A Million Heavens

by John Brandon

  Now Reggie touched the belt buckle but didn’t lift it off the polished wood of the piano. The buckle was a skull with wings, the skull smiling deviously. The next time Reggie had seen his uncle, the next big holiday, his uncle hadn’t had the Corvette and he didn’t seem as tan or carefree. It was easy for Reggie to see that he’d turned out a lot more like his father than his uncle. Reggie liked to work and didn’t care to impress anyone except the people closest to him. When he’d died he’d been driving an old Dodge truck his father had handed down to him.

  Reggie turned away from the piano with the intention of leaving the main hall and almost walked into a bureau, broad and hunched-looking, close enough to the piano that when Reggie backed up a step they seemed like a set. He knew this bureau. It didn’t tower like it had when he was a kid, but he recognized it. It was his father’s. And here it was. His parents had new furniture now, but the bureau squatting mutely in Reggie’s space had been his father’s years ago. As a kid, Reggie used to sneak into his parents’ bedroom and creak the bureau drawers open and pore over the contents. There were boxes in the bureau and boxes inside those boxes. Jewelry that probably wasn’t worth much but that Reggie could think of as pirate treasure. Photos of relatives Reggie had never met. Car titles and birth certificates in baroque script. Tie pins and cigar cutters.

  Reggie had stolen a buffalo nickel. He had no idea why he hadn’t simply asked for it, but instead he’d filched the old coin and taken it back his room and after that he’d never again picked through the bureau. The nickel had been old when Reggie had taken it and it was older now. Reggie had no idea where his father had gotten the nickel or what meaning it held. His father, if he’d noticed it missing, had never said anything about it. Of course he’d noticed it missing. Reggie, as he’d grown older, had often wanted to confess, to clear his conscience and have a laugh about it, but he never had. Now it was too late. He wondered if, when his parents were finally ready to sift through his possessions, they’d find the nickel in the old fire engine bank.

  Next was a program from a chorus recital Reggie had performed in, perched in the piano’s music holder, which to that point had sat empty. Reggie didn’t touch the program or even look closely. He knew it by the yellow-winged birds on the cover. The program marked the first experience Reggie’d had with a girl. His memory was a plaything, he gathered. He’d known his afterlife was a plaything, but apparently his history on earth was too. Kimmy Susteran. She’d never spoken to Reggie before that day on the bus when she took his hand firmly in hers and guided it up under her white polo shirt. Reggie wasn’t going to indulge in this recollection. Someone wanted him to indulge, so he was refusing. He wanted to think about what he wanted to think about. He wanted to think about nothing and wait in peace for whatever he was waiting for.

  THE WOLF

  The wolf had begun his rounds early in order to see the humans gather outside the clinic building. He wanted to witness their arrival, and so he had crossed over from Golden to the outskirts of Albuquerque with the shadows still strong. This was an excellent way to get shot, but getting shot seemed a far-off fear, too obvious a fear. He padded past the old market and bellied under one of the trucks on the adjacent lot and saw as the first humans found their places under the weak, lofty lights. One at a time or in clutches they entered the quiet and hunkered in it, intensifying it. The wolf didn’t know what he’d wanted to learn, beating the humans to this spot. Soon enough he was waiting again, like last time. The cars appeared in a slow flurry and then everything was still. The wolf could hear confused lizards scuttling around outside the perimeter of the human presence, wondering what was going on. The wolf could hear a noise the moon was making.

  The wolf did not enjoy these meetings. He did not enjoy watching the humans stifle their sneezes to preserve the quiet. They were young and old, these humans, men and women. None of them would laugh or cry. This parking lot, this hush, made the silly serious and the weak strong, but none of these humans would ever be as serious as the wolf. He was fascinated because the humans weren’t acting like humans, but there was nothing in this for him. And probably the humans were acting like humans—probably they were intentionally acting unlike themselves, which only humans would do. In some way the wolf could not detect, they were competing or bargaining.

  It was not a struggle for the wolf to leave this time. He shimmied out from under the truck and galloped vacantly in the direction he always went. Like the moon, he saw everything, and seeing everything was the same as seeing nothing.

  He galloped until he heard drumming, and when he snapped back into the moment he was startled to be in Rio Rancho. He could not recall his journey up the western flank of the city but he felt the fatigue of the journey. He tracked toward the drums, soon hearing other instruments too. This was music being made by live humans right this moment, deep in the night. He knew if he got close enough he would feel the music. It was the jubilant soundtrack of parades. The wolf was nearing the high school. He leapt a fence and crossed a grass field where he’d seen humans attempt to outrun each other. He snuck through a courtyard crowded with a thousand tiny locked doors and smelled the glue of books and smelled cotton and salt and the plant the young humans burned and inhaled.

