MFS Modern Fiction Studies

In its desertion of every basis for comparison, the event asserts its singularity. There is something empty in the sky. The writer tries to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space.

—Don DeLillo, "In the Ruins of the Future"

The best of Prophets of the future is the Past.

—Lord Byron, "The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron"

[End Page 563]

The War on Terror has always been a rather speculative affair. Immediately after 9/11 the George W. Bush administration asserted the need for renewed vigilance in the face of an invisible, global threat of terror. The 9/11 Commission Report hauntingly identified this new age as one in which "the American homeland is the planet" (362). The fact that they could not locate this threat any more specifically only added to its immediacy, and it quickly became an unquestionable aspect of the new security state that the validity of our maneuvers must be taken on faith. We would not see the actions of the over three thousand entities at work on "counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence" (Priest and Arkin), President George W. Bush assured us, because this new conflict would be fought with "covert operations secret even in success" (Bush). Deploying what Al Gore has termed "the politics of fear" (780), the Bush administration, we now know, consistently misrepresented and heightened the threat of terrorism so as to short-circuit the American public's resistance to the wide erosion of legal protections to which citizens of the United States were entitled. This amorphous, deterritorialized fear of terrorism was only magnified by Osama bin Laden's eventual death and burial at sea, acts that symbolized how the terror he emblematized was now "an oceanic, global presence" (Mitchell 248–49).

This global yet unlocatable threat of terrorism necessitated the American fantasy of homeland security that stretched America's borders beyond the confines of any discrete nation state. In the aftermath of 9/11, as John N. Duvall and Robert P. Marzec explain, "the US National Security State has instantiated fantasy as the basis of the political in heretofore unimagined ways" (2). At the heart of the newly planetary reach of America's security state—and the widespread erosion of the civil and human rights granted to those seen as a threat to this security—one finds only a neoliberal fantasy where the ends justify the means and the web spins so tightly that no individual can comprehend its full reticulation. Such a deployment of illusion as a dominant mode of the body politic was first identified in Jacqueline Rose's States of Fantasy. Writing before 9/11, Rose traces how fantasy—"far from being the antagonist of public, social, being—plays a central, constitutive role in the modern world of states and nations" (4) as it conjures the communal imagination necessary for the state to function.¹ While Rose suggests that fantasy has always existed in tandem with the nation, it now reveals itself, as Duvall and Marzec contend, as the bedrock justification for, and method of, the War on Terror. [End Page 564]

While the United States' systematic conjuration of an exaggerated fantasy of terror has been expanded on multiple times, 9/11 fiction seems to embrace a different tactic, focusing instead on the realist form over any more speculative or fantastical genres.² Exemplified by narratives that focus on the banalities of middle class consumerism, the literature of the homeland security state works, according to Richard Gray, to domesticate the fear of terrorism so as to "assimilate the unfamiliar into the familiar structures" (30) of suburbia and capitalism. Furthering—and gendering—Gray's analysis, Elizabeth S. Anker contends that the realist suburban fiction of 9/11 reveals "a longing to return to a bygone era of American omnipotence wherein white, heteronormative, patrician masculinity was still sacrosanct" (468). In short, as Kathy Knapp explains, 9/11 novels may "register catastrophe and chaos, but they do so in order to give voice to the nostalgic impulse for order and male authority" (xii). In response to the widespread fantasies of terror, scholars make clear, American literature seemed especially invested in quotidian suburban tales written by white male authors.³

Steve Erickson's recent Shadowbahn, like the 9/11 works of Don DeLillo, Art Spiegelman, and others, resists any such regressive conceits. The novel opens on a striking premise—the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center have recently reappeared, fully formed, in the Badlands of the Dakotas. The tale takes place in a near-future United States where, in the backlash from "the former president's color" (Erickson, Shadowbahn 132), a second Civil War has ruptured the nation. Hauntingly similar to tensions of our current moment, flags of "Disunion" (6) now fly across many states throughout the South and Midwest. In short, the America that Erickson limns embodies the very "Ruins of the Future" that DeLillo presages in the essay from which I draw one of my epigraphs. Rather than the realism common to much 9/11 fiction, Erickson deploys his wonted postmodern style to craft a speculative tale about the legacy of this tragedy on the American psyche.

