by Maria Mutch
His sleeve freezes to a spot on the table where earlier he spilled some water, and after freeing his arm, he gets in his sleeping bag. Writing letters to his wife and children, he thinks of Scott’s dying words, Last entry. For God’s sake, look after our people, and places the letters in a green metal box that he stores on a shelf. Instructions to two of his men he ties to a nail that would normally suspend his lantern. Sleep comes and goes, as does a flickering of gratitude that he is still alive.
He is awake and feeling lucid. He lets the beam of his flashlight linger on a bottle of sleeping pills, then takes the bottle and pours the contents into his hand. Sleep and death, perhaps they are the same here. Like the snow crystals that surround him, the pills are white and minimal enough. They can be tamed in the hand, held on the tongue; they connect to a region of obliterating white. Taken collectively, they are a door.
There is an alternative, however: he sees a piece of blank paper lying on his bunk. It is another kind of portal. He writes on it,
The universe is not dead.
figment [no.2]
It is early spring and I’m running through wetlands from which the colour has been drained. Trees are still bare, and the ones in the middle of the marsh spike up headless and limbless. But activity under the water’s surface belies what appears on top to be a still frozen quiet; everything is actively becoming something else. Tufts of grass burst up among the dead leaves. The trees farther along the trail, where the marsh isn’t digesting them, are alive and bud-covered. Several days of rain have soaked the bark through, soaked everything so that the forest is black.
My feet hitting a small wooden bridge cause a great egret to burst out of the trees. The scene unlocks suddenly, the black trees snapping out this flag of white. The sky is a slope of white, too, banked and solid, into which the egret vanishes.
The door’s the thing. Gabriel opens the night with it, pounds on it, and the sound is like a giant wanting in. His bedroom door shudders and the sound comes for me, as if the giant is there in my ear. The pounding wrecks the heart. If R and I have been in a deep sleep, we feel the burst of adrenaline, start panting before our feet hit the floor. If R is the one answering the terrible drum, he’ll remember it in the morning; if I’m the one to get up, he’ll go back to sleep within seconds and in the morning will often remember nothing about the giant in the night.
When Gabriel gets out of bed, he’ll sit on the floor behind the door with his legs straight out in front of him. He’s so flexible that when drowsy enough, he’ll simply fold his torso down to rest between his legs, his cheek against the floor, and has been known to sleep in this position for several hours. His legs have begun to turn outwards from so many sessions of sleeping this way that we try as much as possible to get him back into bed and lying prone. If he’s sitting on the floor and doesn’t fold himself and go to sleep, but instead sits there and wonders what to do, well, there is the door.
In the metaphysics of autism, doors have significance for him. He bangs them, drums his fingers on them, runs his nails lightly along them, pounds them so the hollow interiors of the cheap ones fill with sound. (He has been given actual drums, but he doesn’t engage them the same way.) He pulls and yanks and thrusts them, and his favourite: he slams. He swings them open wide before the push, so they fly shut, look like wings in midflap. The door in the night is his communication device, his conduit and sounding board, a tribal drum signaling haste, come running—now. Listen to Philly Joe Jones on the drums at the start of the Bill Evans Trio’s “Night and Day”; it is the sound of Gabriel playing his door.
He has been fascinated with doors since toddlerhood, perhaps because of their binary open and shut, or maybe because of their potential to reveal. Of a wall, but not a wall. There are keys and codes and passwords, letter slots and numbers, welcome mats or, in cartoons anyway, trapdoors. The space on the other side could be a brick wall or infinity. The door is glass, or has a window, or is nothing more than a veil or beaded strings. There are doorbells that glow, and brass knockers shaped like a pear or a face. Doors can be whispered open or broken down. Maybe that’s the thing he wants most when he’s pounding: the way out. It’s not as simple as it would seem. The boy who can fall inside jazz and find his way home again finds a doorknob hard to operate, so perhaps this is part of the draw. A child’s development, I’ve discovered, isn’t the linear progression some would have you believe; there are detours, blind alleys, rotaries. He can use a spoon, create his I-wants, and work the buttons on his portable DVD player, but doorknobs, pencils, and shoelaces confound him. Even covering himself with his blanket once he gets back into bed is a kind of motor planning that stalls him.
