Know the Night (3 page)

Elsewhere in his room, the indications of suspended time: two bins filled to the top with his small stuffed animals (his
twirlies
), the elephants and rabbits and bears with their paws and ears pinched into pointy twists; another bin filled with balls; a yellow bookshelf filled with picture books, many of them from his infancy; plain plastic shades on the windows coloured a retreating beige in the hope that he’ll leave them where they are; a closet full of the developmental toys—puzzles and foam blocks and toddler games—from which he has never progressed, and stacks of picture symbols, homemade storybooks, drawings from his schoolmates saying things like
Gabe yur the best!
with sketches in bright marker of saxophones and drums; the detritus of various physical, occupational, and nutritional therapies, and missives from the professionals that have come and gone and come again since his birth: pediatrician, pediatric dentist, neurologist, speech therapist, occupational therapist, pediatric ophthalmologist, physical therapist, developmental therapist, gastroenterologist, and psychiatrist.

In the rest of the house, the signatures of the cyclones that have spun out from him: the unbreakable plastic cups and plates and toddler utensils with fat handles, and here and there the patching jobs to cover the dents in the furniture and the black semicircles on the walls where he has swung picture frames when walking by; toys
and books that are held together with tape like little Frankenstein’s monsters, and the dried speckles of juice, pudding, and yogurt explosions that have escaped the exhausted washcloth. Everywhere you look, the battered, rejoined scene, walls left with a blank stare, cabinet doors that lean from their hinges in a house that has gone elastic. Everywhere, the evidence of entropy and gravity and the provisional nature of the material world in the hands of a boy who doesn’t speak.

Before Gabriel, I believed that night is for forgetting in the morning, for a kind of indifference to reality or at least the outward appearance of it, and if we happen to catch a glimpse of night itself, it’s through the veil of electric lights. When Gabriel was three—and shortly before I became pregnant with his little brother—we moved from the outskirts of Toronto to a small town in Rhode Island, where we could see the stars, easily, but even with the astronomical readily available, there was still the sense that seeing and being aware of it for longer than the walk from the car to the door of the house is unusual. Humans can be a little estranged from night, stuffing the dark as we do with fears or streetlamps, and that estrangement included me. Until Gabriel began his Sisyphean rising, and rising.

When he was still a toddler, I took him to a playgroup, where a woman struck up a conversation. She asked me if I belonged to a Down syndrome society.

Except that she didn’t say,
Down syndrome society
. What she said was, leaning forward and tilting her head slightly,
Do you belong to a secret society?
And then she stopped, laughing with embarrassment, and corrected herself.

It’s okay
, I said.
It’s okay. I know what you mean
.

But entrance to the society, and its knowledge, has a price. Night is composed of the things we aren’t meant to see or know, and evidence of my transgression turns up as crying jags, an inability to abide the simplest logic or remember the most fundamental details. Sleeplessness has been so persistent that I commit the lapses of a bland dementia: the coffee mug ends up in the fridge, the milk in the cupboard. I don’t see the time of a medical appointment despite it being marked in capitals on the calendar. One day a stoplight seems perfectly green in my reality and I slide through a startled intersection, just narrowly avoiding a tragedy. This is the hallmark of sleepless living, the almost unconscious flirting with potential disaster, the playing with charms that are really electrical wires or scissors. The amount of sleep I get is too short for adequate dreaming, and I stay close to the surface, where the sleep is delicate and prone to dissolving. During the day, my mind feels stuffed with cotton balls and briars, the brain itself rubbed with sandpaper. And yet, in spite of what feels like mental disintegration, I have moments of lucidity, when my visual cortex seems especially charged. In those moments, the symbolism of objects becomes available; the red apple on the counter, the horse’s black eye, the white curls on the ocean mean something. Colours break open in a deluge of prismatic code. Van Gogh wrote,
Colours indeed have something to say for themselves
. And if there was anyone who was acquainted with the night and the shattered mind, it was he.

The shattered mind also tends to dwell in isolation. In the night, I’m alone with Gabriel, cleaved from all the sleepers in the world, even the ones I love most. They turn to shadows and slip away. R and S. My isolation, however, doesn’t prevent an understanding:
there are other initiates in the society. I know a man who was hired by exhausted parents to be the night nanny to an autistic boy who would rise from his bed and pinch his sleeping sister; my friend’s job was to stand sentry at the bedroom door, guarding the sleep, or the waking, of the boy—guarding the night.

I wonder how many of us are in this darkness—and who would take the census, rapping on our shadowy doors, to count us like coins or diseases? I think the number is larger than some would guess, that we move about unnoticed or unknown or cloaked or secret. We are up, with the doctors and nurses and firefighters, because in the night the child’s abrasive response to the usual rhythms becomes an emergency. Or at least an emergence. We are up.

The other initiates can be hard to discern, but I look anyway. When Gabriel and I listen to his jazz albums, I know the musicians are speaking a night language, and it feels like an understanding is being traded back and forth; it feels like empathy.

I’ve looked in other places, too, for the initiates, and in January 2007, I ordered a book online. It was by Admiral Richard Byrd, the polar explorer and aviator. In 1934, while on his second expedition to Antarctica, he attempted to stay in a hut by himself for six months during the part of the polar year when the sun doesn’t rise. He made it through four, though nearly died doing so. The book is called
Alone
.

