by John Brandon
The piano teacher had decided she would always depart last. She would remain until every last vigiler down in the parking lot was headed back to regular life. She would wait for the exodus that would occur between one and two in the morning, and after the last car had left the clinic and the wind was the only sound again, she would turn her key and leave the market and steal the last faraway glance at Soren’s blank window up on the top floor.
CECELIA
She stayed in line with a convoy of cars leaving the clinic until the interstate loomed up. Car after car pulled onto the west ramp, heading toward other parts of the city, and only Cecelia broke off and climbed the ramp going east. She was already on the outskirts, and after she cleared the jutting foot of Sandia she would be clear of town entirely. She lived out in Lofte, a stagnant outpost on the once-lively Turquoise Trail, about a twenty-minute drive into the desert and then another ten minutes on the state road. She had a stop to make before home, at the cemetery that served Lofte and the other basin towns—Golden, Hill City, Cromartie. There were few other cars on the road this late, and they either screamed past like rockets or drifted around in the right lane. Though it was nowhere near morning, light was bleeding up from the corners of the sky.
When Cecelia reached the grounds of the cemetery she couldn’t help but feel like she was trespassing, like she was going to get run off by a rent-a-cop, but the gate was wide open and the streetlights along the lane were burning. She pulled around a curve, assuring herself that she was using the cemetery precisely as it was meant to be used. No one could say what the right or wrong time was to visit the dead. The place was absolutely still. Going this slow, Cecelia could hear her engine gargling and hacking and she felt rude. She let the car cruise without touching the gas or brake. She didn’t hear any birds, didn’t hear an airplane in the sky. The place likely didn’t have a night security guard and Cecelia didn’t see any cameras on the lampposts, and in short order she went from fearing surveillance to feeling too unwatched. She wasn’t being monitored and she wasn’t being looked out for. She could do anything, but what she was going to do was absolutely nothing, just like the last time she’d been here. When she’d come to Reggie’s funeral almost a month ago she’d lost her nerve and stayed in her car, and the same thing was happening tonight. She had the same feeling, helpless and unhinged. She parked at the curb in the same spot as before and wound her window all the way down like before. She tipped her head toward the sky. There was no weather, not even the ambitious little clouds that had been blowing over the vigils.
There was a modest hill between Cecelia and the gravesite over which, the day of the funeral, she’d seen the tops of the tall men’s heads—Reggie’s father and uncles probably, men Cecelia had never met. The funeral party had been partially shaded by the cottonwood trees. The cut grass sprawling in every direction had struck Cecelia as the greenest thing she’d ever seen, the fresh flowers around the headstones jarring bursts of color. Even with the engine and the radio off, she hadn’t heard anything that was said about Reggie, any of the eulogy. She’d heard only a reasonable daytime wind that had little to whistle against. She’d been unable to raise herself from her car that day, unable to shut the door as gently as possible and blend into the group at the gravesite to cry and pray like everyone else. She’d sat behind the steering wheel in a black dress she’d picked up that day at a consignment shop. When the ceremony was over and the bereaved had begun descending toward the parking lot, Cecelia had fired up her engine and fled. And it had been only a couple hollow days later that Cecelia found herself at a vigil for a boy in a coma, part of a mild crowd hungry for unspoken rules. That she knew how to do. She knew how to vigil. She knew how to sit passively. She’d logged hours and hours down below the sixth floor of the clinic but after a month had still not laid eyes on her friend’s grave.
Reggie sometimes didn’t seem gone. He did but he didn’t. Cecelia had never met anyone like him and she had thought that even before he’d passed away. When Reggie had been doing nothing he never seemed to be wasting time, and when he was doing a lot he never seemed to rush. He’d spent his energy and his money and his mind at the correct rate, never hoarding or throwing to the wind. His temper was rare and expertly wielded. And yes, Cecelia had admired his hard-earned tan and his loose-limbed mannerisms and his arresting jawline. She had watched him with more than the curiosity of the bored as he did everyday tasks like making coffee or changing his shoes, and she’d listened with more than a bandmate’s professional interest each time he’d shared a new song in rehearsal. She was glad she and Reggie had never succumbed to any demoralizing trysts or clumsy grope sessions. Truly. Now that he was gone, she was grateful she’d be able to miss him in a straightforward way, as a fallen ally. She didn’t know how to grieve him, only how to miss him, as if he’d only moved away rather than died.
