Know the Night

by Maria Mutch

  Did Monk control the silence, or did it control him? Perhaps it was both. His father spent the last years of his life in a mental institution, suffering from some of the same things that afflicted Monk. But Monk had his music, a way of conversing with the silence. Sometimes he would get up during a gig and dance around, which meant he thought the band was swinging. And he had Nellie, his wife and support. He would sweat when he played, and so Nellie made him large white handkerchiefs with which he could wipe his face, and sometimes when he got up to dance, he’d unfurl one of these flags. His surrender.

  The Ice

  It is the last day of May, and Byrd has a radio schedule with his men, which means running the generator in his tunnel. Listening to the distant voices on his radio receiver, he conducts business with Little America for an hour and a half, sending back his hesitant code until it occurs to him that the engine doesn’t sound right. Wait, he spells, and goes to check. He is snuffed like a flame. When he regains consciousness, he reaches for the telegraph key and through a heavy veil, signs off, though he can’t get the earphones back on his head to know whether Little America has responded. Dizziness and nausea rumble through and his heart surges.

  In the scramble of memory and time, he finds himself lying on his bunk. He wakes enough to understand that the engine is still running. Crawling under the exhaust clouds, he is finally able to reach it and shut it down; crawls again to his stiff sleeping bag and shifts himself in.

  Later he will write, … the illusion of being a thin flame drawn between two voids.

  When I’m here in the dark, I wish on the stars for what seems like their detachment, their delicious remove. What looks like a kind of freedom. But the twinkling is a bit of a ruse, attached as it is to a thread that stretches back into a sink of millions of years. Somewhere back in time their cores rage. Night’s ancient blasts and fires that are now so refined the cacophony is lost, combustion turning cold and clean and inscrutable. I want, sometimes, a night like this.

  figment [no.1]

  Running around the edge of the pond, I see the hunched form of the fox, exposed in daylight as though sleeping in grass. A few flies thread the air around her as I look more closely to assess how still she is, how dead. I watch and wait, wondering the protocol. Do you speak to the dead? Say a prayer? I whisper, and improbably the fox lifts her head, carefully turning her small painted face toward me, her eyes shut tight as fists. She is not yet dead. I feel like Alice, like I’ve grown larger and larger until I’m forced to back away and slip around the other side of the pond, taking my presence and intrusions with me. I walk in an arc, sitting down on the grass many yards away, obscured by foliage. But after I watch her dying for a while, she lifts her head in my direction, smelling where I am, so I pull away again. She is not to be watched, and I run back to the path, slip back into the forest.

  3 a.m.

  white

  Dear Mom and Pops,

  This is going to be bad news and here it is, our class is going to slay our plants. Do you know what slay means? These plants were meant to die. First we grow them and act like we love them, then after a while we … have them Die. So, that is what this paragraph is all about.

  love, S

  S is afraid of the dark. There is a sharp glow around his door that illuminates the end of the hall. He sleeps under the glare of his ceiling light and not one but two bedside lamps, which R and I sneak in to turn off before we go to bed. At some point during the night, he gets up and turns them back on. But all this is fairly new; when he was a baby and toddler, he slept fearlessly in the dark. There are no streetlamps or neon signs here to leak in. Only a low full moon, especially if there’s snow cover, will spill inside so that it’s possible to move around without a light. Otherwise, the black is a palpable element. Once he reached a certain age, it seemed that he understood that he entered his dreams alone. How vulnerable the sleeping body is, how left behind. Paralyzed and private. He could no longer float trustingly into sleep with everything dark around him and so in order to go to bed, he arms himself with light, layers of it in every lamp around him. He has nearly unbroken sleeps, and R and I don’t hear from him until morning. When I told my therapist about his impervious slumbers she said, He knows who has the night.

  Of course, I’m afraid of the dark, too. The problem is the range of possibility, the way exploration has to be done by feel before finding the lamp. My recurring dream as a child: feeling through a dark room for the light switch and finding that it doesn’t work. The dark is the sovereign country of the unknown, and a borderless one, at that. The guards are just glimpses and shapes. Striking a light is only so helpful when the light is artificial, an intruder. The dark hunkers down in the self-satisfied comprehension that it is the one, and the only one, at home.

  But what I’m afraid of now, aside from the dark, is interruptions in the dark. I wake even when Gabriel sleeps, just because I’m anticipating getting up. The anxiety becomes too large, almost as if the interruption arrives not from him but through him, as if the universe is transmitting its own impatience, the primacy of its need. When he breaks the night or hovers expectantly in daylight, it’s electric and impossible to ignore. He’s a tsunami of interruption, a forty-foot wall of it. We can only allow him to pass over, loaded with boats and houses and drifting people, awash in the force of him and the resulting debris to which we’ll have to attend.

  And then I think I must have it wrong. Byrd, even in his misery, looks out to the night around him, in which he is entirely alone, and he watches the sky. The aurora unfolds, both sinister and beautiful, and he feels a harmony with the things that normally lie beyond his attention; he is lifted out of himself and spends a moment or two where he understands all that he needs to before he begins again to forget. The dark is the fulcrum for that harmony—the aurora is invisible without it. So, too, the stars.

