Shadowbahn, p.1
Shadowbahn, page 1
Other Books by Steve Erickson
Days Between Stations
Rubicon Beach
Tours of the Black Clock
Leap Year
Arc d’X
Amnesiascope
American Nomad
The Sea Came in at Midnight
Our Ecstatic Days
Zeroville
These Dreams of You
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2017 by Steve Erickson
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Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint lyrics from “Trouble Down South” by the Mekons, courtesy of Low Noise America Music.
Ebook ISBN: 9780735212039
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Erickson, Steve, author.
Title: Shadowbahn / Steve Erickson.
Description: New York : Blue Rider Press, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016036521 | ISBN 9780735212015 (hardback)
Subjects: BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Alternative History.
Classification: LCC PS3555.R47 S48 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036521
p. cm.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
Contents
Other Books by Steve Erickson
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
One | Shenandoah Things don’t just disappear into thin—
the unnamed song
summer wine
cross the wide Missouri
all our trials
emergence
the unheard song
Did they just appear out of the thin
badlands
return to sender
towers of song (lakota)
the long boulevard
hallowing / desecration
I long to hear you
first crossfade
second crossfade
sonic sky
turin
the unsung song
the unremembered song
the homeless song
the unmanaged song
the forbidden song
the untethered song
the song that is really another song
without a dream in my heart
without a song of my own
the voice that is really another voice
Gladys Love
the unwanted song
the undreamed song
the unforgiven song
take the highway that is best
Get your kicks on . . .
twentieth century
third crossfade
song of Sheba
the beckoning (one)
bar code
occupancy
cartography
current events
mixtape nation
song of Zema
EQ (frequency-specific)
EQ (flat)
the secret song
trans (impunity)
stereo (bass)
stereo (treble)
Within two hours of the
suspicious minds
the denied song
jihad
those
jurisdiction (one)
the song in pursuit
the song on her trail
the beckoning (two)
song hanging from a tree
Ninety-three floors up, Jesse
the unloved song
the untamed song
the fill of the sky
the fall of the sound
the beckoning (three)
top of the world
double trouble
into the past
Two | Supersonik Day 0 Millenniux (9/12/01) | Almanac in Song, or an Autobiographical Soundtrack
tracks 01 and 02: “Naima” and “Subterraneans”
With his sister sleeping in
badlands (reprise)
starless stripes
darklands
only-children (right speaker)
only-children (left speaker)
Parker’s mood (take one)
Parker’s mood (take two)
you can’t leave ’cause your heart is there
dead-free
juke
jook
the natural song
final crossfade (Muleshoe)
one road more
snake
siren
hush vortex
ghost dance (one)
ghost dance (two)
ghost dance (three)
into thin air
sonography
chronometry
out of the future
Candy says (New York City 1966)
ROUND MIDNIGHT | May 1968
tracks 03 and 04: “Wooly Bully” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”
tracks 05 and 06: “La Bamba” and “A Matter of Time”
When she was eight, in
Sometimes her father wouldn’t
One afternoon, the
we want the airwaves
rune
treason
the fugitive song
caravan
dust to dust
sound check
off / on
on / off
calling out around the world
ready for a brand-new beat
time is right
jurisdiction (two)
the song in hiding
Radio Ethiopia
and where will she go
and what shall she do
Three | Earshot tracks 07 and 08: “Pilots” and “Seven Nation Army”
when midnight comes around
June 3, 1968
and cry behind the door
factory
the smallest taste
revisions
chord of D
strobe
key of J
Jack
magnum
everything
variables
July 13, 1960
jigsaw
yes / no
no / yes
the refuted song
the wrecked song
closing track
fade
hidden track
[stuck in the groove]
[the needle lifted]
no refrain
the unreasoned song
the unwritten song
Valerie
tracks 09 and 10: “Dancing in the Dark” and “Spirit in the Dark”
tracks 11 and 12: “That Lucky Old Sun” and “Warmth of the Sun”
aquarium
procedural
echo
ricochet
imagine
crossroad
45
Winston
a trail
Dakota
instant karma
don’t believe in
just believe in
New York City 1968–73
moon (sun)
Four | Desamor tracks 13 and 14: “Night Train” and “People Get Ready”
devices of experience
gardening
education
disappearing (the world-famous author)
what you need, you have to borrow
disappearing (the surrogates)
what you get is no tomorrow
source
quadrex
the beacon
track 15: “Surrender”
when justice is gone, there’s always
towers of song (new doubling)
the secret track’s secret track
&n bsp; real real gone for a change
the half-remembered song
the insubordinate song
and when force is gone, there’s always
curve
the unfinished song
the unworthy song
ambienopolis
the unknown song
tracks 16 and 17: “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down”
tracks 18 and 19: “Stormy Weather” and “Where or When”
the near song
the stowaway song
vestige
clef
2t = [c+m]x
ameri©a
song of arches
tracks 20 and 21: “Murder Incorporated” and “Blind Willie McTell”
ROUND MIDNIGHT
take it home
storyville
impunity (train)
days between stations
shadowborn
lonely street
dwell
the forsaken song
terrace
lullaby
twilight song
Malik
strain
get ready
the song in the dark
the corrupted song
the tattered song
lunacy
the singular song
paternity
song of reckoning
the faithless song
the song that may or may not be true
tracks 22 and 23: “A Change Is Gonna Come” and “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted”
tracks 24 and 25: “Oh Shenandoah” and “O Souverain”
the song that starts all over again
An Inadequate Acknowledgment
About the Author
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
RALPH ELLISON
America, the plum blossoms are falling . . . I refuse to give up my obsession.
