A Million Heavens

by John Brandon

  In the weeks following the lesson, about a dozen lawyers called Soren’s father. They called wanting him to reconsider his position regarding the music, wanting him to entertain offers, wanting to represent him if he was going to do any television appearances, wanting to know if he felt he was being slandered.

  Thankfully, because Soren’s father had not gone on TV, had not accused anyone of slandering him, because he had stayed in the clinic and mostly out of view and in his worn jeans and windbreaker didn’t impress anyone as a mastermind, the media hoopla had died down. In place of attention from reporters, the weekly vigil had emerged. Soren’s father was not comfortable being the object of attention, whether the attention came from churches or TV hosts or anonymous Albuquerqueans, and he’d hoped the vigil would be a one-time thing, then a two-time thing, three-time, but it had been going for a month now and the attendees had grown from half a dozen the first night to close to a hundred. These people seemed to be on Soren’s side, but still they made Soren’s father self-conscious, down there peering six stories up. They made him feel there were things he ought to be doing that he wasn’t. On one level they were simply well-wishers, but they also had wishes for themselves that probably weren’t simple at all, hopes to get something out of Soren, and Soren didn’t seem to have anything to give. Apparently Soren had turned over everything when he wrote that music, music the vigilers had of course not even heard. The vigilers were shivering campers, and Soren was their fire. These people were cold in their souls, and if being near Soren offered them comfort then Soren’s father supposed that was okay. The vigils only meant Soren’s father had to close the blinds each Wednesday evening and that for a few hours he couldn’t go out to the landing and smoke. Soren’s father felt bad for the vigilers, really. They were waiting and didn’t know what for. Soren’s father knew what he was waiting for. He was waiting to get his son back.

  DANNIE

  Arn’s night off, and no vigil. Dannie was sitting with him at the kitchen table, the oven light casting shadows. Dannie had a bowl of cut fruit out, picking at it.

  “I’m not going to start sleeping all day like you do.”

  “I don’t think you should,” said Arn.

  “Then how are we going to see each other more?”

  “Quality, right?” said Arn. “Not quantity.”

  “I want you to go to sleep right now. I don’t care if you’re not tired. Tomorrow we’re spending the entire day together. We’re going around doing normal-people activities in the sunshine.”

  “Like what?”

  “The zoo, for one. And we’re going to happy hour.”

  “What if I don’t feel happy?”

  “You go to happy hour to get happy,” Dannie said.

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Eat some of this fruit.”

  “No way.”

  “It’ll go bad.”

  “You can say the word ‘fruit’ all you want. Those are still just sugar-veggies.”

  Dannie didn’t laugh. She gently chewed a grape. “I was lying when I said I was twenty-seven.”

  Arn stuck his chin out.

  “I didn’t want you to think I was old. I’m really twenty-nine.”

  “Okay,” Arn said. “Lying doesn’t bother me. It’s not a pet peeve of mine.”

  “The idea of dating an older woman. I was letting you…”

  “You didn’t need to, but it’s okay you did.”

  “Not a pet peeve?”

  “Lies. The truth. What’s the big difference, really?”

  Arn’s face was sober and untroubled.

  “You’re not going to be mad at me, not even for thirty seconds?”

  “The issue’s dead as Doris Day. Whoever that is. Or was.”

  “But I was dishonest. It’s a betrayal.”

  “You weren’t honest, but I don’t feel betrayed. Takes more than that to make me feel like someone betrayed me.”

  “So you accept my apology?”

  Arn nodded. “Twenty-seven, twenty-nine—either way you’re a broken-down old lady.”

  REGGIE

  A guitar materialized, leaning in a stand right next to the piano. Reggie picked the guitar up and it felt at home in his hands, but he didn’t play it. He put it back on the stand. Whoever was running this show knew he was a musician, and maybe was trying to be hospitable to Reggie, giving him a way to pacify himself, but he didn’t want pacification. He hoped he wasn’t offending anyone—it was a gorgeous guitar, made of unstained white oak that smelled of broken nutshells—but in his predicament happy music seemed mocking and unhappy music indulgent. And writing music, making something out of nothing in the context of this void, would require optimism that Reggie did not at the moment possess. Reggie wasn’t ignorant anymore. There was plenty that was being kept from him, but he wasn’t ignorant enough to believe that writing a song had any point.

