Shadowbahn(65)

“How do we know they haven’t been there the whole time?” says Parker.

Zema and Aaron both look at him. For a while the car is quiet. “Just saying,” Aaron finally offers, “that I don’t know how it is those Towers first showed up when I came along. That’s all. But sometimes, honest to God, I . . . think none of it would have happened if I hadn’t seen them to begin with.” He adds, “I know how that sounds.”

“Maybe,” Parker suggests wryly, “the Towers saw your bumper sticker.”

“I’ve never been able to figure out what that bumper sticker means. So,” Aaron asks Zema, “do you think of a particular song and that’s what comes out of you? Or is it more random? Does a song ever come out that you’ve never heard before?”

“I’m not a jukebox,” she says.

? ? ?

Abandonment hemorrhages. Its moment turns into too many other moments at one time to be any river of such moments other than a flood: The collective bearing of witness collapses under the weight of its own hope and terror. Somewhere along the dark little highway the exodus turns mass, a long line of fleeing campers and trailers past which flies Parker and Zema’s Camry going the other way.

“Stop,” says Zema at almost the very place where Aaron stopped nine days before. In the distance the horizon’s rim of night sky east of the Badlands glints dark blue before shimmering to silver, preluding a streak of the sun at dawn. As Parker stops, his sister gets out; after a moment the men get out with her. She stares northward agape. Aaron looks at her, looks at the empty northbound landscape, back at her. Parker just watches his sister, shaking his head and snorting with a perfunctory derision, but he can’t help a small smile. “You see them, don’t you?” he says.

“You see them?” says Aaron.

She turns to both of them. “You don’t?” But she knows the answer, and pivots back to the two massive Towers before her.

? ? ?

As everyone who’s come to the Towers has learned, they’re never as close as they appear. Halfway between them and the Camry behind her, crossing the weathered rock, Zema stops to look back; she barely can make out her brother and Aaron, who’s still holding his ribs and trying to see if his cell works as it did the first afternoon he stopped his truck in the middle of the road and called his wife. Now the sun is up and becoming warm enough that she pushes on, if for no other reason than to slip into the peak of the South Tower’s shadow.

When she reaches its shade ten minutes later, the Tower blocks enough of the sun that, at this hour from this position on the landscape, able to see it in greater detail than before, nonetheless she finds herself tricked by the light anyway—or so she believes. She turns back to look behind her the same way that Sheriff Rae Jardin turned to look behind her the afternoon she entered the South Tower, raising one hand to her eyes in order to squint hard in the sun, except that where the sheriff saw tens or hundreds of thousands of people, Zema sees only the Camry and her brother, barely visible, alone, with whatever few stragglers were there now gone. Glancing back at the Tower’s base, she still spies what she dismissed from her mind only moments before.

? ? ?

A few minutes closer to the building, there’s no mistaking that at its base, in one of its many massive doors, stands a man, and the closer that Zema comes, the more clearly she recognizes him as not just any man. Five minutes closer, she stops again and looks. “It’s you?” she calls. His hair is beginning to gray a bit now and his face is becoming lined, but she still recognizes him from all the posters that, as her brother loves to taunt her, she had on her walls when she was younger.

“No, darlin’,” Jesse answers, too quiet for her to hear, “it’s not.” He hasn’t any more idea how he got back here to the Tower than how he left that night when he disappeared from the rooftop; when he gazes up to the roof, it’s too high to see without falling over.

“I didn’t hear you,” she calls, cupping her mouth with her hands.

“I said,” cupping his own hands, “that I’m not him.”

She’s still walking. Half a minute later, close enough to speak without shouting, she says, “You look like him,” except older, she almost adds but doesn’t.

A look of anguish like she hasn’t seen before sweeps his face. He opens his arms. “Can’t sing me a lick.” He laughs the saddest laugh. “I’ve tried, but . . .” He asks, “Now, how is it I can swear I hear him right this very minute? Is that just his voice in my head again, or you got yourself a radio? Or one of them newfangled music—”

“It’s me.”

“You?”

“It comes out of me.”

“How’s that?”

“I can’t even hear me anymore.” She asks, “What am I playing right now anyway?”

“One for the money, two for the show.”

After a pause, she says in something of an outburst, “There’s music coming out of me that’s not mine.”

He nods. “There’s singing in my head that’s not me.” He peers beyond her. “Everybody up and left, looks like. T’was some kind of damn multitude once, as near as I recall.”

She explains, “They don’t think you’re here anymore,” by which she means the buildings, gesturing at them.