A Million Heavens

by John Brandon

  It was principle that was causing him to resist writing songs. Reggie hated bullying. He had never bullied nor allowed himself to be bullied and he didn’t want either end of it now, but at the same time he was starting to understand that if ever there were a place where principles were mute, this was it.

  He didn’t know a thing. He was staggering around in a tight circle, humming. The only way to drown out the buzzing, which seemed to emanate from the direct center of Reggie’s brain, was to hum. And what humming led to was not lost on Reggie.

  CECELIA

  It was Christmas Eve, but nothing in the house would’ve told you that. Cecelia and her mother had never been huge on holidays, but they usually at least put a ham in the oven and hung a couple wreaths. They hadn’t even driven over to the Hispanic outskirts below Albuquerque, a tradition of theirs, to admire all the driveways lit with candles in stiff white bags. Cecelia’s uncle, who she hadn’t spoken to since last Christmas, wasn’t stopping by this year. He had a bunch of guests at the hotel.

  Outside it could’ve been any time of year. The TV was set to the one network they still got, to a show about people who wanted to be inventors. This week the inventions had a holiday theme. The judges were mean to the contestants but nice as pie to one another.

  “This teenager on the news.” Cecelia’s mother set aside the flimsy basin newspaper that still got delivered to the house every week. “He tried to commit suicide by drinking Woolite.”

  Cecelia was a teenager, for another couple months. She didn’t feel like a teenager. She felt, when she was around her mother, like she was the parent and her mother the kid. This woman had taken care of Cecelia for the better part of two decades and now, what, she wanted the favor returned?

  “He threw it all up. It was too gentle to do any damage, just like they advertise. Teenage boy.”

  Cecelia picked up the Rubik’s Cube and gripped it in her lap.

  “Teenagers,” Cecelia’s mother said. “You almost have to admire them.”

  “Almost,” said Cecelia.

  “Last night a bunch of them painted fake petroglyphs in with the real ones.”

  “They should go to jail.”

  “I’ve never known the difference between petroglyphs and hieroglyphics.”

  “Hieroglyphics are in Egypt and they tell complex stories. Petroglyphs are here and they look like something high school kids could do.”

  “While I’m thinking about it, can you get my yearbook down from the attic?”

  “Your yearbook?” said Cecelia.

  “They didn’t invent high school especially for you, you know?”

  “The attic?”

  “You’ll see it. Pop your head up there and it’s over to the left.”

  Cecelia placed the Rubik’s Cube, already sweaty from her palms, onto a cork coaster. A man on TV was pleading. He was wearing some sort of helmet. Cecelia had been waiting for her mother’s spirit to resurface, getting her mother up each morning when she was barely awake herself and half the time running late, and there simply wasn’t a course being run. Things didn’t even seem to be getting worse. Her mother was going to slouch in the wheelchair of a dead woman, incrementally losing weight and idly making small talk until—until when? Now she wanted to look at her old yearbook? What did that mean?

  “Something wrong with you?”

  “I’m ship-shape,” Cecelia said.

  Her mother made an indignant noise.

  “Actually, I’ve got to go.”

  “Where to?”

  “I need to be somewhere. Else.”

  Cecelia’s mother looked at the clock, her eyebrows raised, then resignedly rested her gaze on the TV screen. She wanted to protest, to say Cecelia shouldn’t be running off on Christmas Eve, but because she hadn’t put up one stocking, didn’t receive a channel airing a Christmas special, hadn’t had the stove on all day, she didn’t have ground to stand on.

  “Well,” she said. “Get my yearbook.”

  Cecelia barreled up Route 14, not sure where she was going. She knew that whatever happened during the night, she’d wind up back at that house by morning, dragging her mother out of bed. She felt taken advantage of most every day. The afternoon that Nate had called and harassed her in the A/V booth she’d vowed to go on the offensive, but she hadn’t. She hadn’t confronted Nate. She hadn’t openly confronted her mother. She had her car to escape to, her bedroom, the vigils. She didn’t attack. She evaded.