Cecelia breathed the night air, smelling neither flowers nor cut grass. She smelled her car. She didn’t want to go home yet, didn’t want to face her mother or the stupid chickens her mother kept in the yard. The chickens were all her mother cared about any more. Her mother wasn’t well. Mess around with chickens and watch television, that’s what the woman did. She didn’t do anything else. Cecelia didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to walk into that house that always stank of the elk stew her uncle liked to drop off on the doorstep. Chickens. TV. Elk stew. Cecelia squinted. It was the middle of the night but she could see everything around her, like the whole cemetery had moved off and left a shadow of itself. The upholstery was sagging from the roof of Cecelia’s car and she reached and pressed it back into place.
With the loss of Reggie, Cecelia had lost her band. She had been in a band and now that band did not exist. It was no more. No more rehearsal. No more arguing with Nate, the drummer. No more going to the tragic little gigs. Cecelia’s ears would ring no more. She would sing no harmony. She wouldn’t wear that men’s dress shirt with the wide collar that she always wore to shows. Was it a big deal, no more band? She couldn’t tell. Was school a big deal? Or the shell her mother was retreating into these days? Cecelia was a dormant guitar player. She was probably a dormant daughter.
The upholstery sagged down again, and this time Cecelia pushed it back in place with both hands, pressing upward on the roof of her car and pressing herself down into her seat. She pressed until her arms began to quake.
REGGIE
The piano sat in the center of what Reggie was calling the main hall. The room was spacious, but still the piano dominated it. The piano looked disapproving, dauntingly formal, like pianos often did in unfamiliar places. The instrument was ancient and well kept, of a dark but faded wood, and its bench was upholstered with leather the color of a radish. There was no ceiling to the hall Reggie was being kept in, or else it was too lofty to be seen. The place was blanketed in uniform shadow. It seemed alive, the hall, or at least not dead. If Reggie held his breath there was true quiet, pure of electricity running its course, of insect industry, of breezes.
Reggie had a mat to lie down on, even though he didn’t sleep. He rested, like a great fish might. There was no way to track time, so Reggie rested when he felt tired of not resting. He remembered real sleep, back in life, black and hard and oblivious to everything but dreams. He remembered waking full of unhurried purpose. His mat was right down on the floor, like a monk or a drug addict. It smelled worn and tidy.
After Reggie had been in the hall what felt like a couple weeks, a library appeared. It didn’t contain a desk, so it was a library rather than a study. It was attached to the main hall but the light was cleaner in the library, bright enough to read comfortably. Reggie didn’t read, though. He sat bolt upright in the library’s grand, creaky chair, which was covered in the same red leather as the piano bench, and flipped backward and forward through the ornate volumes, listening to the pages and smelling the bindings. He didn’t have what it took to read one of the books. It wasn’t a crisis of energy; it was that Reggie knew none of the books
could help him. Reading a book seemed local and desperate. And the fact that people had sat down and written the books instead of doing pretty much anything else with their time on earth—taking a walk with a friend, eating chocolate, tinkering with a weed whacker in an oil-smelling shed—made Reggie sad. The thought of all the songs he’d written made him sad. All any writer could do was either document what was known or speculate. Reggie didn’t need to imagine a different world because he was in one. He didn’t want to celebrate or complain about the world he’d been snatched from, which was now so fathomable. It was easy for him to see now that the living world had always given him what he needed. This new place had no idea what to do with him. He sat in the big chair and ran his fingers over the rough cloth of the book covers. He shuffled through the pages with his thumb, picking out random words. When he needed to break the quiet, he snapped the books shut.
