Shadowbahn(43)

devices of experience


Things don’t just disappear into thin air, Parker and Zema’s father has heard his whole life. But if he has existed to prove anything, it’s that this isn’t true. Toward the end, he’s come to realize that things in his life always disappear into thin air, before it’s his life itself that begins disappearing: all those eyeglasses by which to see things, those headphones by which to hear things, wallets by which to identify himself, all those devices of experience that he’s attached to himself or gripped in his hands and that so pointedly have disappeared, that so pointedly have vanished from his fingers and his eyes and ears, from his memory, to which he has committed the things that—by such devices—he believes he has learned.





gardening


Late at night, after the rest of the family was asleep, Parker and Zema’s father would tend his playlists like people tend their gardens. As other men’s fantasies run to harems or world power, he is the Supreme Sequencer ensconced on a mountaintop or at the edge of a cobalt grove with his catacomb of songs in their proper place, his archive of sequences that he sets right—not among mediocre song-collections, since no one cares about those, but recorded masterpieces with the flaws that make them human. The problem with musicians, the father seethes, is that they’re not novelists; they have no sense of narrative. Didn’t the saloon singer understand he should open, not end, his torch-song cycle with “One for My Baby,” setting up the rest as flashback, and then (as the singer himself would grasp years later in concert) close with, not squander near the beginning, “Angel Eyes” with its devastating final line? In short the Supreme Sequencer reorders, which is to say improves—well, why put so fine a point on it?—perfects all the greatest long-players ever made. If he himself is incapable of perfection in anything he does as a father or writer (not to mention that he can’t sing or play a note), at least he manages musical perfection’s finishing touches.





education


His wife used to joke to their friends that when it came to parenting Parker and Zema, the mother and father weren’t so much good cop and bad cop as horrible cop and no cop. Funny line, he would fume silently at the suggestion that he was absent when it came to the responsibilities of raising their children. But while it was true that he held a laissez-faire philosophy on certain things, that he felt it was up to his son and daughter to find their own way on smaller matters such as the existence of Satan or Republicans, like any good father he attempted to set them straight on more fundamental verities from which he knew mob hysteria conspired to sway them. “Now, kids,” he said at one such evening convocation around the family dining table, choosing his words so as not to alarm them unduly, filled with the misery of any father who imparts tragic dimensions of life and thereby sullies innocence with reality at its harshest and most despicable, “I know this will be difficult to comprehend, but you’re at an age when there are certain things you need to know.”

Mustering moral authority, he choked, “I need you to listen to me so as to be mindful when forces of darkness attempt to lead you astray. Try to understand that someone who thinks Queen and the Grateful Dead are good”—this caused him a particular pang, since their mother was known to have a fondness for the former band—“is not necessarily a bad person. Sometimes,” he allowed, “good people can believe bad things. But then there are purists, elitists if you will, cultural clergy,” indignation rising, “who will tell you that mono is better than stereo, for instance. There are those in the audiophiliac oligarchy who will tell you that vinyl is better than MP3s. Well, we’re not reactionaries in this family, goddamn it—”

“Okay,” his wife interjected.

“—we’re democrats, egalitarians. We’re futurists, we don’t go back. Pet Sounds is not better in f*cking mono.”

“All right,” she admonished.

“Blonde on Blonde is not better in mono. Do you understand what I’m saying, kids?” Sixteen-year-old Parker seemed slightly stunned (was he smoking weed again?), eight-year-old Zema was wide-eyed. “As for MP3s, not only can I carry all my songs on this,” he said, holding up his cell, “I can put them in the correct order that the artists in their so-called f*cked-up genius—”

Sighing, his wife stood from the table, retrieving her car keys. “Let’s,” she said to the boy and girl, “go for a drive, shall we? Give your father some alone time.”

“Stereo,” their father continued, following them out the front door to the driveway, “is the sound of America. Open! Wide! Containing multitudes. MP3s,” striding alongside the departing car until he worked up to a sprint, “are the format of the twenty-first century. Unmoored! Restless! Perfectible. Don’t forget that, kids,” he called to the car’s red rear lights disappearing down the road, the howl of canyon coyotes rising around him, “and don’t,” he shouted after his wife, “ever say I didn’t teach them something important.”





disappearing (the world-famous author)


When he was young, reflexively he resisted the music of his time out of what he now realizes was pathological nonconformity to what everyone around him embraced. He pretended that teen anthems were beneath him while secretly he remained glued to the car radio on summer afternoons when he was hired to water neighbors’ lawns. Unconsciously yet unmistakably his Damascene conversion was timed exactly with moving out of his parents’ house. As well, the music became inextricable from the paroxysms of his country. Did his country lead him to the music or did the music lead him to his country? Now, as close to the end of his life as he then was to the beginning, there are song-moments, song-statistics he recalls more vividly than the disappearing names of best friends. When he discovers that he himself is disappearing with his memories, when he gazes around and grasps pieces of his world going missing, when he peers down and finds pieces of himself missing, he realizes it has been going on awhile; it has been going on for years. It has been going on at least since he became world famous, although he can’t remember exactly when that was, since he has come to feel he always has been world famous, even as he suspects this isn’t the case. In any event, his world fame has become pervasive and all-consuming enough that one of the vanished memories is what it was like not to have been world famous.