A Million Heavens

by John Brandon

  Soren’s father took a step back from the window. He was still holding the canvas bag. He thought of the people who had sat and taken time to write the letters he’d sent down the trash. They were better than Soren’s father because they could admit they were desperate and try to do something about it. Soren’s father folded the bag like a big pillowcase. He couldn’t get it to look neat. He rested the bag on the dresser and went over next to Soren and kneeled beside him. He pulled Soren’s stiff crossed arms off his chest with a gentle effort and put his ear to Soren’s body.

  CECELIA

  She went out with her guitar and muted the TV and played for her mother, an old Arizona mining ditty that was one of her mother’s favorites. It had been months and months since she’d played a song that wasn’t Reggie’s. She watched her mother’s expression soften during the first verse and her posture improve during the second. It was like back when Cecelia was first learning guitar, back when she and her mother were proud of each other. Her mother wanted to know that Cecelia didn’t despise or resent her, and Cecelia was letting her know she did not. The song was a peace offering that could open the door for other offerings. The two of them hadn’t had it out. Cecelia hadn’t said anything mean to her mother, had never raised her voice. They’d both stood their ground long enough that the ground had become worthless.

  Later, while Cecelia’s mother made them sandwiches, sandwiches that would constitute the first meal they’d shared in way too long, Cecelia went over to the Waller lady’s house and bought her mother a bird, a tiny inside bird that lived in a cage. She felt a pure physical relief at buying her mother a gift, as if she’d escaped a building that was caving in. Driving home with the well-mannered bird in her passenger seat, she felt no dread at the thought of arriving back at the house, and she realized in a way she hadn’t before how terrible that was, to not want to walk into your own house. There wasn’t going to be a tearful reconciliation, but a restoration was in progress, and that was enough for now.

  Once home, Cecelia presented her mother with the new pet and they found a spot for it and admired its stately habits. Cecelia promised her mother she’d always be home in the mornings, and she convinced her mother to donate the wheelchair, to make an effort to eat proper dinners. They were both giving in, that was the important thing.

  Cecelia offered to clean up the feathers in the backyard and her mother said she wanted them to stay. Cecelia remembered the chickens being dingy, but the feathers were bright as snow. Cecelia didn’t tell her mother about getting fired. She certainly didn’t tell her about Reggie’s songs. For now she was only going to treat her mother like a respectable adult who had a right to her own business, and she could treat herself the same.

  Cecelia had no clue whether the new bird was supposed to be able to speak, but she and her mother talked to it anyway. They asked it who the yellowest bird in the whole desert was. They asked it who had the best little birdie manners.

  MAYOR CABRERA

  Ran was in New Mexico and wanted to meet. No decision yet, but he wanted to meet. He didn’t know Mayor Cabrera wasn’t the mayor anymore. Mayor Cabrera didn’t want to invite him to Lofte and have people wonder who he was and start busy-bodying around, so he suggested a bar out east, out where the old mining concerns used to operate.

  It was a good afternoon for driving. The landscape appeared painted in oil, and Mayor Cabrera was putting himself into the painting. To be nervous for this meeting with Ran was the sensible emotion, but Mayor Cabrera mostly felt distracted. He saw that the situation was not urgent, whether he was the mayor or just a citizen. It wasn’t urgent in the big picture. Lofte would fail, of course. It would fail in a couple short years or it would find a way to hang on for several decades, and it didn’t matter which. Lofte’s story was going to end sadly, whether pretty soon or very soon. People were going to have to find another place to live now or find another place when they were older and had less energy. They were going to have to find another place to get attached to, and what exactly were they attached to about Lofte? Most of the folks Mayor Cabrera knew could use a change. A big one. Mayor Cabrera was one of them.

  The bar looked like a log cabin. There was one person inside and this was indeed Ran. Mayor Cabrera sat down at his table. Ran had a soft-looking spike haircut. His hands were pudgy.

  “There’s a sign up there that says the bartender stepped out for a bit,” Ran said. “I’ve thought it over and I’m going back there and mixing us a round of drinks.”

