by John Brandon
He was at the mercy of the afterlife whether he surrendered the songs or not. To act like he wielded any leverage was delusional. Reggie told himself he wasn’t giving in because of the deteriorating living conditions, nor to squelch the shrill vibration in his brain, nor even because the solitude was too much for him, the lack of answers, the lack of everything—love, hunger, sleep. He was giving in because there was nothing noble about holding out. There was egotism and defiance in holding out, and probably even toughness, he could admit, but nothing truly noble. Reggie had been able to accept in life that he couldn’t have all the answers, and he would accept the same in death. He knew that the notion that one got what one deserved was childish and his obstinacy concerning relinquishing his songs had become a form of begging. Begging for answers about the day of his accident, on that straight, familiar road, answers about this new life that wasn’t a life at all and wasn’t new anymore. Reggie was going to wind up where he wound up. Someone had a plan for him and that plan was none of his business.
Reggie tried not to hold his breath. He raised his hands and let his fingers fall upon the keys and felt a great relief at acting rather than resisting action. He was a man, though a dead man, and what brought him peace was work. The notes were strong and Reggie was not rusty in his playing. The song danced out through his hands, the buzzing in his head subsiding, the notes filling the void that was Reggie’s world. He had never cried as a grown person and didn’t know how, but he felt the trials he’d endured swelling up in his heart. It was hard not to play too fast. He was finally complaining. The song was a lament. The little room without a ceiling had the most robust acoustics Reggie had ever heard. It felt like he was composing the song as he went, though that could not have been true. He’d been writing the song all along in a secret part of his brain, the part where he’d hidden Cecelia from himself for all that time. As the song opened up before Reggie he wondered what Cecelia would think of it. He wished she could hear it. It was good, he knew. What he wanted was to see Cecelia frown at it, pleased.
CECELIA
She woke up groggy, her throat dry and stomach unsettled. Her mind was as quiet as a closed theater, but there was turmoil in her body, in her midsection and limbs. She felt like she’d been breathing something other than air all night. Cecelia had already gotten used to leaving her mother in bed, leaving her mother to deal with the morning on her own, but this morning she was pointedly thankful at being able to slip into clothes and swish some mouthwash and sneak out of the house unmolested. She felt like she hadn’t slept all night but she had.
It wasn’t until she was in her car, after pulling up onto the interstate and settling into the right lane as was her habit, that she realized she was humming. She wasn’t a person who hummed or whistled, but she was humming and not stopping. Maybe she wasn’t stopping because she wanted to know what the song was. She didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t a finished melody. She could hear notes in her head that corresponded to the notes she was humming. She could’ve stopped, but for some reason she wasn’t. She heard piano, fluttery at first but jostling into a song, and then suddenly decisive. She wanted to speak out but she didn’t. She kept her window closed. Cecelia had had songs stuck in her head before, but these notes were way inside, like trace amounts of lovely poison. They continued as she drove and drove, the sky getting clearer along with the music. The discomfort in her body was fading. Her stomach felt okay. Her head didn’t feel normal but it didn’t ache. The song sounded like it was being played on a very old piano, like a lot of the songs in the History of Music class Cecelia had dropped. This song wasn’t from History of Music. Cecelia had never heard it before. She’d never heard anything similar. She wasn’t humming anymore. It wasn’t necessary. Her throat was quiet and she heard the song all the more clearly.
During her first class, she could barely hear the professor. The song was getting louder and the noises from the outside were falling away. Cecelia found she could slow the song down in her mind, but she couldn’t stop it. It was either repeating or it had no end. Cecelia was grinding her teeth. She wished she had gum. There was a pop quiz and Cecelia wrote her name on the paper and handed it back in without answering any of the questions. The forced heat in the classroom was making her eyes water and her sinuses tingle.
