Know the Night (12 page)

Byrd calls flying in the Antarctic
flying in a bowl of milk
. I read this when I’m in bed, tucked beside my lamp with
Exploring with Byrd
, about his first expedition to the Ice, in 1928. He’s been flying his plane in what he describes as a porcelain bowl, or this, which stops me:
Only a milky
,
trembling nothingness
(and I doubt that he consciously intends a sexual inference, but there it is). Eventually, he sees a mountain, and then a total of fourteen peaks, counts them out knowing that they will fill a blank on maps of Antarctica.

I read this and then fall asleep with the book in my hands. The membrane between space and time is a sieve; I can be dusted through it and reassembled on the other side. I don’t know what it is that I’m seeing. There is a total lack of definition, and not the expected blinding Antarctic white but an impression of navy and umber and black. On my skin is a sparkling cold so searing it calls to mind fire and wakes me. In that flash of sleep, in a hot room, I had been freezing.

I get up and walk in the dark to Gabriel’s room. Something about the silence seems noisy; it has a presence as distinct as calling. The
dark has that pixilated look, as if it’s full of flies or bees, and there’s light at the bottom of his door. My image flicks by in the mirror at the end of the hall. Perhaps there are times when you know what you’re about to find.

When I open his door, I find him slathered. He’s sitting on his bed and his right hand is cradling feces the consistency of pudding, his hand cupped as though he’s holding a small bird. His face is smudged, and on his quilt are several Rorschachs: a flying eagle, a vase, a topographical map. His pants and the back of his shirt are covered, too, and his eyes are wide as he watches me. My heart clinks faster as the air fills with the prickly scent of chaos. There is the clean glint of stars in the cold night, and this extravagant disaster, and the reconciling of the two together.

I can see him assessing my body language. Something in his expression suggests his fascination is not untouched by revulsion. It seems he’s playing with contrasts, testing the way that his own interest comes up against an instinctive distaste, and waits for my response. He watches how still I am at the door, how I seem to be locked in a kind of momentary paralysis. I’m actually trying to think which piece of him to clean first.

I can almost hear the guy in
Cool Hand Luke
drawling,
What we have here is failure to communicate
. Somewhere in here is a zen koan about upheavals and their appearance, what a friend of mine calls
Another fucking growth opportunity
. This is the night’s ideational equivalent of fallen republics, coups d’état.

I see him, as he really is. A boy vibrating with the inveterate desire to say. Wanting a conversation so badly that this is the transmission, the note in the bottle. Graffito. His hair is not as light as it once was, though underneath his bangs the white vestiges glow along the
rim of his forehead. He has the softest chin in the world and skin so fair that the network of veins is visible in places. His teeth are a little motley, varying in size and shape and even colour as if they came from different mouths, and they’re hard to clean. He resists the twice-daily brushing, but R and I are persistent, and in a twist common to Down syndrome, he hasn’t a single cavity. He is looking at me with those blue eyes, his head tilting as if he’s listening for something, as if he’s picking up distant signals. His limbs are slender, with astonishing joint laxity, but his belly is rounded; his legs are long like his father’s. I asked R what he remembers most about the younger Gabriel, and he recalled the small round spectacles that are no longer needed, the way Gabriel would pat his leg to sign dog, how he would slide down the carpeted stairs on his stomach, the way he squealed when tobogganing or gleefully kicked down the block cities we had built with him. R would call him Godzilla.

I’m not sure that it’s possible, in describing him physically, to move any closer to the more nebulous characteristics, the private, ungraspable ones. Perhaps the fecal covering obscures him. Can you see him or is he lost? I’m standing in my pyjamas (bare-footed, rumpled), in the collisions of light and dark, and there’s a space that occurs between me and the boy in the night but there’s still connection. I think the word—something like nobility, humility, opportunity, presence—is soul. Or maybe the word is inspiration, or spirit. It’s hard to see it. Somewhere in the late eighties and early nineties when I was attending university, painting was said to be dead, the novel too, and possibly the soul. Beauty was repudiated and the earnest despised unless later found to be ironic, and anything warm and fuzzy was left to scorch in the new ozone rip. We were young enough to think that people who had children had taken the easy
route. I don’t know if we had heard of autism, which is a strange thought, considering the prevalence of the word now. Anyway, soul as applied to this situation means that the unknowable and uncontainable have made their entrance. There is the dead of night, Louis Armstrong in mid-laugh on the wall, and the great brown birds, how they envelop the room, and then us. And yet care and love not only turn up, they expand. It means that when Gabriel is covered in shit, the disaster really isn’t one, that what appears to be a slaughter of language and taboo is only the flipside of the haunting and beautiful void, the Great Emptiness, the bowl of milk. Peace.

This is the thing of night. We contain variations that come like jazz riffs and change again in daylight, when the presence of the rest of the world is felt. My caring for Gabriel in the night occurs on an island, a remote part of it without internet, cable, or radio receivers. I can’t tell what he’s thinking as he’s gazing at me from his brown cloak, but it occurs to me how tenacious care is, how it will turn up even in this sequestered place with its buckets and soaps, its sleeves pushed up to the elbows to show hands that are toughened by the repetitions but also ready.

