Shadowbahn(2)

emergence


By midafternoon—the tail end of the five-hour drive to Rapid City from Sioux Falls—Aaron has neither called his wife nor heard from her. He’s buzzy and bleary at the same time, in the crossfire of fatigue and two Starbucks espressos self-administered in Chamberlain. But when he slams on the brakes of the truck, without bothering to check in the rearview mirror whether anyone is behind him, he knows he’s not in the tunnel of any song. He’s not dreaming the thing that suddenly has appeared before him and can no longer be missed as he rounds a corner and emerges from a pass into the Dakota Badlands, with its rocks shaped like interstellar mushrooms and ridges like the spine of a mutated iguana.

? ? ?

He doesn’t bother pulling his truck over to the side of the highway. Stopping in the middle, he gawks for a full minute, opening and closing his eyes and then opening them again. His truck abandoned mid-highway, Aaron strides to the roadside as though the few extra feet will somehow make what he sees comprehensible; a moment later, he returns to the truck’s cabin. Unsure what he would say on it anyway, he remembers the CB is dead. He pulls his cell phone from his pocket. “Hey,” he says when she answers.





the unheard song


“Hey,” he hears her say back, hesitant and quiet.

“Uh . . .”

“Look, I’m sorry. . . .” A pause, and when he doesn’t reciprocate she says, “Okay then,” annoyed; then another pause. “Aaron?” When he still doesn’t answer, she’s both irritated and worried by his silence. “Must be close to Rapid City by now.”

“Listen.”

“I really am sorry”—testy but maybe slightly freaked out? Sometimes he wonders if she wonders if he’s going to leave her.

Listen, because he hears the music, or something like it.

? ? ?

The afternoon sun slides down the sky like a window shade. Aaron studies the little icons on his cell phone. “How do you take a picture with this thing?” he asks. “These things take pictures, don’t they?”

“You sound like your mother,” she sighs, baffled. “Tap the little symbol of the camera. Did you open the icon? So point it at whatever and press the b—”

“How do I send it to you?”

“Little arrow at the bottom . . . send it to me later. . . .”

He says, more emphatically than he’s ever said anything to her, “Now. You have to see this and tell me—”

“Tell you . . . ?”

“—that I haven’t lost my mind,” but he knows he hasn’t lost his mind, he’s not in any dream. He’s not in any tunnel; now another truck approaching in the distance from the other direction—this one’s front bumper festooned with the flag of Disunion—stops in the middle of the highway too, like Aaron’s. Like Aaron, the other driver gets out of the other truck to walk to the roadside, rubbing his eyes as if in a cartoon. Yet another vehicle nears, and as Aaron turns to gaze over his shoulder, up and down the highway other cars have begun to stop, passengers emerging, everyone’s stupefaction surfacing in thought balloons. The sound that’s like music, that Aaron thought he was hearing, he hears again: Ask me what I just heard, I have no idea, but not this time. “Yeah,” he calls to everyone in and out of earshot, spinning there in the middle of the highway, “oh yeah! Explain that,” gesturing at the two towers.





Did they just appear out of the thin


air into which things don’t just disappear? It’s midafternoon, hundreds of cars and trucks already having passed this way since daybreak; Aaron has driven this highway many times, as recently as the previous weekend, spotting nothing but the forbidding Badlands horizon utterly undisturbed by human endeavor. But before his eyes now, striped by their four horizontal black bands, patterned by their gray verticals—demarcating windows narrow enough to offset the absurd fear of heights felt by the Japanese-American architect who designed the structures to be the tallest that ever stood—twin towers rise from the volcanic gorge.

? ? ?

They aren’t just the tallest things that Aaron has seen, since he knows that wouldn’t be saying much. They’re the tallest things most people have seen, with their two hundred twenty floors between them, each of identical height, except one is topped by a colossal aerial antenna jutting out another four hundred feet. The dual monoliths rocket to the heavens even as they’re ominously earthbound. Aaron lifts the cell back to his ear. “Cee?” he says as calmly as he can manage.





badlands


Anyone who’s looked at a television or the Internet or a history book the previous score of years recognizes the buildings instantly. On the other end of the phone she finally says, “I don’t get it.”

Some slight hysteria rises in his voice. “What do you mean you don’t get it?” Let’s not fight about this too, he thinks. “You don’t see it? Them?”

“I do see it. Them. But . . . where are you?”

“Highway 44 in the Badlands. Same 44, same Badlands I drive almost every damn day.”

? ? ?

She says, “Maybe they’re a monument of some kind. . . .”

“A monument?” Aaron practically shouts in disbelief.