{"product_id":"shadowbahn-isbn-9780735212022","title":"Shadowbahn","description":"\u003cb\u003eA LA TIMES' BEST BOOK OF 2017 (FICTION)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Gorgeous, compassionate, weird, unpredictable, alarmingly prescient . . . an answer to and sanctuary from the American Century to come.\"\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Fiona Maazel, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When the Twin Towers suddenly reappear in the Badlands of South Dakota two decades after their fall, nobody can explain their return. To the tens of thousands drawn to the “American Stonehenge” — including Parker and Zema, siblings driving from L.A. to Michigan — the Towers seem to sing, even as everybody hears a different song. And on the ninety-third floor of the South Tower, Jesse Presley, the stillborn twin of the most famous singer who ever lived, suddenly awakes. Over the days and months and years to come, he’s driven mad by a voice in his head that sounds like his but isn’t, and by the memory of a country where he survived in his brother’s place.\u003cbr\u003e So begins \u003ci\u003eShadowbahn\u003c\/i\u003e, a kaleidoscopic, musical road-trip across the dreamscape of American destiny. Original and fearless in vision and form, Steve Erickson’s novel speaks to our current times, and to a nation “defiling its own great idea . . . the moment that idea was born.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e“A beautiful, moving, strange examination of apocalypse and rebirth.”\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Neil Gaiman, author of \u003ci\u003eAmerican Gods\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e  \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e “Jaw-dropping. A tour-de-forcer’s tour de force.”\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Jonathan Lethem, \u003ci\u003eGranta\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Steve Erickson’s novel is: compassionate, weird, unpredictable, jaunty. It’s sad, and it’s droll and sometimes it’s gorgeous … In this novel, Erickson has mobilized so much of what feels pressing and urgent about the fractured state of the country in a way that feels fresh and not entirely hopeless, if only because the exercise of art in opposition to complacent thought can never be hopeless … In 2017, it reads like an answer to and sanctuary from the American Century to come.” \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eFiona Maazel, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eShadowbahn\u003c\/i\u003e [is] the best kind of experiment: provocative throughout, alive with laughter and surprising in the ways it stirs the heart.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eJohn Domini, \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Erickson was postmillennial long before the millennium ever got here…\u003ci\u003eShadowbahn\u003c\/i\u003e grabs hold of its narrative idea early and never lets it go...its concerns are as genuine as its characters -- believable people traveling through a degenerating political landscape while trying to remember how they got to where they are before they reach the end of the road.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eScott Bradfield,\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Los Angeles Times \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"A one-of-a-kind work…[an] utterly Daliesque, polyphonic rhapsody of a book.\"\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eDotun Akintoye, \u003ci\u003eO Magazine \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Shadowbahn\u003c\/i\u003e will be an epoch-defining book in Trump’s America. It’s an American \u003ci\u003eHeart of Darkness\u003c\/i\u003e almost by accident.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eChris Vaughan, \u003ci\u003eThe Rumpus\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"The novel of now… the first novel of the Trump era. [Erickson] has written a battle hymn.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eMichael Robbins\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e, The Chicago Tribune\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Staggering. This is a book in which the vastness of American ambition and dreaming can take your breath away and then, only a few lines later, make you tremble with the sense that we are always living a hair’s breadth away from catastrophe.\u003ci\u003e Shadowbahn\u003c\/i\u003e filled me with exultation and terror.”\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eCharles Taylor\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A book like\u003ci\u003e Shadowbahn\u003c\/i\u003e serves as a bulwark against numbness and the dangerous belief that the only response to incomprehensibility is inaction.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eDavid Leo Rice\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e, The Believer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Erickson is an author for whom national tragedies are things with which to wrestle from an unexpected angle — and the results are almost always searing, haunting, and immeasurably powerful…In going to places few other writers touch, Erickson explores uncomfortable questions with an eye towards a greater moment of revelation.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eTobias Carroll\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\"Shadowbahn\u003c\/i\u003e isn't the novel we deserve, it is the novel we need. The novel we need to Save American From Itself.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJoshua Chaplinsky, \u003ci\u003eLitReactor\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eShadowbahn\u003c\/i\u003e is an experience as much as a book—a guided dream, maybe, or a trip through various emotions more than through plot points.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSamantha Holloway\u003ci\u003e, New York Journal of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"In this audacious futuristic novel, Erickson takes on American myth and history, scrambling mobile phone signals and playlists, pushing our imaginative borders along ever more shadowy faultlines.