A Million Heavens

by John Brandon

  “Once I commit to this,” she said, “I’m in for about seventy hours a week. That’s doing it without quality help.”

  Soren’s father set his jaw. He didn’t take a sip of coffee or glance over at his son.

  “It would be nice to get my memoir in order, but this space won’t sit around forever. I guess it’s just as well. I’m a chef, not a writer.”

  “You’re a lot of things. You got enough brains and heart to make four or five women.” Soren’s father blinked his eyes clear. “And here I am this one old man.”

  THE GAS STATION OWNER

  Walking away from Lofte, he thirsted for the arrival of night and the true cold. He had been close to putting it off again, close to not leaving for yet another day, those days that turned into weeks and into worse, but he had not put it off this time. He’d eaten his last meal from the diner. He’d chugged a beer and slammed the can down and locked the doors of his house. He’d laced up his boots. He’d spat on the tame dirt of Lofte and had put one foot in front of the other. He was scared but he didn’t care about that. He headed west, his pack already heavy, his face to the sun. His legs were prickly with exertion. Parts of him were being roused from long disuse. He was doing it, going into the desert. In no time Lofte looked tiny behind him. In no time he had the town in perspective. It wouldn’t disappear from view, though. It stayed, minute but stuck on the horizon, until the gas station owner got rid of it by veering north around a hulking dune.

  Forty days and forty nights. This was day one. The direction he was heading there were no towns. If he spotted an over-serious hiker or drug lab he would give a wide berth. He didn’t have enough food for forty days, and his water would be gone in a week. Forty days and this was day one. The gas station owner thought of all the nuclear geeks shipped over to this bleak land and charged with creating a weapon that could make any land bleak. He thought of these men who’d never wondered about their purpose, who’d fallen asleep and awakened thinking of the same thing always, whose greatest love and greatest fear had been in their brains all along. The gas station owner lived in his body and keeping that body alive would become his obsession. Forty days and forty nights. He knew he was mixing science and religion, but neither had a claim on him. He was going to force the desert to claim him, to claim his life or claim him as an equal.

  DANNIE

  She didn’t want the vigil to end, but as always the hour came when the group naturally and wordlessly felt that it was time to rise. There were seven of them remaining. They’d lost the painter. Dannie had no idea what kind of painter he was, if he wiled away his mornings on corny watercolors or if he painted houses or if he touched up signs for the city. The fewer people that remained, the more it troubled Dannie when they lost someone. Each departure, at this point, felt like a betrayal of the group. They weren’t a mass anymore. They wouldn’t have been able to field a softball team. Dannie had seen bands with more members. They’d lost the fat hopeful women. They’d lost the guy with the sunglasses. Dannie had singled out one of the remaining vigilers, the college girl who was getting skinnier by the week but only ever wore baggy clothes. This girl would not abandon Dannie. When the others left, as they were bound to, Dannie wouldn’t despair. She had the girl. Maybe she didn’t have Arn the way she used to, but Dannie had this girl.

  Arn had sat next to Dannie and had held her hand for a while, out of obligation, but the quiet charge of intimacy was gone. Now it was simple wordlessness between them. It was like they were relieved to be at the vigils because they couldn’t talk. They had made love that afternoon and it seemed to Dannie they were performing out of fear, acting. Arn would never admit they were growing apart, and Dannie hated him for that. She was the one who had to initiate anything unpleasant. Like she had initiated everything pleasant. They never raised their voices with each other, which made the idea of breaking up seem unapproachable. She’d never slapped him. He’d never wrenched her roughly by the arm.

  Dannie drove them back to Lofte and when they arrived at the condo she said she was supposed to meet an old friend for coffee back in town. She told Arn she’d be home late. He looked at her puzzled but he didn’t protest. He went inside and Dannie pulled onto the road and went all the way down to Route 66. She wanted to feel free and aimless. She wanted Arn to be the one sitting at home and wondering.