Reggie didn’t believe he was being punished, but it was possible he was awaiting punishment. He wasn’t religious, but of course he was aware of purgatory, familiar with the concept of the afterlife utilizing a waiting room. He didn’t think he’d committed any acts that warranted eternal justice, that warranted Hell or whatever, but he also knew sometimes you broke rules without knowing it. Or sometimes you were supposed to do something and did nothing instead, a sin of omission. And now and then, he wouldn’t have been surprised, your paperwork got lost or the person you needed to speak to was on vacation or whoever was in charge just didn’t like the look of you. At least this particular waiting room wasn’t cramped or foul-smelling. It didn’t matter how long he had to wait, Reggie reasoned—it wasn’t like he had to be somewhere. It wasn’t like he was going to be late to band practice or run out of daylight working on a yard.
The trouble was the solitude. In life, Reggie had never minded being alone, but this was different. Back in life, solitude was temporary. Even if a person was in jail, not that Reggie had been, there were guards and other inmates. If you were driving across the empty desert, you were on your way to see someone. If you were a child banished to your bedroom, you would accidentally fall asleep and before you knew it the morning was underway and here was Mom making pancakes. There was no waking up for Reggie because there was no sleep. There were no other inmates. No pancakes. No map on which to track his progress.
Reggie walked laps around the main hall, managing at times to feel like he was strolling instead of pacing. He felt he had very little peripheral vision, though he couldn’t be sure about this. He had no aches or itches to ground him, no hunger that could rise up and concern him. He still had his scars. He could feel that his tooth was still chipped from when an edger had shot a pebble up at him. He found himself fretting over the yards he’d tended back in the living world. He imagined them growing dumpy. It took more skill to keep a desert yard presentable than to run a mower over a lawn of St. Augustine grass. Not many people knew what they were doing with desert yards. Most guys dumped weed killer everywhere and plopped down some pots. Most guys did whatever was quickest and cheapest.
Once in a while Reggie stood in front of the piano and wondered if he felt like playing it. He didn’t. He didn’t want to play. He hadn’t even sat down on the bench. Reggie existed in a gray area and the keys of the piano were the whitest and blackest things he’d ever seen. He rested his finger on a low B-flat and pushed it down so gently that it didn’t make a sound.
MAYOR CABRERA
His town was dying and its last best chance, it seemed, was a group of religious yahoos headed by a guy named Ran. Ran had told Mayor Cabrera over the phone that the group had 170 members. More importantly, they had enough money—their endowment, Ran called it—to build a facility and then sustain themselves in that facility for a hundred years. They were going to erect one plain building that would include housing, worship space, a gym, a cafeteria. Not being fancy was important to Ran’s group. Mayor Cabrera didn’t understand their religion. They started with the Bible but had no problem revising it whenever science proved it wrong. They thought one should be devout for moral reasons, not to cash in on everlasting life. They considered confession childish. They thought talking about Hell was wrongheaded. They never, under any circumstance, recruited. It was the opposite, Ran had told Mayor Cabrera. If someone wanted to join the group, that person had to be voted in. That person had to convince the members that he belonged, then survive a probationary period. These people were going to make their home either in Lofte or in some town in Oklahoma.
SOREN’S FATHER
Some of Soren’s clothes were hanging in the closet of the clinic room, and Soren’s father pulled the doors shut so he wouldn’t have to look at them. He made a point to flip back the blanket every morning and put socks and shoes on his son, and he liked to be the one to remove the shoes when night fell. It was a habit, and habits were what he’d always counted on. The sight of the tiny polo shirts in their garish colors, adorned with dinosaurs and airplanes and tractors, made Soren’s father think of specific days he’d spent with Soren—at the zoo, at the plaza where the Indians sold toys, at that church where the old lady read stories—but the shoes were plain and brown and not particularly beat-up. They were any kid’s shoes.
