by John Brandon
When Amber arrived, she led Arn to a white back porch and had a conversation with him. They didn’t talk about the past. Amber could get earnest in a snap and she could throw her head back and laugh and laugh. She wore a sleeveless shirt and her shoulders flexed every time she picked something up. Her shoulders looked stronger than Arn’s. Everything Arn said to her was right. Amber seemed to want Arn to have a secret, and he did. He had a whopper.
They stopped by the hotel in Amber’s minivan to pick up Arn’s bag and Amber drove him to a huge complex that was to some degree a church but was other things too. Arn was installed in a room in the dormitory. He was fed pizza. He looked out at the parking lot, saw a tow truck patrolling. The whole experience felt cultish, but this was a small worry. Arn wasn’t susceptible to brainwashing, and felt very favorably about being given pizza and a free place to stay.
The church grounds were a beehive of activity, but for the first few days Arn only heard from Amber, like she didn’t want anyone to spook him. She hadn’t asked him for his money yet, hadn’t asked for free labor. Arn was not yet a dupe or a slave. Amber began telling Arn about herself, Arn eating pizza and Amber picking at a salad. She’d had a muscle condition that had caused her, as a child, to walk on her toes. At age twelve she’d had surgery to fix the condition and had needed a bunch of physical therapy. She’d grown close with her therapist and had fallen in love with working out. Exercise had changed her life, had given her an identity. Through her twenties, she’d been a competitive fitness professional. She had a closet full of trophies, she told Arn. She’d been asked to appear on the show American Gladiators. She had been paid to show up at the grand openings of gyms and vitamin shops. Arn expected a tragic end to this phase of Amber’s life, steroids or injuries, something that had pushed her toward religion, but she didn’t share anything tragic. She wasn’t a zealot. This church job was just a gig for her. Running the branch of this organization that helped troubled youths was her career, like somebody else was a hairdresser or a pharmacist.
She checked on Arn a few times a day, and she did give him papers to fill out, but nothing that seemed official. The papers asked what Arn liked to eat and what music he preferred and what kind of work he excelled at. Arn told Amber his favorite sport was basketball and she showed him the church’s indoor court. It was like a high school’s—glass backboards, hardwood floors, bleachers. Arn would shoot baskets for hours, then he’d go back to his room and eat pizza. He felt like a beloved dog, fed and allowed to play and sleep as he wished. Amber was his master and he was supposed to wag his tail when she showed up. She wasn’t white, Amber, but she talked like a white person. She wore very straight-legged pants. Raised veins ran down her forearms. She had pretty fingernails and she smelled like crisp bed sheets. Whenever Arn smelled her, he felt the feeling he’d felt during his first conversation with her, out on that splendid latticed porch. Arn noticed that Amber was a big hugger but she never hugged him. She never rested a hand on his arm, never patted him on the back.
In the time it took for summer to arrive, Arn constructed a new life at the New Garden complex. There were lots of meetings about fostering a full existence and having full relationships and doing other things to the fullest, but Arn could skip the meetings whenever he felt like it. He thought maybe he ought to go to some meetings about addiction—drug, alcohol, gambling—to make it seem like he was damaged and needed more help and should not soon be discharged from the dormitory, but he couldn’t bring himself to do this. He felt like he’d be making fun of the people who really needed the meetings. Instead he took jogs around the parking lot, getting a tan, something he’d never had. Other people were installed in the dorms, but they didn’t last. There were even some guys about Arn’s age, but he avoided them. He only shot baskets when the gym was empty. There was a certain courtyard where people smoked, and Arn considered taking another shot at cigarettes, to pass time, but he didn’t want to have to become friends with all the smokers. On Tuesday and Thursday nights movies were shown, mostly comedies. Arn was set up with a job at a warehouse that supplied restaurants. He only worked four days a week, six hours at a time. He did a lot of sweeping, a lot of opening big cases of canned foods to check if the cans were dented. The manager wanted certain cans to be dented because he didn’t like that particular vendor and wanted a reason to return their shipments, so sometimes Arn dented these cans himself. He kept waiting for New Garden to ask more of him, but they never did. Sometimes Arn didn’t see Amber for days, but when he did she would stare at him and ask where in the world he got his smile from.
