You wanted to know what this creature knew.
Then the sounds maddeningly changed. To ones he didn’t know at all. Twelve years ago. Lang is asleep. The question What would be the worst thing asks itself, now free of the passion and truth of work, for every night gets late: will the boy have to go and live with his mother? Like a difference between two parties that is the agreement. Is it the worst? And was it she who dropped by yesterday to more than borrow the photo album? That was it.
NIGHT SOUL
The first night, the man woke to a string of sounds, expelled, quite awful stabs of voice throat-rasped, deliberate, from the crib across the room. So that for a time he felt the person there to be his equal, and he feared for him. In trouble over there, in a small, accurate way the infant is possessed and on his own, and maybe the man can’t help his son, maybe he can’t do anything about it. It is even part of him out of control.
A shallow-sleeping family man who will wake in the middle of the night anyway, he woke to the woman breathing next to him, and to the room in the desert, his eyes opening on the window at the foot of the bed, where the screen was ripped, burst, jagged as a wave with an infinitesimal fire — like steel or flesh — telling him something has gotten in here, an animal, a hand. While the terrible sounds from the crib across the room—ah, ih, uh, eh—choked-out, cut-off, not asking for anything, were vowels, he realized. As if this is what you do waking alone: you speak, even if you are not talking yet; for anyhow the room is awake. So that getting out of bed beside the breathing of his wife, he would make a noise the baby would hear — who would want his company, or hers. But these vowels uncannily at work, the child is choking or being taken away or accosting whatever it is, so what’s his father doing here in bed? what is he waiting for?
Like a comrade he made his way across the cool bricks, he’s with his son in a moment—flowed there to him and stands above the crib in whose immaterial depths a blink of the mouth locates the face. Where are his eyes? Darkened, do they stare behind their lids? They’re asleep in some way and distinct from the child that is his, whose mouth moves as the moon in the window above the crib draws a cloud in front of it. The kid’s in one piece, thank God, thank the stars, thank the desert, but the sounds begin again, for they were no dream of the man’s zig-zagging away through low piñon pines and stunted, ancient-elbowed juniper the way the phone seems to have rung as you wake upon the waste of future and past which dreams are. But where are these sounds coming from if his son was not greeting a predator or giving a name to an intruder? Why, they’re just practical sounds the baby’s actually practicing which the father hears as if his own good depended on it and will try to answer.
And so it happens that he is learning these sounds, like letting them strike what hasn’t yet quite woken up in him: the ah, the ih. Squeezed off the palate hard, or choking, cut off, not hoarse at all in the dark but blunt, certain, and alone. The man’s no clawed intruder but the father here, a witness; ready for anything — to be his son’s equal, who is alone and launching these sounds, one that goes far, just the intent of it, while the next, you could swear, sends its breath at some near thing. Hearing is like answering him, even if they are no match for each other. He is to be answered. The man believes in it in the middle of the night. It’s what he will tell him one day: answer — not do what they say, but don’t not answer. If tongue-tied, at least make a noise. Go agh, go aiee. Come back at them in a whisper. But don’t not answer. Did the man just learn this, it feels so fresh? Seed planted in him in the middle of the night.
For the vowels are brave. They are things more right than words; but, as the man heard them, there and here are what they apparently say—ah and ih, a cast and a return; while the next, the uh, as in “mother,” accepts what belongs to you, to this basic person, it measures just this. So to the man it meant, what you found; while the next, the eh, as in “again,” stops what you found and holds it to what it is: accosts it; accosts what? the moon moving? a knife of reflected light cut by the ceiling beam? or a memory you can’t have all by yourself? As good as an owl whistling in the arroyo, hearing like this, or some fool — hearing there, here, found, accosting.
The infant whispered like thought, old things are what he whispers into his thinking. The time has come, vowel cries that are about to come again that the man standing around naked in the middle of the night is learning, they are not to him, they are only what woke him. This creature in the crib talks out loud and with something at stake, but in an order more raw and stately—“uh, ah, eh, ih, aw.” He knows what he’s doing — and to his father’s ear it is found, there, accosting, here, just between the two of them a seesaw sense more theirs now, less to be feared.
Though hearing the aw sound hard and creaking as a bird, foraging and unconsciously alert, the man made little or nothing of it, and felt free to. So he stepped back so as not to wake the child with his body or familiarity; for if the kid is asleep after all, he could open his eyes that seem hidden by their lids from the darkness and the breathing of the man, and see the man, who now thinks proudly where this is, where they live — a desert state, vast or actually weird—“beloved,” he likes to think, who, waking to the gash in the screen enhanced by the moonlight, forgot he already knew how it got ripped. Waking to these god-awful sounds and the damaged window screen which his eyes told his brain was part of it, he thought Animal, an animal had leapt in out of the desert. But no high-hipped bobcat far from its rock or lost bear cub or snouted coati with a taste for the fruits of the night that jumped out of somebody’s truck on the Interstate is going to try a stunt like this. And in his heart like what he knew all along it was of course the same mange- and sore-ridden half-blind dog of yesterday who couldn’t bear the noonday sky, the bright ground, and, wanting the shadow of the house, went for the open bedroom window while the family were having lunch.
His son’s blood is safe from that dog who wouldn’t drink or eat and didn’t even roll his eyes up when he brought two dishes in and then brought the baby in to show him this hounded creature, muzzle on the brick, too tired to have rabies or plague, where he had ended up collapsed with one hind leg out, the hide caked with adobe dirt.
A personal sigh has deepened the room, his wife’s, and it threatens them with her perspective. She turns. She hears with her body, her mind, declines to talk in her sleep, hears her husband if necessary, yet will sleep on until, toward dawn, hearing the baby burst out crying, she will probably get out of bed in one motion, go and take him, hold him and nurse him. So the man knows from her breathing she is not doing any serious hearing of these sounds right now. Which come again in the moonlight, vowels in a whole new order, called and attempted, or brave; not crying, but uttered.
Plus the o-ish aw-ish one the man hears as aw now — vowel five, it’s his.