Free Know the Night by Maria Mutch

against him, our sore ears close to his face.
    R, who is normally so calm and slow to anger, bounded up the stairs and into Gabriel’s room, yelling for him to
STOP PLEASE STOP .
Gabriel continued and R yelled more, and as I stood in the hall, I could hear the disintegration in R’s voice. He was begging. Finally, as Gabriel didn’t let up, R understood the futility and joined me in the hall, exhaustedly shutting the door behind him. Gabriel usually trumps everyone else in line for my compassion, but not this time. I thought, See what you’ve turned your father into? Even as I knew that none of this has ever been Gabriel’s choice. And I thought, too, about why we were so alone, why no one seemed to be helping us, though much of the answer to that lies in the way we have kept the dark sea, the boat, and the Sirens to ourselves.
    There was another incident around that time, except in this one the person being pulled apart was me, and it was R who was calm, like someone who knew just what to do. Perhaps this is how we manage, take turns at being dismantled, and it was my turn to wonder how a noise like that could possibly emanate from a child and for such a sustained period. It was apparent that Gabriel needed saving and neither R nor I knew how. He was in his room, screaming and laugh-shrieking his brains out, and I stood in the hall, unable to help him in any way and unable to move. Parenthood delivers with it an assumption of strength, knowing what to do, how to rescue. How not to hate him. How to reach in and find a boy, and yet the knowledge wasn’t there. Just paralysis, guilt, a breaking heart.
    R took my hands and led me into the bedroom, our bedroom, and shut the door. He kept his eyes locked on mine as he guided meto the bed, and I thought, Now? Are you kidding me? And then the next thought, as I stared back at him—Why not? If we could not rescue Gabriel, we could find each other, and I wanted to be found, made real. Back in university, when we were just beginning, R received his master’s in a branch of mechanical engineering called finite element analysis. I understand virtually nothing about it, but the name sticks and I’ll use it here for my purpose, to describe what needs to be done when there are whiteout conditions. Sometimes the edges of the void can be felt for, grasped, and it is then that the void ceases to exist or nearly so. Bring in Camus again,
What I touch, what resists me, that is what I understand
.
provisions
    H is desire for something like a toy or a drink was the very thing we used to lure him out from behind his walls. Gabriel learned to use the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS), which was developed for people with speech and language problems. Through workshops, I learned how to use the program so I could implement it at home, and then his staff at school learned as well. He was taught to assemble pictures of the things he wanted on plastic strips, forming
I-want
statements.
I want pretzels, I want a drink, I want cheese, I want a show
. A child using the method learns to make requests first by using a single picture, then constructingsentences. One level involves commenting:
I see a blue car; I hear music; I feel angry
.
    The upper levels involve a nuance of desire, however, that remains elusive to Gabriel—he doesn’t feel the need, maybe, to communicate he saw a blue car rather than a red one—and he’s unable, so far, to comment (or perhaps, in the way of astute politicians, prefers not to). But he is a master of I-want, able to extend unexpected significance to a plastic strip with pictures. In the process of learning the method, he was made to seek out his target, the person who would answer his desire, and present them with the strip. Now he’ll travel through the house to deliver his message, sometimes throwing the strip to the ground in a huff if we’re occupied. I was in the basement when I heard something thwack on the concrete floor beside me:
I want a