Shadowbahn(5)

the unsung song


Defense surveillance, intensive media coverage, and the focus of a million amateur photographers relentlessly scour the upper floors of the South Tower for another glimpse of its occupant. As more hours pass and no further indication of life in the building presents itself, slowly but with emerging unanimity the consensus conclusion is accepted—by some with regret and by others with relief—that no one is there.

? ? ?

When Jesse Garon Presley wakes on the South Tower’s ninety-third floor, in his first conscious moment—not a full moment; a sliver of a moment—lying there on the conference table he sees it out of the corner of his eye, right outside the northern windows: a monstrous Boeing 767 airliner flying straight toward him like a silver sun, roaring leviathan of death faster than can be comprehended, because once Jesse has comprehended what he sees, then it’s gone, and he has no reason to believe he saw it at all.





the unremembered song


Damned if Jesse has the slightest idea where he is. He closes his eyes at the sight of the plane outside the ninety-third-floor windows, and when several seconds pass and he hasn’t gone up in a fireball, he opens his eyes again and the plane isn’t there and he’s sure he dreamed it. He sits up uneasily, dizzy, body aching. What the hell, like I been sleeping on a damn tombstone or somethin’, by which he means the conference table around which a couple of dozen desks fill the abandoned office space of the ninety-third floor, and I’m not ready, he insists to himself, to start asking other stuff, like what is this place and how did I get here and, oh yeah, who the tarnation am I. That last one in particular, sir.

? ? ?

Not so long from now he’ll recall his name. But first he unbends himself from his sleep, if sleep is what it was. He lowers himself to the floor, wandering the aisles among the desks, aimlessly picking up several telephones out of nervous compulsion before actually raising one to his ear to find the line dead. The next phone on the next desk is dead too, and the phone after and all the damn phones, sir. He looks out the windows again where he dreamed he saw the plane, and as the afternoon sun sinks over the distant curve of the earth and hits the glass a certain way, he catches a reflection of himself.





the homeless song


He says, “Well, you are a good-looking rascal then,” satisfied sneer curling, pointing at himself and striking a pose. But he can’t pull it off, it’s not his pose. Since my baby left me, I found a new place to dwell sings in his head in what he first believes is his own voice—but when he repeats it out loud, he can’t pull that off either. He can’t carry a tune to save his life, or to even claim his life as his own. “All right then,” he says, “so I can’t sing—whoever said I could?” and then the voice in his head answers with power, conviction, in key and with perfect pitch, It’s down at the end of lonely street, the voice in his head that’s his but isn’t; and Jesse barely registers that his madness is just beginning.

? ? ?

The Tower is defiant in its lack of functionality, excluding the function of its own standing. Alarmed by the dry pipes in the Tower sinks, Jesse finally stumbles on an emergency room of bottled water and canned goods, part of what once was, as best he can determine, a government-related agricultural agency. No electricity works, no lights or heat or air-conditioning, with the lone exception of a small transistor radio running on batteries that he finds in one of the desk drawers. He has to remind himself what a transistor radio is. When he turns it on, he gets static. Sometimes stray bits of a tune play back.





the unmanaged song


Nothing else about the building betrays disruption. There’s no rubble or disarray, everything in its place, desks tidy with paperwork and framed photos of long-ago families in other parts of the world, Europe, Asia, South America. Back on the floor where he first woke, with its rows of desks and chairs segmented into semi-cubicles and a glassed-off meeting room, the office appears to have belonged to an international “risk management” firm. He has no idea what this means or what risk the firm managed, apparently having failed to manage the biggest risk of all. At one of the desks is a woman’s portrait signed to Anthony, with love, your Pamela.

? ? ?

Jesse says, “Well, Pamela darlin’, I near feel now like we’ve met, and if ever I do get my poor self out of here, maybe I’ll look you up sometime, what do you think of that?” without any way of knowing that in the twenty years since the Towers fell, Pamela has died of ovarian cancer, something she cruelly and irrationally concluded she deserved. On that September day, she heard the news of the Towers at the end of what was a long lunch hour in London, during which she had just concluded a tryst with a male lover she had been seeing and another woman she just met, a Chinese-born artist married to a professor at Kingston University, where Pamela worked in human resources.





the forbidden song


Pamela had just gotten in the cab after leaving the hotel room when the driver told her what happened in New York. Frantically and repeatedly for the next thirty-six hours she dialed her husband before accepting what she knew was true the moment she heard the news. Over the days and weeks to come, over the months and years, she would fold her arms around her as if to hold in some part of herself. When the grief waned but not the guilt, Pamela found herself turning not to the illicit boyfriend, whom she would see again only once, but the Asian artist, for whom the dynamic of the ménage à trois unfolded exactly as anticipated. The relationship between Pamela and the other woman, such as it was, eventually ended in the wee hours one night when the artist confessed that, during the subsequent months, she watched over and over the footage of the planes exploding into the buildings because she couldn’t help finding it beautiful. An American, Pamela had met Anthony in New York, returning with him to London, where he then was assigned by his company back to the Manhattan branch on a semipermanent basis; it was by an odd twist that Anthony and Pamela switched countries in their long-distance marriage. One of the last things that occurred to Pamela before she died was that she probably loved Anthony most on the night they first met, when she couldn’t help falling in love as they danced to a song called “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”