Shadowbahn(31)
adrenalized by his own hammering heart, he hears himself silently exclaiming, Is this it? Have we found it? the secret highway! and over and over he whispers, Zema! or believes anyway that he’s whispered his sister’s name only to realize he hasn’t, that he’s uttered to her nothing but a shadowhisper, and that there’s no point at all to any consultation since they pass nowhere any diversion or exit as they continue to drive, if what they’re doing can be called driving, this one-way thoroughfare with only its single escape at either end of it—assuming they haven’t just disappeared into thin
three
earshot
tracks 07 and 08:
“Pilots” and “Seven Nation Army”
The first song is released to little notice on September 11, 2000. The second is released in March 2003, the same month that—in the name of the incendiary millennial moment that follows the first song by exactly one year—the country invades another that had nothing to do with the moment. All the words are going to bleed from me, sings the second song, which becomes the year’s biggest, recorded by a Detroit ex–husband-wife team posing as brother and sister who could be twins. The song’s opening guitar riff turns into a stadium chant sung together, in unison and full-throatedly. Soldiers drive their tanks across Middle Eastern borders humming the riff, pushing themselves onward to the song’s insistent opening seven notes. Opposing armies hum the same notes back, bolstering their spirits or fleeing with it in their ears. “Pilots” also is written and recorded by a male/female duo, from London rather than Detroit: Armored cars sail the sky, they’re pink at dawn forecasts that morning exactly one year later. Does its ethereal melody float above the clouds with Atta and al-Shehhi in the cockpits of American 11 and United 175, airliners pink in the sun before rendered the red of fire and blood? On opposite sides of a chasm, are these two songs infused with the spirit of a stillborn nation that wanders its own landscape trying to make sense of destiny, trying to make sense of survival, trying to make sense of which twin country is really left? Which is the corporeal and which is the ectoplasm? Which is the reflected and which the reflection? Which is the sun and which is the shadow?
when midnight comes around
and Jesse wakes, he really has no idea what time it is in the vast emporium where it’s always midnight, regardless of whether, outside, it’s two in the afternoon or two in the morning. Whatever dream he was dreaming already fades. Was he in the Tower again, back on the roof of the world where nothing is in the distant dark but moonscape and the twinkling of a thousand lights, back atop the world’s highest building that he seems to dream of every night? if he must concede it’s a dream, which he has nearly convinced himself it must be, since he can’t remember how or when he actually would have been in such a high space, the winds such as to blow him from where he stood into another place and time.
? ? ?
Yet it all has the vividness and emotional specificity of not a dream but a memory. The song that made its way into his sleep still plays; he can’t be sure, wondering to himself, if it’s a recording or Andy’s new little kraut blonde singing from the next chamber. “Must be evening,” he decides out loud, based on the doings around him, and then sits himself up in the corner of the cavernous room. A series of Moroccan arches link every foiled silver wall of jagged mirror shards to the adjoining red wall. Junkies
June 3, 1968
shoot up in whatever dark corners where couples of indistinct gender aren’t f*cking. There’s Gerard with his whips, Mare gyrating before a projection on the wall of Andy’s latest: naked people—mostly guys, so Jesse surely doesn’t need to see that—down at the Mad Hatter Diner not doing anything much, like in all Andy’s movies. Janet from upstate, lately calling herself Viva, railing in her fashion about Catholics. Paul, scowling little Nazi mick on the prowl with his f*cking camera like he’s C. B. goddamn DeMille. Jesse catches sight of a woman on the other side of the room glowering at him, all ferocity.
? ? ?
Val, well shit, Val, li’l dyke psycho, disheveled jeans and work shirt, folksinger’s cap pulled down on her crazy little f*cked-up head, bedraggled and agitated and barely able to stand in her own footsteps: glamour-killer if there ever was. Hell, thinks Jesse, she be unhinged by even the standards of this place. She just keeps scowling at him and then it comes back—was it earlier this afternoon he ran into her outside, stalking the steps and lying in wait so she could hit somebody up for some bread or give Andy her latest treatise on lopping off all the men’s dicks, assuming she can’t suck one in the meantime for fifty bucks?
and cry behind the door
Jesse told Val to skedaddle and thought he ran her off but there she is now, who let her in? Couldn’t have been Paul, always threatening to beat her up—well hell, even Jesse would never lay a violent hand on a lady, stretchin’ the definition of the word mightily to include Valerie. Just a few feet away from her, where he’s been every night for the last two weeks, is a silver-haired gent in a wheelchair saying nothing, just watching, small smile. Assume it’s a he; in this place you never can be sure. Jesse still is unsettled by the blow job Candy gave him last week. No way Candy can be a he, Jesse assures himself, dismissing from his mind the gossip and overheard chatter.