Know the Night by Maria Mutch Page A

Dyer at Little America comes through the radio receiver like cracked pepper, repeating Byrd’s call letters,
    KFY … KFY … Can you hear me?
    He tells Byrd the odd bit of news from the world, the one of people and countries and stock market crashes, but the significance cannot travel the distance. The words do not console Byrd or alleviate his solitariness and instead seem
almost as meaningless and blurred as they might to a Martian
. Though he can hear their voices over the radiotelephone, he has to communicate back to them by telegraph, which presents its own set of obstacles. The transmitter, sitting in his food tunnel near a ventilating pipe that leads to the surface of the ice, has to be powered by a generator, which in turn has to be warmed beside his stove before he can pour fuel into it and haul it back to the tunnel. In order to start the generator, he has to fit a cord around a flywheel and then yank on it to spin the engine, lawn mower–style, then he heads back to where the telegraph sits on his table to confront the lines of Morse code that he barely understands. If he knows what is going to be discussed, he plans out what he wants to say, writing the letters in vertical columns and then marking down the corresponding dots and dashes; he does this knowing that as soon as Dyer or Murphy or Waite says something unexpected, he won’t be able to keep up. Communicating, then, is a burden; it is difficult to say what he means, difficult to find the drive to do so. What he understands now is the creep of ice in his hut and changing the sheet on the barograph. He longs for the sight of trees, the sound of a foghorn. The temperature falls to -65° F, then -72° F, and the ink of the thermograph finally freezes despite being mixed with glycerin. The Barrier stops sending its messages.
    He’s digging in his Escape Tunnel when the anemometer cups start rattling. Wind on the Barrier has increased, so much so that it travels the ventilator pipe and snuffs the red candle that had been lighting his work. He goes topside to make his observations, and the wind blows out the fire in his stove. A blizzard is working itself up, so he makes a second trip onto the Barrier to check the wind direction. But the ravenous whiteout gulps his vision, his hearing, his reason. He pulls up on his trapdoor, but it doesn’t budge. As he tears at it, his mind hurtles through white space and his body is battered. Flailing about, he finds the top of his ventilator pipe. He looks down into it and sees the warmth and definition within that was so recently his.
    He remembers a shovel lying somewhere around him in the drift and begins a search. Holding onto the pipe or the edge of his door, he lies flat on the Barrier and kicks out with his legs until finally he hits the shovel. He wedges the long end into the door handle and heaves up until the door springs open.
    The storm snarls overhead, and he is depleted but safe in the small dark space of his hut. There is no one to speak to, so he simply thinks it:
How wonderful, how perfectly wonderful
.

2 a.m.

soul
    PROVISIONS FOR BYRD:
    BEVERAGES
Tea
1 case
Cocoa—prepared
1 case
Sanka coffee
1 case
Ovaltine
4 14-oz cans
Torex
1 case
Bovril
12 8-oz jars
Malted Milk
2 cases—chocolate and plain
    SPECIALS AND CANDY
Cheese
2 Limburger, 2 Roquefort,
2 Swiss, 2 Old English,
6 American
Swedish Bread–Rye Crisp
5 cases
Black Psylla Seed
5 cans
Predigested glucose
6 cans
Grapefruit juice
1 case
Lemon in sugar
1 case
Hard candy
Peanuts
6 cans
Popcorn
12 small cans
Gum
3 boxes
Marshmallows
½ box
Saltines
10 cans
Chocolates
3 boxes
Bar Chocolate, Nestles
Mixed nuts and pretzels
White psylla
1 can
    I have shovels and battering rams of my own. There are three ways for me to reach the safety and light of the symbolic fort. The first is running, as in the practice of going for a run, which I do in the mornings. And which lends itself to metaphor too quickly perhaps—that I am running from something or to