Except I’m not ready. Night has lost its perimeters, or it’s me that blurs. I want to go back to sleep like a desert traveller wants water. I can’t think straight or begin to sort the scope of the mess in front of me and the living creature inside it. The linear left the building long ago and we’ve been joined by the dendritic and decentralized. I’ve never been someone who passes out, but it seems that the perfect thing to do would be to fall comatose to the floor.

When Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote his book about Robert Scott’s famous last expedition, he wrote about a deep sleep that I would like to be engulfed by, the blank and obliterating kind,
the kind where, on waking, there’s a few seconds of forgetting that holds within it something like infinity and offers an expanding, nameless territory and an expanding, nameless self. The sleep Cherry-Garrard wrote about was induced by the Antarctic, one of its gifts to the explorers, where a summer blizzard would settle in and there would be nothing to do but curl inside the tent to wait it out in delicious slumber, one day, two days, three days, waking to eat and then descending back into the abyss. Later, he would write that what he would give for a good sleep was five years of his life.

O
ut on the Barrier, Byrd goes topside to check on the aurora and finds it bland. It’s around midnight and the moment when things suddenly vanish, or turn up. His phonograph is playing inside his hut, Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony
. He has left the door open so the music swells onto the Barrier. The aurora begins to unroll its drapes and shoot beams over the sky until, Byrd will record in his diary, what he sees and what he hears become the same. I imagine him standing in his furs and mukluks, leaned back a bit to take it all in, the aurora expanding and rippling, his trapdoor propped open, and the Barrier receiving Beethoven for the first time. In 1810, the great German Romantic and sometimes music critic, E. T. A. Hoffman, would hear the
Fifth
and write,
Radiant beams shoot through the deep
night of this region and we become aware of gigantic shadows which, rocking back and forth, close in on us, and destroy all within us except the pain of endless longing
.

I play the
Fifth
for Gabriel one afternoon, while he sits on the bed, and turn up the volume so that he can enter the symphony the way he enters jazz. He listens, while keeping his body very still and his head cocked to the side; as the first movement proceeds to the second, he starts to rock. I imagine Beethoven composing, the pen’s scratches and the ringing in his ears that dogs him as he goes deaf. In the last movement, he adds instruments that have been previously silent: trombone, piccolo, contrabassoon. Silent—but they get the finale. I picture him hunched over his work and irascible because of the growing deafness that he tolerates better while composing. He forges a trail for the musician or the listener to follow, even the ones two centuries later. He says, follow me or be lost in this place; he knows how to endure the deficits of the body, lovers who slip away, fury that bolts through him and necessitates his apologies, the need to have paper or a piece of slate so visitors can write down what they want to say because he can no longer hear them through the noise.

I watch Gabriel absorbing the sounds, how open and attentive his expression has become. What Beethoven seems to be saying to him, to Byrd, to me, to anyone who will listen, is
I hear something else and I will lead the way
.

G
abriel has to be unpeeled, the bed stripped, the floor scrubbed, the windows opened. We’re attended in the night by plastic bags, newspapers, soaps, latex gloves, and disinfectant. The pyjamas, extracted inch by inch, are so far gone (under there somewhere is a pattern of snowboarders maybe, or hockey players; I haven’t found such a thing as jazz pyjamas), I decide to throw them out. Which feels extravagant. Which feels clean and resolute; also dark and slightly wicked—a skin of him I’m throwing away. I walk him gingerly to the bathroom over a newspaper path since his feet are covered also. The extent of the mess crowds us, along with the messes exactly like it in the future, though it seems that the remedy is conferred by easily available things. Soap and water. Since I’m hustling inside a scene that’s vaguely apocalyptic, the thought occurs to me, what if they weren’t available, what then? But the soap is lavender-scented, the water warm, and Gabriel is calm and quiet while I wash him. The past Gabriel is here, the baby who loved to be bathed, and then the toddler who hated it and churned in a slippery struggle. The future Gabriel is here, too, the one who is my size and then bigger, the one with stubble to shave. Together we work along the Möbius strip of care.

R and I have been obliged to be obsessed by how Gabriel’s body works and doesn’t, how it expresses again and again whatever maladaptation has occurred in his brain. His bowel movements in particular have become one of our principal concerns, often superseding intellectual development and communication in the queue for attention because if the bowels aren’t working, then nothing is. Contrary to this episode of sprawling feces, constipation has been his near constant companion since toddlerhood. More than this, virtually every fundamental process required to live in relative comfort has, in his body, become complicated. Around the time that his words began their exodus, he turned from being a child who ate an unusually broad spectrum of food, especially vegetables, to narrowing what he would put in his mouth to yogurt, applesauce, pudding, and the occasional sandwich or French fry, a diet that unsurprisingly exacerbated the sluggishness of his bowels. Physiological examinations turned up nothing to explain the change; it was yet another way that our world created dissonance for him, it was another kind of turning away. He was often battling dehydration, too, because he refused to drink more than a few sips at a time, even once ending up in the hospital with a saline drip. After that, R and I had to haunt him with a syringe filled with juice that we would squirt into his mouth whenever he started refusing to drink, in an effort to ward off another hospital stay. We have pored over when he last defecated or drank until time has turned to units that rely on his systems. Five days since he’s had a bowel movement, twelve hours since he’s had a drink. But each thing stands in relation to everything else, and so this exorbitant display of feces in his room is actually preferable to the subjugation of our daily routines to constipation, and at some point, he simply started eating his old diet
again, as if pastas and stews and curries and tagines were always what he preferred, as if he had never turned away.