Shadowbahn(49)

              Lucille



             Snow White Diner

              Wichita Lineman



             Oh Shenandoah

              Psychedelic Shack



             St. James Infirmary

              I Feel Love



             Lose Yourself

              Hey Ya



             96 Tears

              Straight, No Chaser



             Jockey Full of Bourbon

              Theme from Peter Gunn



             Theme from Now, Voyager

              You Go to My Head



             Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

              All Apologies



             Bad Reputation

              This Bitter Earth



             My Funny Valentine

              Song to the Siren



             Ballad of El Goodo

              Winterlong



             Summertime

              Debaser



             Stardust

              Redemption Song



             Pyramid Song



         . . . only to realize with a glance . . .





the half-remembered song


. . . because it takes only a glance for it to be instantly apparent, that the second playlist now is shorter than the first. One of the songs is gone. The Supreme Sequencer stares at the once-twin playlists assuming there’s a mistake; it must be, he tries to convince himself, that the second list isn’t shorter but that the first is longer because maybe a title accidentally has been duplicated? since, after all, songs don’t just disappear into thin air. But the moment that he considers this, some part of him knows better, some part of his brain that has mapped these compilations so as to immediately recognize something is amiss even when he can’t tell what, some part of him that can discern havoc has been wrought and the order of the playlist violated even as he can’t pinpoint the violation. He stares hard at the second list, concentrating, subliminally identifying—in his sequencing supremacy—that the sequence has gone awry somewhere near the bottom. But with a horror more acute than all of his various vanishings have instilled so far, he concludes his sequences are vanishing too.





the insubordinate song


Sitting before his curved window, he peers at the floor around him. He checks the pockets of his coat hanging on the back of his chair. In alarm, he glances at the sill just beyond the window—where he keeps a carton of milk in the winter chill as refrigeration—in case the song has, like a cat, crawled too far out. For a moment he feels certain that he catches a glimpse of the song bolting down the street, calling to strangers for help. You always were free to go as you chose, he thinks indignantly, never my prisoner; but he’s not sure this is true. He wonders if this is the onset of a full-fledged revolt. He looks at the lists again to determine if any of the others have made a break, if they’re congregating in mutinous groups, punk tribes and psychedelic clans, bebop cabals and rhythm-and-blues secret societies. If he’s being honest, he knows the reason for his congenital eclecticism is to keep the songs isolated from fellow like-spirited songs and thereby powerless: in their heterogeneity lies his control. One afternoon he’s convinced that he spots from his window the song skittering into the guitar of the young woman in the street, lurking in the instrument’s hollow. But when he pulls on his clothes and rushes down the circular stairs, she’s gone by the time he reaches the bottom.





and when force is gone, there’s always


Upon first checking into the Sonark, having seen the wraparound window from the street below and known it was the room where he was meant to finish his work, he’s been slightly surprised by his own demands, not having thought of himself as demanding. But these are the perks of world fame, and thus is his dedication to completing the line in his head and thus is his resolve to uncover whatever it is that better be done because the planes are coming. Having searched the city—which, considering he never heard of New Dublin before he became world famous, he finds shockingly grand for an American city, with palatial promenades and arching bridges and vast parks and the centuries-old campus built around the old settlement’s remnants—he takes the room for a month on the condition that the Sonark move out some of the furniture, a qualification about which he’s politely adamant in the face of the concierge’s resistance. Since checking in, he has persevered in rearranging the room further, shifting an armoire from one end to the other; had he a sledgehammer in hand, he would knock out one of the walls. So when he wakes in the middle of the night hearing the song in the ceiling above, nothing is going to stop him from chasing it down.