  Mayor Cabrera peered back toward the kitchen.

  “Stay put.” Ran smirked. “I don’t want you getting involved in this.” Ran went and found what he needed and mixed the drinks, humming as he worked. He brought the drinks to the table on a tray. They were tan in color, each with a twist of lemon on the rim.

  “I don’t know why I picked this place,” Mayor Cabrera said. “Maybe I felt like a drive.”

  “I always feel like a drive,” Ran said.

  “I could’ve shown you around town. That would’ve been the smart thing.”

  “I’ve been to Lofte plenty,” Ran said. He sipped his drink, judging the flavor. “There’s no bar in Lofte. Not really. Not one I’d want to go to.”

  “Is that a positive for your church?” Mayor Cabrera asked. “Not having bars around?”

  “There are a lot of positives. Plenty of positives. I’ve observed you in secret and I like your style. The town takes on the personality of the mayor, in my experience.”

  “You observed me?”

  “That’s how these things are done. I wasn’t observing you in particular.”

  Mayor Cabrera tasted his drink. It didn’t taste bad, exactly.

  “That’s a sazerac,” Ran said. “They grow on you.” Ran’s hands looked even smaller and softer wrapped around his cocktail glass. “I got drunk on these the other night, with some guy from the History Channel.”

  “I watch that,” Mayor Cabrera said. “We get it at the motel.”

  “They’re doing a special on cults. We’re not a cult, but if you never do these little cable channels then you never do the networks.”

  Ran was trying to impress Mayor Cabrera. It was working, a little.

  “When will it be on?” Mayor Cabrera asked.

  “They don’t know. I might not even be in it. They might cut me out.”

  “What exactly qualifies a given group as a cult?”

  Ran laughed archly. He didn’t attempt to answer the question. Mayor Cabrera took a closer look around the bar. There were photographs hanging everywhere of smiling miners. They had soot all over them, but their teeth were gleaming. There were some pictures of the womenfolk, as well. They weren’t as pleased.

  “That town in Oklahoma is throwing itself at me,” Ran said. “And you’ve been doing the bare minimum. Like I said, I like your style.”

  “The basin speaks for itself,” said Mayor Cabrera. He wasn’t sure what he meant.

  The door swung open and a guy came in carrying a jug of mixed nuts. It was the bartender. Ran told him about the sazeracs and the bartender said they were on the house. He said it was against his principles to lock the door during business hours.

  “And we’ll take another round,” Ran said. He was done with his drink.

  “I don’t tend the kind of bar that doesn’t have nuts,” the bartender said. “I really hate it when people ask for nuts and I can’t give them any.”

  The bartender got to work, clinking things together. Ran’s face changed, and then he leaned in.

  “You see that car outside when you came in?”

  Mayor Cabrera nodded.

  “That’s a 1984 Saab hatchback, red. One hubcap mismatched. Big tear in the passenger seat upholstery.”

  “Could use a wash too.”

  “That car makes me happy,” said Ran.

  Mayor Cabrera waited.

  “That’s the exact kind of car I had when I was a senior in high school. I found it at a used car lot last month and bought i
t on the spot. I had to take it to the shop and have them unrestore it. It had been kept too well.”

  The new drinks came, and Mayor Cabrera hurried and finished his first one.

  “I’m not a sneaky person,” Ran said. “I’m precisely as corrupt as the world warrants. I wanted to meet face to face in order to invite you to bribe me.”

  Mayor Cabrera didn’t want to bribe Ran. He didn’t think he had anything to bribe Ran with.

  “It’s not my style,” Mayor Cabrera said. “That style you like so much, bribing people isn’t part of it.”

  “How can you be so nonchalant?”

  “Because this is my last act as mayor. Drinking these drinks.”

  “I don’t ask twice,” Ran said.

  “If you do, you’ll be asking someone else.”

  “Not an ideal time for a leadership change. We’ll be deciding within a week.”