  Cecelia pushed the gas pedal down farther. The evening sky was brackish with light. She slowed for some roadkill, then went even faster, as fast as her falling-apart car would go. The more wind she could get whipping in the windows, the less she could hear the cranky noises her engine made, the latest of which sounded like a Styrofoam cup being crumpled. Pebbles were pinging hard against the oil pan. With the speedometer at ninety and the car not willing to push it any higher, Cecelia let off the gas. She slowed rapidly. The noise of the wind evaporated. Soon everything looked familiar again. She saw a stately adobe mailbox in her headlights and pressed the brake and swung onto a driveway. It was one of the unused mansions, low but sprawling, a lot of logs incorporated into the structure. Cecelia kept her lights on. She didn’t hit the gas or the brake. She rolled around the back of the house, feeling powerless against the momentum of her car, expecting motion lights or dogs or something. When she shut down the engine, she felt off the grid, away from herself even. She wasn’t a normal college girl who got to live on campus and worry about diets and dating. She wasn’t a member of a band. She wasn’t a daughter in good standing.

  She got out of her car and walked up to a huge screened porch and tried the door. It seemed locked at first, but Cecelia kept jiggling the handle and it popped open. She felt like a criminal, an element of the night. Everyone else in the world was ensconced in holiday warmth. The air inside the screened porch was different. Chlorine. Cecelia strolled around the pool and then sat at a dinette set. These people kept a stark pool area. There was a cactus-shaped thermometer hanging up, and a humorous placard about peeing in the pool. The owners had probably never been here. These were the decorations that came with the house, to get you started. Cecelia put her feet up, then set them back down.

  She sensed movement. She turned her head and saw a guy descending a flight of shallow steps, and there was nothing to do but stay still and seated and try not to turn red. The guy saw her and made a noise. He was holding something, a lit joint. He looked down on Cecelia with an open expression, like the world was full of reasonable explanations. He was acting cool or he was cool. He glanced at the joint in his hand, peered out toward Cecelia’s car. It was hard to say who’d been caught in something.

  “Evening,” Cecelia said. She was still in the chair. “No harm meant. Just having a sit-down.”

  The guy wasn’t much older than Cecelia. He was a little nervous, but mostly he seemed ready to be amused.

  “I assume I don’t know you,” he said. “I don’t really know anyone around here. Are you a vandal?”

  “Not as of yet.”

  “Is anyone with you?”

  “No, that’s the whole point,” Cecelia told him. “I was looking for a place to be alone.”

  He drew on his joint, then settled stiffly into a chair, still peering out through the screen. “I guess I ruined that for you. I guess you’re not alone now.”

  “Where’s your car?” Cecelia asked.

  “Garage. That’s where I left it, anyways.”

  “I’m not here to steal anything. I was just, you know…”

  The guy shrugged. He held out the joint and Cecelia declined.

  “Our garage is full of my mom’s crap,” she said. “I forgot cars could go in garages.”

  “Fortunately, no moms live at this house.”

  “I thought these places were all empty.”

  The guy squinted, holding in smoke. “Usually is, but I have an internship.”

  “I better get one of those,” Cecelia said. “See
ms like what everybody’s doing.”

  The guy let the smoke leak from the corner of his mouth until there wasn’t any more. “I believe you. You’re harmless. You were looking for a place to chill out. You’re not dangerous, I can tell. Either that or, you know, I’m wrong.”

  The tension was already drained out of the situation. This guy didn’t really know how to be tense. He came from rich, healthy, relaxed stock. Cecelia told the guy her name. She watched him pull a baggy of trail mix from his pocket and drop it on the table. She’d thought it was going to be more pot but it was trail mix.

  “I started walking out that way today,” he said, pointing by raising his elbow. He extinguished the joint, then tucked what was left of it behind his ear. “I guess you’d say I was hiking. The problem with the desert is there’s not really a trail and you don’t know when to stop. You don’t know when it’s okay to turn back.”

