Shadowbahn(3)

“Like Mount Rushmore . . .” but she understands, as he does, that having a fight about this doesn’t make sense. “Okay,” he snaps, “they’re a monument,” realizing this time he’s about to hang up on her. “Don’t go,” she pleads, and then Aaron can hear she’s scared, and knows he’s scared; he peers around at the rapidly swelling sea of human disbelief, the highway traffic jam devolving to a parking lot. “They look just like in the pictures,” she says.





return to sender


She says, “But it can’t be them, the actual . . . I was seventeen when they came down.” It was a Tuesday, she remembers. “I mean, where did they come from? What are they doing in South Dakota?”

“What are they doing anywhere?” answers Aaron. He had just turned twenty-one. That weekend his pals were taking him out to get him hammered; they wound up not going. He pulls the cell from his ear for a moment to make out something, raises the phone in the Towers’ direction. “Do you hear that?”

“Just your radio.”

“My truck radio’s not on now, and the CB is broken. It’s coming from . . .” He hums to himself, trying to identify it. “What is that, anyway?” He can’t tell whether the music is actually from the Towers themselves or from the earth around them.

“I think I recognize it,” she says.

“You know me and music.”

“One of our parents’ songs,” she says, “or grandparents’. . . .” She starts humming too.

“Yeah. That one.” Wait, he thinks: I do know this.

“. . . address unknown . . . ,” she sings.

“. . . no such number . . . ,” he chimes in.

“. . . no such zone.”





towers of song (lakota)


Or maybe they hear no such thing. It’s not actually a melody, and it has no lyrics other than what they sing themselves. The “music” rises from out of or around the Towers “like the northern lights,” others will say later, maybe even Aaron to Cilla Ann: “Don’t the northern lights make some kind of sound?”—like a song of the spheres. When the people start coming, first by the hundreds and then the thousands, and then by the tens of thousands, from hundreds and then thousands of miles, from all over the country and then all over the continent and then all over the world, some hear the music and some don’t. Some hear it take shape as a recognizable melody, some hear only a mass of harmonics.

? ? ?

As the crowds arrive over the following days, the families and loners, the footloose and motor-bound, the drivers and passengers and hitchhikers, the cars and RVs and trailers, the shuttles and buses and private jets, the news vans and military jeeps and airborne surveillance, the constituents and pols and advance teams, the graphic designers and Hollywood scouts and novelists who can’t make up anything anymore, the mystics and cynics and the juries-still-out, the Towers loom from the end of what becomes a long national boulevard.





the long boulevard


Drawing closer to view, the constructions of steel and tubing rise from the ground against the azurescape of the sky not as if placed there but rather as the Badlands’ two most enormous buttes, shadow stalagmites of the most possessed geography of a possessed country: skywardly launched tombstones of a lakota mass grave. What once surrounded the Towers is gone. The customs office that stood at Vesey and West, the small bank once at Liberty and Church, the Marriott, and the underground mall where, on that doomsday twenty years ago, a funnel of fire flashed down ninety floors of elevator chutes before exploding into the concourse and sending thousands of morning pedestrians fleeing in panic past the boutiques and eyeglass vendors, newsstands and ATMs, the bookstore at one corner and the music shop with the flower stall behind it at the other corner across from the South Tower, past the entrances to the uptown Manhattan subway and trains to the river’s Jersey side. When the sprinkler system burst, a small tidal wave swept everyone along. On that day, the people at the Towers’ bottom had a more immediate sense of what was happening than those at the top where it happened. But on this day here in the Badlands, all that’s left is the Towers themselves and the wind that has gusted through, and the granite and dirt at their massive forty-thousand-square-foot bases now piled in some places as high as the structures’ third level, like hardened black wax holding two candles erect.





hallowing / desecration


AMERICAN STONEHENGE blares the cover of one newsweekly. To some who gather, the Towers represent a hallowing of the ground. To others, particularly those who lost someone in the Towers twenty years ago, they represent a desecration. Some descendants of those who perished come to the Towers immediately, while some keep their distance, watching TVs and computers from thousands of miles away, watching for the slightest sign of life, the slightest sign that those who were in the Towers on that day are now as present as the Towers themselves.

? ? ?

Otherwise, media is reduced to silence as the story ends where it begins, at the Towers’ edge, unless someone—soldier, adventurer, statesman, anarchist, the indignantly erstwhile or errantly intrepid—should take it upon himself to breach the periphery. But no one breaches either of the buildings. Occasional demands from some quarters that the president should enter clash with counter-demands that she shouldn’t. Everyone simply bears witness to the twin ghosts and whatever three thousand human ghosts haunt it.