When the class was dismissed, she went out and stood under a tree in the liberal arts quad. She could hear singing now, along with the piano. She heard singing and the voice was her own. The lyrics were as unfamiliar as the music, but the voice singing them was hers. She looked around. Sorority girls and a yoga guy and a maintenance man. A professor from the journalism school. They were all going about their days, wishing to be better people. There were no leaves on the tree Cecelia was standing under. The ground beneath her was too soft. She didn’t know what to do. She went to the student union and ate lunch off by herself. She tried thinking of another song and couldn’t keep straight even the simplest, catchiest pop melody. She picked her sandwich apart and then pushed it away. She put her head down on her bag and tried to sleep and pretended to sleep, but she was nowhere near drowsy. The other kids were finding lines to wait in. They were getting out on the sidewalks and striding toward reasonable destinations. Cecelia couldn’t blend in with them anymore. She felt ridiculous. She went to a deserted part of campus and sat under a sculpture that resembled a shipwreck and cried for a time in the shadows down under the hull.
By the time her afternoon class wrapped up Cecelia was way beyond liking or disliking the song. She’d spent a day with it. She knew every note and lyric by heart and she always would. She’d collected some handouts her religion professor distributed, but she couldn’t remember a word the woman had said. The song was poppy but not upbeat. It groused impalpably, it’s underlying tone one of grievance.
Cecelia went to her evening class, a class focused on the city of Paris during certain decades. The song was as clear as ever, but not as insistent as it had been. Or maybe Cecelia was exhausted. The song seemed to have gotten comfortable with her, too-loud background music. Cecelia could almost follow the thread of the lecture. Marie, the girl from the A/V booth who’d sent her the pizza, was in this class. She winked at Cecelia. Cecelia sat in the back and held a pen over a blank sheet of paper as ten minutes passed, then another ten, then another, admitting something to herself, a fact Cecelia had no idea what to do with but could no longer avoid. She knew what Reggie’s songs were like and they were precisely like this one. She had the same feeling in her guts, the same apprehensive joy, as when she’d first heard any of Reggie’s songs. The structure, the lyrics—none of it was done in a manner that would’ve occurred to Cecelia or anyone else. Cecelia had written plenty of songs and they were a far cry from this one. This wasn’t her style and it wasn’t anyone else’s in the living world. It was the unmistakable style of Reggie Mercer. A fact was a fact. The Paris professor was going on about plumbing and bearded painters, and Cecelia stared toward him dumbly, nodding as if she appreciated his knowledge, watching the piece of chalk he kept tossing up and catching.
After class, Marie came back and sat in a desk near Cecelia. She had colorful eye makeup on. Marie always invited Cecelia to go out with her at night, and this time Cecelia did not turn her down. Cecelia didn’t want to be alone. She didn’t want to go back home with this song in her head, didn’t want to go back home regardless.
They walked together to the parking lot and then Cecelia followed Marie to a heavily balconied high-rise, where Cecelia parked her car and hopped into Marie’s brand new volkswagen Bug. They drove across town and visited some people who lived in an old church building. There were a handful of young men around who were continually engaged in tasks. There were girls, all of whom had long pink fingernails, and they lolled about on the couches. It was an environment where a conversation would never survive, and Cecelia was glad for that. The young men kept bringing sweating pitchers and the girls kept emptying them into their glasses. Marie sat next to Cecelia with a hand on Ce
celia’s forearm. None of these people knew Reggie. Marie hadn’t known him. Outside of Nate badgering her, Cecelia hadn’t spoken about Reggie since his death. She never felt like explaining how she felt about him, explaining the quiet benevolent edginess he’d embodied, explaining what was happening now, his song.
Cecelia looked around at all the stained glass. At the other end of the room was an altar, a pulpit or whatever. A couple rows of pews hadn’t been ripped out. They still had the hymnals in the little slots.
“There’s no music,” Cecelia said. “There isn’t any music on.” She wasn’t sure whether it would help or hurt, to have music going outside of her. Maybe she wanted everyone’s voices drowned out. Maybe she didn’t like a bunch of people lounging around in a house of God. Cecelia didn’t think there was a higher power looking out for her, but this was still disrespectful. It was the kind of thing Reggie never would’ve done.
“We’re trying to cut down on music,” one of the girls told her.
