A Million Heavens

by John Brandon

  She had not asked for this type of student. She hadn’t even asked to have a good student. She’d been perfectly pleased with regular children who learned slowly and sensibly at thirty dollars per seventy-minute session until their parents decided they’d given piano a good enough try and let them take up high-diving or painting. She had not asked to hear music like that, the notes dragging with impotent hope. She had not asked to live in Albuquerque. She was never supposed to be in this damn desert and it wasn’t her that should’ve been the boy’s teacher. She had not asked for her gas-guzzling car. She had not asked to grow old.

  In her wood-floored den, the room she’d been using for lessons, she approached the piano from a wary angle and sat on the bench without surrendering her full weight. She didn’t want to press the soles of her bare feet against the pedals, and so she kept on an old pair of sandals she wore around the house. The piano teacher turned her head and gazed out the big window that looked out into the backyard. There was an orange tree that had come with the house and that had its own private sprinkler that flipped on for twenty minutes each night. The tree kept getting bigger, but the fruits it produced were tiny and sour.

  Twice in her life a piano had been taken from her. This one, though she was sitting at it, had been stolen from her by the incident with the boy, and long ago her childhood piano had been sold. The piano teacher’s father had once had money but then the piano teacher’s stepmother had come along and spent it. Her father had allowed this to happen, had downsized their house twice and given up his hunting trips. Eventually her father had to move them to Albuquerque and come out of retirement, and that was when the piano, a lovingly maintained Bösendorfer, had been liquidated. There was still a lake in Oklahoma that bore the piano teacher’s maiden name, but she had no claim to it.

  She had never decided anything for herself. She’d been handed off from her father to her daughter. She wasn’t from this desert. She belonged in this desert as much as the orange tree in the yard. She’d once had piano, at least. Now she had the vigils but the vigils were not hers. She didn’t belong. The vigilers were more of these lost desert people, trying not to be lost. As long as you were in the desert, you were lost. You could forget for a time, but you were still lost. The piano teacher felt the same at the vigils as anyplace else. She felt separate always. She had a stale secret, she had stopped the boy playing, a secret she would never tell and was already tired of keeping.

  DANNIE

  She was up early, making breakfast for Arn, frying a pound of bacon and cutting up fruit. She had coffee brewing and she was going to put out an expensive bar of chocolate. The sliding door stood wide open, dry air washing in. Soon light would pour over the horizon and find Dannie’s balcony. The sun would arrive after the dawn was long done, dopey, drifting upward like a child’s balloon.

  Dannie had moved to New Mexico about a year ago. She had lived in Los Angeles and now she lived in a town called Lofte in the middle of a desert basin, on a road once known as the Turquoise Trail, in the condo of a trucker. The condo was full of the trucker’s belongings—books about addiction, auto racing memorabilia. The trucker was around fifty, Dannie gathered from the pictures on the walls. The condo had a bunch of magnifying glasses and pairs of binoculars and a telescope. The telescope had been out on the balcony when dannie had moved in and she’d left it out there, slumping toward the scruffy fairways of the golf course that bordered the condo complex. The course was out of business and full of rabbit holes. Dannie sometimes gazed at the sky, but often she zeroed in on abandoned golf balls and read the tiny print on them, the handwritten initials.

  Dannie had come to New Mexico after her divorce was final. She didn’t know whether to feel sensible or insane. She’d come to the desert planning to stay a month and return to California recharged, but a month had passed and then eleven more had slipped away and Dannie couldn’t bring herself to go back to her old life. Her old life wasn’t there anymore. She had a job she could do anywhere and a balcony to linger on and she was getting enough sleep, which all seemed sensible, but she was doing one thing in particular that a sensible woman did not do: she was trying to get impregnated by some young kid she barely knew. She’d gone off the pill and she hadn’t told Arn. She’d met this guy two months ago and he was practically a teenager and now they were living together and she was trying to conceive his child. Of course, it didn’t ever have to be his child. If Dannie got pregnant and didn’t want Arn to know anything about it, she could always break up with him and leave the area. She doubted Arn was attached to her. He was dazzled because she was older, but he wasn’t attached. He did whatever Dannie told him to do, but there wasn’t much he’d do without being told. He would rub her feet for a full hour if she told him to. He was attending a vigil with Dannie for a boy genius who’d fallen into a coma, spending one of the two nights off work he had each week in a parking lot because Dannie had told him she wanted company, because she couldn’t stand to lose a night with him. Dannie couldn’t tell what Arn thought of the vigils and she wasn’t going to ask. There was no talking at the vigils, and talking about them on some mundane Thursday afternoon wasn’t something Dannie was going to do. Arn didn’t like for anyone to be upset, and if he quit, he knew, Dannie would be upset. He would probably attend every vigil till kingdom come rather than get into an argument.

  Dannie pulled the last of the bacon out of the pan and rested the strips on top of the others, a paper towel layered in between. She got syrup and ketchup out. What Arn did was put the bacon in the middle and put a saucer of syrup on one side and a saucer of ketchup on the other and alternate strip for strip. Arn struck Dannie as a carrier of desirable sperm not because he had lots of dazzling positive attributes, but because he had no negative ones. Dannie had come to believe it was more important to not be an asshole than it was to set the world on fire. Arn wasn’t stubborn, moody, jealous, fickle.

