Story of Your Life

Speculative Friction

by Claire Bateman

“Story of Your Life”

After you were born,
you couldn’t figure out
how to fit inside your body.
Sometimes you’d scrunch yourself
way over to one side;
other times, you’d overflow your skin
in all directions,
but no matter how
you twisted and tossed,
you couldn’t get comfortable.

No wonder you were always
flailing and wailing,
your flesh prickly with rash,
your eyes crossing,
your feet turning in;
no wonder you were such an inveterate
spitter-upper,
the corners of your mouth perpetually dribbling
breast milk, soy milk, goat’s milk,
and every chemically-engineered
infant formula the late
twentieth century had to offer.

After several months of this,
you complained to your tutorial entity.
“Guardian,” you said,
“My skin is rashy, my eyes cross,
and my feet turn in.”

“None of this is uncommon,”
replied the guardian. “You’re probably
just a slow learner.”

So you dutifully returned
to the all-absorbing assignment
of babyhood, but in not too long,
you were back.

“Guardian,” you said,
“even for a slow learner,
my difficulties seem to be
inordinate.
Like an egg plucked
too early from its saucepan,
it’s as if I’m cooked on the outside,
but still runny within,
unable to coalesce.
Also, there is the matter of my continual
spitting up, which,
out of a natural sense of delicacy,
I refrained from mentioning
in our previous conversation.”

“I’m sure everything’s okay,”
said your guardian,
“but just to reassure you,
I’ll go check The Big Book of Symptoms.
Sit tight; I’ll be back in a jiff.”

As a matter of fact, however,
you were finishing up
your graduate work
when the guardian returned
without seeming to notice
the time lapse.

“According to the book,”
the guardian explained,
“you are a Difficult Baby,
just one of a tribe of Difficult Babies
destined to seek professional fulfillment
in what is currently known as ‘liberal studies’—
more specifically,
the literary, visual, or performing arts.
What this means, in practical terms,
is that your hair will grow in funny,
and that you will spend decades of your life
attempting to compensate for this.
From the time you first learn to walk,
you will be the sort of individual
who manages to fall
upstairs.
The invisible grain of salt
with which you’ll take everything
will be roomy enough
to contain many mansions,
thus making you something
of an outcast,
at least through the seventh grade.
You will learn to endure
twenty-three kinds of fatigue
known only to your tribe.
On slow days, your mind will resemble
an army ant colony gassed with nitrous oxide,
but when anyone asks you what’s wrong,
you will learn the hard way to reply, ‘Nothing.’
In short, you will be unable to either
digest or regurgitate
the world.
But you will be able to behold
night pouring itself
with unwavering confidence
between winter branches.
You will be able to trace
each inlaid coil
of the rare but magnificent Mobius Rose.
You will be able to overhear
every quarter-note of Otis Redding’s last song
rising from his wrecked plane
to tap gently against the bottom layer
of that lake of ice,
and you will be able
to make other people
hear it too.”

“That’s lovely,” you responded,
“but how will I earn a living?”

“Well,” said the guardian,
“official prognostications are as yet
a little spotty,
but the general feeling is that
because of a new idealism
due to burgeon in the eighties,
government support for the arts
will grow ever stronger
into the next century.
Gas prices will plummet,
the economy will be robust,
and the culture will veer sharply away
from technology toward the humanities.
Sculptors will be besieged by would-be patrons,
and everywhere on busses, you will behold
folks reading skinny little poetry books
they’ve stood in line for hours to purchase.
Your entire tribe will flourish.”

This was the turning point
of your moral life.
This was the moment you truly
touched your blessing.
Though you could have roughly
straightened out that guardian,
told it everything that had happened
in its absence,

forced it to see you as you’d become,
a weak, straggling thread
on the fraying edge
of the swiftly unraveling middle class,
you found yourself
curiously protective toward this entity,
which, though deluded,
clearly had your interests at heart.

So instead, you said
very, very gently,
“Thank you, O Guardian.
I am most grateful
for your tidings of comfort and joy.
I now release you
to go on your way,
for I have listened carefully
to all of the words you have spoken,
since we first met,
and I believe that they are holy
and true.”

And as a matter of fact,
they were—
at least, some of them.

From Coronology (Etruscan Press, 2010) by Claire Bateman. First published in Grist.

GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—4/25/11—“. . . Virginia had learned to regard paintings as something in which time was shattered and light was understood, and to know the steadfast link between high emotions and beautiful images. She knew that the image had to be cold, because its task required silence and detachment in the presence of the intangible powers it conveyed, but she had not realized until now why it had to be cruel as well. The cruelty and coldness were almost physical forces. And they acted upon the heart, they made it rise and feel. They purified motives and tested the soul with uncompromising certainty. Images and people had to be strong enough to stand by themselves. For when they did, they had the capacity and power to be interlinked, and to serve.” —From Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin.