by John Brandon
The shop was made to look like an adobe dwelling, like all businesses in Santa Fe. The mechanic sat on an overturned bucket, outside on the driveway, fiddling with a pair of glasses. He slipped the glasses in his shirt pocket and motioned for Mayor Cabrera to pull inside. He shook hands then immediately propped the hood up and began poking around. Mayor Cabrera had no clue how much this night was going to cost him. He imagined a very high figure, so that he wouldn’t be shocked. The mechanic jacked the car up a few feet and wriggled underneath.
Mayor Cabrera stepped out the bay door and sat on the flipped bucket where the mechanic had been sitting. It was a brisk night, the sky a brimming void. It felt strange being this close to Dana, being back in Santa Fe. He had told himself he would confront Dana once his family affairs were back on track, and at the moment, so close to the ground with the sky so far above, he felt that he would confront her, that he had nothing to lose by doing so, that he was a guy with a couple troubles like every other guy. Things were on track with his sister-in-law and now he was doing something for Cecelia that a real uncle would do.
The mechanic stood back up. “One step at a time,” he said. “That’s how we climb this mountain.”
The mechanic talked as he worked. He told Mayor Cabrera he was going through a divorce, and that’s why he didn’t mind being in the shop all night. He was moving into a new place, but it wouldn’t be ready for another week. Hotels were too expensive, he told Mayor Cabrera, and Mayor Cabrera did not try to sell him on staying at the Javelina. Mayor Cabrera was not a salesman. The mechanic said he was going to need every dollar he could get for lawyers and furniture. He’d spent a couple nights in the shop and a couple in the garage of his house and a couple in his Caprice Classic.
“I ordered a pizza to the car,” he said. “I told them where I was parked and they brought over a pepperoni pizza.”
Mayor Cabrera laughed. He wasn’t comfortable sitting on the bucket.
“She didn’t seem like the type to turn on you,” the mechanic said. Mayor Cabrera could hear him straining, and then something came loose. “She’s always doing volunteer work and drinking soy milk. Always listening to music you never heard of. She seemed like she wanted to live in the moment and be forgiving. Not the case.”
Mayor Cabrera rose and asked the mechanic if he could bum a smoke from the box on the desk. He said he was going down to the street to smoke it, and left the mechanic clanging around under the car. Mayor Cabrera found his matches. He tried to always carry matches. He stood in the middle of the road and lit up. He hadn’t had a cigarette since he’d been with Dana—since he’d been with Dana successfully. He was grateful to be stuck at the shop, his transportation dismantled. That way he didn’t have to consider the option of going over to Dana’s right now. He didn’t have to worry about rushing over there with no plan and pounding on her door and finding her there with someone else, another customer. He didn’t have to worry about not going to Dana’s, about not finding the courage. He didn’t have to worry about going to Dana’s and deciding not to knock on her door and winding up creeping around in the bushes, a grown man, a mayor, trying to spy on a professional lady.
REGGIE
He had never been blocked before. He had refused to write for a time when he’d first found himself in this mute gray afterlife, when he was new to death, but that had been his choice. What was happening now was something else. He would sit at the piano to compose and it simply would not work. It would not happen. He could feel the plan brewing in his mind, could sense the glorified math of music within him, but at the piano it wouldn’t bang out. And now all this music that refused to cooperate, that refused birth, was getting mixed up in his head and he was slipping further and further from being able to write a song. He’d never thought of himself as confident, because he’d never lost confidence. On several occasions he’d stayed in front of the piano for what would have been hours on end if hours existed in this place. He would sit there with these melodic spare parts and half-strategies tangled in his mind, and he’d feel a sneaking pleasure at not being in control of his self-expression. He’d feel a slight, ephemeral thrill at failure, he who’d always succeeded.