ALLEN GINSBERG
one
shenandoah
Things don’t just disappear into thin—
. . . but she hangs up on him before he finishes. “What the . . . ?” he says, staring at his cell phone in dismay and trying to remember if she ever hung up on him before. As he finishes filling the tank of his truck and replaces the pump’s nozzle, Aaron ponders how this became the kind of argument where his wife hangs up on him. He hauls himself back up into the driver’s seat thinking maybe this is really the kind of argument that’s about something other than what it’s about.
• • •
Starting the ignition, turning down the oldies station on the radio, he sits a minute irritably checking the rearview mirror. Another truck waits for him to pull away from the pump. Aaron remembers that he meant to get a donut and Red Bull from the gas station’s convenience market, some concentrated discharge of sugar and caffeine to take him the rest of the way to Rapid City.
the unnamed song
He looks at his cell to see if she’s texted. “Fuck if I’m apologizing!” he says out loud to nobody and nothing; without his donut and Red Bull, he glides back out onto Interstate 90 in his red truck with its gold racing stripes and the bumper sticker that reads SAVE AMERICA FROM ITSELF. When he first put on the sticker, he thought he knew what it meant. The more he’s thought about it since, the less sure he is.
• • •
Aaron considers the one time he fell asleep at the wheel. It couldn’t have been longer than a couple of seconds, but enough to start veering off the road until another truck’s horn blared him into consciousness. His heart didn’t stop pounding till he finished the route: If you want to wake yourself up good for the rest of a drive, try falling asleep at the wheel for a moment. On the radio a man and woman sing to each other, not with each other, having their own argument maybe. She hung up on me, he’s thinking, “I’m not apologizing, fuck that.” But he’s had fights with Cilla Ann before and knows, as his indignation subsides, that if she hasn’t texted by the other side of the bridge at Chamberlain crossing the Missouri River, he’ll wind up calling.
summer wine
Is something else wrong? he wonders. Is there something else going on with her? Can this fight actually be about something as trivial as his wallet gone missing, vanished from his jacket? even if now he’s a driver without an identity. The man and woman singing to each other on the radio aren’t exactly arguing. It’s kind of a cowboy song but not exactly, half a century old, trippy with spy-movie horn riffs—although Aaron, not caring about music, doesn’t break it down like that. Instead he catches out of the corner of his ear the story that the cowboy sings in the deepest voice anyone’s heard . . .
• • •
. . . of the woman seducing him with wine made of strawberries, cherries, and an angel’s kiss in spring, so she can steal his silver spurs while he sleeps. If I’m being honest, Aaron admits to himself ruefully about the conversation with Cilla Ann, I know it’s not true that things don’t just disappear into thin air. If I’m honest and I’ve learned anything in this life, it’s that things disappear into thin air all the time.
The woman singing on the radio reminds Aaron that these are the last days of summer, nine days before the fall.
cross the wide Missouri
The music that he pays little mind is only something in the background to keep him company and awake. “A song finishes,” he says out loud, “ask me what I just heard, I have no idea.” Sometimes instead he’ll listen to the talk radio until it becomes too nuts, or the CB radio that’s broken at the moment, Aaron having tried futilely back in Mitchell to get it fixed. In his early forties, he drives Interstate 90 at least three times a week counting both to and from, sometimes four or five if he can hustle up the commerce. Sometimes when the traffic of other trucks is at a maximum, or just because he feels like it, he cuts down to Highway 44 running through the plains beyond Buffalo Gap.
• • •
From the cabin of his truck, he aims himself at anything westward that he can see a hundred miles away, at the swathe of blue crushing a horizon invaded by the slightest vapor of white—not so much clouds, since there hasn’t been a cloud in the sky, let alone rain, in forever. Highway 44 is draped with the flags of Disunion that grow in number the farther west Aaron gets. Later he’ll wonder how it is that on this morning of the argument about the wallet disappearing into thin air, he could have missed there on the flat plain before him the two skyscrapers each a quarter mile high: the breath of Aaron’s country, exhaled from the nostrils of Aaron’s century.
all our trials
Soon, the change in the landscape announces itself as always. Dashed lava and the blasted detritus of dying asteroids, slashes of geologic red and gold rendering his truck a chameleon. A song finishes, I have no idea what I just heard, but he still remembers what was playing on the radio the time he fell asleep behind the wheel, a mash-up of spirituals and national folk tunes sung by the most famous singer who ever lived: old times there are not forgotten, look away and His truth is marching on and a third, all my trials will soon be over.
• • •
In the two seconds when Aaron fell asleep that time, he had a dream that lasted hours, in which the song appeared as a black tunnel on the highway before him. Of course he has no idea now where the tunnel led, or whether it led anywhere or had any ending, because he woke with a great start to that warning of the other truck’s horn and the open highway, no tunnel in sight.
emergence
By midafternoon—the tail end of the five-hour drive to Rapid City from Sioux Falls—Aaron has neither called his wife nor heard from her. He’s buzzy and bleary at the same time, in the crossfire of fatigue and two Starbucks espressos self-administered in Chamberlain. But when he slams on the brakes of the truck, without bothering to check in the rearview mirror whether anyone is behind him, he knows he’s not in the tunnel of any song. He’s not dreaming the thing that suddenly has appeared before him and can no longer be missed as he rounds a corner and emerges from a pass into the Dakota Badlands, with its rocks shaped like interstellar mushrooms and ridges like the spine of a mutated iguana.
• • •
He doesn’t bother pulling his truck over to the side of the highway. Stopping in the middle, he gawks for a full minute, opening and closing his eyes and then opening them again. His truck abandoned mid-highway, Aaron strides to the roadside as though the few extra feet will somehow make what he sees comprehensible; a moment later, he returns to the truck’s cabin. Unsure what he would say on it anyway, he remembers the CB is dead. He pulls his cell phone from his pocket. “Hey,” he says when she answers.