“For purposes of spiritual renewal,” said another.
“Music giveth,” the first girl said. “But it also taketh away.”
In time, the young men came out with grilled cheese sandwiches. Each girl, Cecelia included, got her own little platter. The girls all had to remove their bare feet from the table. A pickle was on each plate, a handful of chips. The sandwiches were quartered. The young men didn’t sit down. They stood by in case the girls needed anything else.
Next they went to a bar with a cowboy theme. The place was closed and the staff had convened out back to drink from a keg and grill hot dogs. Cecelia downed her beer greedily. She had passed most of the day with the feeling of being on a remote plane, but now she felt close to the ground, aware. She could smell the sweat of the busboys, stripping their shirts off in the cold.
Cecelia found herself in the passenger seat of a parked SUV, Marie on the seat with Cecelia, half on her lap. Cecelia recognized the guy in the driver’s seat. He was the pizza guy, the one who’d come to the A/V booth. This time he wore a light blue shirt. It said, across the front, LIGHT BLUE SHIRT. He put on some music, soft enough that Cecelia couldn’t really hear it.
“It’s stuffy in here,” she said.
“All the windows are open.”
“Is this elevator music?” Marie asked.
“This is my music,” answered the pizza guy. “Frankly, I wouldn’t mind if it was used in elevators.”
“Cecelia’s a musician,” Marie said.
“My bandmate died,” Cecelia said. “His name was Reggie. He died, so the band is over with, but the notable thing is that last night he sent me a song while I was sleeping. That’s the only conclusion I can draw. That’s the part that might be worth mentioning to people at a party. A new song of his, one I’d never heard, found its way into my mind while I was sound asleep and it’s playing over and over as we speak.”
Everything was still for a moment. Cecelia was relieved to have said what she’d said. She couldn’t decide if it sounded crazier or more reasonable, now that she’d put it into words. The pizza guy blew air into his cheeks. He seemed like maybe he’d heard all this before. He tapped his knuckle against the windshield, thinking.
“That’s morbid,” he said.
“I agree,” said Cecelia.
“How do you know it’s this Reggie guy’s song?” Marie asked.
“Because it’s just so,” Cecelia said. “It’s done the perfect amount—not underdone and not overdone.”
“Sounds like a good name for a really bad album,” said the pizza guy. “Just So.”
“You can’t tell what the song’s trying to do until it does it.” Cecelia could hear the beer in her voice. She was drunker than she felt.
“If you learned to write songs from Reggie, wouldn’t your songs naturally sound something like his?” Marie asked.
The pizza guy broke in. “Doesn’t work that way. If you can’t write a certain kind of song, you can’t write a certain kind of song.”
“That doesn’t sound true.” Marie shifted her smooth, soft weight on Cecelia’s leg.
“I can tell it’s his song,” Cecelia said. “Like the way you could pick a relative out of a crowd, even if you’d never met them.”
“That doesn’t sound true, either.”
“Believe her,” said the pizza kid.
Marie scoffed kindly. “I say she’s not giving herself credit. She wrote a song and for some reason she’s not taking the credit. As a rule, songs don’t get telepathically transmitted. They get written.”
Cecelia shook her head.
“Maybe that’s how geniuses work,” Marie continued. “The songs appear in dreams. Maybe you’re a genius and you didn’t know it until today.”
“I wish,” said Cecelia. “I’m many things, but I’m no genius.”
“What’s the first line?” Marie asked. She lit a cigarette. Cecelia had never seen her smoke before.
“The curbs in the suburbs all rhyme with each other.”
“Okay,” said the pizza guy. “What’s the second line?”
“That’s why you kick them like you kicked your little brother.”
Finally, at sunrise, Cecelia and Marie arrived back at the high-rise with all the balconies. Cecelia got on the road headed for Lofte and fought to stay awake. This was going to be the first time since she’d started college that she would blow off an entire day. She hadn’t missed an hour of work when Reggie died. Today she was going to miss work entirely and the same with all her classes. She drove under a hot air balloon and then could not relocate it in her mirrors. It seemed to climb to a point directly above her whining Scirrocco and vanish.
