Know the Night by Maria Mutch Page B

it—when in reality the motivation seems to have something to do with present time, with feeling my body and its limits. I run sometimes on a forested trail that curves along a bay. The trail’s surface changes from sand to wood mulch to leaves, and in some places, the soil has been pounded hard by feet and horse hooves so tree roots appear to pull up the earth in fistfuls. The ground requires attention and it becomes a kind of study, how to land my feet without twisting an ankle. On a recent run, my mind was pulled between assessing the path ahead and thinking over words and desire—mostly desire—entwining them, pulling them apart, when my foot caught a tree root, hooked it. It was like being thrown to the ground by a giant. I was aware suddenly of torn muscles and scorched skin; I was awareof being slammed into myself, tossed in there with the monsters and gravity and night.
    There was a quiet, blinking solace while I sat on the ground and examined the soil mashed into my hands, my right hip, the spray up my legs. The ground beneath me seemed to be smoothing over its attempt to devour me, while the ache on the right side of my body had already begun. I got to my feet, took a few tentative steps, as though testing the ground, whether it would grab me again, and finished my run.
    The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s, and the body shrinks from annihilation
, wrote Camus.
    I run sometimes at night, because it’s another way of knowing the dark. I’ve run with groups of people after sundown, but I’ve also run alone, using a small headlamp to light the way on the bicycle path where there are no streetlamps and the surrounding area is all woods and wetlands. The night has its controversies. Running alone in the dark is something I’m told I’m not supposed to do, but that instruction feels negating to me, as though the only ones entitled to the night are men. It would seem to me that it is the killers and bears that should stay at home. But the returning message is that in the night, you get what you deserve. Step out alone and into it and, well. You’re really on your own then.
    When Byrd set out for his hut, he had the right idea. The Barrier still had some light, so he could settle in and wait for the dark to gather around him, which is another thing entirely than marching headlong into the black. I tested this theory unintentionally when I went for a run as the sun was going down. As it grew dark, my headlamp lit the path directly in front of me but to the sides were amorphous margins full of possible creatures, toomany to count. At first, it wasn’t so bad. The problem arose after I’d gone three miles to a point where the path intersects civilization, where there’s a road and a streetlamp. I stood under the light for a moment, bathed in contrast, feeling relieved until I turned and saw that the trail to get back appeared to be a black cave. I would have to run straight into it for the same three miles to get back to my car, which I did, as fast as I could. The terror seemed to be fueled more by the suggestive area between what the headlamp illuminated and what it did not than by the black itself. The possibilities added a layer of terror to the terror, so that by the time I reached my car, I was practically incandescent with fear.
    I went back on another night, because this seemed like something I needed to dismantle, or get inside of, or defy. But this time, when the sun dipped down and things turned black, instead of turning on my headlamp and igniting those peripheral ghosts, I let my eyes adjust. I ran as if I were invisible and limitless and one with everything I’m afraid of.

    The second route home is jazz, because it collects Gabriel and brings him along, effortlessly. Because it can speak to both night and desire.
    When jazz musicians would stop by the cathouse (so named because, aside from the jazz cats who came to call, over a hundred felines dwelled there), jazz lover Pannonica de