When I open his door, he looks up at me with an alert gaze from his spot on the floor. He gets to his feet and plunges onto his bed. I tuck him in, turn out his light, draw the door shut behind me as I leave. I wonder what he dreams about, what his nightmares are like. A dim light glows from the bathroom, and my shadow glides briefly along the wall.
Pounding on the door is another way of talking; he collects ways of saying. Recently he discovered that the main phone unit attached to our kitchen wall has a speaker button on it and that if we aren’t right around him but he wants us to be, he can press the button and summon us with a long, loud dial tone. Which is followed by two rings, and then a recording (which can be heard clearly upstairs) of an operator, If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again. If you need help, hang up and then dial your operator. Then the recording starts again before reverting to the dial tone. We’ve learned to materialise as fast as we can at the first sound of the tone, come running before the damn recording comes on again. We’ll find him with his fingers clasped together over his belly and moving contentedly foot to foot.
He uses what he finds at hand to send out his messages. There is a night that I open his door to find that he has stripped his mattress. I have heard of children who do this on a regular basis, take apart all the blankets and sheets, and then go for the curtains, but this is the first time that I’ve seen him do it, and so I wonder if this is the start of a new obsession that will confound each and every attempt to be resolved, and what, in his code, it means. Each thing he does tends to come freighted with significance, or at least this is what I hope to find, even in his act of unmaking the bed. Is he trying for the simplicity of the mattress or the chaos of the blanket heap? Imitating his parents changing the sheets or just reveling in coming apart?
But, remarkably, he doesn’t leave the mattress empty. He’s placed five of his twirly-creatures in a line at the top of his bed. The pillow is on the floor with the blankets. He sits on his bare mattress, looking at the animals as if they are an audience. He has gathered a committee, a crew, or witnesses. Despite the hour and the bed’s state, this dismantling is good news. He has rarely engaged in what is considered imaginative play, and this looks for all the world like playing.
Perhaps the twirlies know his secrets, or he theirs. They are expressions of the material world’s mystery and its dissonance, its sheer weirdness, as if they’re jokes about beingness. They are studies. His favourites include a small pink pig, a zebra, a duck, and a tiny bear wearing a jester’s cap. Each one has been given to him by a friend or relative who no longer knows what to get for him, and each has been exhausted to the point of coming apart, the fur matted, the eyes gone, and in the case of the bear, the paws have been clutched into oblivion and the jester’s cap is now just a small velvet shred. They have been tortured beyond reason and still they won’t tell.
I know other children with variants of autism whose material obsessions yield similar specificity. In J’s case, he is passionate about empty but fragrant paper coffee cups or Altoids tins. In H’s case, he has a small toy aquarium with fish that swim when he presses a button, and which he carries with him everywhere. B’s passion is a ragged bunny on a string and chicken nuggets. Each child is a connoisseur of their chosen object, which if no longer rewarding will be replaced by anot
her, equally specific. It is not just any bear or fish or chicken nuggets, but very particular ones. I imagine that they are each constructing a roster of necessities, the ones that will snag their attention and hold off the dissonance within and around them. Something like a list of provisions.
There is a tiny beach not far from my house where the water coughs up so many little white shells that they have to be shoveled back by tractors twice a year. Millions of small worlds, whorled homes, tombs. Footsteps make a crinkling sound and send dozens of tiny spiders shooting across the shells like brown darts. The Atlantic swells, becomes sea after sea until they swirl around the ice where Byrd is, was, one more facet of my connection to him. What is cerulean one day is gunmetal the next. The changeling water relentlessly folds, and where it meets the shore, it shapes and hammers the way it does around the islands and pack ice in Antarctica.
