Shadowbahn(45)

the beacon


On the run, American daylight arrives a couple of hours before noon and departs just a few hours after, black gulls from the sea swooping into the city like bats. Taking his room in the curve of the Sonark at the far end of Abyssinthe Road, the world-famous author can see from his large window that wraps around the building the college in the distance and the lattice of winter-woven trees beyond which lies the Atlantic. Traffic surges and ebbs up and down the boulevard. A steady stream of students enters and exits the taverns and café where he gets muffins on black mornings, and like land’s hot air smashing the cold of the sea into fog, space’s sonic rain beats the silence of the city floor into a silver shhh. A woman in her midtwenties plays guitar on the sidewalk below, although no cup or cap or open guitar case at her feet receives the tribute of passersby. He thinks maybe she’s familiar to him. She has dark cropped hair and a scar on her nose where a ring used to be. “What is a sonark anyway?” she asks one afternoon when he walks by, and the world-famous author explains that as a lighthouse is a beacon in the dark, a sonark is a beacon in the silence. Studying the tower behind him, the guitarist frowns. “If it’s a beacon in the silence, I don’t hear it making any sound,” she says, and he answers, indicating her guitar, “Maybe you’re the sound.”





track 15:


   “Surrender”


   but don’t give yourself away.





when justice is gone, there’s always


During his stay at the Sonark, the world-famous author persists in believing that one morning he finally will complete the line that he’s arrived in New Dublin to finish:

Here come the planes, so you better—

Run? hide? scream? You better die? You better . . . what? All the possibilities seem obvious, and yet he feels sure that the correct conclusion is inclusive of the others, meaning something that doesn’t choose running or hiding at the exclusion of screaming or dying. He also has a nagging suspicion that he knows this line from Another Place or Time. He worries that it’s something he already has written; then one morning he wakes realizing, to his enormous chagrin, that the line is from a song, and that he’s come all this way to finish a line that isn’t even his, not just written by someone else but sung for millions to hear. Since he has made it a habit to leave pulled open at night the curtains of his room so that the city lights splash across his closed eyelids when he dreams, he can’t rule out that the song has come through the window as well.





towers of song (new doubling)


On his laptop at his fingertips, as he gazes out over Abyssinthe Road from his window and can hear up and down the thoroughfare the shhh misting in from the side streets, he has twin playlists of a hundred and ten songs, each drawn from a musical library of 2,996. Of course, as music’s Supreme Sequencer he has systemized the playlists precisely according to a rationale that’s evident to him if no one else:

                                            Générique

              Ethanopium



             Crosstown Traffic

              The Sky Is Crying



             Ghost Riders in the Sky

              Armenia City in the Sky



             Tombstone Shadow

              Paradise Circus



             Rebel Girl

              Route 66



             Slip Inside This House

              Ballrooms of Mars



             Parachute Woman

              Paper Planes



             Airborne

              Atomic



             What a Good Man He Is

              Papa Don’t Take No Mess



             Little Babies

              Family Affair



             Piece of My Heart

              Get Ur Freak On