  When the wolf emerged from the school buildings he was socked by the thump of the drums and rising blasts of the horns and by the fragrance of the lush grass getting chewed under the boots of the band members as they pivoted this way and that. He took cover behind a closed-up concession stand. The bleachers were empty. The leader would stop the playing and raise his voice and then motion for the show to resume. The leader wasn’t wearing a hat like the others but he was wearing white gloves that seemed to glow. The wolf was enthralled and had no sense of what was behind him or whether he was obeying or defying his instincts. The music was so loud that for a moment he didn’t pay attention to the scents on the air. These arranged yet wild sounds would outlive the instruments that produced them and certainly outlive the young humans that played the instruments and the music would exist, somewhere, after even the wolf was dead and gone.

  SOREN’S FATHER

  After peeking to make sure all the vigilers had gone, he raised the blinds to the dark, petering foothills. His coffee had gone cold. It was hard to stand up straight. His back had begun to ache from the orange-upholstered armchair in the clinic room, but going out and locating a store and talking to a salesman and choosing and purchasing his own chair and having it brought up to his son’s room on the sixth floor was not something he was going to do. Everything was daunting. He had even been skipping his pushups. He wasn’t going to do them unless he could do the full two hundred, and when the time came to do them, after breakfast, light swelling into the window, he found that he was unable to get himself down on the floor. He thought he could already tell a difference, that his triceps were succumbing to atrophy. It didn’t take long at his age. He was even smoking less—one around midday and one after dinner and one late at night when he couldn’t sleep. The nurse who’d shown him the smoking spot, Lula, had switched shifts and the new nurse was too young and businesslike and made Soren’s father nervous when she came in, flashing her practiced smile, and shifted Soren so he wouldn’t get bedsores. Soren’s father had quit putting socks and shoes on his son each morning. He had stalled out on his science fiction novel, and he told himself it was because the shoddy sleep he’d been getting made his eyes ache. That wasn’t really it. The problem was that all the crises of the galaxy seemed either too large to fathom or too small to worry about. Things would work out in the book, and he didn’t feel he needed to know exactly how.

  He knew how bad it was for him that he wasn’t running his lunch truck route. He had always run the route. It was the spine of his days. Everyone looked forward to seeing him on their breaks, waited for him and saluted him and marveled at how fast he made change. There were five trucks in his fleet, and only four were in use right now. Soren’s father’s truck was sitting in the parking lot,
sand blowing into the grill and collecting around the tires.

  Still nothing was wrong with Soren other than his coma. His vitals were strong. His skin was fine. No colds. No seizures. There would be no drama, no lesser trouble that might offer relief or distraction.

  CECELIA

  She was up in the booth. She had a view of four auditoriums, but only one was used at this hour, a class about architecture. This particular professor never needed anything complicated from Cecelia. He used an old-fashioned slide projector that never broke. The professor was very old, kindly. He was exactly what Cecelia believed a professor should be. He had white, mussed hair and patches on his sleeves.

  A lot of the younger professors had latched on to the idea that they were doing something wrong if they didn’t utilize all available technology. They wanted to incorporate the Internet and show everything on big projectors that hung from the ceilings and could only be operated by remote control. They wanted every kid to have a laptop and have them all networked and downloading and everyone was supposed to wear headphones and use thumb drives. Despite her A/V job, Cecelia was not savvy in these matters. Whenever a professor had a problem that was over her head, she would go through the same routine. She’d shut the whole system down and power it back up, duck down and mess with some wires underneath the cabinet, press a few random buttons, put her hand to her chin and shake her head and say, “I’ve never seen it act this way before. Something’s really wrong with it. They’ll have to get a technician out here in the morning.” Usually the professors were understanding, but occasionally one would say, “I thought you were the technician.” So far, Cecelia’s boss seemed not to have caught on that she didn’t know the first thing about high-tech computer equipment.

  Cecelia cracked open her poetry anthology and read a couple verses about small boys playing in backyards. The poems were hushed and reasonable and made Cecelia drowsy. There was another girl who was supposed to be in the booth with her this hour, who always helped keep Cecelia awake, but she hadn’t shown. The girl had a lot of friends and always came in with a different hairstyle. Her name was Marie.

  Cecelia closed her eyes for a few minutes and then a knock came at the booth door. She looked down at the architecture class. Nothing was amiss. The professor was still pointing and lecturing.

  “It’s open,” Cecelia said. She sat up straight and tucked her hair behind her ear.

  A guy holding a pizza pushed the door back. He had a ponytail. “This is from Marie,” he said. “She felt bad about leaving you alone in here.” His T-shirt was bright yellow and it said YELLOW SHIRT across the front.

  Cecelia was starving. She wondered if the pizza was meant as a bribe, so Cecelia wouldn’t tell their boss that Marie wasn’t showing up.

  “She didn’t have to buy me a pizza,” Cecelia said.

  “She didn’t,” said the guy. “I owed her a favor. I had some other deliveries on campus.”

  “How do you know Marie?” Cecelia asked.

  “Lots of ways,” said the guy. “She couldn’t make it because she came down with temporary fatigue syndrome.”

  “Oh,” Cecelia said.

  “People are always trying to be funny, aren’t they?”

