Shadowbahn(53)

the stowaway song


All the stowaway songs are in their own voices, all the songs that never had their own voices but waited for a singer to give them one. A couple of months from now, the midnight incident will give Traci a funny, funny feeling, when she is capable of feeling anything that isn’t dread; the day following the incident, Linda will seem almost the same but not quite, and will seem less the same the next day and the day after. She has been invaded, as have the others, the Pattersons and Ortizes and Ramseys and Hartmans, whose one-year-old mutters surfadelic themes of spaghetti Westerns complete with choral vocals and operatic crescendos and ghostly chimes in the distance. Back in their Alexandria kism, not far from the ruins of ancient Memphis, where once ruled the Pharaoh Menes, the Nours listen to their thirteen-year-old daughter sing from her sleep, I’m a rolling stone all alone and lost, for a life of sin I have paid the cost. The next day they will take her to a doctor to confirm she is still a virgin. Justin Farber, just turning sixty-four knowing he’ll never see sixty-five, wakes himself to When I got home I found a message on the door . . . burning airlines give you so much more gurgling inside him. As the song scampers away in the night, he watches himself scamper with it. Parked on Lake Pontchartrain’s northern shore with the whistle of a song that’s been in her head since the Badlands finally went silent, ex-sheriff Rae Jardin strolls a swampland road that she last walked half a century ago, with her grandfather clutching her hand.





vestige


Or she thinks it’s the same road, anyway. Sometimes she stops in the humid afternoon gazing around her to be sure; gone from this part of her life for decades, nonetheless she assumed when she got here that the memory of it would be as indisputable as it was behind elevator doors in the ghost Tower from where she’s come. She figures the vestigial sounds of rain fallen from the trees’ higher leaves to the lower leaves hasn’t changed in half a century, and that caught in the higher branches falling to the lower branches will be the same laughter of men. She looks for the tree where it happened, because trees endure not knowing one particular blue sky from another, or a particular waft of wind or a crow’s particular caw or a particular crowd of men laughing beneath it, or the particular evil of it all. Somewhere between the Badlands and Louisiana, on Interstate 55 outside Jackson after the incident in Valentine, the sheriff decided she needs to see the tree again; but she never finds it. It’s disappeared into thin air. Scouring the swamps that afternoon like someone scouring the graveyard for a tomb, finally she gives up. When she reaches her South Dakota patrol car, for a split second, as though peering through a flashing breach in the national memory, like a man waking on the ninety-third floor and in his first sliver of a moment seeing a Boeing 767 airliner flying straight toward him, the sheriff could swear New Orleans is going up in flames before her.





clef


Twenty years to the day after the appearance of the Towers in the Dakota Badlands—when the event might have passed into the kind of Lourdesian legend attending religious visions but for the fact that twenty-first-century technology has borne witness to it—the Towers will reappear in flashes of sightings confirmed by thousands from Delano to Dallas, from Memphis to Montgomery. Some find this route historically unsettling. Occasionally the Towers are separated by an expanse, such as the ten miles of U.S. 80 that divide them in Selma.

? ? ?

Configuring the accumulated data of the new reappearances with satellite photography, researchers can neither ascertain nor dismiss the pattern that forms a five-latitude musical staff, let alone determine which single sighting might represent the beginning clef. This means that the notes signified by the Towers’ appearances all over the country might constitute almost any one of a thousand melodies, any or all of which might predictably be “Oh Shenandoah” but, as it happens, are not. Years are spent trying to decode a composition as revelatory as it is circular. America, however, does not do circular.





2t = [c+m]x


As with the original Badlands occurrence, unverified is whether the Towers themselves have actually come and gone, appeared and disappeared, or whether they always have been in place and those who see them are appearing and disappearing in time. A decade later this speculation will be rendered more indeterminate by the most groundbreaking scientific formulation since relativity and mass-energy equivalence, Dr. Vondel Shane’s PACER (past-consciousness encoded retention) Theory, by which she proves memory isn’t a function of time, as assumed for twelve thousand years, but that time empirically and quantifiably is a function of memory, reversing long-accepted polarities of objectivity and subjectivity.

? ? ?

In what by this point is a growing tradition of political uselessness, some call for “laying plans” to greet the Towers’ next manifestation in yet another twenty years, although precisely what plan is to be laid remains unclear. Will a massive net be dropped from the sky to hold the Towers in place once they return? Will the skyscrapers be tasered into acquiescence with an immense surge of electricity? In the meantime America—the America, that is to say, that never looked like anything but what it ever was: a dream—comes to bear less resemblance to itself, until it eludes all recognition.





ameri?a


Regions secede from the nation, states from regions, cities from states. By midcentury the recently formed Arklahoma Christian Conglomerate applies to the World Trade Organization for a patent on “America” under the Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIP) agreement. A rage of countersuits is filed by other northwestern-hemispheric entities. Attempting without satisfaction to assess the petitions by typical standards of singularity, functionality, and precedent, the organization’s council ultimately gathers representatives for the various claimants in a locked conference room where, stripped of all digital resources, each is posed a question with the understanding that the patent for “America” legitimately belongs to whichever answers correctly: Who recorded “West End Blues” in June 1928?