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their presence in a place that rebuffed them. Some of them died, some of them didn’t. The Ice had a dual nature, being both menacing and meditative, composed at once of gigantic, stable plateaus and also changeable cores. The Antarctic is a conundrum, and I have known some of those.
    Finally, there was Byrd, who left the suffocating confines of the men and dogs of his own expedition and went more than a hundred miles away. He took meteorological machines with him to assess the void, take its pulse. Really, though, it would seem he wanted to assess himself, explore the void right there at his centre. Either way, his story appealed to me, and it didn’t hurt that the book pictured on my computer screen featured his face, rimmed in fur, and he was handsome. So I clicked ADD TO CART . Days later the book arrived and I read
Alone
, and I read it again, and I continue to read it and thumb through it and write in its margins and flag the pages with yellow sticky notes and torture the spine, which has held up remarkably well. The sleepless mind is nothing if not obsessive, and so I open the book again and again until it no longer closes.

    There is Byrd in his colossal night, the cold morning amplified by waking. For weeks, he watches the sun hover and stutter along thehorizon until it fades entirely for the Antarctic winter, a process he speaks of casually, seemingly with little regret as he’s watched it go.
    But then a small, slick pain. He writes,
as one might watch a departing lover
. Darkness comes, but so too the red spectacle of a vertical line of four stars, a blaze that turns silver, before he decides it’s likely one star refracted three times by ice crystals.
    Night is never really blank.

    For the first six weeks of his life, Gabriel was silent. His cry was only a grimace, and I remember holding him, being awed by him, and wanting badly to hear his voice, and that when it finally emerged, it was small and wavering. It seemed that the start of his language, and the reality of him in a way, was ushered in, like a Zen meditation with the sound of a gong, by this turning point: his cry.
    His words gathered a few at a time, and by the age of a year, he had accumulated about twenty before they began to slip away, the typical ones like
pop
and
up
and
bubble
. The words now are ghosts, and I can’t hold them in my mind, the sounds of him speaking. I don’t remember his first one, and I have to wonder if the forgetting is intentional, as forgetting often is. First words are spectacles, and seismic. They stop a room. The baby promises a trajectory with that first word: one, and then many more, proof of cognition.
Dada
or
cat
or
cookie
synthesizes to a kind of developmental largesse. All is well, it has begun, you can relax now.
    Eventually, I kept a journal for recording his words, and they appear, in black marker, arranged in rows, along with his signs. We had anticipated oral-motor difficulties, and so one of the therapists who made regular visits to our house taught me to sign. As Gabrieland I talked each day, I drew in the air, and he eventually imitated. While the sound of his words in my memory is thin, the image of him signing is clear, his hands languorous and purposeful at the same time, a sweep of meaning through the air.
Ball
and
elephant
and
airplane. Giraffe
and
help
and
milk
. His gestures were fluid and surprising, almost elegant, and his signing vocabulary grew to eighty words—
more
and
mama
and
book
—until meaning pulsed and flickered around us.
    The signs, too, vanished. The disappearance was so exquisitely subtle, so already submerged in silence, that it was a long time before R and I realised what was happening. We were so delighted when he did communicate that it masked that he was turning inward, but in the journal, it became apparent that I was recording a decline. From age two to four, the words and signs, every single one, began to slip away. Clutching after them and writing them down did nothing