Shadowbahn(6)
the untethered song
Having vaguely realized how high ninety-three floors is, Jesse finally stops watching his own reflection in the Tower windows long enough to cast his gaze to the dakota desolation beyond. In the far distance of the craggy moonscape, so small it might be a flea crawling on the other side of the glass if fleas flew this high, he sees what he can’t possibly discern is a red truck with gold racing stripes belonging to a man named Aaron, which by happenstance was the middle name—minus an a—of Jesse’s stillborn twin brother.
? ? ?
A few hours later, still alone inside the Tower, from the high, dark, and narrowly vertical windows Jesse peers at the masses mobilizing on the chasm’s far ridge. It’s not so much a crowd that he sees, because from ninety-three floors up, there can be no such thing as a “crowd,” which allows for some perception of individuals. No singular person can be seen from ninety-three floors, just as no one below might possibly glimpse Jesse a thousand feet high.
the song that is really another song
The extending multitudes outside his window form a mass that only after a while can finally be recognized as people. No hand raised in hello can be seen from where Jesse is, just as no one below can see him wave to them, as he does now and then. Who are they and what do they want? he wonders, as they might wonder about him in return, he figures, if they had any idea he was there.
? ? ?
Lying belly-down on the conference table where he first woke, chin resting on his fists, he says, “Well, I don’t rightly reckon what to make of it all.” From time to time he continues talking out loud like this over the next couple of days, never sure whom he addresses; he’s not certain he can precisely say he’s talking to himself, since he has no idea who that is. “Aaughhh!” he shouts at the singing in his head that won’t . . . shut . . . up even in his sleep. He clasps his hands to his ears.
without a dream in my heart
The voice. The voice in his head. The voice rising from the half of his id that’s missing, that half’s small fetal shell curled in an old shoe box on the kitchen table beside the bed where Jesse’s mother gave birth to her twin sons. Wolf’s purr and wildcat moan, the voice croons at Jesse (have you heard the news?), declares its petition and demands its tariff, siren-calling in harem chants and banshee hymnals and cowboy canticles (blue moon, you saw me standing alone), shuddering somewhere between genders and beyond years. The voice fills with its own echo and disputes all claims on it by either black or white. It razes artifices of progress and levels the confines of banal decades (caught in a trap, I can’t walk out), announces the onslaught of appetite and desire (like a river flows surely to the sea) and the sibling reunion of God and Satan (is what I’m now praying for). The voice predates its own death, casts its own shadow in ecclesiastic serenades and hermaphrodite cradlesongs; it plunders the restraints of eternity. It insists on fun, at only the cost of Jesse’s existence.
without a song of my own
After a couple of days, Jesse attempts escape. He moves from floor to floor, trying to get out of the Tower where his wandering doesn’t stop, and out of his head where the singing never ceases. He holds the fleeting hope that maybe it’s the Tower that’s singing to him, and that if he can flee the premises, he’ll escape the voice as well. But even with his hands over his ears he can’t keep out the sound, and none of the elevators run to the bottom. Prying open one of the doors of the shaft at the building’s center . . .
? ? ?
. . . he finds himself gazing down fifteen floors to the seventy-eighth, where the Tower’s occupants once changed to another elevator to the forty-fourth, where they changed again. He takes the stairs, also at the building’s core, to find the doors at each level locked; the farther he descends, the louder the singing in his head grows. He reaches as far as floor sixty-seven when the prospect occurs to him that he’ll get all the way to the bottom and, unable to get out—and somehow unable to get all the way back up to the only floor open to him—he’ll be forever trapped in the stairwell.
the voice that is really another voice
He knows it’s not really the Tower singing to him. Although the voice in his head never stops, sometimes it sings low enough that he almost can tune it out. Sometimes it only hums. It would be one thing if the voice in fact was his, another if his head in fact was someone else’s. But the voice in his head is both his and not, and that’s what he can barely stand: the abel-voice in his cain-head. It’s a voice that reminds Jesse he exists in someone else’s place, a freak of fate.
? ? ?
When he sees, from his northern windows, the other Tower staring back at him like a mirror across the gulf, it occurs to him that maybe he is over there, looking back. Momentarily he comforts himself with the idea that he is over there going as mad from the idea of Jesse as Jesse is from the idea of him. But almost as immediately he knows better, he knows there is no other, that Jesse is alone in the place of both, that in fact the whole point of the other Tower, the whole reason the other Tower exists, is its emptiness.
Gladys Love
He insists out loud, “Well hell, I can too sing if I really try!” and why shouldn’t it be so, if the voice singing in Jesse’s head is the exact duplicate of his, as he keeps trying to convince himself even in the dream that he has on the third night, sleeping on the long conference table—although he couldn’t have remembered what she looked like before he saw her. With his first glance, however, he recognizes immediately the woman who answers.