by John Brandon
A MILLION HEAVENS
McSWEENEY’S RECTANGULARS
SAN FRANCISCO
www.mcsweeneys.net
Copyright © 2012 John Brandon
Cover illustration by Keith Shore
Cover lettering by Walter Green
All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or in part, in any form.
McSweeney’s and colophon are registered trademarks of McSweeney’s,
a privately held company with wildly fluctuating resources.
ISBN: 978-1-938073-32-8
A
MILLION
HEAVENS
JOHN
BRANDON
Contents
The Wolf
Soren’s Father
The Piano Teacher
Cecelia
Reggie
Mayor Cabrera
Soren’s Father
The Piano Teacher
Dannie
Cecelia
The Wolf
Soren’s Father
Dannie
Reggie
Cecelia
Dannie
The Gas Station Owner
Mayor Cabrera
Cecelia
Reggie
The Wolf
Soren’s Father
Cecelia
Mayor Cabrera
Reggie
Cecelia
Soren’s Father
Dannie
The Gas Station Owner
Soren’s Father
Cecelia
Reggie
Cecelia
Soren’s Father
Mayor Cabrera
The Wolf
The Gas Station Owner
Dannie
History Of Arn I
Reggie
Soren’s Father
Cecelia
The Gas Station Owner
Mayor Cabrera
Cecelia
Soren’s Father
Reggie
Cecelia
The Wolf
Dannie
History Of Arn II
Reggie
Cecelia
Mayor Cabrera
The Gas Station Owner
The Wolf
Dannie
The Trainer
Cecelia
Dannie
Soren’s Father
Mayor Cabrera
Cecelia
The Teacher
Soren’s Father
Dannie
History Of Arn III
Cecelia
Soren’s Father
The Gas Station Owner
Dannie
The Guide
Cecelia
Soren’s Father
Dannie
The Rivals
Mayor Cabrera
Cecelia
Dannie
Mayor Cabrera
The Gas Station Owner
Soren’s Father
Dannie
Mayor Cabrera
The Freshman
Soren’s Father
The Piano Teacher
Cecelia
The Wolf
Mayor Cabrera
Reggie
The Wolf
The Gas Station Owner
Cecelia
Dannie
Arn
Mayor Cabrera
The Wolf
Cecelia’s Mother
Soren’s Father
Cecelia
Mayor Cabrera
Dannie
Cecelia
The Wolf
The Gas Station Owner
Mayor Cabrera
Cecelia
Reggie
Soren’s Father
Cecelia
Soren’s Father
Acknowledgments
About The Author
THE WOLF
The nighttime clouds were slipping across the sky as if summoned. The wolf was near the old market, a place he remembered enjoying, but he resolved not to go inside, resolved to maintain his pace, an upright trot he could’ve sustained for days. He was off his regular route. He had passed several lots of broken machines that weren’t even guarded by dogs and now he was crossing kept grounds—the trees in rows, the hedges tidy, the signs sturdy and sponged. He cleared the first wing of a well-lit building, catching his trotting reflection in the mirrored windows. His head jerked sidelong toward a parking lot and there he saw the quiet humans.
The wolf understood that he had stopped short in some sort of courtyard and he understood that these humans had snuck up on him, or he had snuck up on them without meaning to, which was the same. He retreated into the shadows. The humans hadn’t spotted him. They seemed lost to the world. They sat with their legs folded beneath them. Not a whisper. Not a sigh. The wolf couldn’t tell what these humans were doing. A lot of knowledge was obvious to the wolf and hidden from humans, but they had their own wisdom—deductions they’d been refining for centuries, beliefs they would cling to until they could prove them.
The wolf slipped into the neighboring truck dealership and crept under a row of huge-tired 4×4s. He snuck around behind the humans, who were all concentrating on the building in front of them. Not one of them was eating or drinking. Their hands were empty of telephones. The wolf could tell this had happened before. This gathering had occurred untold times, and the wolf had known nothing about it. He resisted the urge to clear his snout and break the quiet. The humans. They were even more vulnerable in the night than in the day. They’d convinced themselves they were in their element by raising buildings and planting trees, but the wolf knew that seas existed and that humans belonged near those seas and eventually would return to them. These humans were stranded in the desert and above them hung a moon that was also a desert.
This domain, this fin of the poor neighborhoods south of town, had not been part of the wolf’s rounds for many seasons. He checked in down here from time to time and the area seldom changed. The clinic had been built, the wolf didn’t remember when, and the market had shut down. The wolf would’ve liked to explore the old market, cruise the sharp-turning passageways of trapped air, but he could not pull himself away from these humans. He was putting himself behind schedule. The wolf could not have named any specific entity that threatened his territory, but that was irrelevant. He had rounds. The wolf was as trained as the terriers that slept in the humans’ beds. The wolf had been trained by his instincts, by forefathers he’d never known. He didn’t roll over or beg, but his trick was rounds, starting each evening near Golden and veering below Albuquerque to the loud safe flats near the airport. Up to the windless park where the humans’ ancestors had drawn on the rocks, then farther to Rio Rancho, where the scents from the restaurants were milder and children on glinting bikes coasted the hills. Bernalillo. The big river. The property where the Indians were kept. With plenty of time before dawn, the wolf would pick his way around the base of Sandia Mountain, winding up near Lofte, the northern outpost of the eastern basin, and there he would watch the new sun turn Lofte’s handful of buildings, which from a distance appeared to be holding hands like human children, the urgent red of hour-old blood.
