Upkeep by Claire Bateman

Because no one had ever paid much attention to the wall between the past and the present, it wasn’t until light from the past began to seep through into the present, and vice versa, that people noticed it was developing thin spots where even a child might be able to punch a hole.  

Light from the past inspired acute memories: Why, this is the radiance of my eleventh birthday morning! someone in the present would exclaim, though later, the same person might whisper, We stood in this noontime dazzle when we buried my sister.

Light from the present made the citizens of the past dizzy and disoriented, endangering the completion of their daily routines.

As is often the case in such situations, the populations of both past and present were split between patchers and demolitionists, the first group eager to repair and maintain, and the second anxious to raze and rebuild.  

On both sides of the wall, various feasibility assessment projects were begun, each costly, protracted, and blundering.

Meanwhile, the wall itself became an object of fascination as everyone gathered around the weak places, the occupants of the present knocking to communicate with their ancestors and previous selves, and the inhabitants of the past tapping to reach their descendants and future personae.  

At first, of course, all kinds of codes were brought into play, both traditional and invented for the occasion, but when these turned out to be unintelligible, it was acknowledged that the longed-for newsy exchanges must be epistemologically taboo.

Nevertheless, both populations found the vibrations they made on the wall’s surface so unaccountably consoling—even thrilling—that no one could even describe the sensation.

And that’s how the solution emerged, which was to neither rebuild nor fully repair the wall, but to preserve it at a precise, uniform degree of deterioration by doctoring it where it was frail enough for more than an acceptably indistinct, low-level shimmer to leak through, and tenderly scraping away at it where it was thick enough to render tapping inaudible.  

This delicate engineering enterprise, colloquially known as “tuning the wall,” is accomplished in both past and present by teams of trained sentinels who pace the wall’s length, scanning for anomalies.  

Rumor has it that the sentinels eventually become so aware of the wall’s minute structural fluctuations that not only can they evaluate the light with their eyes closed, they can also make their presence known to their counterparts on the opposite side without even touching the surface.

So when parents behold their little one rapt in the game of tiptoeing with eyes squinched shut, hand outstretched, and palm up as if braced against empty space, this is taken as nothing less than a sign of vocation, a gift from the asymptotic future.

Claire Bateman is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Scape (New Issues Poetry & Prose), Coronology and Other Poems (Etruscan Press), and Locals (Serving House Books). She lives and works in Greenville, SC.