Even the title seemed commiserating. But Byrd wasn’t the first discovery in my search for solace. Initially, I was intrigued by explorers in cold places, either poles or mountains, and the idea of their aloneness, and not loneliness necessarily but singularity. The spaces were captivating, the sheets of ice and snow, and either a
never-ending day or a never-ending night seemed both beautiful and difficult. There were ships and men locked in ice in the Arctic, and arcs and curtains being drawn in auroras of rippling colour. Or I was intrigued with climbers of Everest, for instance, the ones who don’t come back and are grafted by cold for eternity to the side of the mountain, made indelible in a hard rumple of clothes. Imagine the subsequent climbers who find the bodies, which are eerily seated, perhaps, as though waiting. So maybe the idea has to do with waiting, or with being found, or being found too late. The idea has to do with the attempt at exploring a difficult place and with whether or not there is rescue.

After the mountain climbers and Arctic explorers, my attention turned to the Antarctic, which seemed even more of a blank. An intriguing Nothingness, one correlative with the psychic regions where I’ve been stumbling. A place so abstract it came to us first as an idea, providing semantic balance to the North. There had to be a cold, icy South, asserted Parmenides, and then Aristotle. For a time, Ptolemy led everyone astray by insisting that the South was temperate and populated. But eventually it was found, the existential realm of ice, so potent in its ability to wait that its existence was surmised two thousand years before anyone would actually see it. Someone fantasized Antarctica, and it was true.

A supercontinent once existed that contained the bodies of what would become Antarctica, Australia, Africa, India, and South America, called Gondwana (and there is something about the naming of prehistoric—even theoretical—lands that seems uncanny). Over millions of years, Gondwana split apart. Eventually the piece that was Antarctica, dressed in plant and animal life, made a verdant parade through the oceans. It drifted south, turned away, and,
like a boy without words, turned inward. It covered its lush land and its secrets with ice.

Eventually there were the explorers who tapped at the edges of the actual place, and the ones of the early twentieth century, such as Shackleton and Scott and Amundsen, who attempted to go farther in, even reach its centre, who were driven to insist on their presence in a place that rebuffed them. Some of them died, some of them didn’t. The Ice had a dual nature, being both menacing and meditative, composed at once of gigantic, stable plateaus and also changeable cores. The Antarctic is a conundrum, and I have known some of those.

Finally, there was Byrd, who left the suffocating confines of the men and dogs of his own expedition and went more than a hundred miles away. He took meteorological machines with him to assess the void, take its pulse. Really, though, it would seem he wanted to assess himself, explore the void right there at his centre. Either way, his story appealed to me, and it didn’t hurt that the book pictured on my computer screen featured his face, rimmed in fur, and he was handsome. So I clicked
ADD TO CART
. Days later the book arrived and I read
Alone
, and I read it again, and I continue to read it and thumb through it and write in its margins and flag the pages with yellow sticky notes and torture the spine, which has held up remarkably well. The sleepless mind is nothing if not obsessive, and so I open the book again and again until it no longer closes.

There is Byrd in his colossal night, the cold morning amplified by waking. For weeks, he watches the sun hover and stutter along the
horizon until it fades entirely for the Antarctic winter, a process he speaks of casually, seemingly with little regret as he’s watched it go.

But then a small, slick pain. He writes,
as one might watch a departing lover
. Darkness comes, but so too the red spectacle of a vertical line of four stars, a blaze that turns silver, before he decides it’s likely one star refracted three times by ice crystals.

Night is never really blank.

For the first six weeks of his life, Gabriel was silent. His cry was only a grimace, and I remember holding him, being awed by him, and wanting badly to hear his voice, and that when it finally emerged, it was small and wavering. It seemed that the start of his language, and the reality of him in a way, was ushered in, like a Zen meditation with the sound of a gong, by this turning point: his cry.

His words gathered a few at a time, and by the age of a year, he had accumulated about twenty before they began to slip away, the typical ones like
pop
and
up
and
bubble
. The words now are ghosts, and I can’t hold them in my mind, the sounds of him speaking. I don’t remember his first one, and I have to wonder if the forgetting is intentional, as forgetting often is. First words are spectacles, and seismic. They stop a room. The baby promises a trajectory with that first word: one, and then many more, proof of cognition.
Dada
or
cat
or
cookie
synthesizes to a kind of developmental largesse. All is well, it has begun, you can relax now.

Eventually, I kept a journal for recording his words, and they appear, in black marker, arranged in rows, along with his signs. We had anticipated oral-motor difficulties, and so one of the therapists who made regular visits to our house taught me to sign. As Gabriel
and I talked each day, I drew in the air, and he eventually imitated. While the sound of his words in my memory is thin, the image of him signing is clear, his hands languorous and purposeful at the same time, a sweep of meaning through the air.
Ball
and
elephant
and
airplane. Giraffe
and
help
and
milk
. His gestures were fluid and surprising, almost elegant, and his signing vocabulary grew to eighty words—
more
and
mama
and
book
—until meaning pulsed and flickered around us.