Shadowbahn(57)

“Yes.”

The clerk continues to stare at him. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, sir.” Jesse signs the hotel register “E. Aron Shadowborne.” He’s in his room on the hotel’s highest floor less than ten minutes when the telephone rings.





shadowborn


He doesn’t answer the first time, but when it rings again, he picks it up. “Mr. Shadowborne?” asks the voice on the other end. “Yes,” Jesse answers as noncommittally as anyone can when answering yes. The voice on the telephone says, “This is Mr. Axton. I’m the manager of the hotel. I just wanted to welcome you back.”

“Yes, sir,” answers Jesse. “Thank you. ‘Back’?”

There’s a pause. The manager says, “You were with us a few weeks ago, correct?”

“No, sir.”

“Perhaps you’ve forgotten.”

“No, sir. I’ve never been in this here hotel before, or this here city.” Lying on the bed, Jesse can see the locks on the door from any place in his room; it’s the sort of room in which one can see any place in it from any other place. Other than a single chair and a stool small enough to be useless, there are only a tiny TV on a high shelf and a drawing of the hotel in its inaugural year, 1927, when Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and sound disturbed the movies. Jesse places the sleeved 45 before the screen of the TV. Travel brochures in the room promise that the Desamor is “minutes away” from everything, but the Desamor has never been minutes away from anything worth being minutes away from. Halls and mezzanine fill with strange languages; strange men wander the dim corridors counting their fingertips, lips moving silently. The sink and shower barely drip from the lack of water pressure.





lonely street


At night Jesse studies the door’s bolt and two latches that were added when one of the hotel’s guests was recently arrested for murdering fourteen women in the nearby hills. Another—a journalist on assignment from the East Coast—was apprehended for strangling three prostitutes. When someone knocks on the door at the Desamor, it’s never room service, or not the kind that anyone orders. Over the years heartbroken lovers have leapt to their deaths from the Desamor’s rooms; in the thirties a woman landed on a pedestrian strolling below, killing him. Even the sidewalks of the Desamor are dangerous. Other guests in the hotel stop and gawk at Jesse; someone matching his description disappeared three weeks ago, last seen dashing alone into the elevator. Jesse hears people muttering behind his back and imagines WANTED signs for him in every room but his. He steals a DO NOT DISTURB sign from a neighboring door and puts it outside his own. Later that evening he finds the sign hanging on another door down the hall—the floor’s most coveted item, like lamb’s blood on egyptian entries ushering Death on Its way. Staring at his ceiling in the dark, he listens to the screams of angels falling from heaven.





dwell


The roar of find a new place to rousing him from his non-sleep, he lurches upward one night from his bed to note the frayed curtains blowing before his wide-open window. He has no recollection of opening his window. With a start he sees what he takes to be himself—understanding, of course, that it’s not—sitting at the foot of the bed. Maybe, he thinks, the other has come to steal back his 45 from off the shelf, but in the dark Jesse still makes out the white sleeve leaning against the small TV. The other one at the foot of his bed is soaking wet; in the gleam of city lights coming through the window, beads drip down his brother’s face. “Why now, Jess,” he says quietly, without mockery, even a bit sadly, “what do you suppose it is you done changed with all your commotion?” Rising from the bed he adds, “But you gettin’ close now, big bro, so just follow me,” stepping to the sill and out the window. “No!” Jesse calls, unsure later what he means by it. He waits to hear the thud of a body hitting the street, or the cry of someone on the walkway killed by a falling twin. When Jesse wakes the next morning, if it’s waking, he’s not surprised to find the foot of the bed damp, as he once found the carpet stained with her blood after “dreaming” of his mother.





the forsaken song


He showers, brushes his teeth, and washes himself as best he can, given the lack of water pressure. When he hears a ruckus in the hall outside, he opens the door to the sight of police scurrying past him and up the side stair to the roof, where what remains of the guest who’s been missing three weeks—and for whom everyone has mistaken Jesse—is found in the rooftop water tank. Jesse studies the drip of the faucet, the wet washcloth in his hands, the water glass by his bed. Leaving the Hotel Desamor, heading west on foot, he never quite stops glistening with the dead man, like someone covered with ash from a ritual.

? ? ?

With the sun at his back, Jesse sweats the dead man from inside him, the corpse’s surviving twin making his way among the termini of the last American city, along roads named after flora and fountains and setting suns. Less than a mile from the Desamor, he passes a once grander, now deserted hotel where, from the eighth-floor balcony overlooking a square named for a World War I general, a once destined president bushwhacked by the zeitgeist regarded the city before him with all its high black windows, and music rained from a hole in the sky.