There had been days when Soren’s father was convinced Soren was gaining color and had expected to return from a smoke on the secret landing to find his son blinking into the steady pale light from the window, but that was delusion. His son was absent as ever. He was elsewhere. He wasn’t recuperating. He was just elsewhere and nobody could guess when he might return. The doctors didn’t have a clue. In the first days of the coma they’d been comforted by their charts and tests, their metabolic abnormalities and cerebral cortices and CAT scans and MRIs and they even had a fancy name for the fact that Soren’s arms were bent at the elbows, hands resting on his chest, rather than straight down by his sides. “What does that mean?” Soren’s father had asked. “What does that mean that his arms are bent?” The doctor had clicked his tongue earnestly and said, “A lot of times it doesn’t mean anything at all.” They couldn’t say what had put Soren in a coma. Soren’s father wasn’t accustomed to medical doubletalk. This was the first medical problem of Soren’s life. He didn’t have allergies. He hadn’t even caught those ear infections all kids were supposed to catch.
Soren’s father made a point not to ask the doctors any more questions. It was up to him to consider questions he didn’t want to consider, like whether Soren was supposed to keep growing, how long it would take for Soren to lose all his coordination. Soren’s father didn’t know how much time had to pass before his son would have to relearn the alphabet and choose a different favorite animal and a different favorite food. Would he still know what an opposite was, a rhyme? Soren’s father didn’t even know if his son was dreaming.
He wished he’d been present when his son had fallen into his coma. Not that his presence would’ve changed anything, but he wished he’d seen the start of this ordeal. He felt sorry for the piano teacher. Poor woman. Soren’s father didn’t care a lick about music. He’d signed Soren up for piano because it was supposed to be good for a kid’s brain. Soren’s father never listened to music in his truck. When he’d driven his route he’d listened to the wind rasping in the half-open windows and to the sound of his tires against the road and he’d been content. Music had always seemed irrelevant to him, and the cause of Soren’s coma, he had to admit, was irrelevant too. He just wished he’d been there.
THE PIANO TEACHER
She had suffered a failure of courage in the only moment of her life when courage had been called for. She had stopped the boy from playing and no one knew it. They thought he’d stopped on his own because that’s what she’d told them back when she was telling anybody anything. She’d done something wrong and then she’d lied about it. And so no one faulted her. Not her daughter. Not the boy’s father.
The boy, that day, had listened almost too patiently, alert and without a word to say, while the piano teacher pointed out the parts of t
he piano and explained their functions. She’d sat him down on the bench and they’d flipped through the primer, a resource more for study at home than for lessons, and then she went over and pulled the curtains because the sun was angling in at eye level and she grabbed a pecan cookie to bring over to the boy, a trick she always employed with new students, a simple way to start on good terms. He was toying around on the keys, hitting them at random, softly at first and then surer. The piano teacher gently set the lid of the cookie jar back in place. She stood a moment and listened to the boy’s tinkering, envying him the experience of sitting at a piano for the first time. She could almost hear something organized in what the boy was banging out, an accident of the keys. She made her way across the room to him and when she was a step from the boy, holding out the cookie and reaching with her other hand to tap his shoulder, five gallant notes cut purposefully through the air and then were trampled under by a slow cavalry of low, weighted notes. The piano teacher lost herself. She couldn’t tell if the music she was hearing was fast or slow, angry or sad. She’d never heard this piece of music. There was surrender in it. Surrender to forces the boy knew nothing about. She couldn’t move again until the boy’s hands rested, a fraught pause in the song, and it was all she could do not to slam the fall down on the boy’s fingers. A breath rushed in through her nose and she smelled the pecan cookie, she smelled the boy’s hair which smelled of a clean attic, she smelled the hot dust on the windowsill cooling along with the ocean of sand outside. She lurched forward, her knee on the bench beside the boy, and pressed her palms onto the backs of his hands. The piano released a startled croak, and with that croak ringing on the air the piano teacher found herself catching the boy so he wouldn’t topple straight back off the bench and bust his head.
