Shadowbahn(16)
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Through his head blows a black soundless wind that, for the first time, justifies every moment of him. He barely can be sure now that he’s ever been in the Tower at all. There beneath the ceiling of the world, where nothing lies in the distant dark but moonscape and the twinkling of thousands of flaming lights gathered at the Towers’ base, for the first time since that original flashing glimpse outside the ninety-third-floor window of the airliner coming toward him, he’s ecstatic. The Towers and their future vanish behind him, the single fiery siren-note that has beckoned him goes up in its own flames. Embers of incinerated music scatter on the rooftop from where, seconds ago, crossing a threshold similar to the one from which Sheriff Rae Jardin recoiled more than a hundred floors below, Jesse the Shadow-Born jumped and—in the eyes of anyone else who might have been on the Tower rooftop to witness it—disappeared into thin air.
two
supersonik
Day 0 Millenniux (9/12/01)
Almanac in Song, or an Autobiographical Soundtrack
as originally inventoried by Parker and Zema’s father for the fifteen-year-old girl reading it now, America flowing past her window on the passenger side, motel windows flickering in the dark before the playlists’ songs will sputter from not the radio but the receiver of her body and the stereo of her eyes.
tracks 01 and 02:
“Naima” and “Subterraneans”
The first is a song of both morning and mourning [chronicles the father’s log], beginning with a saxophone’s outburst that settles into prayer before the piano’s benediction. The tension lies not in whether brass or ivory will dominate the other but which will succeed in achieving oblivion—a song about what and who will be the last left standing not in victory but bleeding abandonment, envying the vanquished. Sounding to the modern Western ear something between medieval and Middle Eastern in its dissonances, the second song is a lament by Old World futurists for the last century—with a quarter of that century yet to come when the track originally is recorded—but later can be heard from the vantage point of an America driven to its knees in Lower Manhattan, history rendered private mythology. Picking up on the epiphanic and sanctified alto in the first song, the sax in the second is cracked and heretical, played to the end of notes in the way a writer runs out of italics, music finally reduced to words of code: Share bride failing star, because as pictures pin the maps of our lives, music marks the calendar.
With his sister sleeping in
the passenger seat, Parker drives the black highway spooked. He admits it to himself as much as he doesn’t want to. He never has been the sort to concede fear, more adamant in that refusal than even most boys or men—so admitting it to himself now is a leap of wisdom.
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Up until he was a teenager, he could charge through almost any fear except that of being alone, when sometimes at home he would wake his mother or father after they fell asleep to come downstairs with him to the kitchen, where he didn’t want to go by himself.
badlands (reprise)
It’s ten o’clock, although now Parker is trying to remember if he or Zema changed the clock in the car whenever it was that they crossed time zones. So maybe it’s eleven, with no place in sight to spend the night. Before him unrolls the highway, if it is one. Strange lights come up behind him in his rearview mirror that he can’t identify until they pass; he’s driving seventy and cars are nearly running him off the road. But he feels sure that no sooner will he pick up speed than he’ll get pulled over, a white boy in his early twenties in dangerous Disunion terrain, with a fifteen-year-old black girl no one believes is his sister.
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He doesn’t like police, and on the relatively rare occasion that he crosses paths with them, he has come to realize—with a stumble into that old mischief maker called greater maturity—that he talks himself into trouble. He almost got into it with the cop at the border a few hours back, before downshifting into deference, when the officer stared at him long and hard before waving him into West Texas. Parker’s father was the same when he was younger, with no respect for any authority that was arbitrary, naively figuring that if he was in the right, he was untouchable. “You need to get over that notion,” he later informed his son.
starless stripes
Their mother—having migrated from the new California dust bowl back to her hometown in the Midwest with the great-grand-descendants of the original Dust Bowl that brought people to California in the first place nearly a century before—tried to discourage the drive. She pleaded with her children to fly “or at least take the train.” But until the manifested Towers in the Badlands took over, the news carried ongoing reportage of railway skirmishes with the National Guard, called out to seize back from secessionists control of the Southwest Chief. East of Albuquerque, the brother and sister spied a flaming boxcar, adrift like a viking pyre in the desert dawn.
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Other than that it’s forsaken choked Texas, Parker has no idea where they are now—that’s what unsettles him. He can’t see anything around him, lights of houses and buildings nearly as rare as rain, which means that nothing lies beyond the windshield but the dark. When he turns on the radio, the closest thing resembling a signal sings in static. Parker’s cell doesn’t know where he is either. He figures he missed a turn somewhere after Albuquerque, continuing east when he meant to swerve north, but he doesn’t see any point to stopping and certainly sees none to going back, a direction he never has had the temperament for anyway.