He had taken to drink, had become a permanent shadow in the bar that at first he’d had no use for and later had warmed to. It was now his favored haunt in the hall. He wasn’t sure whether he could get drunk like living people, but everything was softer once he’d made a dent in a bottle. Sometimes, drinking, he felt the presence of time in the hall, of progress. Sometimes he felt he could achieve real sleep. Sometimes he felt he was learning, becoming wise, but that was what all drinkers thought. He was keeping close to the liquor to avoid a problem of the mind, as anyone might, but there was a practical problem he wasn’t going to be able to ignore much longer: the bottles had quit refreshing themselves. The hall had been pleasant enough as long as Reggie had been producing songs, but now that he was blocked there was no breeze for the hammock, the hall was chillier and dimmer, and when he left the bar and took his shirt off and stared at the keys and then put his shirt back on and returned to the bar, the bottles were not full. There had been a few empties, and then the number of empties and fulls had been equal, and now Reggie had only three unopened bottles and a splash left in the bottom of a fourth. Reggie didn’t feel he was being bullied or coaxed like before, but rather that he was being neglected. The hall wasn’t shrinking, but it wasn’t being tended. It smelled musty. There was a crack in one of the walls that Reggie could fit his fingertip in that ran from as high as he could reach all the way to the floor.
Reggie had come to understand that he’d been writing songs for Cecelia. He had not been writing songs he believed she would enjoy, but had been writing songs about her, about his feelings for her. He’d come to understand that. He’d learned from his own songs how much he had loved this woman, Cecelia. And when he got down to two bottles, two amber allotments of twenty-six-year-aged St. Magdalene scotch, he could see that all the songs he’d written in the hall were insufficient. They were songs of Cecelia that weren’t good enough, that did neither his affection nor its object justice. The songs were about love, like all songs, and they were clogged and fettered by Reggie’s talent, by his know-how. Talent was perfectly meaningless. He needed to write a song that laid the cards on the table with no cleverness. Not write it, just deliver it. Art was Reggie’s trouble. He needed to bring forth a song that couldn’t get in the way of itself, a song devoid of style. He didn’t know if he knew how to do this but if he couldn’t then he wouldn’t be here. He’d be somewhere else with some other impossible assignment.
Reggie cracked the next bottle. He’d sensed all this from the first moment he’d been blocked, and that was why he’d resigned himself to the bar. It wasn’t only weakness, escape. It was because he had a better chance of stumbling upon the song he needed than of searching it out. It was because this time instead of dividing his love by writing it into a song, he had to let a song be nothing but love. Reggie had picked his love into strands and woven it into artifice.
THE WOLF
It had been so long without a song, he hardly remembered what it felt like to hear one. He wondered if he was already dead whenever the buzzards passed overhead like a gathering stream, calling themselves to fresh meat, and he felt no pull to track them to their confluence. His instincts were a ghost town. There would be no end to this accruing of knowledge, this piling on of the hollow wisdom of common lives. He would drag it around the desert until the desert was again a sea.
He felt on the brink of an extinction that could never be complete, a lone wolf in the midst of countless coyotes who got snakebit and tracked by cougars and poisoned by small-time ranchers and who had their young carried off by hawks and were torn limb from limb by their own packs and were shot for fun by the sons of doomed towns.
All this wisdom, it felt familiar. The wolf felt he’d lost his instincts before. He’d gained and lost music before. He was in a cycle as surely as he was in Ne
w Mexico. The wolf had always believed the desert had nothing to hide and no place to hide it, but perhaps he was the secret. Perhaps he’d been here through all of it. The stitching of the land with train rails. The human borders shifting this way and that. Gold discovered. The wolf had seen human after human lowered into the parched earth in boxes of cold wood. He’d seen them left unburied as expedition after expedition became ill-fated. He had tried not to cower on the night birds of fire chased away the bats and burned the forest to sand. Albuquerque was founded and could have withered like any other town. Orphanages were established. Squash and beans raised. All of it had been bound inside books, all of it but the wolf.