  THE GUIDE

  She drove without thinking, hitting the likely spots. She was supposed to be talking about how plants and animals survived in this harsh habitat, but her mind was full of what had come in the mail the day before. She was going to Las Cruces. There wasn’t anything for her to do in Las Cruces until the summer, but she was going right away. She was going to lose two weeks of rent, and so be it. She was going to pack her old Subaru to the gills and aim it south on I-25 and not stop until she saw a sign that read NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY.

  This would be her very last desert safari. She had one guest in the jeep, an old guy who was in great shape, who looked like he could still play football or build a barn. His hands weren’t knotty. He sat placidly as she motored them across a flat of sagebrush.

  “It’s okay if we don’t see javelinas,” the man said. “Don’t worry yourself.”

  She looked at him in the mirror. They’d seen roadrunners and woodpeckers and hummingbirds and several rodents and a big scorpion, but still no javelinas.

  “I like the scenery,” the man said. “The scenery is enough.”

  “Oh, you’re going to see a javelina,” said the guide.

  The man waited. He wore a bright gray jacket the same color as his hair.

  “My insurance policy,” the guide told him. She popped open the glove box and removed a gallon-sized zipper-bag of sweet rolls and cantaloupe. “I don’t leave it up to chance. When the little suckers hear the Jeep they’ll run out and meet us. There’s one that’s bigger that sort of leads them.”

  “Lucky pigs,” the man said. “Better breakfast than I had this morning.”

  The guide downshifted for a hill and when they crested it she and the old man saw all the light pouring into the valley before them, casting long shadows behind the cacti and behind the carcasses of dozens of miniature hogs. The guide let the Jeep roll halfway down the slope and then held the brake to the floorboard. There was hardly any blood. Some of the creatures’ snouts were pointing straight up in the air. They didn’t look surprised or scared. They looked as helpless as they’d always looked. The guide could smell the animals. They weren’t rotting yet; this was how they always smelled. The buzzards had not yet arrived. This was the guide’s last day in the basin, thank God.

  She looked over into the old man’s steely eyes and could feel that her own were moist. He put his hand on her shoulder. All he said was, “Jesus, sis, sorry about your pets.”

  CECELIA

  She had been flat on her back on her bedroom floor, had sensed another song on the way and had stilled herself in order to let it arrive peacefully, but then she’d heard her mother out in the living room talking to someone. She got herself up and went to the hallway to listen. Concerning her mother, this was what she’d been reduced to—spying. Cecelia had never gone back to getting her mother up in the mornings, and her mother seemed to be managing that on her own, rousing herself at a reasonable hour with no help. Maybe Cecelia was doing the right thing, leaving her alone. She needed space. She didn’t need an enabler or a critic. Maybe Cecelia’s uncle was a good influence. Cecelia made her mother feel guilty, but Cecelia’s uncle could talk to her mother as a fellow over-the-hill half-depressed person. Cecelia didn’t feel sorry for either of them—someone they loved had died, just like had happened to Cecelia—but her life would be a lot easier if her mother got better.

  From down the hall Cecelia could see her mother’s stiff, dull hair hanging over the back of the wheelchair. Her mother was ordering something over the phone but she was watching the church channel, not a home shopping channel. Cecelia heard the TV, the guy with the shiny beard and the headset who�
��d once been penniless but had depended on faith and had been rewarded with a corporation. Cecelia’s mother was telling the person on the other end of the phone that she felt her faith multiplying in strength.

  “Now where is your organization based?” Cecelia’s mother asked.

  Cecelia didn’t know what to do. She could hear the central melody of the new song in her head. It sounded like one of those lullabies that could fill adults with fear. Cecelia felt weird at how not weird it felt to her now, receiving the songs. It was a vested condition of her life. Each song could reasonably be deemed a miracle, and to Cecelia each was only an interesting chore. She wasn’t missing Reggie on her own terms, but nothing ever happened on her terms. She listened to her mother ask question after question. Something was off. The conversation didn’t seem friendly. Cecelia’s mother was asking questions about where exactly her money would end up and she wasn’t getting an answer. Cecelia saw a tiny insect bumbling across the wall and she didn’t disturb it. She shifted so it could pass. Here came her own voice trilling in her head. Here came the lyrics, something about praying for a drought. She tried not to hear them.