Most overtly, the presence and location of these resurgent Twin Towers raise poignant questions about how we situate 9/11 and the War on Terror into our long history of colonialism. The novel clearly connects the return of the Towers with America's own racial history, describing them as "shadow stalagmites of the most possessed geography of a possessed country: skywardly launched tombstones of a lakota mass grave" (15). As local sheriffs explain, the Twin Towers are no longer actually in the US: "Where they're standing may very well be Lakota land" (60).⁴ In recent years, a growing body of scholarship [End Page 565] has worked to connect 9/11 and the War on Terror to the longue-durée history of colonialism. In Security and Terror, Eli Jelly-Schapiro asserts that "today, in the moment of imperialism's putative aftermath, the fundamental material and symbolic architecture of colonial modernity endures" (3). Immediately following 9/11, neoliberal forces worked to assert the unprecedented nature of this tragedy. "History begins today" (qtd. in Smith), George W. Bush's Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told foreign dignitaries as they watched news of the attacks on 9/11. At the same time that America declared this an extraordinary historical rupture, however, the Department of Homeland Security was embracing tactics depressingly familiar to colonial subjects the world over. Fears generated by the 9/11 attacks were adduced to justify a state of emergency, which in turn created what Giorgio Agamben labels "the state of exception" (1), the process by which those on the margins of our society were "temporarily" denied access to our values.⁵ That various Western governments have invoked such an emergency many times before was of no consequence; our principles had now been overtaken by the fantasy of terror and the burgeoning of the security state.

The speculation Shadowbahn partakes in, then, can be read, at least in part, as symptomatic of its historical moment. As Slavoj Žižek argues, 9/11 did not symbolize an attack on Western liberalism so much as on the heart of "virtual capitalism, of financial speculations disconnected from the sphere of material production" (387). What happened that September day was at once a luddite rejection of the immaterial nature of modern capitalism and a postmodern spectacle of the kind Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard have taught us to recognize. Rather than allowing a realist form to subvert or deny such an irreal event, Erickson opts to compound its strangeness by recourse to the postmodern tool chest. He recognizes, that is, the affinity between spectacle and speculation on the one hand, and the theories of postmodernism on the other. As Duvall has observed, postmodernism "may be able to depict the post-9/11 geopolitical landscape and thus facilitate historical thinking far better than realism" (246).

At the same time that Erickson's novel proves symptomatic of its postmodern moment, Shadowbahn also, crucially, situates the Twin Towers within a long continuity of colonialist history and suggests new ways of inhabiting such an imperial legacy. Rather than producing a speculative novel of 9/11 that, as seems to be common, proves "mimetically realistic—yet cognitively estranging" (Carroll 41)—Erickson embraces mimetic estrangement as a foundational tenet of the story he seeks to tell. Erickson's practice here differs [End Page 566] from that of another famous 9/11 novelist, William Gibson, whose Pattern Recognition (2003), Hamilton Carroll points out, relies on "the representational strategies of speculative science fiction" to render what is ultimately a "realistic world." Shadowbahn, in contrast, does not concern itself with attempting to represent the "real" world as it exists (in any sustained manner) so much as it rewires the imperial techniques of estrangement, amnesia, and inscrutable interconnectivity to critique the paradoxes and injustices of Empire. The choc en retour of the Twin Towers' reappearing allows a reconstellation of America's history, one that resists the obfuscation of a neoliberalism that seeks to disavow any prehistory to this moment.⁶ Such an embrace of the speculative form as the only response to a contemporary moment so fully alienated from any other way of viewing the world not only runs the classic postmodern risk of anchoring itself only on historical myopia—what Fredric Jameson terms "a world transformed into sheer images of itself" (18)—but it also serves as the inescapable staging grounds for Erickson to imagine a resistance to global empire and the banal realism that, wittingly or unwittingly, props it up.

