Know the Night by Maria Mutch

strolling Beacon Hill, 9 Brimmer Street somewhere in the background, his wife and his children. His study. He often imagines he’s elsewhere and sometimes gives ironic designations to the corners of his hut: one is Malibu and another is Palm Beach. Pins in the map from the known world, an ownership that keeps the ice from claiming everything.
    Except that now the aurora is gone, his sticks are gone, his way back is gone.
    Panic expands in Byrd as he searches in all directions with the beam of his flashlight. Using the stars to mark his way, he walks in one direction and then back, and then out in another.
    When Robert Rauschenberg created his white paintings and wrote about them to art dealer Betty Parsons, he referred to the
plastic fullness of nothing
. I think of this when I picture Byrd swinging around for his markers. Somewhere in the plastic nothing, there is a portal that is his hut, the hut where earlier he’s been playing Canfield and losing, and listening to Strauss on his Victrola.
    And then there it is: his bamboo sticks and line, the giant needles and thread, appear in his beam and lead him back.
    All well
.

    He puts sugar in his soup and ladles cooked cornmeal onto his table thinking his plate is there. The pervasiveness of the cold has eaten snips from his nose and cheeks, the soles of his boots never thaw, and the surface of a glass of water that he sets down shuts with ice within moments. Headaches plague him, and wedged between days of serenity are waves of pain that command his body. His lungs are sore, and going topside sets him gasping. His enemy, he says, is subtle.
    As much as he is racked with pain, he is also racked with desire. Here, there is no one to touch him, and no voices, except for the crackling ones from Little America during the radio schedule. He doesn’t even laugh out loud because there is no one to share the joke. He longs for voices in another room, certain smells, the feel of rain, temptation itself. He even misses being insulted.
    Back on his first night alone when he discovers that his alarm clock and cookbook are missing, Byrd suddenly shouts,
Great God!
and is startled by his own voice, the way that his solitariness is underlined.The way that communication, if anything, implies other people, and the way that a lack of it suggests their disappearance.

    In the biography of Byrd by Rose, I find a photograph that intrigues me because it shows Byrd in his hut. It looks like a self-portrait, but the attribution says it was possibly taken later by one of his men as a reenactment. I stare at the scene, at the man and the ordinary objects that attempt to replicate some other place entirely, the place he had wanted originally to escape. He sits at a table, with a silver fork touched to the edge of his china plate. All around are the things he thought he would need, the ones that began their significance in his lists. In the absence of people to talk to at dinner, he reads to himself as he eats, and so in the image, a book lies open on his lap. More books can be seen piled under the table, almost as though they are holding it up. His hair is longish, combed straight back and bushed out about the neck as he grimly regards his food. The items around him, stacked up on shelves or hanging from nails, are evidence of the human will that has been able to contrive digging a hole in the Antarctic and bringing icons of the known world to fill it. On the table, there is an open package of Salada tea, a silver pitcher, a lantern, a teacup, small tins, and papers; a shelf above holds more tins and jars, and papers are pinned to the wall; hanging behind him is a pair of scissors and a hacksaw. Outside the frame of the picture, what you can’t see is the dangerous blank his belongings are meant to mollify. Even amid the isolation he deliberately sought, with his objects as symbols of his lost world, he tries to carry on as if he isn’t truly alone.

    It’s the middle of May and the voice of John