  The guitar appeared, and then sometime after that, down at the dimmest end of the main hall, Reggie found a bar—a full bar with stools and all the paddles jutting up that showed what beers you could choose from. The liquor bottles were a wave of color against the back wall. There was a bowl of lemons and a bowl of limes and a cutting board and paring knife. All the little tools and shakers and specially shaped glasses. Reggie had never been behind a bar, and he stood back there but didn’t touch anything. He leaned with this hip against the back counter. Tending bar had always looked pleasant to him, a job that required practice but not originality, much like tending yards. The beer paddles were arresting in their variety but Reggie wasn’t thirsty for a beer. He’d never been much of a drinker. At parties he’d nurse from the same plastic cup for hours, and he’d rarely tried hard liquor. He slid open the drawers one by one and in the very last drawer found a baggie of marijuana and a small, heavy pipe. Like alcohol, Reggie partook in pot now and then but didn’t much enjoy it. It made him more talkative, he supposed, but that was about it. He slid the drawer closed. Reggie turned and looked the bottles over. Many of the brands he’d never heard of. There was a mirror on the wall behind the bottles and for the first time since he’d arrived in this place he saw his face. It was the same. It was an empty street that could’ve been either lazy or desolate.

  Reggie went and stood in the center of the main hall and peered up into the perpetual dusk, or maybe it was dawn. It was like looking into a weak headlight on a foggy night. Reggie kept doing his laps, trying not to pay attention to the speed at which he walked. He was barefoot and the floor was perfectly clean.

  He tried to piece together his accident, but could not remember what might have caused it. He had a quick clip of the moment after, the tart smells of the wrecked truck, the glare of the sun off the scattered glass, his blood leaking out of him onto the seat. And he had the moment just before. He’d been humming a new song, had felt excited like always, and calm, and there’d been no one in his mirrors, not one car up ahead. He couldn’t call up one note of that song now, like it had been stolen. Not one note.

  Reggie thought of women, and it felt different than when he thought about food. Food gave him no feeling at all, which wound up making him frustrated, but imagining women gave him solace. The feeling was simpler than when he’d fantasized in the living world, because now there was no pressure. There were no women around. He could think of them as a benevolent, plural entity. He wouldn’t have to approach a particular girl and say the correct thing. He didn’t have to feel hollow about the countless women he would never possess. Thinking of women was like thinking of sunny prairies. The backs of their knees. The tops of their feet. Reggie didn’t have to worry that he was wasting time with his reveries. Both waste and time were dead notions.

  CECELIA

  Cecelia agreed to meet Nate, the drummer, for dinner. He’d wanted to pick up sandwiches and eat in the barn behind his house, but that was where they used to hold band practice and Cecelia didn’t care to ever enter that barn again. It wasn’t really a barn. It was a spiffy backyard cabin. A brand new hot t
ub hung from its rafters on ropes because Nate’s dad hadn’t gotten around to having the thing installed. Whenever they’d played loudly, the hot tub would sway above them.

  Cecelia met Nate at a diner on Route 66, his backup idea. The only people who enjoyed the whole Route 66 thing were rich people who didn’t have to stay in seedy hotels and eat at crappy diners, people like Nate who found the idea of migrating because you were down on your luck quaint. Nate had a thirty-year-old car that was in gorgeous condition and Cecelia had a thirteen-year-old car that was an absolute piece of shit, and they both fit right in on Route 66.

  Nate was waiting for Cecelia when she got there, out in front of the diner, leaning against a phone booth. Cecelia felt like Nate was already a complete stranger. They’d spoken only once since Reggie died. Nate had tried to explain why he wasn’t going to the funeral, and Cecelia had explained why she was. Nate didn’t know Cecelia had chickened out and sat in her car in the parking lot.