There is one other fantastical aspect of the conceit that the World Trade Center could spring anew from the Badlands of the Dakotas: the Towers sing. The song seems to be different to each listener, as some "hear it take shape as a recognizable melody, some hear only a mass of harmonics" (Shadowbahn 14), but the one consistency in experience is that the music emanates from the towers themselves. To complicate matters further, scientists determine "that not only are there no waves of music but no waves of any natural sound whatsoever. In fact, all data and instrumentation indicate that the two structures emit no vibration or frequency, not only enveloped by silence but absorbing every vibration and frequency within their proximity" (20). As a type of physical embodiment of John Keats' "unheard" (l. 11) melodies, the Towers actually stand as a type of sonic lacunae, devoid of any noise at all. If "poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (Adorno 34), music, it seems, after 9/11 is impossible. And yet, music is what everyone hears. Countless pilgrims are called to the Towers, "drawn to the vortex of the Badlands hush, silence descending on them with the horizon" (Shadowbahn 20).

This subjective musical motif serves as a soundtrack for the novel, connecting famous folk tunes and patriotic songs with popular counterculture music of the 1960s and 1970s. When Aaron—the first character to set eyes on the new World Trade Center—comes upon the Towers he hears on his car radio "old times there are not forgotten" (7) (from the Confederate Anthem "Dixie"); "His truth is marching [End Page 567] on" (from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"); and "all my trials will soon be over" (the classic folk song popularized by Peter, Paul, and Mary during the Vietnam War protests). The juxtaposition of references to the American Civil War and the 1960s anti-Vietnam protests while driving on Lakota land and looking at the World Trade Center begins to assemble an abstract kaleidoscope of the long history of American imperialism.⁷

At least in part, this connection between music and the resurgence of America's imperial past demands to be read psychoanalytically. When Jesse—a lone man who resides within the Towers themselves—first wakes up and looks out upon the gathered crowds below, he begins to hear a "voice in his head" (29) that he identifies as "the half of his id that's missing." This voice, it turns out, is that of Jesse's stillborn twin brother, the "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." This phantom id, this voice of his lost brother, "croons" to Jesse song lyrics from none other than Elvis Presley: "have you heard the news?" ("Good Rockin' Tonight"); "blue moon, you saw me standing alone" ("Blue Moon"); "caught in a trap, I can't walk out" ("Suspicious Minds"); "like a river flows surely to the sea" ("I Can't Help Falling in Love"); and "is what I'm now praying for" ("One Night").⁸ These references to the King correlate with Aaron, the first man to set eyes upon the Towers and who also hears lyrics from an Elvis song, this time from "Return to Sender": "address unknown," "no such number," "no such zone" (13). The recurrent emphasis on Elvis paints a picture of classic Americana while also gesturing toward the legacy of appropriation throughout American history. Although he was originally touted as a pioneering artist, in recent years Elvis's career has been reevaluated as "less about innovation and more about continuation, namely the perpetual exploitation and misappropriation of black labor and artistry" (Bertrand 63). Many of Elvis's most popular tunes were covers of songs written by rockabilly and blues artists, most of them Black.⁹

The psychological themes in the novel connect to its anticolonial implications. Ranjana Khanna, in Dark Continents, persuasively exposes how works by Freud and others that explore the subconscious were actually just a reinscription of colonial ontology. For Khanna, "psychoanalysis restructured the sense of being in coloniality" (5) under the guise of a faux science of the mind.¹⁰ In other words, Khanna flips on its head our understanding of psychoanalysis as a discipline for uncovering the subconscious, and instead reveals how it was actually a system of impressing modernity's colonial assumptions onto our [End Page 568] understanding of consciousness. Thus, when Freud famously writes that "the sexual life of adult women is a 'dark continent'" (Freud 212), we should hear not an accurate analysis of female sexuality but rather an exposure of the masculinist colonial assumptions that seek to conquer and surveil the Other. Exposing this ideology of psychoanalysis is not intended to demand abandonment of the discipline, however. Rather, Khanna reveals how psychoanalysis, "reconfigured through its location as a colonial discipline, and read against the grain, becomes the means through which contingent postcolonial futures can be imagined ethically" (Khanna xii).