There was one weekly meeting Arn never missed. It was a Spanish class taught by two girls who were freshman at the little college in town. They’d grown up going to New Garden and now they attended the little college, which was also religious, and they taught Spanish class Saturday mornings in the common room of Arn’s dorm building. One was blond and one brunette. They had wavy hair and plump mouths and they managed to construct outfits that were not slutty but still somehow revealed their midriffs. They never tired of flirting with Arn. Amber would not come right out and forbid Arn from going to the Spanish class, but she made no secret of disliking the girls. She disliked them because they were rich and because they were shallow and because they’d always treated her like the help—and, Arn surmised, because they were young. They didn’t have to work out or eat right or be nice to people.
“Don’t you love his little belly?” one would say, loud enough for Arn to hear. “He’s like a movie star when they go on vacation and let themselves go.”
“I wish I could rest my head on his belly.”
“I wish I could kiss it.”
“It’s from all the pizza he eats. That’s what the belly’s from. We just have to keep the pizza coming.”
Since the girls were churchy and were always in a church when Arn saw them, there was little tension to the flirting. It was sort of hypothetical. These girls were pledged to be virgins when they married and they weren’t going to break the pledge nor were they going to marry Arn. They could say whatever they wanted.
“How would you tell me I’m sexy in Spanish?” one of them would say to Arn after class. “It’s a pop quiz. How would you tell me you wanted my body?”
Arn felt guilty going to the Spanish classes, knowing he was being disloyal to Amber. The flirting didn’t feel free.
“Wouldn’t you like to buzz his hair?” one of them would say. She’d walk over and run her fingers over Arn’s head.
One day, one of them rubbed lotion on the other’s legs. One day, they traded bras. One had worn a black bra when she should’ve worn a white one, so the other agreed to trade. They told Arn to close his eyes.
“We’re the exact same size,” one said.
“Yeah,” said the other. “In a dark room you could never tell us apart by our tits.”
It didn’t take long before Amber began trying to get the Spanish class cancelled. She did not have the power to do this because the girls’ parents were prominent supporters of the church, but she seemed to want to send a message, to let the girls know she wasn’t going to let them have Arn without a fight. Amber considered the girls a bad element for reasons that had nothing to do with their flirting. She considered them spiritually bankrupt and hypocritical and spoiled. And Arn knew she was right, but he couldn’t help himself. The girls who taught the Spanish class were the type of girls who, a couple short months ago, in Washington, wouldn’t have given Arn a second look. The girls in Washington knew Arn as the foster kid who’d gotten pantsed in the lunchroom, who worked at the car wash and didn’t play any sports. To these Oregon girls, Arn was a tan mystery.
When Amber couldn’t get the class cancelled, she went with the opposite tack. She advertised the class. She tried to get enough people to attend that the girls actually had to teach, had to make a lesson plan and answer questions and grade stacks of vocab quizzes. It wasn’t ineffective; it annoyed the girls and interrupted their flirting. They could
still hold Arn after class, but other people wanted to stay too; other people wanted special instruction. The girls’ retaliation was to institute a final exam. The exam would be administered to each student individually, at the girls’ dorm over at the college. The girls could’ve asked Arn out to a meal or something any time, but they wanted to beat Amber fairly, to stay within the constraints of the contest. They wanted Amber to know she’d had every chance to win.
The last Saturday the class was to be held, the last Saturday before the final exam, on a morning determined to make itself into the summer day it was meant to be, Arn received a curt phone call from Amber telling him he had to come to her house and trim her hedges. She’d let them get too high and now she couldn’t reach the tops. Arn stood in the common room where the phone was kept. He’d known it was a matter of time before he’d be mowing and raking people’s lawns. Amber was doing this because she was angry with him. She wanted him to miss the Spanish class and do yard work instead.
“What if I can’t make it?” Arn said.
“You can make it.”
“Can I do the hedges later, like this afternoon?”