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eJane Ciabattari, \u003ci\u003eBBC\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Unusually structured and daringly written, Erickson’s gem of a novel is equally challenging and rewarding, spinning out thread after thread of story before skillfully tying them together in a satisfying climax.\" \u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Think Philip K. Dick on smoother acid and with a more up-to-date soundtrack, and you've got something of this eminently strange, thoroughly excellent book.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKirkus (starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Steve Erickson is one of America’s greatest living novelists. Wild, inventive and surprising, \u003ci\u003eShadowbahn\u003c\/i\u003e combines the social novel, science-fiction novel, and family novel.\" \u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDana Spiotta, author of \u003ci\u003eInnocents and Others\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\"A great, great, great, great novel.  I could say more—about its big-world heartedness and old-world shadowness, about twins and towers, brothers and sisters, road trips and borders we design and transgress, and mostly about Erickson’s beautiful heart-bit music—and it would add up to the same thing: great.  Sung, of course.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Mark Z. Danielewski, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Familiar\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\"Who else but Steve Erickson could have imagined the hallucinatory composites that fill \u003ci\u003eShadowbahn\u003c\/i\u003e? History is shadowed by sparkling possibilities, dreams become reality, and reality returns us to the music, the dangers, the beauty and whimsy of the past, all converging with a force no reader will resist.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Joanna Scott, author of \u003ci\u003eDe Potter’s Grand Tour\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eShadowbahn\u003c\/i\u003e has a simultaneous weight and lightness, mapping out a counter-history where events that have touched all Americans are given new shape and speak in new voices.\" \u003cb\u003e \u003cbr\u003eGreil Marcus, author of \u003ci\u003eLipstick Traces\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Devastating, perceptive, brilliant, written in the margins of the American songbook and the shadow of the Twin Towers….Erickson is among the handful of essential American novelists. His books are great unravelings, exposing the deepest enigmas of the American experience.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChristopher Sorrentino, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Fugitives\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Every time I open a Steve Erickson novel, I am whirled into a hundred layers of story—of the stories no one else imagines—and I can’t put it down.  This time, the Twin Towers and the Badlands: What could be more American, and more of the world?\"\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Susan Straight, author of \u003ci\u003eHighwire Moon\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Not sure whether Steve Erickson's off-kilter whoppers have gotten more plausible or the country gets more and more unhinged.  He and his book's bewitching nouns, from the Badlands to \"La Bamba,\" are good company either way.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSarah Vowell, author of \u003ci\u003eLafayette in the Somewhat United States\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\"Shadowbahn\u003c\/i\u003e is adventure, romp, exploration, an act of faith, dangerous, funny, upsetting, certain to annoy the complacent (literary and otherwise), and imparts the uneasy sensation that you’re not reading it, it’s reading you.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Michael Ventura, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Zoo Where You’re Fed to God\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eSteve Erickson \u003c\/b\u003eis the author of nine other novels (including \u003ci\u003eZeroville\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eOur Ecstatic \u003c\/i\u003eDays, and \u003ci\u003eThese Dreams of You\u003c\/i\u003e) and two nonfiction books that have been published in ten languages. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals, such as \u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eRolling Stone\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eSmithsonian\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eAmerican Prospect\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eLos Angele\u003c\/i\u003es, for which he writes regularly about film, music, and television. Erickson is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Currently he teaches at the University of California, Riverside.\u003cb\u003eCopyright © 2017 Steve Erickson\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eOne \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eShenandoah\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThings don’t just appear into thin--\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e. . . 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStarting the ignition, turning down the oldies station on the radio, he sits a minute irritably checking the rearview mirror. An- other 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe unnamed song\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe looks at his cell to see if she’s texted. “Fuck if\u003ci\u003e I’m\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAaron 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. \u003ci\u003eShe hung up on me\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eSummer wine\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eIs something else wrong?\u003c\/i\u003e he wonders. \u003ci\u003eIs there something else going on with her?\u003c\/i\u003e 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 cow- boy 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 . . .\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e. . . 