Read in this psychoanalytic light, Shadowbahn can be seen as an exploration of how America's national subconscious is colonized. As Paul Gilroy observes, both "nostalgia and melancholia" (13) are tools through which the "imperial and colonial past continues to shape political life," and the braiding of Americana nostalgia with the melancholic trauma of 9/11 throughout the novel paints a complex portrait of the American psyche in the twenty-first century. The implications, then, of this voice and what it sings to Jesse are manifold. The novel appears to embody a kind of national id, for it layers the idea of the Twin Towers as a part of our national subconscious while it exposes this psychoanalytic discourse as inevitably colonial. The voice that Jesse hears "is both his and not" (Shadowbahn 31), "the abel-voice in his cain-head." The Towers reify a past that shadows the American present; themselves geminate, they also represent America's twinned psychic reality, signaling the eradication and displacement of Native Americans while singing nostalgic tunes conjuring the exclusion of non-white bodies from popular media. As Jesse's mother says to him in a dream, "you ain't nothing but the shadow-born that did precede him … though you have his voice, you don't have his song" (33–34). The same could be said of the white appropriation of Black, Indigenous, and immigrant art forms throughout American history.

Another scene that explores the psychological implications of this reappearance occurs when the local sheriff Rae Jardin decides to enter one of the towers. As the elevator doors open and beckon her further into the building, Rae is catapulted into ugly, half-repressed reveries of her childhood in Louisiana: "Behind the doors" (65) she suddenly realizes, is "Another Place and Another Time that doesn't belong here any more than does the Tower, a place of her past into which she might now step." Crossing the threshold, Rae steps into a harrowing memory of when her grandfather took her to the lynching of a young family. As she reembodies her memory and looks up at three figures charred and hanging from a tree, the sheriff particularly [End Page 569] focuses on "the smallest body belonging to what even a girl of four knows was another little girl not so much older than she, charred so black that it can't be seen she was black before burning." As her grandfather firmly clasps her hand and forces her to gaze upon this godawful spectacle, she realizes that he is whistling—it is all she can hear—"a black man's blues no less."

The novel, then, reveals how these resurgent towers inhabit a complex position in the psychological landscape of American history. Those who enter are confronted with their past, often in torturous or harrowing ways. Thus, an unsanitized communal history of the US emerges from pasts momentarily freed from the mechanisms of repression: "Some speculate that the Towers' manifestation is a second vision of Wovoka" (103).¹¹ The narrator ruminates on the recurrent description of the towers as twins and how the haunting that these structures expose reveals the doubling of American white culture with its racial Others: "Which ghosts are being summoned is unclear: the spirits of the Towers? or the phantoms of the Badlands? Or do, within the buildings, the spirits of two decades previous meet the phantoms of more than a century past." Shadowbahn exposes how a nation's colonial history and perpetual repression of alterity can be read as an inescapable doppelgänger, one that haunts the nation until it eventually erupts anew like these Towers themselves. This motif of twinning extends, Erickson suggests, to white American culture's treatment of its racial Others. The abused, marginalized, and yet still appropriated explode back as a national abreaction. Erickson's deployment of 9/11 as a metaphor for the national unconscious demands that renewed attention must be given to the role of colonialism in America's national psyche. The novel's fantastic elements suggest that speculative fiction is the vehicle to make such repressed realities visible.

Colonialism's corollary, cultural appropriation, is a natural part of Erickson's vision, and music again figures prominently in this indictment. One of the most common songs that listeners hear the towers sing is the old folk tune "Oh Shenandoah" (17), and this song becomes a structuring refrain for the novel. Its lyrics prove a potent distillation of these complex power dynamics between white culture and the Other. As the narrator explains, the song derives its title from the name of an Iroquois chief "whose daughter fell in love with a white explorer":

The 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, [End Page 570] "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, Confederate song, a French trader's love song for his Indian bride.

Like the previously mentioned songs of Elvis, "Oh Shenandoah" is a problematic cultural touchstone. Referencing settler-Indigenous relations, the Civil War, and Manifest Destiny, the tune subsumes a fractured and contentious history while at the same time it reveals a kind of subjunctivity as a "news bulletin from the American future."