“I’m not a person who threatens or bribes,” Amber said. “I’m a person who gives of herself to a staggering degree, and then when I need help with something once in a while I like to receive that help without a lot of back-and-forth.”
“I see,” said Arn. And he did. He was going to trim hedges instead of being teased by hot young girls. He was going to hold a pair of sheers above his head, sun in his eyes, clippings cascading onto his shoulders. He could handle it. Worse things had happened to people in the history of the world.
Arn walked to Amber’s house. He followed the directions she’d given him over the phone. It was seven blocks. There was her minivan. Approaching the house, Arn saw the hedge and let out a chuckle. It was about twenty feet high. The job would’ve required a bucket truck.
Arn knocked on the door and then stepped back off the porch, taking another look at the hedge, amused. He knocked again. The deadbolt turned over and the door drew open and Amber was standing there in a pose both forward and shy, wearing a complicated nightgown and platform shoes. Arn was overwhelmed. His wish to step inside the house and his wish to flee felt exactly equal. He saw so much of Amber. He’d never seen her hair pinned up. Her calves bulged in the high shoes. She didn’t smell like clean sheets. She smelled like something else. Snaps and buttons were everywhere. She was a woman, full-fledged.
“You’ll skip the final,” she said.
Arn failed to disagree.
“You’ll skip the final and you won’t attend any future classes those girls teach or meetings they run or anything they’re involved in.”
Arn held onto the doorframe. “What will I tell them?”
“You don’t have to tell them a thing.”
Amber held herself against the half-open door, pushing her front against it.
“The only person you have to answer to is me,” she said.
Arn felt awakened. The Spanish class girls were nothing compared to Amber. They were pretty, that was all. Arn was afraid he was supposed to say something now. He watched, entranced, as Amber took a step back and grinned. Arn could tell she was savoring the fact that he had no idea what he was supposed to do, that his head was spinning. She pulled him inside firmly and guided him to the bedroom. One by one, she tossed about a dozen pillows from the bed onto the floor. She asked Arn to take his shirt off and he felt he would’ve done anything for her. He would’ve robbed a bank without a moment’s hesitation.
The bed all cleared off, Amber ignored it. She walked over to Arn and pulled him down onto his back on a lavender rug and climbed atop him. She knew what she was doing. No sooner than it dawned upon Arn that he was having sex, he began to realize that it wasn’t going to last very long. He had to remind himself that he was allowed to keep his eyes open, that he was allowed to watch this amazing spectacle.
REGGIE
There was a breeze. There were no windows but there was a breeze from somewhere. It carried blatant scents such as chlorine, such as the smell of a heater kicking on for the first time since last winter, but also scents Reggie had to guess at—dollar bills, dead batteries. The breeze was cool and the floor had become comfortably warm, like the floor of the bathroom in that fancy hotel Reggie had stayed in on a trip to Colorado with a friend’s family. Reggie’s living area was spacious, a hall again, but he made a decision not to recommence his laps. The bar and the library had returned, and Reggie prepared himself Irish whiskeys and perched on a stool like a customer. He’d never been a real customer at a bar because he’d died before turning twenty-one and had never felt compelled to procure a fake ID. He sat across from the bottles and sometimes he looked past them into the mirror and his face didn’t show him a barren, lethargic street anymore—maybe, instead, a beat-up stretch of interstate, a stretch of interstate that didn’t go anywhere exciting but that the locals appreciated. Reggie had to use more ice in his whiskey than his father did, and couldn’t take down an honest gulp until some of the ice had melted. He never carried his drink to another part of the hall and never left a drink unfinished. He sat in the red chair in the library and committed to a novel, a five-hundred-pager by an Italian in which all the characters realized they were characters, understood they were mere artifice, and began hopping trains in every direction to confuse the author. The billowing exhaust from the trains was described in a fancy way and from what Reggie could tell looked exactly like the sluggishly circulating smoke huffs that hung above the main hall. Reggie’s mat did not return. Instead, a hammock. Reggie had never been in a hammock before, and it was almost too comfortable. The breeze was stiff enough to rock it. Reggie didn’t bring books to the hammock. He drank in the bar and read in the library and rested in the hammock.
