimming underneath. As I lie in bed listening on some nights, Gabriel’s moans and calls have a similar haunting, sustained quality, as if the universe is humming through him. As if he’s expressing all of his desires at one time and the sounds have blended into a note that seems uncomplicated by meaning except to the initiated listener. The note is so big I can walk around inside it. I wait for him to take a breath. After he does, the sound continues again, hauling all of his desires with it. Effortless and complete.

But this time the sound is different, having stops and starts and cadence. It’s like hearing subway passengers speak through the noise of wheels and doors. It seems as though it’s coming from his room, except that it can’t be. There is R’s breath against my ear, and beyond that, what sounds exactly like talking. An electronic toy malfunctioning, maybe, and the recognition that I’m squinting in the dark
in order to hear better. Night is pulling a trick. I sit up with my heart racing:
What is that? Do you hear it? What the hell is that?

R shifts from his sleep and raises his head, strains to hear. He says it as if it’s reasonable.
It’s Gabriel … He’s talking
.

So he is, talking in his sleep. Not speech exactly, but speech if intention counts; the roll and rhythm of sentences. Here is what we’ve been waiting for, the elusive thing we’ve been hoping would eventually find us. Desire can be potent enough to make the object of the wish substantial, and the mind, desperate to organize what it hears, will break a code whether or not the code exists.

Maybe he speaks for just a few seconds, but in the night, everything is pliable, especially time. Beyond the warp of furled bedcovers and the slim light of the hall, he seems to go on for minutes. We stare into the dark, waiting. I feel a momentary panic, too, at the way meaning seems to be shooting away from us, scattering. Somehow, a portal has swung wide during sleep, if only briefly, and yet we still can’t see into it and learn what he means. Here are the words and we can’t understand them. We can’t understand
him
.

And then it’s over, the torrent stops. The night, the dark, the cool air reassemble. Another sound comes and it’s Gabriel laughing, a deep long chuckle. The curtains on the windows glow faintly as my eyes are adjusting. I look at R’s form in the bed and can tell that he’s smiling.
I think
, he says,
that he’s telling a joke
.

Perhaps if he had never spoken in the first place, the desire might be different, less acute. He was a child who spoke and became, somehow, one who didn’t. Which said that reliable processes were actually tenuous, that his ordinary need to convey a thought could be obviated by something unseen. He likely remembers little about
speaking and signing, but whether or not he does, he’s certainly aware that he isn’t able to do what everyone around him can. And whether or not he remembers, we do.

I gave him a shower recently and was toweling him off when he tried to tell me something. While looking into my eyes, he made a sound with two distinct syllables, ones it was clear he was trying to shape. A small occurrence to the outsider, but to people familiar with him any sound has significance, coming as it does with the opportunity to interpret. (As Margaret Atwood wrote, using stoplights as an example, … 
if we didn’t interpret, we’d be dead
.) The mind wants so badly to understand, to
get it
, that it will chase meaning relentlessly, pursue it straight through the dark. The listener can’t help but stop and wait for more and adjust to a slight flurry: did he just speak? what did he say? moreover, what does he want? In those moments, I think that if I knew what he wanted, I would give it—anything. But the sounds, as soon as they were made, disintegrate.

The mind guts the sound archives but comes up with nothing but a guess; the code falls to the floor.

The second-to-last time that he spoke, he was six years old.
Bye
. He said it when we were visiting his grandparents and I was at the door putting on my coat to go out. He had been standing watching me with our relatives, who were arranged in the living room like actors in a tableau. (I picture, even before it happened, everyone frozen in place.) When a child speaks who hasn’t said a word in more than a year, then we are not ourselves. I buttoned my coat as I stood in the foyer and waved to him,
Bye, Gabe—see you in a bit!
He stepped forward, locking eyes with me, and memory slows this frame-by-frame so that I’m ready for it when it comes, except that I
wasn’t. He said, Bye, and waved, casually, with his right hand as if he did this all the time. So simple:
Bye
, a step, a wave. I think it’s fair to say that, as hyperbolic as I want to be about it, the effect was atomic: a mushroom cloud and obliterating silence. None of us spoke. A version of Gabriel—the one who speaks—had suddenly made an appearance, and there was paralysis all around because we’d been through this before—the wondering what to do because we didn’t want to frighten away this particular Gabriel. I knelt down so he could see that I was looking at him, listening, waiting for more. But nothing more came. There was no stopping then the tears that I wanted to hold back. I kissed him, stood up, and adjusted my coat.
Bye, Gabe
, I said.
See you in a while
.