This musical motif, and in particular the emphasis on "Oh Shenandoah," connects to the "secret highway called the 'shadowbahn' that cuts through the heart of the country from one end to the other with impunity" (53). When Aaron falls asleep at the wheel just before seeing the Twin Towers, he "had a dream that lasted hours, in which the song appeared as a black tunnel on the highway before him" (7). Beyond references to America's troubled history, music also recurrently connects to transportation networks, whether trains or highways. Like his sister Zema and her vision of Native displacement by settler soldiers, Parker dreams history. When he attempts to fall asleep one night he "hears an old nineteenth-century folk song his father used to like, except with different lyrics: Oh shadowbahn, I long to ride you. Roll away" (136). "Shenandoah," "shadow-born," and "shadowbahn" all begin to meld together in the oneiric logic of the novel as history, trauma, nostalgia, and melancholia begin to intertwine—strands of the cable mooring the giant dirigible America.

The idea of such a highway echoes traditional perceptions of the western frontier and the vehicles—from Conestoga to Cadillac—that made us its masters. Erickson knows that his fellow Americans worship the automobile and mythologize the highway.¹² While on their cross-country road trip Zema and Parker first set out on "old Route 66" (37), the historic American byway colloquially known as "The Mother Road" and "The Main Street of America." "U. S. Highway 66 has two histories" (Dedek 2), one scholar notes, "a material one as a major U. S. transportation corridor from 1926 to about 1970 and a symbolic one as a pillar of mid-twentieth-century American automobile culture and tourism." This iconic American symbol is given a dystopian twist by Erickson, though, as it now serves as the apocalyptic throughway that Parker and Zema traverse to avoid the interstates patrolled by "Disunion" (Shadowbahn 53) supporters across the now largely lawless Midwest. Unfortunately, even on this highway they are harassed and disrespected by shop owners and hotel clerks because of the differences in their skin tones. Eventually deciding [End Page 571] to abandon Highway 66, Parker and Zema land on the alienating "shadowbahn" that "runs from an undisclosed western point to an undisclosed eastern, as though there is no America at all of physicality or fact, only the America of the mind." While traveling through this subconscious heart of the country, Parker and Zema first hear on the radio about the resurgence of the World Trade Center, and Zema begins to have strange dreams at night of "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" (44).

While this idea of a secret "shadowbahn" highway clearly points to American nostalgia and reveals how such images can obscure the troubled settler histories of this continent, the odd marriage of the English shadow and the German Bahn also connects this history to the West more broadly, exposing the continuity between European forms of colonialism and their settler counterparts. In line with Hannah Arendt's tethering of European imperialism to the rise of fascism, this coinage links America's colonial past with the War on Terror's tendency toward the same system of oppression that rose in Germany, Italy, and Spain in the years of l'entre deux guerres.¹³ While one often thinks of the German Autobahn highway system when hearing the term, Bahn also translates as "train" (Oxford-Duden German Dictionary 135) or "railway." Keeping Arendt in mind, one cannot help but hear a further echo of the haunting train cars carrying off prisoners to extermination camps and the capitalist advancement of railways that allowed "the circulation of colonial commodities throughout the imperial core" (Karuka 40). Yet a reference to trains also calls to mind the Underground Railroad and its resistance to the American holocaust that was slavery. The novel embraces this complexity as near its end it discusses the recurrence of trains in American music:

the mystery train and the midnight train to Georgia, but most of all the train that's coming so people get ready. This is the train that rolls out of black churches into white radios. This is the train of deliverance but also the one where there's nowhere to hide, the train that every American takes to the end of the line, the same shadow-railroad of history that moved black Southern slaves to the free North in the first half of the nineteenth century.

(Shadowbahn 209)

Thus, while its ultimate connotations are left ambiguous, one can hear in this "shadowbahn" complex and even paradoxical impulses concerning America's imperial past and its problematic transmogrification in the present crisis. Refusing to shy away from both the [End Page 572] negative and positive connotations of such a term—as transport to liberation or destruction, celebration or appropriation—this "shadow-railroad" becomes a structuring refrain of American history mired in a dreamscape only illuminated by the World Trade Center's fantastical resurrection.

