Speculative Friction

by Claire Bateman

Thinking East

Why am I so reluctant to go home? My friend Mary has expressed it perfectly: There is a dearth of sky in Greenville. And my friend Johnny has remarked that after he moved from Kansas to Greenville, he felt as though he was always passing through a tunnel, since everywhere he looked there were tree branches coming together to close him in.

I believe that we suffer in this way because the Greenville sky has already fallen, and is continuing to fall, its viscous surface seeping into all the cracks and potholes of the downtown streets, and, like a trance, covering the city’s bandaged traffic lights and gas pump hose handles, its gouged-out construction sites, its bridge angels who have for so long endured concrete fatigue and cracked timber pilings. The sky drapes itself moistly over the willow oaks, trickling down toward the root-wounds where fungus long ago entered, hollowing out each trunk at its base, so all the trees are filling up with self-interred sky, not at the speed of light, but at the speed of liquid glass.

Because it’s everywhere, you can’t see it, yet if you were to gather it all in one place, it would so weightless and transparent that you could pull it through a gold pinky ring, and if you were to lay it out flat, you’d find it couldn’t possibly be more shallow.

The Sky Was a Bell of Silence

Didn’t hear the dunes singing.

Didn’t hear coyotes.

Didn’t hear the famous Taos Hum.

Didn’t listen to the radio in the desert, only the low wind that comprised the silence.

I knew all those other sounds were out there, free-roaming, but I felt no need for them or for their shadows in that charged quietness where sleep seemed permanently unnecessary, irrelevant.

Standing now at the edge of a Louisiana bayou, I want to lie down in the heavy green murk, the shrill of insect voices.

The South is sleep itself, hypnosis, pure, a deep suctioning force, a sound that emanates from nowhere in particular and everywhere at once.

Fosterling

I realize that some part of me will always be broken as long as I can’t see the entire sky all the way down to the horizon. So I’ll survive by assuming that my personal history is like those of the feral children you hear about from time to time, lost or abandoned babies reared by wolves, by bears, even by sea lions—but in my case, it was the trees of the southeast that fed, sheltered, and educated me, even though they understood I wasn’t one of them. Their songs lulled me to sleep each night in my cradle of roots and moss, and in the spring, my favorite maple satisfied my thirst for sweetness, begrudging me nothing as her blood trickled over my tongue.

Odysseys

Just a few days after I began my trip, W. Mark Felt disclosed his identity as Deep Throat.

Not long before I got to Laguna Beach, a resident named Al Trevino grabbed a garage-sale painting as he escaped from his home during the June mudslide, and soon after, learned that it was worth half a million dollars.

As I passed through Las Cruces, New Mexico, police had just released the name of the long-lost student whose skeleton was recently discovered inside a car at the bottom of Burn Lake.

Around the time I was navigating New Orleans, two people from my town of Greenville, South Carolina flipped their car during a high-speed chase in Louisiana; opening the trunk, the police discovered a decomposing corpse.

All throughout this world and who knows how many others, objects, events, and entities are being brought to light with painstaking delicacy, with astonishing violence, and with every manner and at every rate of speed or stillness in between, and at the same time, things are falling through, sinking, sifting down, hiding and being hidden.

What is the largest that can be lost? What is the smallest that can be found?

Somewhere in the Mississippi delta, smoldering in a mesh of rotting cypress roots and scheming to go ever deeper, there’s a thumb-size green glass medicine vial containing three of the four ounces of brandy allotted to soldiers in the War of 1812.

And even home is not without its mysteries. Beneath an unmarked field a few miles from Bristol, South Carolina, not quite suffocated under 30 feet of kudzu and red clay, there might be a cathedral carved entirely from alabaster, rumbling and ready to rise.

—First published in National Literary Review

GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—8/15/11—“The next stage is memory, which is like a great field or a spacious palace . . . . It is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain? Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? How, then, can it be a part of it, if it is not contained in it?”

—From Confessions, by St. Augustine