  They went in and ordered burgers with green chiles. The table had a dozen condiments on it, a huddle of syrups and hot sauces. Nate looked cheated. The band had been his project. Reggie had been about as close to a friend as Nate could come.

  “I wanted to meet because I need to know what your thoughts are concerning the band.” Nate struggled to get his straw out of its paper tube.

  “Meaning what?”

  “We need a new member. You got any ideas?”

  Cecelia drew an impatient breath.

  “You heard me,” said Nate. “This is what bands do. They reconstitute.”

  “Another one-of-a-kind songwriter?”

  “They’re around.”

  “Reggie was the band. He was the architect and we were bricklayers.”

  “You were his apprentice. Maybe it’s time to ply the trade. Maybe you’re the answer, right here under our noses.”

  This was how Nate’s mind worked. Everything could be fixed by hustling. Nate had booked all the gigs and gotten local critics to review the band and had bought a bunch of equipment with his own money.

  “I’m presently not touching my guitar,” Cecelia said. “That’ll make things tricky.”

  “You’re going to stop playing music?” Nate asked. “You’re going to take up jogging or collect stamps? Just keep going to those vigil things and waste away? That’s what Reggie would want?”

  “Let’s leave Reggie out of it,” said Cecelia.

  “I’ll put it this way. I’m keeping the band going and I’m retaining the name. So what I’m really asking is if you’re quitting.”

  “Then, yes. I’m quitting.”

  “Think it over. Let your emotions settle. Or better yet, leave your emotions out of it.” Nate looked out the window. There wasn’t much out behind the diner—some dumpsters and a sagging fence. Somehow you could tell the wind was blowing. “Our name has some recognition factor in this town, you know.”

  “With a dozen people.”

  “You’re underestimating us and you know it.”

  “No one wants to hear us without Reggie and you know that.”

  “They’d get over it. Just like us, they need to get over it. We can mourn Reggie the person, but Reggie the band member we’ve got to move on without. Lots of bands have lost a member.”

  “Not one I’ve been in.”

  They were quiet for a while, resting their cases, each testily examining a menu even though they’d already ordered. Eventually the waitress showed back up. She dropped off their food and Nate asked her if she’d heard of a band called Shirt of Apes.

  “Shit of Apes?” said the waitress.

  “Shirt of Apes,” Nate pronounced.

  “I don’t think so. Y’all need anything else?”

  Nate shook his head and the waitress left.

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

  Cecelia didn’t believe there was any decision to be made. Even if she’d wanted to keep the band going, where would they get songs from without Reggie? Nate had never written a note in his life and Cecelia was just another chick who had some complaints she put to guitar.

  “Just have an open mind,” Nate said. “Can you at least do that?”

  “My mind is open,” said Cecelia. “It’s the topic that’s closed.”

  When they were done eating, Nate paid the bill and they went outside. The air smelled cheap, like sand and rubber. Cecelia didn’t want to make plans to see Nate again. Without the band their paths might not cross, and that was fine. They said goodbye and Cecelia moved toward her car, but Nate followed her, trailing a few feet behind. Cecelia slowed and Nate caught up and walked her backward a step like they were dancing. He put her against her car with his body and leaned in with the unmistakable intent of kissing her. Cecelia squirmed, her breath misplaced, Nate’s eyes close to hers, the chemical smell of his hair all around. Cecelia could not stop their lips from brushing. She couldn’t stop a kiss of sorts from occurring before she jerked herself back against her Scirrocco, her elbow banging the window. She was flabbergasted. She looked at Nate, hoping for an explanation, but the look that came over his face meant that he had nothing to be sorry about. Cecelia tried to duck into her car but then remembered the driver door handle was broken. Nate didn’t give any ground and Cecelia had to sidestep away from him and circle around to the passenger door. She glanced over the top of the car toward Nate, and he was still standing there, almost jaunty, smirking at Cecelia uncharitably as she fumbled with her keys.