Beyond the chimeric narrative concerning music, a lost highway, America's racial past, and the legacy of 9/11, the novel also stands out for its formal ingenuity, a fresh fabulation that traverses time in new, imaginative ways. Shadowbahn is structured as an extended playlist, split into sections labeled with song titles and track numbers (many real, some imagined), followed by short vignettes that mimic liner notes found on vinyl record sleeves or in CD packaging. The novel's form complements, as it were, the "Log of Playlists" (84) left to Parker and Zema by their father, which becomes the soundtrack to their road trip. This structure allows Erickson to nest diverse discussions and narratives within his overarching tale about the return of the World Trade Center. It also accommodates a dream aesthetic perfectly suited to the complex historical overlays to which he seeks to do justice. Thus, one again recurs to a psychoanalytic lexicon for further understanding of this text. Discrete meaning proves elusive as the congeries of vignettes drift across time and space. Shadowbahn slowly crafts a montage of American history whose logic exists as a type of archival reverie, a stitching together of unmoored events to craft a whole whose meaning is to be found in juxtaposition.

Most pertinent to our discussions here are the notes that concern new perspectives on time. One day, Aaron—the first man to see the Towers—drives down that highway yet again and realizes they are no longer there. Yet others still see them and hear their songs, and the news still broadcasts images of them. Eventually others begin to find "the skyscrapers gone even as neighbors see them plainly" (105). No one can explain this phenomenon, how some still see and hear the Towers and others do not; or some still hear them but no longer see them, and some see them now standing silently over the landscape. More than the buildings' disappearance and reappearance, "it's the randomness that people find disconcerting." Studies are done to try and graph why some might still see the Towers and others do not, to try to plot patterns of the "to-ing and fro-ing of skyscrapers and soundtracks," and yet insight remains elusive. This moment stands as a "cosmic demonstration of the limits of the rational."

A theory circulates that "the Towers always occupy their space and that in fact it's the time around them that slips: that the Towers are located at temporal coordinates rather than spatial ones, which [End Page 573] sometimes coincide and sometimes don't with the different traveling coordinates of each individual" (106). "In other words," the track list labeled "chronometry" explains, "the buildings have been standing at the edge of the Dakota Badlands since 7:59 and 8:28 Mountain Time on the morning of September 11, 2001. The music that everyone has heard and that now no one hears is time's audiotape, the tunes of chronometry." Like the indecipherable nature of the Towers and their appearances, this understanding of time frustrates reasoning.

This seemingly illogical understanding of time as subjective and nonlinear calls to mind Jameson's classic definition of the eroded distinctions between past and present as a type of historiographic "schizophrenia" (26). For Jameson, postmodernism inevitably leads to a present "reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time" (27). Shadowbahn corroborates such a vision of history multiple times. In a passage dramatizing a fictional discussion between John F. "Jack" Kennedy and his brother Robert F. "Bobby" Kennedy in an alternate history where Jack loses the presidential election, Jack thinks how "Bobby believes life is supposed to be fair or, if not fair exactly, then serial, consequential, a sequence of things that lead to other things that are led to by the earlier things" (Shadowbahn 182). In contrast, Jack believes in a timeline of "randomness, caprice, the errant happenstance of a shot fired (or not) from a depository window, or a song that falls (or doesn't) from the sky that changes (or doesn't) the world and all its possibilities." Here, Jack gives voice to the classic postmodern understanding of schizophrenic history: no single event can incontrovertibly be connected to any other, and sequentiality or linear cause and effect dissolve in a mire of uncertainty.

And yet, at the same time, this seemingly outlandish reorganization of history stands as a type of artistic resistance to a received—yet spurious—sequentiality. Parker and Zema's father tends his playlists "like people tend their gardens" (211), as he decides the contiguity of various pieces. Thinking himself "the Supreme Sequencer," he pursues an "archive of sequences that he sets right." Like Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, the unending multitudes of musical selections stand before Parker and Zema's father as a rubble of history that he reconstructs into an alternative sequence of songs, an artistic rendering that "reorders, which is to say improves" the vast archive of music from which he draws. This rewritten narrative, however, can never be complete. As he tries to write his new novel, Parker and Zema's father realizes that "nothing he has ever finished has been as good as it was moments before he finished it" (232). He quickly shifts [End Page 574] to talking about the crafting of playlists, not writing his new novel, to express this aesthetic of incompleteness: "A playlist consists of not only the songs that are on it but those left off for reasons having nothing to do with whether a song is good or bad, because addition of the wrong song disrupts the haunting of songs left incomplete by their missing twins." The motif of twins that serves as a guiding principle to understanding artistic creation is clarified even further here as the dichotomy between absence and presence. The haunting that this playlist renders is only possible through the exclusion of other songs for no other reason than that their elision disrupts the existing song selection. Like the Native erasure that these resurgent Towers signify, this playlist serves as a metadiscourse on the structure of the novel. Shadowbahn's sustained interrogation of the past's inevitable resurgence exposes how America cannot escape the legacy of the settler violence it has worked so diligently to erase.

