Shadowbahn(21)

ghost dance (two)


White people in their white cities two thousand miles away panicked at word of the Ghost Dance. The American government took the dance seriously enough to hasten the government’s own agenda of the Indians’ assimilation or, failing that, extermination. But Wovoka’s prophecy, born of a revelation that he had when the moon passed between the Earth and sun, couldn’t or didn’t save his people, and few biographies since are able to tell where he went or what he did for the next forty years, other than that he lived and died under the name that white people gave him.

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By the end of the first week following the skyscrapers’ appearance, as the rest of the world watches aerial news footage of what is variously called Badlands Nation or the Tribes of the Towers, questions arise. To what end is the mass vigil? Is everyone simply paying tribute, and then at what point do they disperse? Does anyone believe that they’re there to somehow protect the buildings, as if they could, from some horror like the one that brought them down, and if so, then for how long? Particularly following the recent, still unexplained incident involving a local sheriff who’s gone missing, what is it that anyone expects to happen? For what is everyone waiting? For something or somebody to emerge?





ghost dance (three)


Some speculate that the Towers’ manifestation is a second vision of Wovoka, although there’s no conclusion as to what such a vision might mean. Others suggest that the Towers are the Ghost Dance’s monumental grave markers. Which ghosts are being summoned is unclear: the spirits of the Towers? or the phantoms of the Badlands? Or do, within the buildings, the spirits of two decades previous meet the phantoms of more than a century past, and do they embrace in spectral communion, swap tales of their lives, commiserate and comfort each other over their deaths, display for each other photos and engravings of wives and husbands and children, some wrapped in animal skins and blankets and others donning Mets caps and The Blueprint sweatshirts?

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Among the entire assemblage outside, who are certain—up until the buildings go suddenly soundless like the rest of the country—that music has been coming from the Towers since the first sighting, many now claim that they hear Native American chants and Sioux hymns mixing with get ur freak on and thirty notes in the mailbox will tell you that I’m comin’ home. Then sometime early in the second week, particularly as it becomes evident that no one else is going to venture inside the Towers again, a mass realization overtakes the vast humanity that now numbers what is by official estimates nearly a million.

What they’re waiting for is the Towers to disappear





into thin air


and then for some, including those at the site watching the buildings and those watching on television and the Internet, it’s into thin air that the Towers do indeed disappear. Driving his route yet again, the first person on record to have seen the Towers stops his red truck with the gold racing stripes yet again where he stopped that first afternoon, this time to gaze at the empty sky where the buildings have vanished like they vanished from the sky one September morning twenty years before.

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But when he calls Cilla Ann and she turns on her TV to the news stations that have been broadcasting round the clock nothing but video of the Towers, they remain on-screen. “Maybe what you’re seeing isn’t live,” Aaron suggests—but why would the stations not be broadcasting live? “Says ‘live’ on the TV,” Cilla Ann answers, and Aaron notices that, unlike when the Towers appeared, little other traffic stops on the highway. Few others seem to react to the Towers’ disappearance because, he realizes, many still see them.





sonography


Soon others report the Towers missing, including more and more onlookers at the site, who wake from their campgrounds to find the skyscrapers gone even as neighbors see them plainly. It’s not illusion or psychosis. It’s not a matter of some not seeing Towers that are there, or others seeing Towers that aren’t. The Towers are present in some photos and missing in others. They vanish from the radar of some circling aircraft and remain on the radar of others. Until it disappears entirely, the music doesn’t correspond with the vanishings. Sometimes the buildings aren’t there but the music persists. Sometimes the buildings are there but in silence.

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More than the buildings coming and going, it’s the randomness that people find disconcerting. Attempts are made to study the patterns of the buildings and music among individuals first, then larger groups. Attempts are made to break down sightings and hearings and vanishings and silencings demographically among genetic and ethnic and socioeconomic and national and continental constituencies, to feed computer systems with corresponding data that will divine (if that’s the word) patterns among the to-ing and fro-ing of skyscrapers and soundtracks. It’s a century that disputes and hates the dearth of patterns, that disavows and loathes a vacuum of digitalogic, as though Someone is putting on a cosmic demonstration of the limits of the rational.





chronometry


Some deduce ideological lessons, others religious designs. Some wait for science to draw conclusions that are nonexistent outside science. A theory takes hold among some that the Towers always occupy their space and that in fact it’s the time around them that slips: that the Towers are located at temporal coordinates rather than spatial ones, which sometimes coincide and sometimes don’t with the different traveling coordinates of each individual human being. As though the Towers always are at a fixed midnight that strikes at different times of each individual clock.