#shadowbahn

But now the radio plays music, a tune he doesn’t know, and as he waits for Zema he changes the station, and changes it again, and—music on all stations now—keeps changing it, certain that, sooner or later, he’ll find one of his father’s favorite songs.

Out of the house and on my own, I faced the fact I didn’t much like who I was. I didn’t like my judgmentalism; I didn’t like my absolutism. I didn’t like my repression of natural empathy, my pinched lack of emotional generosity. How I had been thinking politically had less to do with what was wrong with the world and more to do with what was wrong with me, with my fears and insecurities, failings, weaknesses. Moreover, all those things were at odds with the things about myself that made me want to be a writer. So I decided I would change myself, be the person I wanted to be, be the person that I hoped I really had been all along.

...but she hangs up on him before he finishes.

He heads towards a west that is the dreamer's true north, where the desert comes looking for us and curls at the door, a wild animal made of our ashes; hijacking the sun halfway, Jesse leaves his shadow at the crossroads. For the first time since his mad leap into another life, he hears in his head the singing that is his voice but isn't. Among the trains passengers is talk of a shadow track that cuts through the heart of the century with impunity, as though no time exists of calibration or counting, only an era of the mind. Every shadow hides a shaft to the center of the Earth, from which blows the gust of cancellation. In the distance, like the train's whistle, out of the dream-strafed countryside beyond Jesse's window, the singing of in his head grows louder the farther the train round's Vegas's nuclear id, where the flesh of the world is tattooed with light.

But his crisis is also expansive, it’s a national identity crisis. Zan’s playlist is an American songbook, a way to remember. “The music is unlike any heard by anyone since what once was called the ‘American century…’” A sentence like this works when the grist of real loss drives it. It’s not hyperbole or melodrama, Erickson really feels this mourning through Zan.

Review: “Shadowbahn” by Steven Erickson