Shadowbahn(63)

Now Jesse hears his own name whispered in his ear, whispered as close as if his brother is standing there next to him. He turns to gaze around at the flat silvery mesa over which shines an enormous ashen orb that he can’t be sure is an eclipsed sun or a full moon bursting the far horizon of the brightest night. The old man from Luna Recording is nowhere to be seen, nor is the buried boat with the tattered double-trouble sail. All that Jesse confronts are the two massive open graves, transported from national recollection by the moan of three thousand ghosts; gazing back at the city in the distance, he has a feeling he’s not in L.A. anymore, to coin a phrase, assuming he ever was in any L.A. that anyone has ever known as L.A. Damned, of course, if he has the slightest idea where he is, but he’s gotten rather used to that by now, and isn’t even certain that he sees anymore the point of knowing. But standing there small before the two enormous scorched cavities under the rumbling sky and under the mammoth moon the color of cinder, Jesse feels the bottom of himself drop out, feels his soul fall to his feet and keep going: He is a man disappearing not only from his life but from the cosmic annals of being. Softly he whispers back to no one around him, no more loudly than was his brother’s whisper a moment ago, “I do believe that I am the loneliest man who ever lived, in the loneliest country there ever was.” Staring into the distance at all the smoke billowing from all the fires that he’s set behind him, he asks, “What have I done?” But no one is there to answer that either.

Here come the planes, so you better . . . Lying in bed on his last night in the last room of the Sonark that he’s pillaged searching for his missing song, Parker and Zema’s father no longer is certain if the lyric is something he actually hears or can just no longer get out of his head, like a virus. Things don’t just disappear into thin air, but now the only thing of his that’s left to vanish is whatever is left of himself; in the dark, thinking of his family, he feels his eyes leak down his face. He raises to his face his hands. Growing old, he’s come to realize, is like traveling the round world for a long time—that you understand, in the end, isn’t that long at all—until the shores of childhood drift into sight again, one’s mind slipping the gears of time and accompanied only by the echoes of a song as everything else lurches into soundlessness. Here ome th planes, so ou better and now even that disappears too, a sound at a time. Here ome th pl nes, so etter and we’re only our own Xs marking the spot on the map of ourselves. “Good-bye,” he whispers in the dark to his wife and son and daughter, before it’s too late, “g odby . I love y

air. Then as before, behind the wheel Parker hears himself again . . . wake up . . . realizing then that—has it been only moments, or hours or days or years?—he has been if not asleep then somehow not present: he turns to confirm that his sister, Zema, still is in the passenger seat next to him, aware that, as there have been no exits on the Shadowbahn that hurtles them onward through the shadowcountry and through the shadowcentury, as well there has been the most complete silence that he can remember hearing, not so much a hush vortex, because even a hush has a presence, but something that is outside sonics: and then suddenly the secret highway

is gone altogether. Zema stirs and wakes. They’re back on two-lane road pushing on into the Dakota night. Zema’s music flickers on and off the closer they finally near the Badlands. As she sputters static, he peers over at her from the driver’s seat until she snaps, “Why do you keep looking at me?”

He answers, turning back to the road, “Just making sure you’re okay.”

“Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

He pauses. “Your music . . .”

“I know,” she murmurs.

“. . . keeps cutting out.”

“I’m okay.”

“I mean, it’s not like some kind of vital sign or something?”

“No.”

“Like the monitor that flatlines when it’s hooked up to a hospital patient—”

“I don’t know what the music thing’s about.”

“—or like your heart is skipping beats or anything.”

“I’m fine.”

“I just,” he says, staring straight ahead at the highway, “want to be sure,” and she looks at him, because although he’s stated it in as much of a monotone and with as little affect as he can muster, never remotely has Parker said anything like it to her. “Probably should watch the road,” is all she can think to answer.

? ? ?

Somewhere in the dark, Parker realizes he’s on the wrong road. “This isn’t the highway I thought we were on,” he says to the pitch black before him, intermittently shredded by his headlights.

“Should we go back?” asks Zema.

“We’re still going the right direction,” he claims, “just . . . the wrong way in the right direction.”

“Dad always said you have Mom’s sense of direction. That means we could be going anywhere.”

“I don’t know where we would go back to.”

“It feels like we’re in the middle of—”

“You’ve been asleep, how would you know what it feels like?” In the distance are taillights. “There’s someone.” The taillights grow closer, and when Parker and Zema’s Camry catches up, it’s clear that the truck—red with gold racing stripes and, in Parker’s headlights, a bumper sticker that reads SAVE AMERICA FROM ITSELF—has run off the side of the road. Zema sits up. “Is that person okay?”