  It took years to see that Gabriel was unlike anyone we knew, until we finally understood that no one was either so magical or so lost to behavioural repetitions. Bound by increasing cycles and loops, he would repeat an action without seeming to tire of it. Aside from shrieking episodes and night waking, he would throw or bang an object, or rock back and forth, or jump up and down for long periods, and like the disappearance of his words, the accumulation was gradual and almost lulling.

  There was a space when he was very little where we caught our breath. The seizures were gone and the crying, too, and he emerged from that spell a round, beaming baby, one year old. There were the first ripples of conversation, the first sightings that we took to be him, the authentic him (which was erroneous, of course, because he has always been the authentic him). I remember that in the autumn of that year, R and I took him camping to Algonquin Park, a huge Ontario forest, and how extraordinary and ordinary this seemed. We showed him moose standing in streams, enormous beaver dams, the lit halls of hemlock cathedrals, and lakes old enough to be dying. We hiked under beech trees where black bears had nestled in the branches and feasted on the seeds. At night, guides organized wolf calls so that the humans could converse with the wolves, but it was just a distant, floating language. The wolves were peripheral and cloaked, and we never caught a glimpse of them. Two weeks after returning home, we read in the Globe and Mail about a couple and their toddler camping just a few miles from where we’d been; a wolf had lunged into their camp, grabbed the child by the abdomen, and tossed him in the air before fleeing. The boy had escaped injury. I wondered about him, about the story he would have to tell when he grew up, how a wolf had grabbed him, and he flew.

  As Gabriel grew, he seemed to become more entranced by his repetitions, the most notable, because the most onerous, being his shrieking, but he began to practise an entire language of obsessions and sameness, one that expresses his uneasiness with his body and all the world’s things. Throwing began, and the swinging of doors open and shut, and sometimes hitting himself in the head. It’s like watching someone with an impaired memory wake every day to a new world, one that
he has to examine and repudiate all over again. Various sensory therapies followed, attempts to ease the exchanges between him and everything else. When he was still small, we massaged his limbs and swept a soft brush over his body, a process called the Wilbarger Protocol, which is meant to alleviate sensory discomfort, and used vibrating toys on his hands for the same reason. We took him for cranio-sacral therapy, where a man gently massaged Gabriel’s skull, and hired a private occupational therapist to create an at-home program to help him acclimate to the routine tasks of daily living and their attendant objects: the use of a spoon, a cup, a toothbrush, a hairbrush. He seemed to enjoy the therapies, and providing them made R and I feel less helpless, but his repetitions and what seems like sensitivities in his hands have continued. The mysteries of language and communication have become knotted up with the presence of the body and objects within a space. Watching him repeatedly dismantle the contents of a drawer, for instance, makes me think that he isn’t only playing in the way a toddler does when emptying the kitchen cupboards but that something more philosophical is happening and he is working out the puzzle of the material world, the thingness of things. In some ways, it’s gratifying to see him sit on the floor beside a chest of drawers and pull T-shirts and pants into heaps around him because it does seem like playing, connected as it is to the development of typical babies. But he is far from being a baby now, and the relentless focus on his task reminds R and me that we are all a bit stuck. The clothes heap, like Sisyphus’ rock, suggests we are chained to a process of repacking drawers, to righting and repairing things.

  Gabriel throws. He throws magazines, stuffed bears, plastic plates, pillows, storybooks, pens, toast, peanut butter sandwiches, puzzle pieces, playing cards, and lamps.

  Also CDs, DVDs, DVD players, blankets, toothpaste tubes, hairbrushes, toy cars, Lego pieces, crayons, and picture symbols.

  Shoes, socks, pants, turtlenecks, nail clippers, novels, and cheese cubes.

  Pretzels, building blocks, French fries with ketchup, cups with juice, bagels with cream cheese.

  Staplers, tree-shaped candleholders, comic books, atlases, high-heeled dancing shoes, prescription sunglasses.

  Paper napkins, bowls of yogurt, bowls of popcorn, bowls of pudding, and bowls.

  Buttons, butter knives, orange slices, apple pieces, paper clips, camera parts, and magnets.

  And balls. He throws balls.

  If you want to be with him, converse with him, live with him, you must be willing to be with the repetitions also. They’re something he’s trying to say. Which doesn’t mean that I’m always available to hear it. The repetitions are deafening, deadening, and simple. Sisyphus’ trek with his rock is not complicated; it’s precisely the simplicity and the anticipation of the next cycle that generates the mien dark enough to be mythological. When the repetitions come in their spare but unceasing waves, I experience something very much like self-pity. I read a few words in a book, and he taps his sentence strip on my shoulder or leans over me as I sit in a chair and a long drip of saliva falls from his mouth (which, because I’m his mother, and in spite of the frustration, I sometimes find eloquent). Or he stamps his foot or makes a sound, a whine or a moan, or he taps his yes/no sign. I fulfill his requests, read a few words more, try to centre myself in the spot I was, and hear the television remote shatter on the living room floor or cutlery clatter and spin on the kitchen tile, or S’s books and drawings being swept from the table. The rest of us insist, regardless of knowing better, regardless of knowing his thoroughly entrenched repetitions, on continuing to place our books and drawings on the table, the TV remote out in the open in the living room. (And the TV remote has a story of its own; aside from being held together with tape, it has also lived for its own protection inside a plastic container; until Gabriel learned to open plastic containers, and we found him, giddy with triumph, sitting on the sofa with the remote.) We insist on flouting his rules because our habits are more like his than we care to admit, because repetition is comforting in some way, or it’s a way of insisting on having our way, and so we suffer a loop of our own.