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. \u003ci\u003eIf I’m being honest\u003c\/i\u003e, Aaron admits to himself ruefully about the conversation with Cilla Ann, \u003ci\u003eI 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\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe woman singing on the radio reminds Aaron that these are the last days of summer, nine days before the fall.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eCross the wide Missouri\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe 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 maxi- mum, or just because he feels like it, he cuts down to Highway 44 running through the plains beyond Buffalo Gap.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom the cabin of his truck, he aims himself at anything west- ward 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 Dis- union 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\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAll our trials\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSoon, 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. \u003ci\u003eA song finishes, I have no idea what I just heard,\u003c\/i\u003e 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: \u003ci\u003eold times there are not forgotten, look away\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eHis truth is marching on\u003c\/i\u003e and a third, \u003ci\u003eall my trials will soon be over.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eEmergence\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBy 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 any- one 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe doesn’t bother pulling his truck over to the side of the high- way. 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe unheard song\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Hey,” he hears her say back, hesitant and quiet.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Uh . . .”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Look, I’m sorry. . . .” A pause, and when he doesn’t reciprocate she says, “Okay then,” annoyed; then another pause. “Aaron?” When he still doesn’t answer, she’s both irritated and worried by his silence. “Must be close to Rapid City by now.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Listen.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I really am sorry”—testy but maybe slightly freaked out? Sometimes he wonders if she wonders if he’s going to leave her.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eListen,\u003c\/i\u003e because he hears the music, or something like it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe afternoon sun slides down the sky like a window shade. Aaron studies the little icons on his cell phone. “How do you take a picture with this thing?” he asks. “These things take pictures, don’t they?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“You sound like your mother,” she sighs, baffled. “Tap the little symbol of the camera. Did you open the icon? So point it at whatever and press the b—”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“How do I send it to you?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Little arrow at the bottom . . . send it to me later. . . .”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe says, more emphatically than he’s ever said anything to her, “\u003ci\u003eNow.\u003c\/i\u003e You have to see this and tell me—”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Tell you . . . ?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“—that I haven’t lost my mind,” but he knows he hasn’t lost his mind, he’s not in any dream. He’s not in any tunnel; now another\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003etruck approaching in the distance from the other direction—this one’s front bumper festooned with the flag of Disunion—stops in the middle of the highway too, like Aaron’s. Like Aaron, the other driver gets out of the other truck to walk to the roadside, rubbing his eyes as if in a cartoon. Yet another vehicle nears, and as Aaron turns to gaze over his shoulder, up and down the highway other cars have begun to stop, passengers emerging, everyone’s stupefaction surfacing in thought balloons. The sound that’s like music, that Aaron thought he was hearing, he hears again: \u003ci\u003eAsk me what I just heard, I have no idea,\u003c\/i\u003e but not this time. “Yeah,” he calls to everyone in and out of earshot, spinning there in the middle of the highway, “oh yeah! Explain \u003ci\u003ethat,”\u003c\/i\u003e gesturing at the two towers.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eDid they just appear out of the thin\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eair into which things don’t just disappear? It’s midafternoon, hundreds of cars and trucks already having passed this way since daybreak; Aaron has driven this highway many times, as recently as the previous weekend, spotting nothing but the forbidding Badlands horizon utterly undisturbed by human endeavor. But before his eyes now, striped by their four horizontal black bands, patterned by their gray verticals—demarcating windows narrow enough to offset the absurd fear of heights felt by the Japanese- American architect who designed the structures to be the tallest that ever stood—twin towers rise from the volcanic gorge.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThey aren’t just the tallest things that Aaron has seen, since he knows that wouldn’t be saying much. They’re the tallest things most people have seen, with their two hundred twenty floors be- tween them, each of identical height, except one is topped by a colossal aerial antenna jutting out another four hundred feet. The dual monoliths rocket to the heavens even as they’re ominously earthbound. Aaron lifts the cell back to his ear. “Cee?” he says as calmly as he can manage.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eBadlands\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnyone who’s looked at a television or the Internet or a history book the previous score of years recognizes the buildings instantly. On the other end of the phone she finally says, “I don’t get it.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSome slight hysteria rises in his voice. “What do you mean you don’t get it?” \u003ci\u003eLet’s not fight about this too, \u003c\/i\u003ehe thinks. “You don’t see it? Them?