Free Know the Night by Maria Mutch Page B

explorations. The magic of my favourite one was that I could still see the house from it, and yet I was firmly in the woods. I tended not to bring friends there, and my sisters were much older, so these were mostly solitary haunts. I understand Byrd’s decision to stay alone in the hut, to have complete ownership and feel utterly enclosed. His original idea was that the hut would contain three men, but he eventually decided that he would be the sole occupant. He understands the nature of this place, the night and the void, and that only he has been invited to this particular spot, these exact coordinates. (It is true that, whatever the justifications we may use in selecting our cohorts, we are often compelled to bring some people along with us and leave others firmly behind; we say the knowledge is for us, with the
us
being so narrowly defined it can become a unit of one. I know this because I, too, have fallen victim to this way of thinking, erecting a fence around my piece of the night, even as I say I want companions.) I can see him there, hunched at his machines or stirring his tea or preparing to climb his ladder, as if I could just about touch the fur of his coat, pet the animal that he isbecoming. This, too, is a kind of desire, one grown from loneliness now that it is night and we are all laconic.
    Mornings, he writes, are difficult. He does not want to get out of bed. The black is now so pervasive, he runs through a series of questions when he wakes, who he is and why he’s here, in this place, in a sleeping bag, until the sounds of the wind register and the thermograph remind: order, duty, the little world outside his bunk. Ice has begun to creep from the floor and up the walls. After he forces himself into the cold and dresses, he makes tea so hot it scorches. He emerges from his hut to check the day and notes how thinking of a separate day and night has become inane. As if day still existed, and as if night hasn’t sprawled over everything.

    Water is even more essential than words, so intrinsic that it’s easy prey for compulsion when in short supply, and so Byrd is haunted by his need for it. Using a saw, he cuts small blocks of hardened snow from his escape tunnel, and then heats them in a metal bucket on his stove, noting that two gallons of snow converts to only two quarts of water. It is an irony of his situation that he is nowhere near accessible water and yet dwells in its simulacrum. Aside from his unceasing need, it is the stove that imposes, being the source, he believes, of headache-inducing fumes (later, he will believe the source of the fumes is his generator). But the stove doesn’t attract his malice, it’s the hapless bucket that does. It is a greedy open mouth in perpetual need of feeding; in lieu of a human being, a presence who wants something from him.

    He is out on the surface of the Ice, hovering in an unmarked space he hadn’t intended. The problem of the Barrier is that there are no barriers, and without them, the self opens, expands, and keeps going. Nothing to bump against, nothing to stop the self from sailing straight away from the planet into the limitless universe. He had been out for one of his strolls, that was all. The two-foot bamboo sticks he’d wedged in the ground and strung with line so that he could lead himself back to his hut through a storm have vanished. The extra sticks he’d brought with him to jam along his extended route are also gone. Twirling himself around in all directions gives him nothing but the same unmarked view. His world has vanished; he has vanished. The Barrier owns him.
    Earlier that night as he gazed at the aurora, he thought how beautiful the serpentine curtain looked. He watched and recorded the way it slid over the stars, obscuring them, and then disappeared, leaving the stars in their place again. Yet even an aurora doesn’t prevent the mind from grabbing for the world of people, and so he was imagining that he was home in Boston,