One of my favourite places to run curves along the ocean, and I can stand on the beach when I’m done and look at the bay, watch poised egrets stare hard into the surf for their catch. Across the Narragansett Bay is a tiny island where, on a day in July, a big band is playing. We cross to the island for the day, curl on a sunny, hot hill to sip sour lemonade and listen to the band. S, who is bored, sprawls on the grass and rolls repeatedly down the hill, but Gabriel sits on the blanket and listens. After the concert, we walk through the crowded streets and wonder about the people who live in the cottages year-round, think about them in the winter winds, crossing grey seas on the slow ferries, relishing the quiet when the tourists are huddled on the mainland. When we are hot and tired, we board the ferry to go back, and support Gabriel as he walks cautiously up the steep metal stairs.
We settle in and the boat fills with heat and people. Gabriel, tilting his head, watches a group who partied on the island. They are college age and lugging folding chairs and beer coolers. I photograph the sea through the water drops on the windows, and S asks for potato chips and more lemonade.
We are only about fifteen minutes from the mainland when a man comes to stand close to Gabriel. Too close, and Gabriel swats him. He has been calm until this point, has tucked in the urges that no doubt have been circulating through him like blood cells. I cover his hands with mine and apologize to the man, but when the man turns and looks at Gabriel, really sees his face, his expression changes. I’ve seen the transfiguration many times; a stranger comes upon Gabriel and receives him well or not, but anyway receives him. Some people are wary of him and encounter their own darkness, but others seem to suddenly feel something sentimental and want to convey it. The man is stalled by his surprise and he says to Gabriel, and to me, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. He bends his body unknowingly into that curve of autistic space that crackles like an electric fence around Gabriel, he steps into that static-filled space. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. He lists with the boat, dazzled and maybe drunk, and is unable to stop staring at Gabriel or delivering his apologia. I struggle to keep Gabriel’s hands from flying up into the man’s face as I say, It’s okay, it’s okay, hoping to release him from Gabriel’s orbit. He staggers finally into the crowd and vanishes. I sit back in my seat, look out past the people to the bit of sky showing in the windows.
I don’t see Gabriel’s hand rise up. The movement is so fierce and quick that I register only something like a molten red that appears before the pain, and the feeling of time slowing as my nose absorbs the hit in a way I would have said it couldn’t accommodate. And so I cover my face with my hands, and I think, though it’s not, that my nose is broken.
It isn’t possible to think, not in the usual way. I know the ferry continues listing and the crowd, if it sees what has happened or not, continues to knit and unknit between the aisles and vinyl seats, and there must be sounds, but all is silence. Silence and the colour red, and R’s hands tight above my elbows, lifting me out of the seat and placing me in another one as I scurry into myself as far as possible. It’s not Gabriel I want to shrink from but the gaze of the nearby strangers who will not realise the dark of the secret society that’s just been revealed is only one aspect, and only one aspect of Gabriel, that the simplicity of the hit is bordered by the complexities of saying—so many years of him trying to say what he feels, what he wants, who he is. I want to tell them that if their words had drifted away, they too might find themselves lashing out after them. I want them to understand what is impossible to understand: I know how we got here.
Gabriel seems to retreat also, at least he appears to be doing so when I finally open my eyes again. The heat suffocates us, and the depleted air, and the silence, too, that folds like waves, one over the other.