Reggie’s next song was ready. He started by messing around on the harmonica—warming up, putting some cracks in the quiet—but soon it was time to earnestly compose so he shucked his shirt and picked up the guitar. He had no idea how many songs were in him. Reggie cracked his fingers and began playing. He knew what was coming but it sounded different hearing it on the air than it sounded in his brain, as if the songs were made of an element that enlivened upon contact with oxygen. He was enjoying writing songs again, and would’ve been doing it whether or not he was rewarded. He hadn’t asked for any of the luxuries the afterlife was showering on him. His inclination was to feel bribed, kept, but these were concepts from the world of the living. Of course he was kept. Reggie’s earlier refusal to read a book or drink a cocktail had made no difference, and his acceptance of the afterlife’s hospitality made no difference. It wasn’t a bribe. Reggie was giving the songs away. Nothing he received meant anything, only what he gave.
CECELIA
On her way to the agriculture building for a repair call, walking out around the Natural History museum and then past an acre or so of pepper plants, the next song arrived. Cecelia had been taking her time getting to the building, knowing she was going to go all the way over there and climb stairs and locate the classroom and interrupt the class all for no reason, because there was no way she was going to be able to help—she never could—and she heard it, another song. It seemed to grow out of the wind and quickly became louder than the wind. She smelled the peppers and heard the notes. This song was running the same course as the last, arranging itself, getting organized, but this one was coming together much faster. There was no need for Cecelia to hum. She was already getting the gist of the melody, and could already tell it was unfamiliar. Another song. Cecelia felt the same apprehension, the same spark of joy. Something impossible was happening. Cecelia racked her brain. Maybe Reggie had played the songs while she was asleep sometime and her subconscious had kept them buried until now. But Cecelia had never slept around Reggie. Not once. Maybe what was happening was akin to when mothers lifted pickup trucks off their children. Cecelia missed Reggie so badly she was having an adrenaline rush of
the spirit, doing the extraordinary. Maybe the songs weren’t being given to her, maybe she was taking them. She felt sweetly defeated. She was living proof that nobody knew anything.
Inside the building, she found 209 and knocked on the open door. The professor was wearing dress shoes and ratty jeans and looked familiar to Cecelia. He looked more familiar than someone would from seeing them around campus, but she couldn’t place him. He had his phone hooked up to the A/V cabinet. His images were appearing on the computer screen but nothing was coming through the projector. Cecelia nodded at him confidently, hearing parts of what he was saying but mostly hearing the song, looking at the professor’s phone but also looking out at the waiting students, who didn’t seem to be rooting for or against Cecelia.
She touched a couple dials under the cabinet, staying down there for what seemed like long enough. When she stood, she said, “The projector isn’t responding at all. That’s not a positive sign.”
The professor didn’t seem disappointed. He thought it might be the phone’s fault. He seemed resigned to malfunction in general. Suddenly Cecelia remembered why he looked familiar. He’d come to the vigils for a few weeks, back at the start of them. That was it. There’d been one night in particular that he’d sat close by her. He’d dropped out. He’d dropped out like all the rest would eventually. At the most recent vigil, two days before, there’d been only a dozen people. The high-strung painter was still sticking it out, but it was only a matter of time for him. The haughty guy with all the pins on his coat was unreadable, a threat. The guy who always hid behind sunglasses even though it was night out and was always playing with a pen—Cecelia hoped he’d be the next to go. There were the middle-aged fat women with their reassuring expressions who seemed to believe that everything wrong with the world wasn’t really wrong, that it was all part of some convoluted grace. There was the pretty girl in her thirties and her young boyfriend. Who knew what they were doing? They were trying to prove something to each other or using the vigils as part of their dating or something. The woman seemed rich, from her car and her clothes. Cecelia didn’t know why someone with a cute boyfriend and a new car would spend her time in a parking lot. None of the other vigilers had as much right to vigil as Cecelia had. They would all fall away, just like the redheaded hippie woman with the tacky earrings and the weightlifter dude.