  It was a few minutes till six. Dannie missed Arn in an embarrassing way, the way teenage girls and old women missed men. Lately she’d been breaking down crying at songs on the radio. And she craved gossip all of a sudden, something she had no dependable way to get because she no longer had any friends. She’d had friends in L.A. but she hadn’t spoken to any of them since moving to New Mexico. She wasn’t angry with them, hadn’t gotten into a spat or anything. She’d simply stopped calling them back or answering their e-mails. She’d opened a new e-mail account and had stopped checking her old one. Dannie had felt powerful and brisk, being able to stop friendships in their tracks like that. She’d isolated herself, had broken ties with L.A. Now, she knew, she was approaching the point of no return. If she didn’t get in touch with her friends to let them know she’d met a twenty-year-old kid and was trying to get knocked up, she’d never be close to any of them again.

  She knew she was not going to call them. Something was wrong with her. She was going to let her friendships dry up and blow off. She was going to stand by and allow that to happen.

  CECELIA

  Professor Rose’s door was open a crack. He was Cecelia’s music history teacher. She peeked in and saw him at his computer, clicking around with the mouse. He was looking at women. Cecelia knocked and he shoved off from his desk, rolling across the small office on his chair. He pulled the door all the way open.

  “Office hours?” said Cecelia.

  Professor Rose frowned. “By all means.”

  He opened a folding chair for Cecelia, then he sat back down. He didn’t get rid of what was on the computer screen, a couple dozen girls in bikinis.

  “I need to drop your class,” Cecelia told him.

  “Isn’t it too late?”

  “Today’s the last day.”

  “It’s not a demanding class, is it?”

  “I can’t study. I can’t listen to music right now.”

  Professor Rose scratched the corner of his mouth.

  “It’s Reggie,” Cecelia said.

  “I know you guys were close.”

 
; “We had a band.”

  “I see.”

  “We used to listen to the music for this class together.”

  Each girl on the computer screen had her hometown and occupation under her picture. Three of them were from Scottsdale, Arizona. Professor Rose’s office was cramped with record albums. He had a well-trimmed beard that somehow made him appear more troubled than if he’d had an unruly beard.

  “I’m sorry you lost your friend,” he said. “He seemed like a good guy. I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend die on me. I’ve had a couple betray me. I don’t know what I should say to you. I never know what to say.” He looked amused, not genuinely. “People just stop living. They’re alive one day and not the next. It’s very weird, when you think about it. Isn’t it? It’s so strange. See, I’m terrible at this.”

  “No,” Cecelia said. “You’re not terrible.”

  Professor Rose opened a drawer, closed it. “What instrument do you play?” he asked.

  “Just guitar.”

  “What do you mean, just guitar?”

  “Guitar,” Cecelia said.

  “That’s better.”

  Professor Rose unhurriedly ran his eyes over the shelves and shelves of records. His screensaver popped on, obliterating the women.

  “Drop my class if you wish,” he told Cecelia, “but you should still listen to the music. If you’ve really got music, then music is all you’ve got. Look at me. I could’ve been playing in bands the last five years or I could’ve been teaching at this shithole. They let me stay here for five years, using me on the cheap.”

  Cecelia nodded, not really understanding what Professor Rose was talking about. She didn’t like feeling sorry for Professor Rose. She didn’t feel like she needed to feel sorry for anyone.

  “I’m not going back to giving lessons,” he said. “No more teaching of any kind. They say it’s satisfying, but I have to disagree.”

  Cecelia sensed she needed to make her escape. She should’ve dropped the class over the computer and been done with it. It had seemed like the right thing to do, to let your professor know to his face you were quitting his class, but Cecelia now suspected that was an outdated custom. She suspected she’d always been too concerned with following the customs.

  THE WOLF

  On his rounds, the moon high and shrunken above him, he encountered an injured bird. The bird was young and its wing was cleanly broken and when the wolf nosed in to examine, his breath on the bird, it did not wail in alarm. It was proud, perhaps. It shivered though there was never any wind over in this park, in this enclave where humans of bygone centuries had drawn their fears and their gratitude on the rocks. The young bird, the wolf knew, was likely the victim of young humans of the current century practicing at fun, young humans who were not afraid of nor grateful for anything. The wolf was stuck. He was trying to hear his instincts but if his instincts had been working he wouldn’t have to try to hear them. Normally he would’ve passed the bird without a thought, but he found himself considering the suffering of the little creature, found himself considering that the bird was young and proud and quiet. The wolf had to kill the bird. He wasn’t going to eat it because it would be a choke of feathers and brittle bones, but he had to kill it. The wolf gave himself a shake as if after a rain had caught him out in the open. There was no wind so the scent of the bird was gathering. The wolf looked up at the moon and it was even smaller. The bird’s eyes were set on the wolf. It had never seen a wolf and was never meant to see one. This bird was none of the wolf’s business. Its beak was a vivid yet translucent orange. Its feet looked disposable, not like they were meant to last a whole lifetime. They had, though—the bird’s life was at a close. The bird finally looked away. It was smaller than the wolf’s paw. The wolf realized suddenly that the bird, though tiny, was not young. The bird was fully grown and had survived a lot and that’s why it was proud. The bird was old like the wolf.

