Shadowbahn(50)

curve


He can’t be sure if the song is hiding or trapped. It trills at him softly that night and the next, and then more faintly. It’s on the move! and to the concierge’s consternation, the following morning he insists on transferring to the room above. “Please, sir,” she cries, “we can’t be rearranging more furniture!” Then that night in the upstairs room he hears the song in the wall mocking him, and the next morning he demands to be moved next door. Several nights later—or has it been longer than that?—he has chased the song up the cylindrical core of the Sonark, realizing that the wayward lyric has grown less distinct, not more. One ravished room after another around the pillar’s perimeter lies in his wake. Night after night he thrashes in bed to the swirling of the song’s harmonizer, as the city lights ripple like a strobe across his closed eyelids. Winding upward, the world-famous author curves his way around until he’s on the other side and the city is out of sight altogether. With the curtains of his window pulled open as usual while he “sleeps,” the streetlights that flashed across his eyelids are replaced by the moon’s glint off the cobalt domes of the far grove.





the unfinished song


Unable to complete the line of the song, the world-famous author has the shocking revelation that he always has been better at any stage of incompletion than in any state of final completeness. He realizes that at the incomplete moment he always has the potential to be better than he ends up actually being. He’s shocked to realize that nothing he has ever finished has been as good as it was moments before he finished it. A playlist consists of not only the songs that are on it but those left off for reasons having nothing to do with whether a song is good or bad, because addition of the wrong song disrupts the haunting of songs left incomplete by their missing twins. When the Towers came down in September 2001, he spent the following days composing a playlist that would properly unlock a flabbergasting new century. As the twentieth century was about politics, which is to say survival, the twenty-first is about God, which is to say oblivion, a subject his country is profoundly unprepared to contemplate. He found there wasn’t a single song worthy of the event or undiminished by it, or that didn’t diminish the event in return. No song proved at once big and intimate enough, after the world-famous author spent a lifetime believing there always is a song big or intimate enough.





the unworthy song


With the buildings, all the songs crumpled into rubble, all the songs born of a failed dream that marked the century before and the century before that. The world-famous author was left only to hope that if no one song held the key to comprehension, then a playlist might encompass enough meaning for a new century’s birth in flame and blood, beginning with the 1931 version of “All of Me” by a Storyville hooker’s jazz-jesus son whose sense of self-myth was keen and unreliable enough for him to claim he was born on the Fourth of July 1900. The playlist finished with a 1999 song called “The Sky Is Broken,” by the white Harlem-born technautic distant descendent of a world-famous author who located American obsession in the form of a white sea-bound monster. Between exhaustion and sleep, humiliated by the growing suspicion that he’s not world-famous after all and maybe never has been, Parker and Zema’s father wanders the archive of the Sonark interrupted now and then by small portholes through which can be seen Outside’s rolling knolls. Dappled lunar light splatters the tufts of trees. Imperceptibly the mass of the music lining the archive corridors shifts form, songs in one place vibrating themselves to another.





ambienopolis


Rambling down his hall of playlists, Parker and Zema’s father glimpses memory in every song-portal, reaching the corridor’s end without locating the song that tells him what he better do when the planes come. Rather he stumbles on a nameless scratch of mellotron where, sticking his head inside to climb through and poised to cross its threshold, he’s surrounded by future-reverie, the not-before-seen but remembered anyway. Over the flat silvery mesa of the ambientphonik shines an enormous orb so ashen he can’t be sure if it’s an eclipsed sun or a full moon, in the grim light of which two massive open graves gape in the distance, earth-wounds transported from national recollection. Crouched before the twin graves, two tiny figures grow larger as he draws closer to them. The world-famous author can’t help feeling f*cking annoyed. “Oh well,” he says in a huff as they unfold themselves and rise to their feet, “nice of you two to show up. Finally.”





the unknown song


Search & Destroy sighs heavily, turns to One Nation Under a Groove. “You want to tell him?” he asks, and for a moment the other Surrogate regards the world-famous author sadly. “Listen,” he says at last.

The least violent of men, the world-famous author has a notion, overwhelming to an extent that startles him, to take a good pop at One Nation Under a Groove and knock him into the pit behind. “What?” he snaps instead, stopping in his tracks. “I suppose you’re going to tell me I’m not world famous.”

The Surrogate shakes his head. “You’re not.”

“Then what do I need you for?”

“You don’t,” and the world’s least-famous author peers up at the rumbling sky and its orb the color of cinder, then down at the scorched cavities of the Towers. “Where is this?” he mutters. “These don’t belong here.” He nods at the graves. “I saw them come down on TV, it didn’t happen anywhere around here, wherever this . . . is. . . .” He says, “Everything changed when they came down.”