Shadowbahn(4)

I long to hear you


In silence and from a distance, the gathering listens as much as it watches. In the vacuum of what can be scientifically explained or sociologically defined, the music of the buildings provides the only explanation or definition of what has happened. The Patterson family of four from Virginia hears rising from the buildings “Oh Shenandoah,” once the name—derived from the Oneida word for the antlers of a deer—of an Iroquois chief whose daughter fell in love with a white explorer.

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The great national metamorphosis-song, originally a musical news bulletin from the American future, sent back to the rest of the nineteenth century by fortune hunters from across the wide Missouri, “Oh Shenandoah” is a hundred songs in one depending on who has sung or heard it at a given moment over the past two hundred years: pioneer song, sailing song, slave song, Confederate song, a French trader’s love song for his Indian bride.





first crossfade


Older married couple Traci and Linda hear what they’ll only later identify—recognizing it from a jukebox in a diner on the way back to their cottage in Upper Saskatchewan—as a ballad called “Round Midnight,” not one of the accepted renditions by any number of renowned jazz giants but rather a more obscure interpretation by a 1950s San Berdoo bombshell, the daughter of vaudevillians, who took as her nom de chanson a far European capital where she never expected to sing.

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Traveling from their Salt Lake City suburb home, the Mormon Hartmans (all seven) all hear (or at least six, the ten-month-old demurring from consensus) “Ecstasy of Gold,” a dramatic and ghostly choral piece by a composer of Italian Western scores, while the young Ortizes—after a furious war between them over where to spend their honeymoon, with Arturo winning the last skirmish of their marriage that he ever will—pick out the strains of an early-forties composition called “Moon Mist.” Very much of her time and place, Elena has never heard of Duke Ellington.





second crossfade


Terminally ill Justin Farber, sixty-three going on sixty-four and keenly aware he’ll never stalk sixty-five, accompanied only by a jackahuahua dachshund that he named Endgame three years ago when he still thought he could be cavalier about such concepts, hears for the first time in his life a song called “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More,” by a onetime seventies British glam-rocker turned ambient pioneer. A modern and sophisticated Sunni family from Egypt, the Nours, spend several days on the Internet to determine that what they’ve heard is “Lost Highway” by a long-dead country star; they’re amused, though perhaps make too much of the synchronicity, to meet staying in the same motel the Ramseys from Tennessee trying to figure out that what they’ve heard is a piece—by a Nile-born woman considered the greatest Arabic singer who ever lived—called “Al-Atlal,” which translates into English as “the ruins.” The first lawful authority dispatched to the scene of the Towers, Sheriff Rae Jardin, hears a whistle she can’t identify that fills her with dread, an old Delta blues song whose title she’s never known.

In their silver Toyota Camry, a twenty-three-year-old white brother and his fifteen-year-old black sister set out from Los Angeles with no intention of driving anywhere but the shores of Lake Michigan to visit their mother, hearing only the songs—left strewn on the roadside behind them—of their father’s old playlists.





sonic sky


Enough people report hearing music that collective psychosis can’t be discounted, with the sounds in every head a kind of sonic vision or aural rorschach. Helicopters arriving within minutes of the Towers’ first appearance warily circle the structures, determining that not only are there no waves of music but no waves of any natural sound whatsoever. In fact all data and instrumentation indicate that the two structures emit no vibration or frequency, not only enveloped by silence but absorbing every vibration and frequency within their proximity.

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This creates not so much a black hole as what scientists soon label a “hush vortex,” a misnomer since even a hush has a kind of auditory presence that collapses within the buildings’ airspace. But as the white brother and his black sister from Los Angeles make the long advance in their silver Camry to their mother in Michigan, like Traci and Linda, like Justin and the Pattersons, like the Hartmans and Ortizes and Nours and Ramseys and the hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands of others, they’re drawn to the vortex of the Badlands hush, silence descending on them with the horizon.





turin


On the Towers’ third day, an aerial photograph from one of the circling news helicopters records an image of what appears to be someone in a narrow vertical window of one of the South Tower’s top floors. The image and its implications are immediately discounted by government officials as an ambiguous shadow of nothing, a trick of light. As news stations pore over the image and analyze it ceaselessly during the hours that follow, the image of someone living on one of the high floors becomes characterized as a “Turin effect,” the shroud of the Tower imprinted with a vision in which people are either desperate or afraid to believe.

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Enlarged, decoded, in-zoomed and out-zoomed, the photo is digitally extrapolated and reassessed from every conceivable angle and perspective. An intelligence leak reveals that in fact some within the analytic community are not at all sure they share the government’s official position discounting the image. The earliest footage of the Towers is reviewed again on the theory that somebody unnoticed entered the buildings on their initial manifestation, whenever that exactly was. Descendants of those victims of the Towers’ collapse on that fateful September morning demand a more convincing account either for or against the image’s existence and source.