Shadowbahn(58)

terrace


Notwithstanding the creak of pink sky-gondolas swaying high in the distance like blown petals of a dead rose, now the city is hushed and the sky rains nothing. Crossing the Spandrel of Murmurs at a far boulevard named for terraces of the moon, Jesse sings to keep himself company—a man who’s bitten his tongue to kill any song at its tip, who never has sung but to prove to others and himself who he isn’t. Day’s end he reaches the foot of the Hollywood Hills in a section of town identified by the Desamor desk clerk as Bloozpark.

? ? ?

Exhausted and famished, in pursuit of Luna Recording and clutching the 45 in its white sleeve that’s falling apart, Jesse finds a spot under one of the crumbling footbridges sweeping small pools of black lava that bubble up from the cracked earth. When he wakes, he’s nestled in a wooden cage suspended off a dirt cliff. He sees a city whose spires are the rotted masts of landlocked boats, tattered sails bearing meaningless insignia. Lanterns flare from charred ports and starboards and the silhouettes of moldering prows jutting from the hillsides. On overgrown sidewalk corners, deserted intersections are marked by antique telescopes stuck skyward.





lullaby


Past the ridge a quarter mile away, noise ascends and falls, glass breaks, men and women cry out. From the beached boats rises the occasional old hotel built by now-dead film studios, guns in its windows glinting from the plunge of a senseless sun. Half its neon letters burned out, US O & FR N reads the sign of a shuttered restaurant. Jesse can hear animals stampeding in the canyon. Damned if he has the slightest idea where he is; in his first few moments of waking, he remembers dreaming—or what he believes may have been dreaming, in his usual sleeping state that’s too fitful for sleep—of being lifted and carried.

? ? ?

As he gazes below in the twilight, his is the only white face in the midst of gathering black faces, as many as several hundred. Some are in a clearing close by small fires, others are perched in their windows and leaning against half-earthed hulls. Some watch their prisoner with only mild curiosity and others ignore him. All around, Jesse hears a bottleneck of music from every avenue, jams and solos, grooves and refrains. He realizes that, other than the tune in his head and on his own lips earlier this day—or was it yesterday?—and other than the torched record shops and studios in his wake that went up in lullabies of smoke, it’s the first music he’s heard since he can remember, or maybe since what he can’t remember.





twilight song


From his suspended cage, Jesse can see to the west a valley pass threaded by a vacated freeway. In the foothills to the east is the mouth of a large tunnel, and carved out of the hillside beside his cage is a small cove where a guard is posted. An open trumpet case sits beside the guard, horn undisturbed. In the arm’s reach that separates Jesse from his sentry is a drop of twenty feet. “Say there, son,” calls Jesse.

“I am not,” answers the guard, “your son, son.”

“I surely would appreciate knowing how long I can expect to sit up in this here sky.”

“Until he comes,” answers the guard, but no one arrives that evening or the next morning when Jesse wakes to a voice that, even at a speed too slow, he recognizes as his but not. This time it isn’t in his head but rather broadcasts from a small round piece of vinyl revolving somewhere on a child’s old turntable. Oh Shenandoah, I long to hear you, great national metamorphosis song; and only then does Jesse belatedly understand he no longer has with him the 45. Noon passes and then afternoon. It’s almost twilight again when people below suddenly are in motion, a lone figure on foot appearing in the mouth of the eastern tunnel that runs underground from Jefferson Boulevard eight miles south. The tall, almost professorial man walks out of the firelight as Jesse’s cage is lowered into the hubbub.





Malik


Loping purposefully, distinguished and wearing dark-rimmed glasses, he is well over six feet and nearing fifty years. His black face and beard are tinged red, as though permanently reflecting all the fires passed in his life, his hair the coppery hue genetically passed down from the white maternal grandfather who raped his black grandmother. Everyone parts for his entrance and closes behind him as he reaches the open space to study Jesse’s captivity.

? ? ?

“Behold,” he says finally and turns to the others, “the cracker. By which I do not mean just any cracker but a cracker truly cracked in two, the first of him having swallowed the second, the steam of his missing half rising from his flesh. On the one hand we might call him . . . liberator,” he chuckles, the surrounding crowd chuckling with him if not sure at exactly what, “since he has displaced his other half and thereby liberated us from the white-trash devil who stole our music, stole our style, stole the sound from our ears and the song from our mouths, so as to purvey them to twenty million white adolescent females in the menstrual throes of their black-man fantasies. The so-called King is dead. Long rot the king.”





strain


“On the other hand, brothers and sisters,” he says, calmly raising a single finger pointed at Jesse, “on the other hand we might call him oppressor, having displaced his other half, who, as nothing less but nothing more than a guileless white fool, opened the white door through which rushed black consciousness, infiltrating the white experience. The other half who, in his limited way, educated white-devil America that it was ‘colored folk,’ as he put it so quaintly—colored folk ‘that nobody paid no mind’—who sang and played the music of the so-called Negro shanties and juke joints for years before his white ass knew what it was. ‘I got it from them,’ as he put it so directly once, giving credit where it was due.”