The Ice
The looking glass hangs on a nail near a shelf and Byrd takes it down. It seems that he’s ready to see himself as he really is, in this poorly lit place where the shadows transform what is already liminal. The face that appears in his shaving mirror, however, is folding with age and weakness, and shows the spots the cold has eaten. He’s so disheartened by what he sees that he’ll have to answer another bout of mental disintegration with visions of being surrounded by sunlight and the people he loves. The following afternoon he’ll test his battery-powered radio and tune it to the weekly broadcast from Little America to the United States, so he can steady himself with distant voices. The men at Little America will tell the audience about the cows, named Klondike, Deerfoot, and Southern Girl, and the calf born on the journey named Iceberg, that were brought to the Ice to supply milk, how one of the cows won’t lie down and another refuses to get up. Byrd’s wife and children in Boston will have piled onto his bed at 9 Brimmer Street and tuned into the broadcast. The day after that, he’ll have a radio schedule with his men where he’ll stop himself from calling for help and he’ll contrive messages in his inept code to make it appear that all is more or less well. But at the moment, he is suspended in his little mirror, watching himself watching himself; he is turning in the vortices that layer Antarctica, a witness to being consumed.
Gabriel rarely watches himself. He only catches glimpses. Like our cat, he’ll often smoothly avert his gaze when he’s standing in front of a mirror, not as if he’s afraid to see himself but as if he has no curiosity about how he appears in the glass nor interest that there is a glass at all. Then again, maybe he understands the power of the other self, and like Byrd would prefer not to see the one that is darker and harder to grasp.
He discovered his shadow when he was two and a half and still fairly new to walking. He had a wide, uneasy stance and his hands out at his sides, swiping the air for balance. I had taken him to a neighbourhood park, and he lurched over the grass toward the sand. Though he still had some of his words and signs, the long slow diaspora having only just begun, he was quiet and focusing his attention on the ground. When he reached the pale sand, the dark slice of him was sharpened and he stopped. Looked, moved. Looked. Moved again.
He stared at the ground, at the boy whose legs stretched like ribbons from his feet. He watched how the shadow mimicked, thinly but precisely, the aspect of the lit world that was him. He looked like he couldn’t get over it.
Byrd is late for radio contact with his men. Dyer, back at Little America, has been saying Byrd’s call letters KFY and waiting for him to answer in his poor Morse code, which Dyer grows tired of doing and plays music instead. When Byrd finally gathers strength to run the generator and tune his receiver, he likes what he hears. He listens in the hut’s dim light, surrounded by crystal walls, waiting for the music to finish before he’ll key anything to let them know he’s there. I think of him receiving the notes—a little like Gabriel listening to jazz, sitting, receiving the notes that have been able to travel the distance. One hundred and twenty-three miles lie between Byrd and the sounds’ origin, not so far really, except that in this place the distance may as well be infinite. For tractors and men, the ice is full of spikes and razors, and crevasses that open to plunge downward for hundreds of feet. Byrd and his men could not be farther apart.
I picture him slumpe
d there in a chair beside the receiver when he hears Charlie Murphy’s voice:
Oversleep, Dick?
Maybe Byrd pauses here, takes a breath before tapping his code:
No.
Busy.
It’s June 28 and Tom Poulter is sending his voice from Little America across the ice to Byrd’s hut. He is making a proposal: that he and a few of the men come to the hut to observe meteors, and that Byrd, if he wishes, could return with the tractor to Little America. The journey out to him, barring storms, crevasses, breakdowns, and navigational issues, would take a few days.
Since Byrd began disintegrating, there has been a dance between him and Poulter, one in which he tries to lead and then pulls back. His rough Morse code tangles his meaning, but he speaks in code, too, when he holds back how ill he’s become, how sleepless, how he forces himself to eat. How he’s dying. He thinks he’s got Poulter and Murphy fooled, but because the messages scattering in from Advance Base show gaps and confusion, they have their suspicions. Instead of asking him directly if he needs rescue, which they know he would have to refuse because of the dangers involved and the lack of light on the Barrier, they have decided on this approach: a proposal. Meteor observation. What is, for their part, a rescue in disguise, planned for clear weather sometime between July 23rd and the 29th. In the fumes and cold of his hut, the idea elates him at the same time that it rocks him with remorse. He is a pendulum. Poulter’s voice comes again in the hut, Well, what do you think of it? Byrd taps out Wait a minute, then tells him to make trial runs and let him know the results. After he signs off, he continues to mull and vacillate, long into the night.