  “Money is no object,” she heard her mother say. “I have a great deal of money.”

  Cecelia knew that wasn’t true. It seemed like her mother was getting transferred, working her way up the ranks of holy telemarketing. She still wasn’t getting answers. She wanted to know that her donation would help people in need. Cecelia’s legs were starting to ache. She was hearing the chorus now. If I can’t take your hand for a dance, there ain’t no Egypt, there ain’t no France.

  “Does it feed orphans?” Her mother was almost yelling. “Or does it buy your boss a speedboat?”

  Cecelia saw now. She got it. Her mother was prank-calling them, harassing them. Cecelia had never heard of a person engaging in solitary pranking and she’d never heard of a fifty-year-old woman prank-calling anyone at all. She ought to be relieved, Cecelia supposed. Her mother wasn’t brainwashed. Her mother still had her spunk. Maybe, when she thought no one was around, she allowed herself moments as her old self. Or maybe her and Cecelia’s uncle were turning back into the early-twenties punks Cecelia used to hear stories about. Cecelia didn’t care if she wasn’t the one capable of helping her mother, as long as someone did.

  The religious people were trying to get her off the phone and Cecelia’s mother wasn’t going quietly. She was still claiming to want to donate a large sum, a sum they’d finally become convinced she didn’t have. She wanted to sow a significant financial seed, she kept insisting.

  Cecelia slipped back in her room and finished getting dressed, still hearing Reggie’s song, which was telling her that missing people was a way of giving yourself the sour rewards you deserved. And how else could it work? Cecelia was missing Reggie but she was also missing herself as she’d been when Reggie was around. She was missing having a place in the world, because a world without Reggie didn’t seem to want her.

  She went out the front door without a sound, her mother more or less in a shouting match now, about to get hung up on. She had an afternoon shift in the booth at work. She drove fifteen over the whole way and jogged in from the parking lot and arrived only a couple minutes late.

  She opened the door to the A/V booth and there was her boss, sitting in Cecelia’s chair. Her boss held up a finger. She was reading a young adult novel, as she was known to do. It appeared from the cover to be about zombie cheerleaders. No one knew if she herself preferred this brand of literature or if she liked to screen whatever her children were going to read. No one knew if she even had children. No one knew a thing about the woman. She got to the end of a chapter and snapped the book closed.

  “Don’t put your bag down,” she said.

  She stood and faced Cecelia and informed her that her services were no longer required by the Office of Internal Resources. It was that simple. Cecelia’s boss thanked her for her time. It didn’t seem like Cecelia was getting fired, because the air was not charged, but she was. She was being fired. Her boss wasn’t going to be dramatic, but neither would she be unclear. No one ever got fired from OIR. Not even Marie, who missed a shift about once a week. True, everyone else could work the equipment. Cecelia had had plenty of time to learn how, to ask someone to teach her, and she hadn’t. She’d remained ignorant.

  Her boss held her hand out and Cecelia reached and shook it. This lady wanted Cecelia to leave so she could get back to her zombie book. This lady had never been a bit curious about Cecelia and she wasn’t curious now. She was only curious about her undead pep squad. Cecelia had an impulse to tell the woman that sometimes her enemies became victims of arson, that the woman better watch her back, but she stifled it. Cecelia still hadn’t heard anything about the barn. Nate hadn’t said a word. Nate’s parents had probably decided to cover the whole thing up, for whatever reason, and they probably had the pull to do that, to make it like something that was important to someone had never happened. But there was another way to think about it. Maybe the barn was exactly why she was being fired. This was the world’s next trick, the next step in the dance. She’d taken the barn and now she had to give up her job.

  “I can’t believe it took so long for you to do this,” Cecelia said.

  The woman made a face.

  “What’s the worst part about being old?” Cecelia asked her.

  “I’m only forty-one. I guess that’s old to you.”

  “You’re forty-one but you might as well be seventy-one, and when you were twenty-one you might as well have been seventy-one. Right?”

