The Sound of the Highway

An excerpt from the novel PAN.

The following is an excerpt of the novel PAN by Michael Clune, which he read at our Cluny Journal event in Chicago, IL in April. PAN is available now from Penguin Press.

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Home? Mom’s house was far more exposed to impermanence than Chariot Courts, even including the dire prophetic open spaces of the neighbor. The idea that in returning to Mom’s house I could be returning home was a satire. It was a satire on the very idea of home. Mom’s house was like a theater in which my essential homelessness would be broadcast through every level of my being. Chariot Courts may not have been a home. But it was at least a deferral of the question. Its shapes—the thin walls, the cheap furniture—an evasion of the revelation of homelessness.

But this danger to my condition wasn’t something Dad could see. It wasn’t on the surface. You had to live at Mom’s house for at least a week to understand. And Dad had forgotten. The world of suburban adults didn’t offer a vocabulary for understanding the uncanny desolation of Mom’s house. And so he forgot. Now, years later, he couldn’t see any reason why I wouldn’t want to live there.

On the contrary, he could, if asked, point to many alluring features that made Mom’s house appear far more homelike than Chariot Courts. First, her house, a stand-alone residence, was much bigger than Dad’s. It had real wooden floors in the living room and hallways. It had a separate dining room, a living room with a stone fireplace, lots of windows. A vast yard—nearly two acres. And a brick pathway that led from the driveway to the front door. To the casual observer, the place emanated spaciousness, privacy, rest, elegance.

Dreamless sleep.

But appearances deceive. For instance, when you first drove up, you didn’t realize that the yard was completely treeless. Rows of trees screened each of the neighbors’ houses, another line of trees demarcated the back of the property. There seemed to be plenty of trees around. But in fact the house and yard sat atop a completely treeless hill.

The consequence was that there was nothing to stop the wind. Standing outside, it blew the words back into your mouth. It dried the tears on your face. Inside, it spoke all night and day in three syllables: the scream, the whine, and the thump.

Viewing the property from within a car with windows raised, Dad didn’t experience the wind. Still less could he understand that the wind—bad as it was—actually served to conceal the very worst thing. The worst thing was always there, but you only came to know it when the wind stopped, something that happened maybe twice a day.

When the wind stopped you heard a highway.

At first, you’d think you were hallucinating, that your mind was manufacturing the sound of traffic out of the unfamiliar static of windless silence. No highway, after all, was visible. You could even go to the trees at the back of the property and peer through. All you’d see was the gentle rise of another hill.

But eventually, through intermittent spells of windlessness—accumulating over a period of weeks or even months—your ear would begin to pick out traffic sounds that you knew your mind couldn’t have invented. The muted, distant, high-pitched grind of an accelerating motorcycle, for instance, rising through the dull roar of traffic, then dropping back.

There’s nothing in my mind like that, you’d think. If I was imagining a highway, I wouldn’t imagine that.

Soon you’d start to hear the highway through the wind.

So I’m hearing highway sounds, you’d think. So what? Route 94 is somewhere nearby, maybe half a mile away. Over that hill perhaps. Maybe a little closer than a half mile. So? Ignore it. Get used to it.

But it’s like getting used to the tiny chunk of unidentifiable brown matter that drops into your glass at the restaurant. It’s much too small to make a fuss over, and anyway, the drink already dissolved it. What are you going to do, demand a new drink? Because of something no one can see? Raising your voice at the waiter, while your date eyes you, clutching her purse…

You take a sip. It doesn’t taste any different. Does it? Maybe it does, a little. Well, but you don’t feel any different.

Do you?

Maybe you do, a little. So you don’t take a second sip, and you don’t ask for another drink, and you have nothing.

The sound of the highway was like that. Something you think you can get used to, but actually you can’t. It was like an underground river, undermining the foundations of the property’s claim to seclusion, respectability, and permanence.

Everyone has seen and pitied those who live directly on a major interstate highway. The tiny houses, the open yards. You drive past them—the world drives past them—the highway is an element of speed, a conduit of distance—and here are those who have made their dwelling amid endless frenzied motion. The signs of middle-class aspiration—the porches, with metal awnings, the occasional above-ground pools. Tricycles. The small, open, treeless yard twenty feet away from an unending torrent of steel, a river of cold eyes.

The government aluminum chain-link fence between the houses and the road. And sometimes, a second fence. A heartbreaking fence of white pickets laid down three feet from the government fence. The highway breathes through it.

The highway. The ultimate public place of American civilization. Our plaza, our town square, our marketplace, our agora, our forum, our seashore. When we visit a city we pretend we are seeing the public, but the city is a quaint nineteenth-century picture of the public, in a yellowing photo album in an attic.

The Highway is the public’s modern presence. Each person enclosed in their speeding shell of plastic and metal, with the stereo and sometimes even the television turned on, insulated from the others. They see only the few shells around them, and they hear them not at all. They are inside the public place, but not of it. A dynamic paradox of our civilization. The members of the public, inside the public place, concentrate exclusively on private affairs.

But what of those just outside the public place? Those who live near it? They have no private lives. Their private lives are exploded—the public rushes through their conversations, their thoughts, their pauses, their perceptions.

And you, who are always in the public space or else so far away you can’t hear even a whisper of traffic—you who enjoy the expensive illusion of a closed interior, of a Home, you who think I am in here, and the People are out there, you who imagine that no one can hear another person’s thoughts, let alone drive through them by the thousands—you think you know what the public sounds like?

No. You can’t hear the sound of the American public on TV or the internet. Are you kidding? No one would willingly listen to it. No one can bear it. The sound of the American public is a deafening, monstrous roar, without syllables, without pauses, without increase or decrease. It is the constant bellowing and thrashing of a beast.

The beast is People. The People. Then thousand times more of them than you can talk to on a megaphone. Forget trying to talk to the People, no one does, no one can. The People can’t even see you. You are nothing. The People move at a different speed, occupy a different time. You’re like a single frame of a film.

No one can see a single frame of film, not even subliminally.

That’s what you are when you live by the highway. You are a single frame of film. You see your nothingness glinting off the scales of the People as they slide by roaring. And when you close your eyes you hear your nothingness as a space the People roar through.

The trees at the back of Mom’s property. Nature is a thin crust around the People. The People is the total monster. The People is time. The People are there in your body too.

Sleep is a highway.

Sleep is a public place, it is a highway. Now—standing on Mom’s property that very first day and remembering how to listen, catching the knack, hearing the highway inside the wind, it’s like riding a bike—I understood. I understood why for me the fear of almost falling asleep always took the form of the fear of being hit by a speeding car.

At Mom’s house, when the wind stops, you hear what is always there: the sound of the highway. It is very soft. Soon it replaces silence. It becomes what silence is in the richer suburbs: the background of your life, the place from which your breaths arise, and to which they return.

Buy PAN here.