THE GAS STATION OWNER
He couldn’t tell if he’d reached the blue mountains because as he got closer they were no longer blue. He had been trying to touch the horizon. His naivety was a comfort, as wisdom is to the young. He had used the pages of the atomic history as kindling for a fire, and then decided that if he didn’t have the scientists he didn’t want the Bible either. He’d never seen a Bible burned. Something happened to Bibles, otherwise the world would be overrun with them, but the gas station owner had never seen one destroyed. He had burned his cash. He had broken his knife. He was out of jerky and pretzels. He had some coffee left but no water to brew it with. He had a headache from lack of whisky and lack of food and lack of caffeine and there wasn’t a cloud to be found in the shallow bowl of the sky.
It had been three days since the last evening shower. There’d been nothing to get under, so he’d stretched atop his pack to keep it dry and had opened his mouth to the heavens and shivered the long hours until the clear black night appeared. He had expected to fall ill but he hadn’t. No self-respecting illness wanted anything to do with him. The next day he’d wrung a mouthful of water from the filthy leather of the pack before the desert air stole it all. His little notebook had stayed dry, and he took it out now with the stump of pencil that he no longer had a way to sharpen, and he marked the closing act of another day, the twenty-sixth day, knowing his own closing act was ready to commence all around him.
CECELIA
She headed toward the vigil, her car driving like new, running with a whisper. Her uncle had taken it one night and had every important part replaced. Cecelia didn’t know why her uncle had fixed her car. She knew he’d done it for himself as much as for her, to make himself feel better, but he’d still done it. It had cost him money and time. He’d solved one of Cecelia’s ongoing and growing problems. Cecelia had been a little jealous that he’d been able to make headway with her mother, but she didn’t feel that anymore. She was grateful. And whatever the motives, she was grateful about her car. All the handles and knobs worked. The only light on in the dash was the one telling Cecelia her seatbelt wasn’t on. Her brake light was back, she assumed. It even smelled nice in the car, like mint. She’d never missed her uncle, not really, but if he wanted to be good to her she was going to let him. He was an oaf. Cecelia wasn’t going to make anything hard on him. She was going to wait and see what he did next, and in the meantime, if she saw him at the house or in town, she wasn’t going to avoid him like usual. She was going to thank him. Cecelia pressed the Scirrocco to go faster and faster, and the sound of the engine stayed smooth and healthy. Whoever had worked on the thing was a hell of a mechanic.
Cecelia still hadn’t received another song. They’d stopped. She could finally settle in to whatever she was going to feel toward Reggie, toward his memory. When he’d died, she’d felt cheated, and then she’d gotten a bunch of him she hadn’t expected. She was going to miss him, but she didn’t feel as shortchanged. The songs had given her so much practice missing Reggie, she now felt equipped to do it on her own. She hoped Reggie was in that placid place she’d imagined, near the sea, that place with gently bobbing docks and like-minded strangers.
She pulled into the clinic parking lot, the concrete like carpet under her new tires, the clouds disappearing as they crossed the moon. She parked and walked over to the spot where she always sat. After a few minutes, the other woman appeared in her sleek white car. She came over and sat close but not too close to Cecelia and settled in. Cecelia watched the woman gaze into the black yonder above the clinic building. The woman didn’t look at Cecelia at all. Cecelia felt doubt. She felt that this woman could outlast her. This woman was better at existing than Cecelia was. This woman was putting forth no effort. She’d lost her boyfriend and it hadn’t fazed her. She was preoccupied in a way that could only aid her endurance. She was present only physically, and didn’t seem to even realize that Cecelia was competing with her.
Cecelia squirmed so she was facing away from the woman. She tracked a cloud all the way across the sky, and then another. Normally, at the vigil, the world seemed to slow down around Cecelia, but tonight she was the one who felt slow. She felt way behind. She’d been trying to be a jerk and had been succeeding. She’d been a jerk on many fronts, but with her mother especially. Cecelia was mad at her, but that didn’t give her the right to avoid the woman like the plague. The world might have been rotten, but her mother wasn’t. Cecelia was acting like because she was younger than her mother she shouldn’t have to be the adult. What did being an adult have to do with anything? What was an adult anyway? Some people could locate their spirit when it was wandering lost in the hills. Some people could line their unruly energies up single-file and march them. Cecelia could, her mother could not, but what was Cecelia marching toward? She rested her face in her palms. She should’ve started a new band by now, writing her own songs. She should’ve gotten another job by now. Months were going by—months that had every right to be memorable. Cecelia wasn’t advancing her life. She did not want any more songs. She didn’t want more of the fucking things. She wanted to be okay with her mother and to be able to relax at the vigil. There was a happy self in her and she’d been doing everything she could not to find it.
