Shadowbahn(56)
Previous to two of the latest arson fires, a man matching the suspect’s description was overheard having altercations characterized as “frightening” and “unhinged” with shopkeepers regarding the sale of an unfamiliar recording. Allegedly the suspect threatened one owner with retribution and in another instance angrily questioned the manager’s veracity with a strange canine reference.
Authorities also have been alerted by the editorial offices of a locally published jazz journal to recent communication from the suspect of an ominous and unstable nature. On further questioning, editors of “Round Midnight” magazine acknowledge sporadically publishing writings by the suspect in past years but vehemently dispute assertions that they encouraged the criminal behavior under investigation.
Despite editors’ claims the 45 rpm recording that may have triggered the arson spree in fact does not exist, the victimized merchants in question insist the suspect appeared to have a copy with him during their confrontations.
Police refuse to comment on speculation that Presley may no longer be in the greater New York area.
take it home
In possession of nothing but the clothes on his back and a 45 rpm record in a plain white sleeve, Jesse rides the night train from New York to DC and Richmond, Virginia, too, on to Raleigh and Atlanta, not forgetting New Orleans, home of the blues. He is part fugitive on the run and part man on a mission to kill American song and eradicate from the countryside the recording’s every last copy, hunting down the studio and headquarters of Luna Recording so as to cut the song mute at its source. Jesse gets off in New Orleans just feet from the city’s most fabled district, where he has heard that doorways ring in arpeggios, overhanging oaks weep harmonics, and trilling naked women welcome from their verandas the train’s male passengers. Spying from his train no such uninhibited welcome, he finds the city under the pall of the same quietude that greets his every stop.
storyville
A mysterious silence overtakes the country. Jesse might as well ask where America is when he asks the French Quarter bartender how to find the neighborhood that was once meant to contain American freedom and frenzy with its American whores and horn players, American johns and sax tooters, American pimps and pianists, American drunks and drummers in the pastel-psychedelik of winding staircases and windows from which one might leap—as Jesse once did from a tower rooftop—into an American night of buried memories unearthed or unlived lives lived. Containing American song and whatever wild voice sings it, whatever wild possibility composes it, whatever wild heart loves it, because nothing is more deeply American than the deeply forbidden, the district was intended to quarantine that song and above all else keep everything outside the quarantine from getting too damned American. The bartender informs Jesse that the part of town he searches for has been gone sixty years. Taking no chances, convinced that lunacy if not music resides in the neighborhood where that hooker’s self-mythologized son who claimed to be born on July 4, 1900, went on to invent the twentieth century by the age of crucifixion, in the final minutes before dawn and the next train out Jesse sets Iberville and Basin alight anyway, their flickers growing to flames behind him, the rising daybreak sun a drop of neon blood in the smoke.
impunity (train)
He knows that soon authorities will trace his trajectory of fire and follow. He heads toward a west that is the dreamer’s true north, where the desert comes looking for us and curls at the door, a wild animal made of our ashes; hijacking the sun halfway, Jesse leaves his shadow at the crossroad. For the first time since his mad leap into his other life, he hears in his head the singing that is his voice but isn’t. Among the train’s passengers is talk of a shadow track that cuts through the heart of the century from one end to the other with impunity, as though no time exists of calibration or counting, only an era of the mind. Every shadow hides a shaft to the center of the Earth, from which blows the gust of cancellation. In the distance, like the train’s whistle, out of the dream-strafed countryside beyond Jesse’s window, the singing in his head grows louder the farther the train rounds Vegas’s nuclear id, where the flesh of the world is tattooed with light. In the last days of summer, nine mornings before the fall, finally he stops a few miles from the sea, near the beginning of a highway that’s one six short of the devil’s sign.
days between stations
Enthralled by doom and deliverance, and with a tunnel where his heart should be, from the station Jesse makes his way south through the wasteland of what he discerns almost immediately to be the strangest city of all time, a city hostile to its own being. A mile and a half away at Main and Sixth, he checks into the Hotel Desamor, its fifteen-floor brick side emblazoned with weekly rates. Pushing the hotel register to Jesse across the front desk, the clerk stares at him. “Is it you?” he asks.
“No,” says Jesse.
“How would you know it’s not you unless it is you?”
“Whoever you think it is,” says Jesse, “I’m not.”
The clerk says, “Haven’t you been a guest at this hotel before?”
“No,” says Jesse.
“Just a few weeks ago?”
“No.”
“This is your first time?” the clerk says, unconvinced.