  The wolf moved away a stride at a time, staring ahead at the silhouettes of the broken hills that marked the edge of the park, waiting for a new scent, and he even began to trot before he slowed and stopped again. He’d moved his body away but some other part of him was still standing over the bird. He turned, backtracking. He never backtracked. But he did now. He returned to the bird and without looking at the tiny animal he crushed the life out of it with his paw and shoved the carcass under a rock and fled.

  The wolf darted through several clusters of half-built houses and then to make up time he cut through a vast shopping complex that had been built in the northern part of Albuquerque. He swiftly passed a bank of loading docks and then an area where plants were kept in pots and then a bunch of dumpsters that smelled like nothing, that smelled of steel and cardboard. There was a shop that reeked of cut hair and then the wolf rounded a restaurant and as he passed the back of it he noticed a radio sitting on an overturned crate. There were a bunch of other overturned crates and an ashtray that was empty because of the wind. The wolf smelled the humans inside the building. He smelled singular harsh liquids. The wolf did not know this area well and should not have been loitering. He sidled up to the dormant radio and tried to make sense of it. It was plugged into the wall and was producing only static. The back door of the restaurant was propped open and the wolf could see down a long, empty hall. He began nosing the big flat buttons on the radio and he found the one that changed the numbers on the screen. He was changing the station. The radio smelled like grease, which to the wolf was a clean smell. He changed the station and changed it again, trying to be gentle because each time he nudged the front of the radio it teetered. He heard voices and deeper voices and he heard human laughter. He heard music but it was drowned in static. He heard an organ, and a woman singing softly, and blocks of wood being tonked together. The static came in waves. The wolf didn’t understand enough about the radio. He looked behind him, into the open, and saw the parking lot give way to a pebbly field of nothing and he knew that beyond what he could see from this vantage the pebbly field gave way to a low road that led to the great, raised road. The wolf was far behind schedule. The business with the bird and now this radio. If the wolf was stopping here it should’ve been because he smelled food the humans had discarded. His rounds had once been his life, a duty that defined him, the most important part of him. The night had been everything and the day only a time in between that had to be tolerated. The wolf began poking all the buttons with his snout. There had been one red light on the radio’s front and now there were three. The noise was louder but still mostly hissing. There was chatter in several languages. Only when the radio clattered backward off the crate, skittering a bottle hard into the wall, did the wolf breathe full again. He knew what to do finally, knew to run away, to push himself to a righteous sprint that might get him to where he needed to go.

  SOREN’S FATHER

  When Soren had played that music and fallen into his coma, his father, along with his piano teacher, had been attacked as frauds. Among the attackers were the Catholic Church and also a big atheist who had a show on cable TV. Neither party had heard the music, but instead of tempering their positions, that fact only made them more vociferous. They said the fact that the music had not been released to the public was more proof that a scam had been perpetrated. The Catholics had released a tougher-than-usual statement that referred to Soren’s case specifically and then went on to condemn all false miracles. The atheist, who always had sweat on his brow and called himself a humanist, implored Soren’s father to come clean, implored him to admit Soren didn’t write the music, to admit that Soren’s father and the piano teacher had seen an opportunity when Soren had fallen unconscious and had swiftly, ruthlessly capitalized on it. Soren’s father had never done anything ruthless in his whole life, and had rarely done anything swift. And he’d said about a dozen words total to that piano teacher. He’d seen her briefly at the hospital when Soren was brought in and hadn’t heard a peep from her since—probably scared into hiding by that first rush of media harassment
. They’d been gone a long time now, the news people, and Soren’s father hoped the piano teacher was okay. He remembered her clothes, a dressy kind of T-shirt and slacks that didn’t go all the way down to her ankles. She’d seemed frustrated, angry even.

  The piano teacher taped all her sessions and she’d turned the tape of Soren’s session over to Soren’s father and to the authorities. The music was sixteen seconds long and then you could hear Soren falling and the piano teacher catching him. All that fuss over sixteen seconds of music. There’d been a meeting where three experts offered up their opinions. Only one believed it was possible that Soren had written the music, but all three agreed they’d never heard it before. Soren’s father had let it be known that he would not be selling the music or allowing it to be used for any commercial purpose, that it was Soren’s music and he could decide what to do with it when he woke up, and this was viewed by Soren’s father’s detractors as a strategy, a way to build mystery and hold out for a higher price when he finally did sell the music. Soren’s father was not going to sell the music. He hadn’t even listened to it but once. There wasn’t a whole lot to it. It was certainly sad, but most slow piano music was. He had the original tape somewhere safe and he tried not to think about whether or not his son was a genius. He didn’t know him as a genius. He knew him as his son, whose favorite food was olives, who couldn’t stand having a comb run through his hair, who enjoyed folding the laundry and making perfect squares out of T-shirts.