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I do see it. Them. But . . . where are you?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Highway 44 in the Badlands. Same 44, same Badlands I drive almost every damn day.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe says, “Maybe they’re a monument of some kind. . . .”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e “A monument?” Aaron practically shouts in disbelief.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Like Mount Rushmore . . .” but she understands,  as  he does, that having a fight about this doesn’t make sense. “Okay,” he snaps, “they’re a monument,” realizing this time he’s about to hang up on her. “Don’t go,” she pleads, and then Aaron can hear she’s scared, and knows he’s scared; he peers around at the rapidly swelling sea of human disbelief, the highway traffic jam devolving to a parking lot. “They look just like in the pictures,” she says.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eReturn to sender\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe says, “But it can’t be \u003ci\u003ethem,\u003c\/i\u003e the actual . . . I was seventeen when they came down.” It was a Tuesday, she remembers. “I mean, where did they come from? What are they doing in South Dakota?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“What are they doing \u003ci\u003eanywhere?”\u003c\/i\u003e answers Aaron. He had just turned twenty-one. That weekend his pals were taking him out to get him hammered; they wound up not going. He pulls the cell from his ear for a moment to make out something, raises the phone in the Towers’ direction. “Do you hear that?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Just your radio.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“My truck radio’s not on now, and the CB is broken. It’s coming from . . .” He hums to himself, trying to identify it. “What is that, anyway?” He can’t tell whether the music is actually from the Towers themselves or from the earth around them.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I think I recognize it,” she says.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“You know me and music.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“One of our parents’ songs,” she says, “or grandparents’. . . .” She starts humming too.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Yeah. That one.” \u003ci\u003eWait,\u003c\/i\u003e he thinks: I do \u003ci\u003eknow \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003ethis. “. . . address unknown . . . ,”\u003c\/i\u003e she sings.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e“. . . no such number . . . ,”\u003c\/i\u003e he chimes in.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e“. . . no such zone.”\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eTowers of song (lakota)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOr maybe they hear no such thing. It’s not actually a melody, and it has no lyrics other than what they sing themselves. The “music” rises from out of or around the Towers “like the northern lights,” others will say later, maybe even Aaron to Cilla Ann: “Don’t the northern lights make some kind of sound?”—like a song of the spheres. When the people start coming, first by the hundreds and then the thousands, and then by the tens of thousands, from hundreds and then thousands of miles, from all over the country and then all over the continent and then all over the world, some hear the music and some don’t. Some hear it take shape as a recognizable melody, some hear only a mass of harmonics.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs the crowds arrive over the following days, the families and loners, the footloose and motor-bound, the drivers and passengers and hitchhikers, the cars and RVs and trailers, the shuttles and buses and private jets, the news vans and military jeeps and airborne surveillance, the constituents and pols and advance teams, the graphic designers and Hollywood scouts and novelists who can’t make up anything anymore, the mystics and cynics and the juries-still-out, the Towers loom from the end of what becomes a long national boulevard.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe long boulevard\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDrawing closer to view, the constructions of steel and tubing rise from the ground against the azurescape of the sky not as if placed there but rather as the Badlands’ two most enormous buttes, shadow stalagmites of the most possessed geography of a possessed country: skywardly launched tombstones of a lakota mass grave. What once surrounded the Towers is gone. The customs office that stood at Vesey and West, the small bank once at Liberty and Church, the Marriott, and the underground mall where, on that doomsday twenty years ago, a funnel of fire flashed down ninety floors of elevator chutes before exploding into the con- course and sending thousands of morning pedestrians fleeing in panic past the boutiques and eyeglass vendors, newsstands and ATMs, the bookstore at one corner and the music shop with the flower stall behind it at the other corner across from the South Tower, past the entrances to the uptown Manhattan subway and trains to the river’s Jersey side. When the sprinkler system burst, a small tidal wave swept everyone along. On that day, the people at the Towers’ bottom had a more immediate sense of what was happening than those at the top where it happened. But on this day here in the Badlands, all that’s left is the Towers themselves and the wind that has gusted through, and the granite and dirt at their massive forty-thousand-square-foot bases now piled in some places as high as the structures’ third level, like hardened black wax holding two candles erect.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eHallowing \/ desecration\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eamerican stonehenge  blares  the  cover  of  one  newsweekly. To some who gather, the Towers represent a hallowing of the ground. To others, particularly those who lost someone in the Towers twenty years ago, they represent a desecration. Some descendants of those who perished come to the Towers immediately, while some keep their distance, watching TVs and computers from thousands of miles away, watching for the slightest sign of life, the slightest sign that those who were in the Towers on that day are now as present as the Towers themselves.