Shadowbahn(15)

the fill of the sky


When he hears the new song, it’s not like any he’s heard in his head. He needs a moment to locate it at the other end of the office space; the song cuts through the static of the transistor radio that he found in the desk drawer. It plays to Jesse direct and clear, as if provoked by the building itself, wafting out of the dark expanse of the ninety-third floor.

? ? ?

The song is more a broadcast of hostilities, half-wail/half-news flash dispatching bad news. A rural-nuclear dirge that’s unlike any Jesse ever would have heard on the radio, let alone in his head, if he even could remember ever having heard anything on a radio. It may be that this song, by a punk tribe from Leeds relocated to the American Midwest, never has been played on any radio at all.





the fall of the sound


It’s a song that announces nothing less than the Death of Song. It’s music that insists on nothing more than the End of Music. Mini-soundtrack of bedlam so steeped in the age’s marrow that whatever once might have been the cause of the chaos, or accepted as the cause of the chaos, reveals another preceding moment of causality, and then a moment before that and another before that. Trouble down south, sings the singer to a backdrop of mournful voices . . .

? ? ?

. . . although the south of where isn’t clear. Fiddle and then other violins barely float mid-communiqué like police reports as the song threatens to come apart. Sky fills with blades, sound falls from above. Avoid strong light is the singer’s final warning, stay underground. But Jesse, thrilled, rushes for the stairwell that he’s descended several times to no avail. “Well, sir,” he calls, flinging open the stairway door, “if there’s nowhere to go down, then I’ll go up.”





the beckoning (three)


He says, “I’ll go up, and see if all them circling choppers can ignore me then? Try to miss me then,” and in the darkened stairwell he feels the steps at his feet and climbs. He calls, “You up there, baby brother? Mama’s little girl with his little-girl lips and his little-girl hips? Here comes the man of the family! shot forth from the top of this here Tower like one last drop of mongrel jism,” and as Jesse leaps the steps in the dark to the ninety-fourth floor, the ninety-fifth and ninety-sixth, the song from the radio follows.

? ? ?

With every passing floor, the singing that’s been in Jesse’s head these days grows at once fainter and more desperate. The radio’s song that he thought was on the ninety-third floor below him now beckons from above, although it’s not clear to him it’s a beckoning, or whether anyone but him is being beckoned. First imperceptibly, then more clearly, the stairwell that Jesse hikes glows lighter. Leaning over the rail of the steps, he cranes to peer up.





top of the world


A faint, frosted radiance at the top—the size of a single musical note—is nearly corporeal. Jesse’s eyes adjust, and with every passing level the light above grows. Running out of steps at the hundred and seventh floor, he stumbles into what he barely makes out once was a food court, sandwich shops in the semidark, pasta joints, sushi eateries, posters for soda and frozen yogurt. NATHAN’S FAMOUS HOT DOGS reads a sign in the Tower’s murk.

? ? ?

He’s startled to see at the floor’s far end, next to a stalled escalator ascending the remaining levels, TOP OF THE WORLD with an arrow pointing, as though it could be anything but literal. Three flights above, at the far end of the escalator, gleams the signal’s source. The closer that Jesse comes, the more the frosted light grows to the size of a man. As he bounds the escalator’s metal steps three, four, five at a time, Jesse nears—buried deep at the light’s core—the faint outline of a memory: “Union Square,” he blurts, I believe I do recollect something . . .





double trouble


. . . and with a lurch from the static escalator’s last step, he tumbles out onto the Tower’s open rooftop, into a foyer of miasma and night where all noise collapses in on itself. Somewhere higher off the planet than almost anyone has walked short of the moon, Jesse has just enough time to reach above him and touch the black arched ceiling of the globe. Ever so briefly he takes in the roof’s layout, centered by its railed island platform that’s surrounded by an empty concrete moat and, at the far rim, a fence once placed so as to prevent jumpers, or at least anyone jumping for any reason other than oncoming aircraft.

? ? ?

Midair in the moment’s leap from the escalator into the light, Jesse gasps. Midair in the moment’s leap, he feels a gust blow him outside his twin brother’s life into his own. Squinting hard into the portal of light before him, he remembers a photo shoot on Forty-Seventh Street before the studio moved to Union Square, and of course the image that he’s been seeing in the light these past few minutes is of himself: two of him, side by side.





into the past


Two of him side by side—or so Jesse thought when the photographer took the double image all those years ago, wanting as the photographer always did to make the most of his superstars, the double image reproduced and silkscreened in variations of color. Both twins postured with six-gun drawn from a holster as though in a Western gunfight, no cowboy hat, long-sleeve buttoned shirt and boots and jeans double-belted with holster slung low on the right hip. Looking not square into the camera but ever so slightly off right; this image that Jesse now surveys is silver and black. But for the first time since that photo shoot decades before, Jesse realizes what he never realized, that they never were double images of him at all: “So, you and me then, baby bro,” he says, staring at the identical twins glistening in the tower-rooftop portal, “it was you and me all along, huh. Never,” he realizes, “was just me and me at all, should have known. Andy always was up to something, manipulative little albino twat . . . he knew all along it was you right there beside me”—and as Jesse steps through the glowing door on the Tower rooftop into Another Place and Another Time, he lapses midstep from the consciousness of one split moment into the consciousness of another.