Shadowbahn itself serves as a type of map that charts such colonial absence in America's historical present. While the seemingly inchoate form this exploration takes may be labeled schizophrenic by scholars such as Jameson, Shadowbahn reveals how our present is made inevitably discontinuous by the continued puncturing of effaced pasts. Erickson's project involves more than simply paying careful attention to appropriation and aggrandizing historiographies. Shadowbahn's form testifies to the inescapably scattered and disjointed form any story that seeks to grapple with America's erased pasts must now take. As Mark Fisher explains, "we might say that postmodernity and hauntology confront 'white' culture with the kind of temporal disjunction that has been constitutive of the Afrodiasporic experience since Africans were first abducted by slavers and projected from their own lifeworld into the abstract space-time of Capital" (46). Shadowbahn, then, wants to imagine a hauntology of 9/11 that ruptures "white" time in a way recognizable to Black and Indigenous Peoples long familiar with the injustices of slavery and colonial conquest. In this way, Erickson's work stands as a type of speculative historical novel. The novel rewires the cultural logic of fantasy to plumb the repression that haunts America's past. This is not to say that Erickson's response to postmodern schizophrenia implies that we can merely imagine our way out of the past. Rather, Shadowbahn explores how the inescapable resurgence of past atrocities disrupts our current moment and seeks to model a path through which we might adapt postmodern epistemology to our advantage. Exposing the disjointed and ruptured space-time of America's present can only be navigated through a certain type of artistic license, a historical rendering that [End Page 575] spends as much time limning the obstructions to our remembrance as it does speculating about what might lie beyond such roadblocks.

Which brings us back to what might be called the psychoanalytic imperative anchoring both conception and interpretation here. Shadowbahn exposes how any discussion of Black and Indigenous erasure demands the modeling of a cultural unconscious. The problems of writing a history of settler conquest in the twenty-first century extend beyond historiography into the realms of psychology and semiotics. After all, as Jacques Derrida delphically remarked years ago, "the presence that is thus delivered to us in the present is a chimera" (167). Being and presence are not interchangeable, and new attention must be paid to the ways that our older visions of history perpetuated the erasure of the Other through asserting naively concrete visions of the historical present that disregarded the kind of chimera Derrida foresaw. This revelation demands new narrative imaginings that render more legibly the complex ways in which the past can puncture our disjointed moment. As Judith Butler explains in her introduction to Of Grammatology, Derrida's work "unsettles those discourses pervaded by the metaphysics of presence, the speculative attribution of a substance or a subject to every possible concept" (xvi). Erickson explodes this concept even more, exposing how the speculative nature of meaning is inescapable in postmodernity, and yet, as Derrida implies, this speculation allows for a reevaluation of what constitutes a true presence in the moment. It is not, therefore, schizophrenic—at least not in some pejorative sense—to realize that one cannot firmly grasp the multitudinous ways that history impacts the now. It actually may be the most generative use of postmodern insights to emphasize how our perspective on the past stands clouded by erasure, ideology, and trauma.

Erickson does not seek merely to dwell in this trauma or lament this historical backfiring. Instead, Shadowbahn outlines the strange spectral permanence of our past through a formal mode that models the sundered present that America inhabits. Like Parker and his sister, we as readers are dragged along through the novel with few handholds for grasping where the story may be taking us, with only an approximation of "the psychological sensation of knowing where [we] are" (Shadowbahn 45). In this way, Erickson seeks to push through pessimistic visions of the postmodern moment as unmoored from history and instead reveals how we can only engage the past via speculative fictions to trace such a disunited present. And while to a certain extent this abandonment or betrayal of "the real" should be mourned (as Jameson does), it also provides the techniques [End Page 576] for a less mendacious historiography. As Parker and Zema's father notes, America has become a "stillborn nation that wanders its own landscape trying to make sense of destiny, trying to make sense of survival, trying to make sense of which twin country is really left? Which is the corporeal and which is the ectoplasm? Which is the reflected and which the reflection? Which is the sun and which is the shadow?" (153).

