Know the Night (8 page)

The very last time that he spoke, R and I were not there to hear it. He was in kindergarten. He was two years older than his classmates, who were five-year-olds, as he’d been kept back, against R’s and my wishes, by his preschool teachers (special education often seems to be a push and pull between family desire and institutional theory). The end of the day was gaining momentum, and maybe something about this caught his attention. The teacher was packing up, and as she did, said,
All done
. I have wondered how those words crystallized in him, what synaptic leap occurred in his brain that made the idea
all done
form as pure sound in his mouth one last time. It seems like he picked his moment. So he repeated loudly and with the clarity of the previous visitations,
All done!
I like to imagine what has been described to me, the twenty-five heads turning toward him, the engulfing silence. His classmates had never heard him speak and were under the impression that he never had. Jaws went slack in one enormous, synchronized hesitation before the children let
out a roar, began jumping and hollering that Gabriel had spoken. It became the talk of the school day. One of the staff, who was also one of his most passionate teachers, called to tell me,
Oh, you won’t believe this but …

But I would. I would believe it, knowing full well that his affliction is really that he’s so goddamn succinct. So we waited, as with the other times, hoping that the
All done!
was not a finale but the indication of more, and more.

In his baby pictures he’s usually laughing. There are so many images of the very round face with toothless grin—he didn’t get his first tooth until he was two—that he appears to have been a jovial baby. But what the photos really attest to is my desire to catch and hold his laughter, which was fleeting. Low muscle tone caused his smiles—electric, stunning—to erupt from a flat expression and then vanish, leaving him deadpan again, the changes quick enough to make those of us around him wonder if the smile had really happened.

There is a photo of him that I took when he was too young to smile and anyway seemed to be shrinking from the environment in which he’d found himself; he was just five days old and staying in the hospital’s special care nursery. A nurse named Maggie (the spitfire kind, the tough-love kind, the kind you would want if you were mortally wounded) holds him in a plastic basin as she washes him. A feeding tube trails from his nose and his face, with tightly closed eyes, appears to collapse in her supporting hand; white-blond hair in a tuft shoots from his scalp. It’s plain that the trading of the dim, watery world for the overly lit one has been harrowing, that he is
being engulfed in a sensory assault so profound that there’s nothing to be done but give in to it. Time has gotten it all wrong, he is geriatric, and my eldest sister has already pointed out that he resembles our grandfather. You can sense, then, looking at his image—and this is not so easy to do without feeling that a curtain has been parted and the viewing is illicit—that while frailty pervades him, he is a sorcerer, gathering silence with his pink fingertips, drawing it in like a tide.

Several years ago when one of my sisters married, after the ceremony and the partying and the sun went down, she had us all traipse with lanterns through a cemetery that was close to four hundred years old. As we wound around the markers, remarking on the names and wondering about the people, we looked at the numerous stones that were broken, lopsided, or sinking into the earth. Some had been smoothed blank by age, suggesting the persistence of the void no one wanted to mention. Inside the disappearance of Gabriel’s words, then, the erasure of
us
.

When he was still very little, when he still said Mama and Papa, an older man, who had meant to be commiserating even as he was minimizing, had said to R and me that at least Gabriel knew us, and I thought, Of course, he knows us! His intelligence was, and still is, much greater and more nuanced than his small vocabulary would allow. But with the exodus of his words, the burden of proof would lay itself more and more in R’s and my hands. We would find ourselves having to defend his intelligence, what amounts to character and essence and being, to argue the obvious: that a mind is much more than words. Still, there is something in the ability to say,
to name, and more than that, there is something in hearing a child’s voice, in bearing witness to the grasping and shaping of language and desires, in detecting the wildly small but gleaming planets of early words and being taken up in their orbits.

Thelonious Monk said,
You know what’s the loudest noise in the world, man? The loudest noise in the world is silence
. And so here we are, in the night, in the unstopping resonance of a loss.

When I check on S, he’s asleep in his pyjamas but lying on top of his covers because he’s developed a new, exquisitely felt fear that if he pulls his quilt back, he’ll find a bed of snakes. At age seven, he’s old enough to know that anything can be turned into a Pandora’s Box if approached just so, and he’s been experimenting heartily, to the point that now the bed
is
full of snakes. Nevertheless, on top of it, he’s in a deep sleep.

He was born when Gabriel was four and a half years old. An easy, robust pregnancy, followed by an easy, robust baby. A labour through the night, and his birth right at dawn, on his due date, on a winter day with a pink and orange sunrise that we all exclaimed over before turning back to the baby that R still swears had his eyes wide open. The nurses brought a heaped tray of pancakes and waffles, and the pediatrician pronounced him
Marvellous!
He had one perfectly shaped elf ear, his left, that would stay that way for two weeks before transforming into the usual kind, and nobody said a thing about that.