  “You could go until you almost couldn’t see your house anymore. That’d be pretty far.”

  The guy took a good look at Cecelia, like it was his right. He slouched to the side in his chair in order to see her bottom half. “I started hearing coyotes,” he said. “That was the end of the hike.”

  Cecelia took a big whiff of the chlorine air. A wind swept through the screen and Cecelia made sure not to show she was cold. She didn’t want the guy to get her a blanket or a coat.

  “Where’s your internship?” she asked.

  “This place that puts out a catalog of catalogs.”

  “What do you do there?”

  “Actually, I don’t want to talk about work when I’m high.”

  “I bet you don’t do much of anything.”

  The guy nodded, like he was too adult to take Cecelia’s bait. “You ever see anyone make a citizen’s arrest? In real life, I mean. Could I citizen’s arrest you for trespassing right now or would I be the one doing something wrong by detaining you?”

  “No one’s arresting anyone.”

  “Is it even a real thing, though? A citizen’s arrest.”

  “Give me some cash,” Cecelia said.

  The guy squinted again, like when he’d been holding in the smoke.

  “How much you got in your wallet?”

  “A hold-up,” the guy said, coming around to the idea, failing to stifle a grin. “Like the Old West.”

  “They have hold-ups everywhere.” Cecelia stood and put her hand out.

  “You’re supposed to have a weapon.”

  “I don’t need one. You’re going to give me some money. It doesn’t have to be much.”

  “I think I got twenty-seven bucks.”

  “Hand it over.”

  The guy laughed to himself. “You should be careful. Not everybody thinks it’s cute to get mugged on Christmas Eve on their patio.” He went ahead and dug out his wallet. “I’ll give you twenty-five. The place I get coffee in the morning only takes cash.”

  “Tomorrow’s Christmas.”

  “I’m working Christmas. That’s how you get ahead.”

  “Weren’t you born ahead?”

  The guy flattened the money and arranged it so it all faced the same way. “Yeah, but I’m going to get more ahead, just like my dad did, and his dad.”

  Cecelia took the bills from the guy’s hand, his face expectant, like Cecelia was going to do something, like he was going to get a show for his money, some parting words. She turned crisply and walked toward her car, finding it difficult to stride normally. The guy was going to miss her when she was gone. It felt good, finally retaliating against the world a little bit. It was a step. She wrapped the money around her finger and slipped it into her pocket. She didn’t know if she wanted to hurry or if she wanted to saunter.

  SOREN’S FATHER

  Hers had been the only letter he’d responded to. Something in the way she expressed herself failed to make him anxious. She wanted things from Soren’s father, she’d admitted, but wasn’t going to trick him into giving her any of them. She was going to get them fair and square. She thought it took years to get to know a person, so what did it matter how you met? What difference did it make what caught your attention first? Soren’s father felt a sensation that was familiar to him from when his wife had come along, a feeling of being taken in hand, of giving way to a person with superior romantic expertise. He was grateful to be pursued, and even grateful to himself for allowing the pursuer to succeed.

  Soren’s father had read the letter over and over and then finally called the number at the bottom, the day after Christmas, standing out on the secret smoking landing but not smoking, and only when the woman answered the phone and greeted him did he know that her name, Gee, was pronounced like the letter G. Soren’s father normally spoke on the phone only to resolve simple dilemmas related to his lunch truck business, but Gee began asking him questions and, a surprise to himself, he knew how to answer the questions and so she asked him more questions and before he knew it he’d been on the landing forty-five minutes. Gee did not avoid the topic of Soren. She surrendered her belief that there was indeed something magical about him, but in this day and age a person’s magic was nobody’s business but his own. She mentioned she was divorced, but Soren’s father didn’t dig for details about that. She lived in Santa Fe. In her younger days, she had been head chef at a Chinese restaurant. As soon as Soren’s father had begun to feel a creeping embarrassment at how long their phone conversation was lasting, with the first stars becoming visible in the semblances of holiday dusk, Gee said they should probably get off but that she wanted to take him to dinner the next night. Soren’s father had gone back inside then, feeling that the longest Christmas of his life had finally passed. Christmas Eve had been awful, thinking of how excited Soren would’ve been at bedtime, his head full of Santa Claus. Christmas day had been grueling, listening to forced celebrations from other rooms, watching his turkey and dressing grow cold on the table. And the feeling had lingered right on into the next day, that feeling of being without happiness while others counted blessings. But at long last, with something new on the horizon, something new to be occupied with, Soren’s father felt that Christmas was done.