The wolf’s paws were planted, his senses directed at the humans. Whatever they were doing, it wasn’t in order to have fun. Maybe they were deciding something, piling up their thoughts. Or perhaps they were waiting. The wolf knew about waiting. But humans, unlike the wolf, rarely waited without knowing what they were waiting for.
It was dangerous and without profit for the wolf to get intrigued with human affairs. At present he was huddled into the wheel well of a hulking pickup truck, putting himself behind schedule, because he wanted to hear the humans speak, wanted them to break their silence, because he
wanted an explanation. He stood in continual anticipation of hearing a voice. A question asked. Human laughter. He worked his tongue around his teeth, tasting nothing, tasting his own warm breath. An involuntary growl was idling in his throat and he stifled it. The wolf could wait no longer. He perked his ears one last time, the wind dying out for him—still nothing to be heard. He forced himself to back out from between the two trucks that were hiding him and forced himself to skip the old market and make for the airport. He cleared his snout decisively. He resumed trotting, but after three or four blocks, while passing some weedy basketball courts that stood empty behind a high fence, he broke into a flat run and the scents he smelled then came mostly from the furnace of his own body.
SOREN’S FATHER
He of course hadn’t run his lunch truck route since he and Soren had arrived at the clinic, and his route was where he’d always sorted out his troubles, paltry as his old troubles seemed now with his son lying here in creepy serenity day after day. On his route—the traffic swelling and subsiding, the billboards sailing above with their slogans, the hungry awaiting him at the next stop—Soren’s father had counseled himself through the workaday decisions of parenting and running his small business. He was a creature of habit and his habits were now mostly wrecked. He still knocked out his pushups, four sets of fifty, right down on the linoleum floor of the clinic room. The floor was perfectly clean, waxed to hell and back, and Soren’s father, if he dropped a crumb from his food tray, always knelt down and picked it up and dropped it into the little wastebasket that was continually empty. The final ten pushups of the final set brought grunts out of Soren’s father that he could not stifle, and sometimes Nurse Lula came and peeked in the door and saw Soren’s father flat on his front. Nurse Lula was the one who’d shown Soren’s father the secret smoking spot, so he didn’t have to descend all the way to the ground floor and walk out front and stand under the carport. There was a landing that jutted from the sixth floor staircase. The door to the landing was marked DO NOT OPEN ALARM WILL SOUND, but this wasn’t true. You could walk right out there and see in every direction. There was a casino in the middle distance, and way off a spine of maroon peaks. Soren’s father didn’t enjoy cigarettes as much as he had before, the smoke chugging out his half-open truck window as he navigated the city; now he used smoking to take breaks from the clinic room the way the folks he served on his route used smoking to take breaks from their factory jobs. Sometimes Lula was out on the landing. She had wide-set eyes and a gentle manner that made her seem holy. When she spoke to Soren’s father she avoided talking about her children but sometimes she slipped. They were girls and the younger one was taller than the older one.
Soren’s father was losing weight already, but it wasn’t because of the hospital food. Everyone complained about the food, but Soren’s father was used to eating from his truck—a soft, odorless sandwich or half-stale apple fritter or limp hot dog. He’d always fed Soren well enough, taking him down to the fancy grocery store with the hot bar and letting him point out what he wanted, but as for himself, he couldn’t see wasting the leftovers from the truck. He was accustomed to eating in traffic, so when he ate his dinner in the clinic room his chewing sounded monstrous against the quiet. He was eating as much as he ever had, so it must’ve been pure worry that was taking the pounds off him. There’d been a scale in the room and Soren’s father had Lula take it away.
It was hard to know what to do with the quiet. Soren’s father couldn’t get used to it. The quiet was impure, same as if you were up in the woods somewhere. The woods had chipmunks and falling pinecones and tunneling beetles and in the clinic there were machines beeping and whirring and nurses shuffling around in their chunky white sneakers and the rattling of carts. Soren’s father had never watched much TV and Soren, back when he was awake, hadn’t shown any interest in it either. Soren’s father used to try putting cartoons on their living room set and Soren would stare at the screen suspiciously for a minute and then move on to something else. Soren’s father had long since stopped trying to watch the news, which was both depressing and uninformative. He was a reader of science fiction, a habit he’d picked up to fill downtime between stops on his route, and now he read in the room, occasionally aloud, wanting Soren to hear his voice. Soren’s father’s interest in interstellar goings-on was waning, but with a paperback in his hands he was not completely at the mercy of the clinic’s busy, endless hush. He could put words into his mind and, when he felt like it, into the still air of his son’s room. One of the characters Soren’s father was reading about had been cast into a trance by means of a dark art that was part science and part magic, and Soren’s father had begun to skip those passages. He didn’t want to reach the end of the book, where the noble young trooper would predictably awaken.
