Shadowbahn(44)

what you need, you have to borrow


Painfully aware of how people gawk at him when he walks down the street, of the rising murmur at cocktail parties when he walks in the room, finally he has fled to this city at the nation’s far northeastern corner, as far as possible from the southwestern corner that is his home. By his burden of world fame, he has been driven to the opposite end of a secret highway that cuts through the heart of the country from one end to the other with impunity. Not entirely clear how long he’s been here, the world-famous author arrived when the Surrogates no longer were a sufficient answer to his dilemma of notoriety. He first assembled the Surrogates in the months immediately following publication of his last novel, as his world fame crested; while he most wants to emulate those authors he so admires who shun the spotlight and allow their work to speak for itself, the demands of world fame of the scope and scale that approximate his don’t allow for this luxury. Those other authors, he realizes, may be famous but not world famous. Originally the Surrogates numbered four. Then he added another and then another when world fame permeated readership south of the border. That left two for the States and Canada, two for Europe, and one for Japan before it occurred to him, waking one night in some dismay, that one for Japan couldn’t possibly be enough, that he needed at least two or three for Japan alone. He’s big in Japan, the Cheap Trick of American fiction.





disappearing (the surrogates)


The Surrogates all had code names like Secret Service agents. They all shared the world-famous author’s lack of any particularly vivid personality, which is to say they were bland enough to pass for him, barring close inspection. All were about his age. Well, more or less his age. Well, some were about ten years younger. Twenty years. All of them, actually. Then the Surrogates began disappearing as well, into the wilds of South America and northern Africa, disappearing or maybe just resigning or retiring, maybe escaping, until there were only two left, whose code names were Search & Destroy and One Nation Under a Groove. As it happened, the two remaining Surrogates were identical twins. Or maybe that wasn’t a coincidence, maybe one stayed because the other did. Dispatched in the world-famous author’s stead to book tours and radio-show appearances and soirees of offended female readers—who might have been mollified by the fact that, seen from a certain angle, the Surrogates bore some resemblance to a world-famous singer, in fact the most famous singer who ever lived, to whom the world-famous author bears no resemblance in the least—soon one or the other was going off the reservation, shall we say? Somewhat outrageous quotes were uttered. Provocatively borderline behavior was committed.





what you get is no tomorrow


This was a problem not because of the outrageousness itself of the quotes, or the provocation itself of the behavior, but because those who know the world-famous author, to the extent that anyone does, realize that he never utters anything outrageous or does anything provocative, and therefore Search & Destroy and One Nation Under a Groove can’t possibly be him and are thereby revealed as impostors. With a start, the world-famous author realizes that the reason other authors shun the spotlight and let their work speak for itself is so that they can shun the spotlight and let their work speak for itself. But even in the midst of his world fame, there are obvious ways that he has been disappearing over time. In the throes of his celebrity, his phenomenon, his work not only becomes of less pertinence but begins to unexist altogether. Whole passages of his work (which of course is about everything) evaporate from between the bindings. Then the disappearing becomes more personal, until it’s a matter of his life unliving itself. With greater frequency he is confronted by eyewitness accounts of what naively he regards as his past’s key occasions or incidents, moments in which he has been under the illusion that he played a crucial role, only to find he played no part whatsoever.





source


Conversations within plain hearing in which there is any reference to him grow fewer. People within earshot speak more as though he isn’t there, and then as though he never has been there, and then as though he never has been. Maybe this is the source of his new dread, or maybe he just has been living so long with more reasonable dread, once supported by more reasonable anxieties, that dread is all he knows. Beginning around the time when Zema came home at the age of two, the family went through an almost biblically difficult seven years, and if they emerged more or less intact on the other side—maybe it’s around then that he became world famous? Or was it before, unlikely as that seems?—they weren’t unscathed. In the process, Parker and Zema’s father learned that he is a man of only shakable integrity at best (whatever that means, one might ask, but not him). He so vested his trust in ongoing and relentless crisis that he came to trust little else. Now, writing these words one gray twilight in the farthest northeast corner of the country, he finds time disappearing around him, not necessarily all time or everyone else’s, just his own. As he watches now from his window in the Sonark with the New Dublin boulevard rolling before him, the sun flickers on and off as though increments of its trajectory are atomizing themselves in the heavens. At first he figures he’s just getting his quadrants confused, his norths mixed up with his easts.





quadrex


Like all Americans, or like all Americans who are conscious of being American, Parker and Zema’s father always believed he was his country. But lately he’s come to realize that if he and his family didn’t emerge unscathed from their American crisis, American faith in the early part of the twenty-first century didn’t emerge at all. By the conclusion of the new century’s first score of years, only those who have a stake in an American idea defined by wealth and power can still speak of that idea so shamelessly, since wealth and power is the only American idea left. If the evil of the attacks on that September morning could be set aside, and of course it could not, nothing better presented America with the opportunity to reimagine itself. This was an opportunity at once botched and fulfilled, with, on the one hand, a war of worse faith than anything the country has done in a hundred years, and by the election on the other hand of a man the color of African orphans—all followed by hope’s collapse. Yet the father can’t shake his obsession with his country even in the face of his country’s disappearance, in the same way that he can’t shake his obsession with himself in the face of his own disappearance. Now the world-famous author has come to a place where American daylight is on the run.