  I was chopping vegetables while he sat and ate his cheese cubes, a magazine on the tabletop beside him. Magazines are one of his tantalizers. Eventually the cheese was gone, but the magazine remained. I saw, as so many times before, how he reached for it, slowly and subtly, his fingertips finally touching down and the almost luxurious tugging on the paper. The magazine turned fluid as it spilled over the table edge and resolidified before it hit the tile.

  I have wanted to open the repetitions, see the insides. His experiments are ones of extension: how to place the urges in his body into the atmosphere and see the consequence in the people around him. The variations are exquisitely minute, and endless. Thousands of incidents—pullings, tuggings, throwings—and an equal number of responses. R and I are practiced at the poker face, the slow breathing, the nonchalance, but if the repetitions show us anything it is how human we are, how fallible. There is always a time when we react more than we intended, or when his faulty vision is suddenly so attuned that he detects the ripple of frustration, a sweat droplet on the brow. Examining the repetition does nothing; there is only more of the same.

  When Gabriel was still a small baby, small enough that R and I believed that by receiving various nutritional and educational therapies, he would surpass the low expectations other people had of his development, long before he exhibited behaviours that moved him from one diagnosis into another, I went with a friend to visit an older couple and their grown son with Down syndrome. At the time, I thought I was coming to see the future, what Gabriel would in some way be like. D was in his early thirties and, dressed in a button-down shirt and khakis, went into the kitchen to make us coffee. He rode the transit system by himself and had a job. He griped about the people he worked with. He showed me his computer where he was entering word-for-word the pages of a book he liked. He stuttered severely, and at the time—unaware of just how accomplished he was—I thought it was somewhat tragic how much time and patience were required to hear him. The stuttering seemed like a barrier to the man who was so well developed and thoughtful, and I was inexperienced enough not to see that, in the grand scope of impairments, it was incidental.

  His chief love was for musicals, and he went to see as many as possible, his favourite being The Wizard of Oz. He had an old hardcover edition of the book that he showed me while telling me about seeing the musical version at a nearby theatre. I asked him who was his favourite character, and he answered, Oh, the Wizard, and described the scene where the Wizard is discovered to be just a man. He struggled over his words, but they were there—the very elusive creatures I would love to hear now from Gabriel—one halting sound at a time. I feel like that sometimes, he said.

  I’m a very good man … I’m just not a very good wizard.

  I’m not a very good wizard either.

  I have watched Gabriel’s favourite spot in the living room became more and more featureless as we’ve negotiated the territory with him and made our modifications. In some ways our freedoms have shrunk in accordance with his (though freedom is a relative concept; we likely can’t grasp either the degree to which his freedoms are lost, or the surprising ways that he might be freer than we are). Certain drawers are kept locked or emptied because of his raiding, and loose objects kept out of reach. Where the coffee table once stood, there’s now nothing. The walls are bare and the end tables, too. (It’s okay, I’ve discovered, for us to be bitter about the adaptations, and it’s also okay to note that the need for them has made us increasingly resourceful. Also less cluttered.) We don’t tend to collect things—the miniature or the fragile or the found—to bring home; no groups of shells or vases or figurines, though we do have shelves stuffed with books. In the arbitrary rules of his obsessions, there are certain things that are exempt from his notice, and the books fall into this category; so, too, Christmas trees.

  In the absence of a ceiling light, there was, however, a lamp. Because o
f the room’s configuration, the lamp had to sit on a small table not far from the sofa, close to the spot where he curls up or stands and bounces. It was seductively large, made of gleaming metal with a pleated white shade, and he discovered that he could crash it, breaking the bulb, or tip it slowly, so that it fell almost elegantly, gaining momentum before hitting the floor. Sometimes the light would stay on and draw taut his interest. He repeated the process with every righting of the lamp, which stayed more or less intact, though sometimes he ignored its presence for days at a time only to remember it and begin again.

  Begin again. We didn’t understand. He was five years old when he started to shove the lamp, and he continued for two years. It was like finding a new hieroglyph and peering at it with a headlamp and held breath to try to figure out what the hell it meant. Because that was it: its meaning and how to get him to stop. We wondered what was the word for this, because it became apparent that there had to be one, that he had stepped with his repetitions from one circle into another. It seemed to us that he was so unlike anyone else we knew, even other children with developmental delays, that a moat had formed around us; we were, all of us, isolated.