Screaming Silence: A Review of Curtis Smith’s Sound + Noise By Erin McKnight
What exists in the space between sound and noise? Between the children of a diving class, forming “an unruly line at the deep end, their bare feet slapping the puddled tiles,” as they prepare to leap from the high dive . . . abandoned at the edge of the world,” and the water beneath them, no doubt “ocean deep” in appearance. Is it an experienced diver, caught mid-air in corkscrew angles, which fills this space—her “plumb symmetry,” prior to finding the water below, a series “of rhythmic tucks and twists”? Yet, what if this diver never descends and instead remains suspended above the heads of those bobbing in the natatorium’s swimming pool? Karen may have made it off “the dizzying ledge”—into the place where “the high diver must believe in the buoyancy of water”—but “faith in [her] own ability to swim poolside” wasn’t enough to get her there. The stillness of the sounds, mechanized and unnatural, that come from her nursing home room after she braves it off the board, only to endure a devastating injury, reflects the silence of dead space that is capable of holding a person in a state of suspended animation beneath the water. The archaeologist’s stillness the result of a car accident which left her in a fossilized state, Karen now exists only as proof—a constant reminder for her husband, Tom—that she had existed once as his wife. Although “the simplest maneuvers in her presence make him feel like an acrobat, the executer of torso-twisting high dives,” Tom nonetheless bobs, as he has done since his wife’s stiffened limbs entered the home’s communal pool. For those swimming above Karen, treading water and fighting to stay afloat, the sound of this silence is deafening. Though masked by a surface noise that directs and controls their lives, the kind that forces them in a fearful attempt to tune out the cold silence “on the other side of Karen’s impenetrable border,” Karen’s condition is an ever-present reminder that an unnatural ventilator sound is powerful enough to force attention. Returning to the Pennsylvania town of her youth, Jackie, a 43-year-old former backup singer for a popular band, faces folly at every turn as she struggles against the “In for a buck, in for a million” attitude that has shaped her adult life. As owner of the Lincoln Bar and Grille, an outlet still exists for Jackie to pursue music on her own terms, yet the “old-girl/young-girl schism” that divides her seems, at times, too wide to cross. For Jackie, the body of water demands a contemplation of “the inertia of her existence” that results in frenetic movement: as if her actions, impetuous and bold, might release her from the sluggishness of the pool. When Jackie and Tom "casually meet"—in actuality, it’s a meeting orchestrated by Jackie as a product of her “young girl’s game”—in the vegetable section of the supermarket, their concealed amazement at “how near” the other sounds leads them to explore whether the space between sound and noise can be filled by their attraction and interaction. Bobbing in the same uncertain life currents is Tom. As art professor at the local college, Tom finds himself painting and repainting Karen’s dark world in the hues of his own nebulousness. By surrounding Karen with the artifacts of her lost life, Tom fears he has “created a museum exhibit, the only thing missing a velvet rope around her bed, a place where nothing moves and nothing changes, where all sense of reference is locked in a slowly fading past.” Certainly, Tom’s frame of reference seems locked, like his memory, in a time when he and Karen travelled, arguing over things like buying a Navajo rug at a roadside stand, and failed to discuss options should either of them slip into an “undignified state of pseudohumanness” as a result of a car accident and a bout of pneumonia. The stillness that exists between Tom and Jackie, and their trepidation to fully live is disturbed only by Karen’s ultimate silence. Despite the swimmers’ attempts not to fall beneath the surface, they are caught in a pool that will experience waves. Once the diver descends, which she will, even if it is in a final plunge of death, her entrance will create a splash. Instead of living beneath the shadow of the silent past, Karen asks, through her muted presence, that Tom and Jackie stop fighting their mutual attraction and the recognition that their own lives aren’t over. They may tread against personal ripples, but Karen’s condition is inserted into the novel to provide a sense of clarity, a reminder that the splashes and laughs of the other swimmers around them indicate life, and that together they should embrace it. Curtis Smith explores the disparity between the natatorium “air [that] hangs humid and thick, a scrim of lovely mist” and the cool waters below, with tenderness. His attention to maintaining balance between Jackie, Tom, and Karen as characters that deserve equal space within the work, and his ability not to alienate readers by focusing on Tom and Jackie’s blossoming relationship as Karen lies alongside them on the page, is poignant. Smith leads readers to the edge of the diving board, at which point they “must believe in [it] and its sound construction . . . focus on the solid foundation beneath [their] bare, cold feet and ignore the thin air that surrounds [them].” Smith suggests that “knowing where to step in the minefield of personal histories people construct around themselves” may be just another haphazard noise that exists on the water’s surface, and that the sounds which never may become noise are the ones that should be trusted as guides, because “perhaps the distance between sound and noise is only as far as the distance between two bodies”—Tom and Jackie’s. Visit Casperian Books on the web.
Born in Scotland and raised in South Africa, Erin McKnight now lives in Dallas. In 2006 she joined The Rose & Thorn Literary Journal as an assistant editor in fiction and nonfiction, and is a writing instructor for the Long Story Short School of Writing. Her writing has appeared in: Siren: A Literary & Art Journal, Ginosko Literary Journal, DiddleDog, The Bergen Street Review, The Flask Review, Flashquake, PRECIPICe, Why Vandalism?, and The Houston Literary Review, among others.
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