At home, Cecelia snuck inside and went to her bedroom. She could hear the TV in the living room. It was the black gospel singers, their voices like revelers heard from across a lake. “Tears for all woes,” they sang. “A heart for every plea.” She could hear the gospel singers and she could hear Reggie’s song. Cecelia wondered if her mother knew she was home, wondered if her mother was out of bed. She wondered if her mother had the wherewithal to worry about her. She hadn’t told her mother anything important in a long time and she sure didn’t want to explain that a guy Cecelia had considered her best friend and who Cecelia’s mother had never met had died and then, dead, had written a song Cecelia was now in possession of, a song about a neighborhood that held none of your history and all your pain.
Cecelia sat up and took the Rubik’s Cube from the nightstand. It was cool against her fingertips and against her forehead. When it wasn’t cool anymore she set it down and stood up from the bed. She pulled the closet doors open, pulled the string that snapped on the bulb. She reached into the back of the closet and took out her guitar and positioned a chair, pulled an old tape recorder over and plugged it in. Cecelia pressed PLAY and RECORD and began stroking her guitar. It was the same old guitar and these were her same old fingers. It took her a few bars to clear out her throat. She looked around at her bare walls. No postcards, but then she wasn’t in need of inspiration. She was in service to someone else’s inspiration. She looked at the interminable line of tiny holes where the tacks had been, hitting notes and strumming heavier.
THE WOLF
It was daytime but the moon was out, a tarnished coin in the ozone. The wolf had given up his rounds. His territory was all he had and he’d been patrolling it since before he could remember and he’d forsaken it and wanted nothing more to do with Albuquerque. He haunted the basin now, a lost land that would offer a lost animal no aid, a land where the dunes shifted overnight and scorpions feared their own stinging tails. The wolf frequented old Rattlesnake Park, an area that didn’t seem owned by any particular human, a place marked off with NO TRESPASSING signs that had been posted by trespassers. Closer to Lofte there was a copse of doomed pine trees on a defunct golf course and the wolf used the branchless woods as cover. The days were not bright and the nights were not dark. The wolf was subsisting on nothing but butterflies, snapped from the wind and sw
allowed in fluttery gulps.
There was no reason for the wolf to do rounds. No animal could encroach upon the wolf, and if the humans encroached, which they had and would and did, it was temporary. Their empires fell. Their great cities burned and blew away like cigarette ash. The basin was littered with wind-scorched ghost towns. Many more settlements had perished than survived.
Everyone who lived in Lofte lived on the edge of Lofte. The wolf watched people soap their cars. He watched them run in groups. One house had a backyard full of chickens, and the wolf found himself gazing down at the penned birds from his perch on a hard hill that seemed high in the daytime but at night seemed so far from the stars. The chickens behind the little house were kept in a fence meant to thwart coyotes. The wolf should’ve slipped down and plucked a few, but he didn’t want them to be gone. He was able to imagine loneliness now and he suspected that once the chickens were gone he would feel it. His rounds had been misguided, but they had kept the wolf busy and exercised. The chickens were unwittingly keeping him company and in a way he was guarding them.
Though often there was no car parked at the house with the chickens, the wolf knew there was always a human inside. Sometimes the wolf saw her ease the back door open and spill feed in the yard. Sometimes he saw her through the window, sitting in her kitchen, sometimes in a chair with big wheels and sometimes in a normal chair. He’d seen her lean against her ice box and cry. There was this older one who never left the premises and there was also a girl who came and went. The girl had arrived home a short time ago, in her low, groaning car. The wolf gave up his promontory and eased down the hill toward the house so he could hear the chickens and so he could frighten them a little, put them on edge for their own good. They didn’t notice him until he was right there at the fence. They had no pride and precious little cunning, but the wolf felt affection for them. A couple of cars were coming up the street and the wolf hid behind a shed in the next yard. The cars passed and the wolf heard the chickens again, clucking softly, a sound like water dripping on wood.
