Shadowbahn(41)
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By the time his marriage broke up back in Hamburg, there wasn’t a day when Winston didn’t hit her. For a while he told himself, as such men do, that she was asking for it, with her merciless taunts from bed of Doctor O’Boogie lost his woogie?—when did her English get so bloody clever?—but that was before sex stopped being a theoretically viable prospect altogether, impotence giving way to nothing more complicated than pure hostility.
a trail
In earlier days, before and during and after his band’s brief popular streak in Europe, the death of her first husband was a bond between them, all the more because that husband was his best friend. It was something for them to get over together, as he put it to her: “It’s simple, really. We decide to survive together or mourn separately,” and this seemed to resemble, as much as anything, the makings of a marriage if not love.
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Then the grief wore off, as it was supposed to. When her photography career went the way of his record sales and their efforts to have a child were no more successful, she got a job as a barmaid at his favorite watering hole, which meant he drank somewhere else, which he took as liberty to drink twice as much, which he took as liberty to beat her twice as often. Occasioned by his usual verbal and physical belligerence toward the arresting officers, he was nabbed by German police in a small neighborhood grocery store shoplifting his favorite chocolate wafers. She was too bruised and battered to show up at his deportation, not wanting to cause him more trouble than he already had made for himself, or to convince authorities they should throw him in jail rather than out of the country, where she wanted him.
Dakota
Back in London, a momentary rapprochement with his former musical partner also came to blows. Seeing little point in returning to Liverpool, in seven months he was in the States, where, for a while, he had what appeared to be a promising career as a cartoonist freelancing for various newspapers and journals. This included a recently launched jazz magazine in which, to his grim amusement, he found himself mentioned by his true archnemesis—the shadow of his unlived future—whom he would meet one more time in the record shop on Macdougal when the cartooning career predictably dissolved in a series of editorial scuffles. Another twelve years would follow of one odd job after another, the last as doorman of an apartment at Seventy-Second and Central Park West.
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The building is named for once having been considered to be as bleakly secluded from the rest of Manhattan Island in the 1880s as are the Badlands from the rest of America in the twenty-first century. At his post, Winston watches enter and exit movie stars, playwrights, and financiers who predate any America in which Jesse has survived in place of his twin. The doorman spots in the park across the street the predators of fame, would-be assassins; he would know them anywhere. Each is his own twin. Unable to stand the parade of celebrity and accomplishment in and out of the building, Winston roots for those hiding in the trees, conspires with them in silence.
instant karma
Finally from the apartment building’s archway shadows one December night, he attacks an eighty-seven-year-old actress who began making motion pictures in 1912, her most famous role that of a Southern belle molested by a black man in a silent Civil War epic, her honor salvaged only by the Ku Klux Klan on their thundering midnight ride for racial righteousness. The British expat spends the next twenty years in and out of jail, in and out of Salvation Army centers, in and out of homeless shelters on nights when he’s lucky. Slunk against the base of skyscraper centers, hair and beard grown jesusian wild, he simultaneously begs for spare change and verbally abuses passersby.
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Struggling to his feet, “Fookin’ peasants,” he rails, pedestrians scurrying as though he’s just exploded, “far as I can see.” As he mutter-slobbers on the sidewalk, his delirium would seem to consume not only his own reason but that of anyone within earshot, until his final hours ten mornings before the fall—in the first year following the century that he was supposed to change but didn’t—when, from his place on the city corner that he’s come to claim, he has what in one last act of reason he insists to himself is a dream.
don’t believe in
But it isn’t. Eyes full of the southwestern sky, he watches a Boeing airliner head straight for the northern twin of the tallest structure he’s seen, only to swerve at the last moment, missing the Tower and turning westward back to its prescribed destination. Others around him take note as well. “Did you see that?” asks a young woman at his feet. “Looked like that plane just missed . . .” and then, most curiously, sixteen minutes later it appears to happen again, another Boeing swooping toward and avoiding the other Tower. “A flight pattern change?” someone speculates, because what else could explain it?
By the time this vision of aeronautic freakishness bubbles up to the evening news, and though his body hasn’t moved, Winston will have gone to what only can be imagined: unfulfillment in the husk of a dreamer’s despair. “Did you see that?” the woman on the sidewalk asks again, staring at the Towers; then, glancing around, decides she’s talking to herself but for the homeless man slouching against the wall. The woman’s name is Pamela, and there on the curb, still pointed in the direction of the Towers, she folds her arms around her as if to hold in some part of herself.