  “There’s a big hurry all of a sudden?”

  Ran grunted. He had an unguarded look on his face that wasn’t quite a smile. It said he’d been around the block and wasn’t going to get in a tizzy if a meeting didn’t go his way. It also expressed an even further deepening of his admiration for Mayor Cabrera’s way of handling things. Ran took a big pull on his drink. “I make these like crap,” he said. “It’s reassuring that there’s skill to it.”

  “Is the town in Oklahoma going under too? Were you only considering desperate places?”

  “That’s kind of the way it works,” Ran said.

  There was a silence then, not unpleasant, in which it became apparent that Ran was going to be true to his word. He wasn’t going to ask again to be bribed. The bartender was wiping things down. The miners were beaming and their women were exhausted with their own thrifty ways.

  “I was in love,” Ran said. He looked at his drink, down into the shrinking pool of it. “I used to drive her around in my beat-up Saab. They say teenagers don’t know what real love is, but it’s the opposite. Teenagers love harder because they’re unaffiliated.”

  “I’m working on getting unaffiliated.”

  “No hope for me,” said Ran. “I’m affiliated as hell.”

  DANNIE

  She had gone southwest the day before, and tonight she was heading southeast. She wouldn’t necessarily find Arn if she found the observatory, but she could find out for sure that he was gone. She could confirm that fact and try to move on with her life. The observatory was the only place she knew to look. It wasn’t in the phonebook, of course. It didn’t have a website. The owner liked to keep a low profile. Dannie pictured the owner with a neat goatee and pricey boots. He probably ate the exact same lunch every day of the year.

  Dannie wasn’t sure she’d even know the observatory if she saw it. It wouldn’t have a sign. It would be way back off the road, might even be disguised. It might be made to look like some shop nobody would ever go in, a pocketwatch repair joint in the middle of nowhere, a trophy store, anything. The observatory would be the same color as everything else by now. You couldn’t fight it; out here everything ended up the same color. It could be underground, all but the big dish. That’s what Dannie could look for, the dish.

  Dannie’s baby was the size of a raisin. The sunset was occurring without struggle on all sides of her. None of the birds were flying. All the birds were teetering along the roadside like pilgrims.

  Dannie saw a statue of an Indian god, all its arms. The statue wasn’t blue. It was that same color. She saw an out-of-business tourist attraction with a sign that said FEEL THE VORTEX. The hills were in their own shadows. A hundred guys on motorcycles flowed past Dannie, going the same direction she was but much faster.

  Dannie wanted to see a chain-link fence, a barrier of any kind. She wanted to see an effort to keep someone out of somewhere. She felt safe, but she did not feel lucky. Dannie had crispy bacon wrapped in paper towels in her glove box. She reached and extracted a strip and took a bite. She didn’t know whether to use her brain or her gut, whether to follow logic or her blood. She had thought about the fact that it was Wednesday three or four times over the course of the afternoon, that it was a vigil day, had understood in a cloudy way that at some point she would have to call the search off and find a road back toward Lofte and then back toward Albuquerque, that she would have to designate one of these lonesome stretches of road as the last one to be studied this evening, but she had not done this. The sky had turned red and then darker and darker and Dannie was heading farther away from the clinic. Her foot was lightly on the gas pedal, her eyes scanning in what light was left. There had been two signs and here came another one for a diner a couple miles ahead. Because there was nothing else, she had made this her destination. Someone might know something.

  A mile from the diner, when she could see a lone light atop a steep roof, she brought the car to a stop at the roadside. She had always wondered how people felt when they quit the vigils. She got out of her car and walked for a minute into the desert. She couldn’t see her car but she could see the light on the diner. She had too much freedom. Inside her was something that would be a part of her forever, but outside there was nothing. She was giving up a devotion that was sure and stationary, a boy in a coma who would never know a thing about her, in favor of looking for a boy who knew things about her whether he wanted to or not, and who would’ve, in time, found out the rest, a boy who needed her and was probably fleeing faster than Dannie could chase.