DANNIE
At the clinic, Dannie’s thoughts were clear. At home, her mind was mush already, soft around the edges. At home she was leaving milk out on the counter and finding it hours later. She was missing her TV shows and putting jeans in the washer with pockets full of gum. Dannie hadn’t told anyone she was pregnant. In her belly was the start of a person who would one day make small talk, who would one day make an effort to eat more servings of fruit, who would have to choose a shampoo out of the hundreds, who would drink coffee on trains.
A cat pawed up to Dannie and the other vigiler, the college girl. Dannie had no idea how many more weeks this girl planned to stick it out. Dannie didn’t know what she’d do if she were the last one. It was a responsibility Dannie didn’t want. She didn’t want to be alone and she didn’t want to be the one who let the vigils lapse away. The cat approached the girl and Dannie watched her make no acknowledgement. It was a Siamese cat, but something else was mixed into it. It had the look of an orphan, bored and wily.
Dannie felt childish in this girl’s presence. She needed to be an adult now, but she had no confidence that she was. Dannie had grown impatient because she hadn’t gotten what she wanted from Arn right when she’d wanted it, because everything hadn’t happened according to her timetable, and so she’d run him off. She hadn’t been capable of simply being happy and enjoying him. Dannie was supposed to have been the grown-up in the relationship, was supposed to have known what was good for her and what was good for Arn. She didn’t know what was good for anyone, and now she was going to have a little son or daughter to guide. She was missing Arn’s presence in her future child’s life, she understood, but she was also missing the way his breath wheezed when he slept, not quite a snore, and she missed the ropey muscles of his arms and his belly and the way he never gave away his mood with his voice, and Dannie missed Arn’s wise, patient innocence, which she thought she could use about now.
The wind gusted and Dannie watched the girl pull up her hood and tug the drawstrings. She had precise fingers. She could do sign language or construct toys. The tepid wind
s reminded Dannie of the Santa Anna winds. Maybe they’d made it all the way across the desert. Maybe that’s how the gulls had made it here from the coasts, riding bands of destined air. Dannie felt antsy. Her scalp felt hot.
Fucking Arn. Dannie still hadn’t told her old friends she was pregnant and it was because she didn’t want to pretend she preferred being alone, like it had been her plan to use some dope for his sperm and the plan had worked splendidly. She didn’t want to have to describe Arn, or make up some fake guy in order to avoid describing Arn. She was angry at him for not coming back, angry with herself for not going after him. She’d been telling herself he was in the wind. She’d been telling herself he was hardened against her, through with her. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was missing her too. Maybe he was cursing her this very moment. Arn was another thing Dannie had lost, but what if she hadn’t lost him yet? The course of her adulthood had been charted by quitting, and maybe she needed to not quit on Arn, to not quit on something she’d lost but go get it back. Maybe she needed to go find the best part of her life instead of worrying about what other thing she would lose next.
ARN
He had taken to shutting the screens down for hours at a stretch, sometimes all night, and starting them up again minutes before the owner arrived at dawn. He was tired of humoring the owner. The government had an observatory of its own, immeasurably more powerful, rows and rows of dishes a hundred miles to the west, like some huge gleaming sand crop. This job made Arn feel toyed with. He’d worked at warehouses where products were stored, factories where products were made, a bar where drinks were served, a winery that didn’t produce wine but at least might’ve served as a front for criminal enterprise. This observatory had no function whatsoever except to tickle the fancy of the owner. Aliens were not attempting to communicate with us. They weren’t. And if they were, they could. It wouldn’t matter whether or not we had wired bowls propped up on the desert floor. It wouldn’t matter if some idiot were sitting the graveyard shift.
