Shadowbahn(32)

? ? ?

But then there are people who aren’t so sure about Jesse, for that matter, which is just stupid. Jesse thinks about this awhile crumpled in the room’s yawning corner that’s one of the only sources of light, besides, ’course, Andy’s latest movie projected on the wall. Also projected is the now celebrated double image of Jesse in cowboy shirt and holster but no hat, six-gun drawn, looking like the superstar that he is, just on the basis of everyone saying so. There in the corner, with the piercing glare of the projector in his eyes, Jesse covers his face.





factory


Crawling out of the light, Jesse scurries like pestilence, sir (self-revulsion), to a darker corner. He realizes he’s hungover. In the drone of yowling thorazine cello, he gazes into the dark of the room, eyes adjusting to the Sunday clowns and femmes fatale with their streetlight fancies, whiplash children in ermine furs and blackened shrouds and shiny boots of leather . . . but realizes maybe the hubbub is losing its charm. Not the same since Edie left, Jesse mulls with a small pang in his heart.

? ? ?

Maybe, he thinks, this move down to Union Square will recharge something. Why hell, back on East Forty-Seventh you got yourself wandering folk who are downright mentally disturbed. Or maybe, he thinks, it should all just die, the whole damn scene. “What are you doing down there, cowpoke?” comes a voice from out of the dark above him that’s not quite male, not quite fe—





the smallest taste


Candy, goddamn it, do you have a dick or not? Jesse peers up at her. Have you ever had a dick? “Catching me my beauty sleep, darlin’,” says Jesse.

“Is that all it takes?” she says. “Maybe I should go to sleep and never wake up.”

“Speaking of dead,” Jesse nods, “do it all seem a might moribund to you tonight?” No one had to worry if Edie had a dick, sweet little dollop of New England maple cream that she was.

? ? ?

Candy says, “It’s midnight. It’s early. You know the witching hour is two. Give it time, it will be fabulous. It will all be very bop, very elvis,” and she looks at the projection of Jesse in the other corner. “Maybe everyone’s waiting for you to make it happen . . . so make it happen, baby. You know I hate the quiet places that cause—”

“Say, darlin’, don’t mean to interrupt what I’m sure is a very poetic thought,” he says, nodding across the room, “but who’s the old earl over there coming in on wheels every night?”





revisions


Jesse has noticed that the man in the wheelchair with the silver hair is watching him. Oh my good lord, thinks Jesse, another Factory-slumming fancyman checking me out, except that when the man’s attention does turn elsewhere it’s to Mare slithering nude across the floor with cat-o’-nine-tails in hand—so maybe the aristocrat’s interests don’t run Jesse’s direction after all, at least not in that manner. Rather the old man, smoking a thin cigar, regards Jesse in the way that Jesse remembers being regarded once before by a young Hamburg exi in black, like someone who knows something from beyond the present moment, as it’s currently defined.

? ? ?

Gazing over her shoulder, Candy says, “My God, what’s she doing here?”

“That’s a she?” says Jesse. “Man, I don’t hardly know as how I can stand the confusion.”

“Not him,” says Candy, “standing right next to him—isn’t that Valerie? Didn’t Andy excommunicate her, and isn’t it someone’s job to keep her out? Why is she looking at you like that?”

“They both giving me the eye, though I feel something close to certain not for the same reasons—can’t hardly say about the old guy. . . .”





chord of D


Candy shrugs. “He’s not that old. Still this side of fifty—old but not ancient. Hair went all white just last year.”

“What’s wrong with him?” asks Jesse.

“Degenerative something. Got a beautiful wife, I hear, he never spends any time with, up in Bridgeport or Boston or New Haven somewhere. Very rich in the chord of D . . .”

“Decadent,” says Jesse, “downright defiled.”

“Definitely.”

“Deranged, demonic . . .”

“But destined too, as I understand. He is giving you the eye.”

? ? ?

Jesse says, “You know that’s not my style, darlin’,” but looking down at him on the floor Candy chuckles from so deep in her throat that, even in the dark, he finds it discombobulatin’. She says, “I’m pretty sure he likes the girls. The girls who are girls through and through, of course, just . . . like . . . you do, cowpoke.” She leans over and touches Jesse’s nose. He has the feeling there’s a joke he’s not in on. “Destined?” he says, trying to recover.

“As I hear it,” she shrugs again, “he was in Congress or something. As I hear it, once upon a time, he was going to be president of the United States.”





strobe


Through the rippled dark, in the swoon of the electric tempest wailing around him, Jesse makes his way across the room.

Perfectly still, the other man in the wheelchair with the white hair never takes his eyes off Jesse’s approach. Jesse pulls up a small round table and chair. “Well, sir,” he says, having to shout over a rise in the soundtrack, “buy you a drink there?” The other man just raises from his lap a cocktail glass before taking another puff on his thin cigar, appraising Jesse ever coolly.