Shadowbahn(17)
darklands
He’s glad that Zema is there in the passenger seat next to him, but he’ll kill anyone who tells her. He’s also glad she’s been asleep since the border, though he can see at this moment she’s pitched and thrashed by bad dreams. Having received no texts in the past thirty-six hours from his girlfriend, he feels especially alone and can’t imagine what good even a map will do them now. Across the Texas border, however, with his sister asleep, he pulls the car over anyway to try and find—rummaging among papers on the floor and in the trunk—the map they spread out between them in their room back at the Bar Code Motel.
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At Zema’s feet lies their father’s Log of Playlists, and in the quiet and dark of the car by the side of the road, Parker shakes the leaves of the book. Out falls not a map but, crinkled and yellowed with age, the stapled pages of an old legal petition; scouring it in the light of his phone, he reads, “STATE OF CALIFORNIA FAMILY CODE DIVISION 12 PART 4, Appeal for the Emancipation of a Minor.” His accelerating fury at his sister—trying to dump the family, the little ingrate!—screeches to a halt only when he recognizes the misspelled scrawl that fills in the form’s boxes.
only-children (right speaker)
Have these papers been among his father’s playlists all this time? “Means of self-support,” inquires the form, to which Parker had written, parttime standup comic, potenchul job @ Coffe Bean, and it all comes back to him how, as a steely-eyed, fourteen-year-old Great Self-Emancipator, he paced his bedroom plotting his break for daylight. Slipping the petition among various other school forms that required a parental signature, he got his father—self-absorbed but also reflexively trusting his son—to blithely sign everything; ultimately, of course, other legal stipulations prevented Parker’s flight. In the section marked “Reasons for Petition,” Parker makes out now in his younger hand, Ever sense my sister came its ben all f*cked up.
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Each always has had the psyche of an only child, with a bond that only-children forge among themselves, although Parker and Zema’s bond is as singular as can be between only-children who actually are siblings. Like their mother, each always has been a take-charge person in his or her own fashion. Each was characterized in childhood by precocities, his of the imagination, hers of the spirit. Each has had recesses, hers noisier, his more sullen. Each has had furies: when he was the teen that she is now; and she still channeling or exhuming what remains of hers from childhood.
only-children (left speaker)
From the backseat of the car, the four-year-old Parker held forth on flying hamburgers that eat trees and on clouds that are igloos in the sky. The four-year-old Zema displayed insights into human behavior that her parents stopped repeating to others because no one believed she could say, let alone intuit, them. By way of natural social confidence and movie-star looks, the brother mastered anything that didn’t involve numbers or school (“If I had an hour to live,” he scrawled to one teacher on a paper, “I would spend it in your class, because it feels like a lifetime”), instantly drawing something original or sorting his way through a song’s chords at a keyboard in an absentminded half hour. The commanding presence of any crowd, she worked out differences among contending parties in the schoolyard, achieving consensus with an empathy honed in her first two years at an African orphanage. Somewhere between gender and heritage, a black girl in a white family, Zema felt herself in crisis until an old black sax teacher, part of an expatriated jazz cohort back in the canyon where they lived, growled at her one Saturday morning during a lesson, “Confusion is the future. Embrace the confusion.” While no more perfect than anyone, and siblings less by genetics or blood than law, the brother and sister also are related by one quality they share that distinguishes them from contemporaries, and that is they’re true to those they would never toss aside at the first rumor or neighborhood gossip, of which both have been victim for years.
Parker’s mood (take one)
Mapless, Parker figures he might as well keep driving until civilization or daybreak, whichever comes first. Privately he’s betting on the sun. He resigns himself to a news station coming through better than anything else, not because he wants to hear the news but because voices out of the night are company. Their father always was listening to news when he wasn’t listening to music, but Parker realizes that all the news talks about is the Towers, and the whole Towers thing has become another fear he’s trying to intimidate out of his way. The reality of the Towers was slow to dawn on Parker. He barely paid attention when Zema first told him, barely gave them any thought. He figured it was some hoax or stunt, like one of those TV shows where people do crazy shit to get themselves attention, or just for the sake of doing it. Something some Vegas promoter built somewhere other than Vegas, and if it’s in bad taste, well, all the more proof it was cooked up in Vegas.
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Obviously there’s no way they can be the actual Towers. What he remembers from when he was three isn’t the event itself, which his parents, like most parents of three-year-olds, went to whatever lengths they could to protect him from knowing too much about, with the footage of planes and people falling from the sky so horrific that no parent, let alone a kid, could wrap his or her mind around it. Or maybe in fact nobody but a kid can imagine people falling from the sky. Maybe for no one but a kid is such a thing so naturally the stuff of nightmares. What Parker remembers is less the actuality of the event than the ever-present sense of parents no longer reliable, the first traumatic lesson any kid learns—that there are limits to parental protection. In the seat next to him, Zema is having a nightmare right now: Does she dream of someone falling from the sky? Did she find among the playlist log, and see and read, her brother’s old petition for emancipation and what he wrote? “I don’t want to listen to this shit,” Parker declares, turning off the radio, not having meant to say it out loud. “Dad!” Zema cries, waking herself.