  She went into the diner and no one knew anything for sure. They’d heard of the observatory. They knew it was around. They knew where a defunct chemical plant was. They knew where someone had tried to start a museum for vintage cars. Dannie had been southwest and southeast and so she headed as close to north as she could. She’d covered hundreds of miles of road that all looked alike. What had seemed like the same mountains looking down on her with pity. The same dazed sky. The same tumbleweeds blowing halfway across the desert and then halfway back. There were two soda bottles rolling around in Dannie’s floorboard, a banana peel, a cracker box. The bacon was gone. In her purse, a mess of scribbled, contradictory directions. Lipstick. Vitamins.

  It was as dark as it was going to get, an advanced phase of dusk that wouldn’t give out, and Dannie had been driving farther away from her home and then closer and then farther, the roads seeming absolutely random in their paths, her mind more lost than her car, when the unbroken field of disappointing wilderness Dannie’s eyes had been skimming for hours was intruded upon by a squat brick mail receptacle. Dannie knew she’d found it. She knew right away she’d found the observatory. She’d harassed luck until it had wanted nothing more to do with her. She’d turned the day’s bad luck to good with pure doggedness. Before she’d even heard the crackling buzz of the elaborate generator set up under a wooden pavilion about a hundred feet off the road, she knew this was the place. It was either the observatory or the end of her looking for the observatory, and she knew it was both.

  Most of the observatory, as Dannie had predicted, was underground. The building was painted a faint green color that was somehow ugly. Green in the desert was always pretty, but the observatory was not. She’d turned in next to the little mail house and soon there’d been fence posts but no fence. There’d been a power line from the electrical source. There’d been a soft dirt road that had turned into a hard dirt road that had become a concrete drive, and then she had seen the pickup, and then she’d seen the big lone dish. Arn’s truck in sight, real as her own hand. She took her time. She left her car door open and took slow steps into the dusk air. She touched Arn’s door handle and looked all around at the bristly shrubs and broken boulders. The sky had no edges. She wandered toward the building, toward the only visible entrance, not quite wanting to turn her back on Arn’s pickup. The door to the observatory wasn’t locked but was extremely heavy. Instead of a knob, it had a leather strap you wrapped around your hand. Dannie had to yank the door a crack and put her foot down. She used her shoulder to force the door open and slip through, and once ins
ide all she saw was a narrow staircase that descended steeply. The steps were covered in metal studs that were meant for traction but only made Dannie’s footing unsure. There was sound coming from the walls. As Dannie grew closer to the bottom of the stairs, a smell like undrinkable water wafted toward her. She came onto flat ground in a plain room that made her think of a newspaper office if you took out the desks. She knew Arn was here. There wasn’t anywhere for him to hide. She saw Arn’s table over near the controls, saw his water jug lying empty on its side, saw the big poetry book. She went over and righted the jug and sat in Arn’s chair. There was a black screen with green cloudy light spread across it. It was like a weather screen, but for sound instead of rain. The green cloud was shapeless but you could tell where it was going. Dannie wondered what would happen down here if a message came through, whether alarms would sound, if the screen would start flashing.

  Dannie heard something behind her. She rose and spun around to see Arn standing there, brow furrowed, hands empty and down by his sides. There was a light directly above him, and it turned his hair auburn and his face shadowy. He looked scandalized, confused. His wiry arms hung limp. Dannie came around the chair and took a step toward him. She thought maybe she could smell him, his wholesome, hale musk. The bad water smell had faded from the room. Arn was so still he didn’t seem to be breathing, but Dannie could hear something. The noise was Arn starting to cry, and it was the sweetest thing Dannie had ever heard. He sniffed deeply. A fat tear ran down his cheek and then another. He seemed not to be able to move, so Dannie went to him. She didn’t embrace him, just took him by the hand and by the shirt. He’d withheld a lot of tears and Dannie wanted to see them roll. This was more than she could’ve expected. She wanted to see Arn’s face betray things it had never betrayed, while his body held still.