  DANNIE

  She needed to convince her body that she was settled in New Mexico for the long haul, so she finally started putting away all the trucker’s things. She carried armload after armload of clutter to the extra bedroom, a room she rarely entered, and loaded up the closet until it was spilling. She stacked pictures on the bed, constructed mounds of knickknacks on the floor. Soon the window was blocked with extra chairs and wall racks. Dannie thought it odd that a person who lived in the desert owned a mirror with a cactus and a wolf on it. That’s what people did, though. People who lived near the beach filled their cottages with shells. In cities, people jammed their lofts with sharp, efficient gadgets.

  Dannie got the idea that the trucker, like her, had moved to New Mexico to escape. In his case it was probably alcohol or pills, in her case the wreckage of a failed marriage and a mother who’d found religion and was impossible to talk to. As Dannie piled all the trucker’s belongings into the extra bedroom, she wondered if he would miss any of it. Dannie wished she could throw it all out, take it to the dump and keep the extra room for a study or a gym. Maybe the trucker wanted rid of all this shit but didn’t have the guts to do something about it, to turn it all over to the gulls at the landfill. Dannie wished she could mail every picture and bookend and paper towel holder to people she used to know. She was likely missing a staggering number of showers and weddings and housewarmings. She was way behind on gifts. She took a photo off the wall in which the trucker was skydiving, his thick gray hair popping out of his helmet, and carried it down the hall and tossed it on the pile.

  Later in the day, tired from rearranging the condo, she sat on her balcony with two rock-hard avocados in her lap. It was finally chilly enough to wear a sweater. Dannie was considering returning the avocados. The idea would either burn off over the course of the day, like the desert haze, or it would gather. She’d bought the avocados the day before. They were nowhere near ripe, and she wanted guacamole. She could always buy guacamole at the restaurant where she bought her little batches of sopapilla, but there was nothing like spanking fresh guacamole. If she were in L.A. and had bought the avocados at the supermarket she would’ve returned them in a heartbeat, but the store in Lofte was a mom-and-pop place and they needed every sale they could get. Mom and Pop were old. Their store was failing.

  Dannie, as sometimes happened when she was alone at the condo, was having dark thoughts about Arn. She suspected he was using her for a place to stay. There was circumstantial evidence, namely that he didn’t seem to have ha
d a place of his own when they’d met. He had a topper on his pickup and Dannie was pretty sure he’d been sleeping in the bed of the truck and keeping his stuff in the cab. She’d never asked him to move in. He’d slept over for several nights, taking sick days off work, then one day he’d stayed at the condo all day when Dannie went out, then before she knew it there was a stack of his shirts on the dresser and bacon in the fridge. He was fully moved in and had never had to bring stuff from anywhere else, hadn’t carried in any lamps or books or spoken of a broken lease. Dannie didn’t have grounds to be indignant, since she was basically stealing Arn’s sperm, but she had grounds for good old romantic worry because she’d grown to like the kid. She imagined him up at that sonic observatory where he worked, and hoped he was imagining her at the condo. The owner of the observatory kept a huge poetry book up there, like 700 pages. No novels, no magazines, no puzzle books. The idea was that when the aliens contacted us, the first thing they would hear was our poetry, our most worthy expression. Dannie pictured Arn vacantly leafing through the humungous tome, letting the stanzas drift into and out of his mind, preoccupied with thoughts about her.

  She sniffed the avocados. They smelled like California. She didn’t want to live in California ever again, but she thought she’d like to take Arn there. For all she knew, he’d never been out of New Mexico. He was a good guy. She wouldn’t be worrying about his motives, she knew, if they were the same age. She doubted a kid his age could genuinely be interested in her, knew how to be interested in her. She had lied and told him she was twenty-seven, then come clean and told him she was twenty-nine, but really she was thirty-three. She was thinking of taking Arn to where she grew up and she couldn’t even be honest with him about her age. Every relationship Dannie had ever been in had been farcical, and this one was no exception. What had ever led her to believe she could be married? In Los Angeles, to a guy from Los Angeles? Dannie was glad she hadn’t had a baby there. The baby would’ve turned out like her, thirty-three years old and with no idea who she was. She wanted to have a baby in a place where it could grow up to be itself, where it could take each morning and afternoon and night as it came, where it could live like Arn, relying on instinct rather than twisting itself in knots with scheming.