It was Wednesday, and evening now, so the vigil had begun. Soren’s father hadn’t heard them gathering but they were down there. Soren’s father’s mental state was one of being acutely aware that he was in a fog, and the vigils weren’t helping clear that fog. He parted the blinds. This was the third Wednesday and their numbers were growing. They were far below, most of them bowing their heads, and it disconcerted Soren’s father that he couldn’t see any of their faces. They were like those schools of tiny fish he remembered from boyhood filmstrips that moved in concert like a single inscrutable organism. They seemed practiced, experienced, but where would they have gotten experience at this sort of thing? Nurse Lula said there had been vigils at the clinic before but it was usually a one-time thing. She remembered last year a cop had been shot in the abdomen during a traffic stop and a crew of folks in uniforms had come one night with candles and had each slurped down one bottle of the cop’s favorite beer. These people showing up for Soren didn’t light candles and they didn’t drink. Soren’s father didn’t know how he was supposed to feel about them. He worried that they knew something he didn’t, that they had access to a gravity of spirit that was beyond him. And the vigilers made him feel exposed too, onstage, so whenever they were gathered out there he stayed hidden behind the meticulously dusted blinds.
Soren’s father had seen them arriving that first Wednesday, before he knew they would become a vigil, when they were merely a half-dozen people loitering in the corner of the parking lot. A security guard had approached that first week and looked them over and elected to leave them be. Last week, with close to fifty people in the troop, a news van had rolled into the lot and a girl in an orange scarf had tried to talk to the vigilers. She didn’t get a thing out of them. Not one word. They didn’t stay long, the news folks. Nobody was beating drums or getting drunk or holding signs. No one was crying. Nobody was doing anything that could be readily mocked.
THE PIANO TEACHER
The lie she had come up with was that a library branch on the other side of town was screening old monster movies each Wednesday evening. She couldn’t tell her daughter she was going to sit outside a defunct flea market half the night, watching people a football field away as they vigiled. Her daughter wouldn’t understand vigiling and she certainly wouldn’t understand spying on a vigil from the high ground of an adjacent lot. And she also couldn’t tell her daughter she wanted to be near the boy. The piano teacher had climbed into the car her daughter had given her as a hand-me-up, a high-riding silver station wagon, and had sat at swaying red light after swaying red light and crossed Route 66 and now she slowed passing the clinic, which was out of place here on the edge of town, the only tall building in sight. The vigilers huddling in the parking lot were like cattle awaiting a storm.
The piano teacher passed them by and rolled onto the grounds of the market. She didn’t feel she was superior to the other vigilers, and in fact observed the rules she knew they followed—didn’t speak during the vigils, or turn the car radio on—but she was more than a vigiler. She was one of the forces that had put them in the parking lot of that clinic. She could do what they did, could open her windows and endure the chill air rather than running the heater in her
car, but the vigilers could never do what she’d done, which was to halt a miracle. The others, hugging themselves loosely in the sand-swept parking lot, were hoping to gain something, but the piano teacher was only hoping to feel sorry enough.
So here she was in the dark in a part of town she wouldn’t have visited in a hundred years. The moon was strong and the piano teacher could see the writing on the market stalls, all in Spanish, cartoonish drawings of vegetables and shoes. Between the market and the clinic was a used car lot full of tall gleaming pickups. From this distance the clinic looked like a spaceship that had run out of gas. Or like a miniature of itself, a toy.
The piano teacher had thought for sure she’d seen something moving in the shadows, and now she saw a creature ambling across the parking lot that must’ve been an enormous coyote. He was big for a coyote. The creature seemed male, though the piano teacher wasn’t sure why. He moved with a strut. The piano teacher watched him pick his way along the fence, which he probably could’ve jumped at any time. He came into the moonlight and passed back out of it and was gone in one complete moment, and the piano teacher, after the fact, thought of rolling up her windows. The piano teacher could not have said what color the animal was, one of those dark shades of the desert that was more a feeling than a color. He hadn’t even glanced at her. The piano teacher looked at the sky, at the clinic, down at her hands, at the buttons that locked the doors and ran the windows up and down. The boy had really played that music, had written it or channeled it or who knew where it had come from. He had played his soul, without ever having previously touched a piano. If he’d stayed conscious there would’ve been calls coming in from all over to hear the boy play, from the wealthy craving a novelty and maybe even from conservatories wanting another prodigy. But the boy didn’t know how to play. The boy had played what he’d played but he had no idea about piano. He was in a coma now, so instead of a prodigy many thought of him as some sort of angel, though they were afraid to use that word. He didn’t know how to play piano but he was an instrument himself, they believed. And of course many were firm that there had to be a medical explanation, folks who would cling to their practicality to the end. And none of these people had even heard the music. They knew it had been played and that experts had deemed it original, but only about a dozen people had heard the music and the piano teacher was one of them, and she was the only one who’d heard it that first time, who’d heard the boy play it live. If anyone knew the truth it was the piano teacher, but she knew nothing. She was a dumb witness. There wasn’t a thing wrong with Soren physically, the newspaper had been clear about that until they’d finally let the story drop because there were no new developments. There was nothing at all wrong with him except he was not conscious.