  The woman’s face had very little animation, but there was fear in her eyes, if Cecelia looked hard enough.

  “I’m broke,” Cecelia said. “Which means I wasn’t in a position to quit a job, so thank you for firing me. It was up to you and you finally did it.”

  The woman set her book down on the counter. On the back cover was a terrified crossing guard. “You’re welcome,” she said. “It was my pleasure.”

  “Yeah,” Cecelia told her. “It turns out I’m not a piddling kiss-ass nerd, so this wasn’t going to be the job for me. I’m not like you. I can be miserable and I can be happy. I’m in congress with music from the great beyond. It lands in my brain. It’s happening now, in fact. I’m important. I’m needed.”

  “I’m not miserable,” said the woman.

  “This job is beneath me. I have a higher calling.”

  “So I guess this is perfect. Everyone’s happy.”

  “I’m not happy that often anymore,” said Cecelia. “But I’m happy right now.”

  SOREN’S FATHER

  He had sold his remaining three lunch trucks, but when Gee asked him what was new, he only shrugged. He had admitted to himself that inevitably he was going to wind up selling off the whole fleet, and a man selling three trucks was still a man selling a business, while a guy selling one truck was a guy selling one truck. If he let Gee know the business was gone, she’d double her efforts to recruit him to be the cook at her restaurant. The restaurant was going to happen, apparently. She’d even gotten an investor. She’d come to terms with the fact that Soren’s father wasn’t going to be her partner, wasn’t going to come up with any seed money or even an idea or two, and now she wanted him to be her “wing man.” She’d offered him thirty dollars an hour to learn how to make the chicken and then keep it coming. Then she’d offered thirty-five. If he were going to do it, he would’ve agreed by now. Soren’s father had more money in his bank account than he’d ever had, and the thought of that made him feel lost. It was supposed to mean something, having a hefty sum in the bank, but it felt like nothing. Everything was this way. He ought to have been over the moon to have Gee, but nowadays he felt lonelier during her visits than any other time. None of their talking felt right. He didn’t want to talk about the future, about plans, and small talk in the presence of a boy in a coma felt that much smaller. Gee could tell. She was testy. The last time she’d visited, a nurse had asked her if she could we
ar soft-soled shoes the next time she came to the clinic because her heels clacked and some of the patients slept in the afternoon. Gee had let her have it, a nurse Soren’s father had seen around but didn’t know yet. Gee had asked her if she thought the patients appreciated the toxic cloud of perfume she dragged into all their rooms. She asked if the nurse had had a run-in with a skunk and was trying to cover it up. She asked the nurse if she owned stock in the perfume company. She asked the nurse if she thought it would be pleasant to be trapped in a flower shop as it burned to the ground.

  DANNIE

  She’d broken up with Arn. She stood at the front window now, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, an eyebrow resting against the glass, gazing at the empty space where Arn always parked his truck. This time the truck would not be back. The permanently abandoned look of that particular parcel of concrete, this time, was not something Dannie was imposing. The oil stain would dry and fade and get blasted clean by the patient sand, sand that would never be anything but sand and would only grow finer.

  There’d been no moment of disbelief. Arn hadn’t asked for a reason. He had never made a single demand on her since Dannie had known him and, this afternoon had held to form. He’d asked her to stay in the living room, out of his way, and he’d packed all his stuff in a duffel bag in about ten minutes. She had been the one crying, she who’d had a chance to prepare.

  Standing at the window now, Dannie felt that she hadn’t known Arn at all. He could be an identity thief. He could be heir to a shipping fortune. Could be dying of a terminal illness. Dannie had watched him from the other end of the hall, stalking around with shirts and underwear in his fists, and he’d seemed ready and willing to be heartbroken but simply unable to pull it off. Emotions were a foreign language. They weren’t his element. His face had been empty as he jammed things in his bag and then sat on the bag and then jammed in the rest. It hadn’t all quite fit and he’d squeezed through the front door wearing two coats and with a hat on his head and a pair of sneakers in his hand.