Shadowbahn(38)
? ? ?
Why is the sound of something always said to be within “earshot”? So, Jack sighs to Jesse eight years later from the prison of his wheelchair in the Factory shadows, “you best have a moment that’s forged from the thing you might like to think that you manifest.” He takes a last drink from his highball. “You best,” he says, “have a moment already . . . catalyzed by an irresistible presence, a moment already defined in fortuitous terms—and I do not mean Frank f*cking Sinatra. Otherwise there’s that . . . missing piece of the sky, some crucial shard, some . . . indispensable color gone from . . .” trailing off.
the unreasoned song
He says, “You might have all the money in the world. Well, not all the money, but enough. You might have a ruthless and powerful father determined to do what it takes. You might have connections and operations and the campaign to deliver West Virginia. You might have the good luck of running against the weakest field of opponents imaginable, opponents who haven’t the slightest chance of unifying enough party delegates to be nominated for anything. But that isn’t lucky enough if you also have barely a Senate term and a half, if you have no record of distinction whatsoever, if you have little credible experience on the world stage, if you haven’t established yourself as the most compelling spokesman of the day’s most compelling issue, whatever that might be, if you haven’t even an underwhelming equivalent of, say, a Cooper Union speech. Then you better be lucky enough to also have a forged moment in which your youth, and your embodiment of a new world overturning the old, commends you. Otherwise, when the time comes and everyone stares up at the convention ceiling and asks themselves, So other than the money and looks, why exactly is it again we’re choosing him? they may find their attention wandering to someone with prospects no better than yours and perhaps worse, just because you never really gave them a good enough reason to do otherwise.”
the unwritten song
The thin cigar stops midway to his lips. “Instead, ignoring what . . . fate encoded in the genes, out you came in some tide of afterbirth that washed away your other, better, more brilliant, more magical version. Instead of getting the twin of possibilities, the half who might fire an age, we got the half who coughed up cold water all over it. Sheriff Stud with his six-gun,” waving at the projection on the wall, “desperado king. Can’t you at least have some of this crazy poon here”—he gestured at one of the naked women on the floor around him—“blow you while I watch, so I can begin to grasp what it was all for? Aren’t you good for at least that? Because it’s the closest I’ll ever come to my glory days, when the * of the world was in flower. I’d rather have had half my presidential head blown off in—of all cars!—a Lincoln, yes, I’d rather that than this.” He slams his fists down hard on the wheels of the chair. “I’d rather be immortal, f*ck you very much. Airports named after me and a myth better than my life ever could have been no matter how hard I tried. They,” he says, pointing at some invisible throng beyond the walls, “would rather have had that, too. They would rather have had the Other Me like they would rather have had the Other You. Nobody ever wanted this you,” pointing at the projection, “at all.”
Valerie
For the last several minutes, Jesse has been nearly levitating from his seat. Now he leaps up with one hand knocking across the room the small round table that’s been between them, and lands on the crippled man, flailing. By the tenth or twelfth blow, or maybe fifteenth or twentieth, Jesse’s resolve to beat senseless the man in the wheelchair morphs into a new intent, to throttle him where he sits. It’s hard to be sure in the din and drone of the room whether anyone’s taking note. A thought exultantly flashes across Jesse’s mind, Good lord, I do believe I’m going to kill this here motherf*cker, as though he might then be free of himself, when he sees the blood on his hands around Jack’s throat. “What the—?” and then he sees the trickle of blood running down Jack’s chest from the hole in it. Jack sees it too. He peers down at himself, he and Jesse looking at each other in mutual confusion, Jesse uncurling his hands from Jack’s throat to gaze at his red fingers. The sound of the gunshot from seconds before registers with Jack before it does with Jesse, first one man then the other turning to look at the crazy disheveled woman in the cap pulled down on her bedraggled head.
? ? ?
At the crack of the gunfire, the surroundings finally seem roused from preoccupation, people surfacing from drinking and dancing and f*cking and shooting up to note something even more out of the ordinary than what’s ordinarily out of the ordinary. Val still holds the small thirty-two-caliber Beretta, dervish of smoke writhing from its barrel like that from Jack’s cigar. Viewing the small bubbling red hole in his chest, Jack looks back at first Jesse, then Val, a gurgle of blood at his lips. “My heart,” he agrees, “well, my least vulnerable spot. Better my heart than my h—” when Val shoots him in the head. “Damn!” Jesse cries, launching himself backward from the wheelchair and the body in it. He’s sprawled across the floor staring at the dead man in disbelief when a third shot whizzes by, nearly grazing Jesse’s cheek; a startled cry comes from somewhere behind. Val fires again, bullet piercing the floor a foot from Jesse’s hand, and then again as he frantically rolls behind the other man’s body, using it as a shield. Around him, Jesse can sense the dispersal of the other denizens, who have shrewdly concluded that his proximity isn’t where they want to be. He peers over Jack’s body to see the woman turn the gun on herself, not putting it in her mouth or up against her temple but rather confronting it point-blank, as if she wants to study the bullet’s emergence and journey from the barrel to her brain. The hammer clicks instead on an empty chamber and then another. She flings the gun at the ground, disgusted at yet one more betrayal in a world of weapons made by men.