  So here he was, waiting under the carport at the front of the clinic for a white van. It was the time of year most people were with their families, resting up and taking stock. Soren’s father’s family was on the sixth floor and Soren’s father’s lunch truck business was suffering without his day-to-day involvement and he was about to go on a date for the first time in years because he knew he needed to. Soren’s father could see his truck over against the far fence, lording above the cars. He knew he should go start it and let it run a minute, but he wasn’t going to do that. It was the same lack of will he felt when he wanted to do pushups. He didn’t want to smell the inside of the truck, the odor of grease and dust, a bad smell that was also comforting. He didn’t want to hear the engine knock around and then settle, didn’t want to picture Soren sitting on his knees at the other end of the bench seat, his face turned toward a window full of endless faded sky.

  Soren’s father spotted the van. It was certainly white. It was one of those old vans, not a minivan. Gee was two minutes late. In his business, two minutes late was a crisis, but for most people it was the same as right on time. Soren’s father found himself short of breath when the van made the turn and rolled under the carport. He felt rooted to the cement. Gee hopped down from the driver’s seat and strode over and hugged Soren’s father. His feeling at seeing her was one of muted elation. He’d seen nothing but the sixth-floor nurses for two and a half months. Gee’s teeth were white, same as the van. She wore a loose sweater and had cool eyes.

  Gee drove them down out of the city, Soren’s father watching the clinic until it was a spot of light among many. This was the farthest away he’d been. This was farther from the clinic than his house was. The night would be cold, Soren’s father could tell, but his palms were sweating. He looked at Gee, driving with both hands locked onto the wheel like they taught you as a teenager
. There were no rear seats in her van and the space was taken with rods and couplers and sacks of bolts. Soren’s father asked about the supplies and Gee said she was helping someone set up an art gallery. Her tiny earrings were glittering in the light from the dash.

  “I meant to buy you flowers,” Soren’s father said. “I forgot.”

  “I don’t believe in buying flowers,” Gee said. “I believe in letting them grow wild and happening upon them.”

  She pulled onto a gravel lot next to a tall, restored home. She explained that the chef lived upstairs and used the ground floor as a dining room. The chef’s two daughters were the waitstaff. Aside from a potted poinsettia on the front walk, there were no holiday decorations, and this pleased Soren’s father. There were no menus either. Small glasses of beer were brought out and Soren’s father realized he hadn’t had a beer since Soren’s coma.

  “My only hope for tonight is that you can relax a little,” Gee said. “You’re the kind of father that needs to be forced to worry less, and I’m going to help with that. The first thing is, loosen your grip on that little black phone.”

  Soren’s father set the phone on the table, and then he picked it up and put it in his pocket.

  “Are you supposed to sip this or something?” he said, holding his little beer.

  Gee shrugged. “Chug it if you want.”

  Soren’s father tipped the glass back and emptied it, then flagged down one of the daughters to bring him another. The beer came out and soon after that an appetizer.

  “I should put this on the lunch truck,” Soren’s father said. “See how the guys down at the paper processing plant would like some confit.”

  “That’s a thing,” Gee said. “Trucks with gourmet food on them. They drive around the downtown office buildings. It makes the lawyers feel alive, buying a meal in cash off the back of a truck.”