  Cecelia nodded.

  “I won’t accept a tip from you because you didn’t order the pizza. No tipping on gift pizzas. That’s my policy.” The guy turned quickly, swooshing his ponytail, and was gone.

  Cecelia slid the pizza box in front of her and opened it. She ate two wide greasy slices and felt like she’d never want to eat again. Now that she was full, the pizza didn’t smell good, so she set it outside the door. The architecture class was winding up. Next there would be a biology class in the east auditorium and a political science class in the north.

  The phone rang. Cecelia got up and carried it over near her chair and set it on the counter. It was so loud it was ringing itself hoarse. Cecelia lifted the receiver.

  “A/V booth,” she said.

  “Amway.”

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Nate.”

  Cecelia hadn’t spoken to Nate since the incident at the diner. “How’d you get this number?” she asked.

  Nate breathed sharply. “Isn’t that a boring job?”

  Cecelia had noticed that whenever Nate felt guilty he acted meaner than usual.

  “What do you make, like nine dollars an hour?”

  “Look,” Cecelia said. “Don’t worry about the other day. It’s a weird time. No big deal.”

  “Why would I worry about the other day?”

  “No reason, that’s what I’m saying.” She wanted to be civil. Nate was probably more messed up than he would ever let on over Reggie. Reggie had been the kind of person who, though he was good at everything, didn’t inspire jealousy. He made people feel satisfied with themselves.

  “Thought you’d be happy to know, I’m giving up the name Shirt of Apes,” Nate announced. “I decided I better take the opportunity to shake the old fans—try to get some new ones, normal ones, maybe people with money to spend.”

  “Uh-huh,” Cecelia said.

  “You probably won’t be as happy to hear I’ve decided I’m going to use our old songs for my new band. I’m having tryouts this weekend and whoever I pick, I’m going to teach them our songs and we’re going to perform them live for pay. As part of a new, currently unnamed band. Just to be clear.”

  “You mean Reggie’s songs.”

  “Since you’re on sabbatical or whatever, and I don’t suppose Reggie needs them for anything.”

  “You mean you’re going to steal Reggie’s songs because you can’t write your own.”

  “Call it what you like.”

  “I am. I call it stealing.”

  “I could justify taking the songs until the cows come home. Anybody can justify anything. It’s what separates us from animals. It’s a waste of time, though, isn’t it—sitting around justifying when there’s so much to be done? It’s not easy starting a band, you know?”

  Cecelia felt frozen up inside, but she heard herself talking. “There’s got to be a way I can stop you,” she said. “Legally.”

  Nate snorted. “You won’t do that. You won’t get a lawyer. Reggie didn’t have the songs copyrighted or anything.”

  “Copyrighted?”

  “Yeah, that’s what you do if you’re smart. You copyright intellectual property.”

  “You’re an evil person, Nate. I know that’s not news to you. I’m pretty disgusted I was ever in a band with you.”

  “You needed my capital and hustle. Power, I call it. You needed my power.”

  Cecelia didn’t say anything. If she had said something, she would’ve expressed her wish that Nate had died, not Reggie. She wasn’t going to say something like that. It was true, of course. If someone had to get in a bad car accident, it should have been Nate.

  “You didn’t have to quit,” Nate said. “I’m not going to be penalized because you don’t feel like playing anymore. I invested a lot.”

  Cecelia’s heart wouldn’t slow down. The only victory she could salvage, at the moment, was not letting Nate know how badly he’d upset her. She was telling herself, almost in a chant, that she wasn’t going to let Nate have the songs without a fight, but right now she wanted to appear calm, merely disappointed. She wasn’t going to get a lawyer, true, but she also wasn’t going to do nothing. Nate would probably get the songs, she could already see that, but she wasn’t going to let him out of this unscathed. She was tired of being above things, of putting up with things. She saw that there were people who attacked and people who got attacked, and that the only way to keep from being a victim, like Cecelia perpetually was, was to do some attacking.

  MAYOR CABRERA

  Once a month he went to visit a professional lady named Dana. Dana was semi-retired. She had a few steady clients and rarely tried a new one. Dana was the only woman Mayor Cabrera wanted. He certainly didn’t want a young woman. Dana had short, straight hair and prim litt
le feet that Mayor Cabrera liked to hold in his hands. She was always wearing a different pair of glasses and when she laughed she straightened her back and crinkled her nose. She didn’t laugh a lot. She always seemed vaguely pleased but if you wanted her to laugh you had to earn it. Mayor Cabrera dreaded the day Dana would say she was quitting the business and he would have nothing to look forward to, nothing bright to think about while he passed the hours at the motel. He shouldn’t think about her quitting, he knew. These monthly jaunts were meant for relaxation, not fretting. It wasn’t only being with Dana in bed; it was getting out on this empty, pebble-shouldered road and absorbing the slaps of the rushing air, doing something that might be wrong, something strictly for himself. It was skipping dinner and accepting one of Dana’s cigarettes and staying up until the stars faded swapping stories.