He was vibrant, and though he would become a boy so loquacious I would suffer the irony of wanting him to be quiet, he would not say one word—not one—for his first two years. It was as though, arriving in our family, he took a look around and concluded
that this is what you do: baffle everyone in near proximity with your glittering, merry silence. There was a day when I was in the kitchen with the two of them, S the toddler who said nothing and his six-year-old brother who also said nothing. They sat side by side, blinking their round innocence at me, and it was as if we were having a committee meeting, a consultation.
One of you
, I said,
is going to have to say something
.

And I don’t care which one it is
.

As jolly as S was as a baby, around the age of two, and when the words were just starting to come in a trickle before the sudden rush of fully formed and intricate sentences (one of his first utterances was the seven-word,
I don’t know where the ball is
), he had a brief period of tantrums. He entered the kitchen one time like a siren, full-volume, scoring the air. He’d been playing with toys and was, figuratively speaking, cracked wide open because his father was eating dinner instead of playing with him. The idea of it was engulfing him (here I picture an octopus clamped hard over a giant scallop), he was twisting in a tourniquet of toddler rage so profound, it began to cut him off. I was seated at the kitchen table and he staggered, bawling, toward it, like someone in a play who’s just been shot, so that all I could see momentarily, before the tabletop obscured him, was the crest of his head covered in delicate, almost translucent strawberry waves. The sound emanating from him seemed ancient, fermented, something dug up. His roar was communicative—I got the picture, neatly, that he was wild with perceived neglect. Until that is, the rage choked him off as he was gasping, his eyes wide, and the siren was abruptly cut short. He passed out, just like that, on the ceramic tile, went limp and quiet.

The next moments were a strange mix of knowing that he was fine, that his brain had just saved him by shutting him down, and watching myself frantically nudging him, wondering if this would require CPR and an ambulance. Seconds ticked by while he stayed on his back, unconscious. Finally, he blinked awake, took a moment to peer at us hovering over him, and got to his feet. We clucked and checked and pressed him to make sure he was okay, half thinking
of course he is
and half thinking
o jesus
. He took a few steps, taking in his surroundings, and began again to remember it all. He picked up just about exactly where he’d left off, tuned up his fury, and continued a long wail as he staggered again around the house.

The absence of speech, it seems, begets rage. On the other side is the power of a word to make real. One of S’s first words was
mama
. When I initially heard it, I was standing in the kitchen. He was upstairs, calling me. He and I were the only ones home, and he must have been about two and a half, meaning that I’d been a mother for close to seven years. He came down the stairs, looking for me, and called out
Mama?
and
Mama?
again. No doubt, he’d said it before, but the combination of the word with being searched out made me realise that I’d never experienced this particular sensation, being found by one of my children.

I wanted to drag it out and hear the word again, so I stayed perfectly silent in the thrill of hiding; the
Mama
sounded so potent. There was nothing quotidian about it; it was all bigness and importance. I think I’d been waiting for that moment, anticipating a kind of being-ness that I’d been trying to conjure since the first attempts to get pregnant (because procreative desire has, attached to its utility, a B side of mysticism; and so there it is, a waiting to be transformed). Each time he called for me, I became present, and
more fragile, until I thought he might be worried, and so I called out,
I’m in here!
I heard his footsteps down the hall and he appeared in the kitchen,
Oh dare you are, Mama!
and, not for the first time, I burst into tears.

So S spoke, and then he spoke eloquently, vividly, and began to wonder out loud if there were any treasure chests hidden in the basement or in a closet somewhere, and he went through a period of telling lame knock-knock jokes and roaring with laughter, but there was still Gabriel and his lack of speech. Desire is so persistent a thing that if Gabriel won’t speak in the waking world, then we conjure him speaking in the dreaming one. We shut our eyes, slip under, and there he is, talking. It isn’t just R and I who have the dreams but a litany of friends and relatives. Even one of Gabriel’s school chums dreamed that a meteor landed and when Gabriel touched it, he was able to speak. And because this is the dream world, sudden reversals make perfect sense, so that when he speaks he doesn’t just mumble a few approximations but is clear and elucidating and, really, goes on at length, as if he’s spoken all along. When I’m the dreamer, my mind races with what I want to ask him—there’s so much to know. I want to take his face in my hands,
Tell me everything
, knowing that in this place there’s a good chance he will. In my most recent dream, though, the exchange was succinct. He simply told me that he was cold. And in the dream, simple as that, I got him a blanket.