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOtherwise, media is reduced to silence as the story ends where it begins, at the Towers’ edge, unless someone—soldier, adventurer, statesman, anarchist, the indignantly erstwhile or errantly intrepid—should take it upon himself to breach the periphery. But no one breaches either of the buildings. Occasional demands from some quarters that the president should enter clash with counter-demands that she shouldn’t. Everyone simply bears wit- ness to the twin ghosts and whatever three thousand human ghosts haunt it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eI long to hear you\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn silence and from a distance, the gathering listens as much as it watches. In the vacuum of what can be scientifically explained or sociologically defined, the music of the buildings provides the only explanation or definition of what has happened. The Patter- son family of four from Virginia hears rising from the buildings “Oh Shenandoah,” once the name—derived from the Oneida word for the antlers of a deer—of an Iroquois chief whose daughter fell in love with a white explorer.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe great national metamorphosis-song, originally a musical news bulletin from the American future, sent back to the rest of the nineteenth century by fortune hunters from across the wide Missouri, “Oh Shenandoah” is a hundred songs in one depending on who has sung or heard it at a given moment over the past two hundred years: pioneer song, sailing song, slave song, Con- federate song, a French trader’s love song for his Indian bride.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eFirst crossfade\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOlder married couple Traci and Linda hear what they’ll only later identify—recognizing it from a jukebox in a diner on the way back to their cottage in Upper Saskatchewan—as a ballad called “Round Midnight,” not one of the accepted renditions by any number of renowned jazz giants but rather a more obscure interpretation by a 1950s San Berdoo bombshell, the daughter of vaudevillians, who took as her nom de chanson a far European capital where she never expected to sing.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTraveling from their Salt Lake City suburb home, the Mormon Hartmans (all seven) all hear (or at least six, the ten-month-old demurring from consensus) “Ecstasy of Gold,” a dramatic and ghostly choral piece by a composer of Italian Western scores, while the young Ortizes—after a furious war between them over where to spend their honeymoon, with Arturo winning the last skirmish of their marriage that he ever will—pick out the strains of an early-forties composition called “Moon Mist.” Very much of her time and place, Elena has never heard of Duke Ellington.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eSecond crossfade\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTerminally ill Justin Farber, sixty-three going on sixty-four and keenly aware he’ll never stalk sixty-five, accompanied only by a jackahuahua dachshund that he named Endgame three years ago when he still thought he could be cavalier about such concepts, hears for the first time in his life a song called “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More,” by a onetime seventies British glam-rocker turned ambient pioneer. A modern and sophisticated Sunni family from Egypt, the Nours, spend several days on the Internet to determine that what they’ve heard is “Lost Highway” by a long-dead country star; they’re amused, though perhaps make too much of the synchronicity, to meet staying in the same motel the Ramseys from Tennessee trying to figure out that what they’ve heard is a piece—by a Nile-born woman considered the greatest Arabic singer who ever lived—called “Al-Atlal,” which translates into English as “the ruins.” The first lawful authority dispatched to the scene of the Towers, Sheriff Rae Jardin, hears a whistle she can’t identify that fills her with dread, an old Delta blues song whose title she’s never known.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn their silver Toyota Camry, a twenty-three-year-old white brother and his fifteen-year-old black sister set out from Los Angeles with no intention of driving anywhere but the shores of Lake Michigan to visit their mother, hearing only the songs— left strewn on the roadside behind them—of their father’s old playlists.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eSonic sky\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEnough people report hearing music that collective psychosis can’t be discounted, with the sounds in every head a kind of sonic vision or aural rorschach. Helicopters arriving within minutes of the Towers’ first appearance warily circle the structures, determining that not only are there no waves of music but no waves of any natural sound whatsoever. In fact all data and in- strumentation indicate that the two structures emit no vibration or frequency, not only enveloped by silence but absorbing every vibration and frequency within their proximity.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis creates not so much a black hole as what scientists soon la- bel a “hush vortex,” a misnomer since even a hush has a kind of auditory presence that collapses within the buildings’ airspace. But as the white brother and his black sister from Los Angeles make the long advance in their silver Camry to their mother in Michigan, like Traci and Linda, like Justin and the Pattersons, like the Hartmans and Ortizes and Nours and Ramseys and the hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands of others, they’re drawn to the vortex of the Badlands hush, silence descending on them with the horizon.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Blue Rider Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300270002405,"sku":"NP9780735212022","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780735212022.jpg?v=1767736429","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/shadowbahn-isbn-9780735212022","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}