Shadowbahn(14)
the beckoning (two)
It’s not clear anymore to even her that it’s a beckoning, or whether anyone but her is being beckoned. “No,” she says now to no one, to the memory she hasn’t remembered yet, and draws back in the cavernous lobby that rises a hundred feet. She looks up at the balcony, from which peer down a thousand ghosts she can’t see but knows are there. Outside the lobby windows, night falls and she clicks on her flashlight; the whistled song from the glow at the far elevator doors pulls her like her grandfather pulled her along the swampland road on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain when she was four, apricot-toned cotton dress sticking to her small body . . .
? ? ?
. . . in the wet air, rain of the vestigial afternoon shower falling from the trees’ higher leaves to the lower. Then the sound of raindrops acceded to the growing laughter of men and maybe—although she can’t be sure she didn’t imagine it—a single small scream. “Come on now, darlin’,” her grandfather chuckled deeply, “you’re about to see somethin’,” and with the spot of her flashlight dancing before her, the sheriff finds the final pair of elevator doors parted as no others. Reaching the doors, she taps them quick as though they might be molten and she would be scorched by what’s behind; she’s shocked how easily they slide open. She barely has to pull the doors apart.
song hanging from a tree
Come on now, darlin’, you’re about to see somethin’. She doesn’t think to draw the gun from her holster; she can’t imagine anything more useless. Behind the elevator doors lurks no shaft, no elevator car to carry her. Behind the doors is Another Place and Another Time that doesn’t belong here any more than does the Tower, a place of her past into which she might now step and nearly does, her grandfather’s whistle—of a black man’s blues no less—adrift in the bayou air like a dandelion blown scattered. Her foot raised, the sheriff is poised to step across the elevator threshold . . . when she’s gripped by the realization that, landing this step, she’ll never return. Looking up from her withdrawn foot, confronted by the place and time she was four in Louisiana with her grandfather’s hand gripping hers hard, what she hasn’t remembered in half a century suddenly is vivid down to the particular blue of the sky, the particular waft of the wind, the particular caw of circling crows, the particular mob before her, laughing beneath the grand bayou oak from which hang by ropes on the lowest branch three bodies, smoke rising off them from their particular dying blazes, the smallest body belonging to what even a girl of four knows was another little girl not so much older than she, charred so black that it can’t be seen she was black before burning; and a four-year-old white girl can’t figure out how another little girl could possibly deserve this, other than being black before burning. Half a century from her small self, the sheriff turns and flees the red Tower, hellhounds on the trail of her country.
Ninety-three floors up, Jesse
opens his eyes again. Lying across the conference table like it’s the top of a tombstone, he opens his eyes like he did the first morning when, for a brief moment, he thought he saw a flaming airliner flying into him. He sits up, looking at the darkened building around him.
? ? ?
He looks around him as if something in or of the Tower itself, somewhere ninety-two floors below, has awakened him. For a while he doesn’t move, face in his hands; finally he rises from the table. “All right then,” he says quietly to no one.
the unloved song
After the dream of his mother, Jesse understands that those assembled outside below his windows are the enemy. He never believed they were there for him; he has no earthly idea why they’re out there at all. But he understands now that if they knew he was up here on the ninety-third floor, he would be the object of their hostility.
? ? ?
“All right then,” he says again. He understands that whatever conspiracy the other one might have entered into with the public there beyond the window, had he lived rather than Jesse, isn’t any of which Jesse can ever be part. This moment, like all of Jesse’s moments, exists within the shadow of the other life never lived. He knows they hate him, even if they don’t know he’s here.
the untamed song
Prowling to the black window and the nation at his feet, he says, “I’m not your irresistible delinquent god, then, not your honky-tonk Amun hiding in plain sight, no. Not,” he says, plastering himself to the cold black glass, “your American Hick, dixie jeremiah wreathed in laurels of some such boogie-woogie jook. I’m yer bringer of Music Death, just as y’all say, your deliverer of Rant, sir, in the black echo of which no music can endure. I come to cut low the Grand Domestic Hymn, sir. I embark to ride the mystery train of Tuneless Shout, destined for aleatoric hinterwilds beyond where timbre chokes on the color of its own tone. Here I am then!” pounding the windows, shouting at them below. “I didn’t reject your music—your music rejected me. So here I am, Presley the First: Jesse Garon! the only f*cking Presley in case y’all ain’t noticed. Having beaten your beloved mama’s boy to the finish line, having outraced him down Miss Gladys’s fallopian express lane in a deafening dash—deafening—for freedom, for deliverance from the mama who spurned him. And your mama’s boy? He couldn’t keep the f*ck up, that’s what.” Jesse turns his head, calls back over his shoulder, “Where you be now, little bro? How you coming now, baby brother? That’s all right for you, just take your damned sweet time, because I got here first.”