The recurrent figures of light and shadow express this duality between presence and absence, between the real and the repressed. Eventually the playlist begins pairing together "twin songs" (188) that "change places in the light and the dark," providing Parker and Zema's father a dialectical space to ruminate on America's past. The first such pair, "Dancing in the Dark" and "Spirit in the Dark," reveals "the looming prospect of nuclear obliteration's atomizing light" that is "so bright that everyone can only wish for a dark in which to dance"—in reference to Bruce Springsteen's tune—contrasted with Aretha Franklin's reminder that "light isn't always life and that the death that God brings is better than that brought by men." This inversion of anticipated trope (darkness as a place of sanctuary, not nescience) also maps onto the racial twinning discussed earlier, for as the notes on Franklin remind, "You kept us there for three hundred years, so now let us guide you to it. Dance a little closer, a little deeper in the dark." This "dark," then, harmonizes nicely with Fisher's understanding of postmodernism as a time of "temporal disjunction" (Fisher 46). African American artists such as Franklin are acclimated to such a disjointed space-time and can provide guidance to white audiences as the choc en retour of colonial logic has now placed them in just such a disjunction.

In the subsequent passage labeled "That Lucky Old Sun" and "Warmth of the Sun," a reference to songs by Ray Charles and the Beach Boys respectively, the notes discuss how "both songs are sung in the shadow of the sun they claim to extol but actually distrust. They're songs not of the sun's warmth or light, but rather the singers' memories of warmth once but no longer felt, light once but no longer seen" (189). The light of this metaphor, then, stands perhaps most literally as the "atomizing light" of nuclear obliteration in reference to midcentury yet persistent anxiety over the bomb. Yet at the same time—if we can understand this metaphor of light and dark as relating to presence and absence—one perceives in this light a reference to one's visible presence within the imagined community of American culture. Such widespread acceptance was never granted to the brown, the gender divergent, or the non-male bodies of America. And yet, [End Page 577] no matter how much such exclusions attempt to bolster a version of America designed to protect its white denizens, Erickson reveals how the growing ghosts of the nation's colonial past will inevitably thrust the long privileged into the disjointed temporality previously visited only on the racial Other.

Dwelling in this heterodox understanding of time and permanence may provide the shift in ideology necessary to grasp alternatives to our present moment. Most overtly, this emphasis on alternatives manifests in a short vignette in the final third of the novel, where the 9/11 tragedy never happens at all. Winston, a homeless man who has fallen on hard times ever since he attacked an actress whose most famous role was that "of a Southern belle molested by a black man in a silent Civil War epic, her honor salvaged only by the Ku Klux Klan" (200), one day looks up into the sky and "watches a Boeing airliner head straight for the northern twin of the tallest structure he's seen, only to swerve at the last moment, missing the Tower" (201). And while there might be some solace in ruminating on the ways that our imagination might provide pathways to realities other than this one, it is more important to emphasize how Erickson gives voice to a type of narrative, a type of existence within postmodernism that acknowledges the inescapable and lasting legacy of American colonialism. By tracing the throughline from the eradication of Native communities to the exploitation of African lives, art, and culture, to 9/11 and our current moment within global empire, Shadowbahn reveals the complex ways in which time and history have been displaced—been made out of joint—within our present moment. In the face of such a liminal awareness of the absent presence of so much history and so much potential, turning our imagination toward the architecture of an egalitarian present is all that is left.

At the end of the novel, the shadowbahn refrain recurs, but with a small, meaningful change: "Among the train's passengers is talk of a shadow track that cuts through the heart of the century from one end to the other with impunity, as though no time exists of calibration or counting, only an era of the mind" (260). What was formerly the "heart of the country" now stands as the "heart of the century"; it is impossible to separate time from space in this narrative world, yet both seem subservient to this higher power, this deepness, this inescapable recurrence of what it means to be America. [End Page 578]