Shadowbahn(9)

“They don’t know if they’re the actual Twin Towers or . . .”

“Well they can’t be the actual Twin Towers,” he replies, “can they? Believe me, I saw them come down.”





the beckoning (one)


He didn’t really see them come down, but it’s something he can hold over her, since it took place five years before she was born. He was three, in the canyon outside L.A. where they lived; his parents kept him home from school that day, like all the other parents. In the hours afterward, the whole country thought planes were falling from the sky. He wasn’t allowed to watch television, and for years after Zema came, their father wouldn’t let her watch footage of it until she finally pulled it up on YouTube when he wasn’t around.

? ? ?

Now, in the car, Parker forgets about the Towers until he messages his girlfriend—who recently entered a rehab center in Vancouver, putting their relationship to the test—and her only answer asks if he’s seen the news. Brother and sister grab sandwiches off the highway to Albuquerque, where they hope to spend the night. “So far they’re identical to the actual Towers,” she says, sipping her Coke.

“Who says?” answers Parker. “I don’t know what that even means.”

“Me neither,” agrees Zema. She declares, “We’re going,” and Parker shakes his head—just like Mom—smiling a bit at the memory of their father, who always told Parker that if anyone was like his mother, it was her son.





bar code


In black letters against the gray outer walls, a motel west of Albuquerque identifies itself: MOTEL. So generic, muses Parker, “I’m surprised it doesn’t have a bar code next to it.” He and Zema study the letters through the car’s windshield; the art student/conceptualist in Parker likes the idea of the bar code and suppresses the impulse to tag the motel with one, his tagging days having ended when he was Zema’s age and arrested by a sheriff for spray-painting canyon rocks.

? ? ?

In the motel’s registration “office,” Zema takes charge, as she figures she probably should have back in Flagstaff. “He’s my brother,” she confidently explains to the Native American woman behind the counter. The woman looks at the teenage girl, at Parker, back at Zema, and says, “Okay.” Parker interjects, “She took our mom’s name, we used to both have our dad’s but—” but the woman waves this away and Zema says, “Parker, she said okay. She believes us.”

“Or doesn’t give a shit,” the young man mutters.

“Hey.” The woman behind the counter fixes him with a stare. “I believe you.”





occupancy


Parker lets his sister have the single bed. On the floor he piles towels from the bathroom and an extra blanket from the room’s closet. The two have take-out Mexican for dinner, then with his institutionalized girlfriend in Vancouver the brother texts himself into unconsciousness, as Zema lies on her bed watching the nineteen-inch television. She has flipped through all eight channels a couple of times before settling on the news station broadcasting—in Spanish she doesn’t understand—the story of the Towers in the Badlands and the hundreds of thousands of people descending.

? ? ?

With the light off and Parker snoring on the floor, Zema looks out the window beside her bed and makes out in the dark a large dead oak and low stone wall beyond it, cacti beyond that, desert wind rattling the sagebrush. Although she realizes the next morning that it must have been a dream, she watches in the night an exodus of displaced Navajos as far as the eye can see, marching past the motel by the hundreds, braves and their women and children at the gunpoint of soldiers on horseback.





cartography


When she wakes to sunlight, she repeats flatly to the window what she said in the car the day before, “We’re going,” figuring her brother—curled beside her among the bath towels—is still sleeping. “You said that yesterday,” he answers from the floor.

Neither is much for maps. After punching “Michigan” into his cell back in L.A. and assuming the device would talk them through the next two thousand miles, now Parker has the revelation that looking at an actual map might approximate the psychological sensation of knowing where they are. This takes on more significance when they’re no longer sure where they’ll sleep.

? ? ?

Parker tosses aside the towels and blankets on which he’s spent the night and spreads across the floor the map they got at a convenience store in Kingman. He crawls around it several times before he’s sure, more or less, that he and the map are aligned and pointing the same direction.

Determining Albuquerque is in New Mexico is one thing. But now, studying the map—and in part because, even fifteen hundred miles away, he’s disinclined to give his mother the satisfaction of being right—Parker withholds from his sister larger concerns, born of paying just enough attention to the news to know that between here and Michigan is more trouble than roads and routes and maps can resolve.





current events


What Parker hasn’t told Zema is that after all those years when their mother wanted that big Route 66 road trip, now, if it were up to her, they wouldn’t be driving at all. On Interstate 40 through northeast Arizona and the western part of New Mexico, the brother and sister already have passed signs of the Rupture, banners of Disunion flying from flagpoles and fastened to the few bare trees that defy the desert rock. Until she finally looks back up at him across the map there in the Bar Code Motel, Parker studies his sister.