A Million Heavens

by John Brandon

  SOREN’S FATHER

  He finally answered one of Gee’s calls and she told him before he could even say hello that she was only interested, at this point in her life, in getting swept up in a person, and that with Soren’s father she had been doing all the sweeping. She wasn’t looking to take care of someone. She wasn’t misery looking for company. She had given more than she’d gotten all her life, she told Soren’s father. All her life. She’d realized she’d wanted to start a restaurant mostly for him, to give him a partner and work to do and distraction and self-respect, and so she’d scrapped the plan. The restaurant was off. She was going to work on her memoir full time, something selfish, something for her.

  Soren’s father had a perverse impulse to beg her not to leave him, to say he wanted to join in on the restaurant even, but he was able to swallow it. She had never been angry with him before.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be. Just be grateful. Be grateful for the time you had with me.”

  “I’m that too.”

  Gee exhaled into the phone. “This was the last time I was going to try calling you. I’m driving to Phoenix to see my son. Bags are packed.”

  “You spoke to him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Drive into his six-month-old neighborhood in my twenty-year-old van and knock on the front door of his mini-mansion. That’s what.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Soren’s father said. “I wish you luck.”

  “I can feel that it’s time,” said Gee.

  Soren’s father was grateful to know Gee, but he was also grateful to her for sharing her intentions about seeing her son. It was good news that felt like good news. Gee could’ve said her little piece about breaking up with him and then hung up the phone. Soren’s father felt a burning in his sinuses and realized it was the beginning of tears. He took a greedy breath to hold them back.

  “There’s going to be a reunion,” Gee said. “And that occasion will be the final triumphant chapter of my memoir.”

  “I’ll read it when it comes out.”

  “And it will come out,” Gee said. “I’ve done harder things in my life than publish a damn book.”

  “Yeah, you tried to be my girlfriend.”

  “I was trying to help myself at first. I thought I needed to get close to Soren or close to you. I thought I needed something, but I don’t. I’ve fixed myself dozens of times.”

  “I’ve never fixed myself once.”

  “You don’t need a whole lot of fixing. You don’t need a complete overhaul. You’re just a little lost.”

  Soren’s father looked over at his son. Whenever he was upset, it seemed to him that Soren was breathing slower, but it was only Soren’s father’s impatience.

  “Let’s say I’m lost,” he said. “What am I supposed to look for?”

  “You don’t find anything,” Gee told him. “You just be brave. You make that a policy.”

  Soren’s father had never thought about bravery. He didn’t know what his policy was.

  “We’re friends,” Gee said, “and I’m going to tell you one thing before I get off the phone.”

  “Okay,” said Soren’s father.

  “Don’t use your son as an excuse.”

  Gee left the line quiet a few moments. Then she said she had a hell of a drive in front of her.

  THE PIANO TEACHER

  She had never thought of herself as possessing nerve. She’d thought of herself as a person with endurance, a person who, if she entertained fantasies, did so in the service of her everyday stamina, but here she was pulling past the clinic, past the vigil, already in progress, and hitting the gas rather than the brake. There were only two of them left now in the parking lot, two women, two vigilers. The piano teacher didn’t feel she’d made a decision. She felt as though something had been sprung on her. She hadn’t packed a stitch of clothing or even a toothbrush, but here she was cruising right past the final shadowy pair. Here she was rolling by the Mexican market with the happy vegetables painted on the walls. Here she was getting on the empty interstate and bringing her car up to a speed it hadn’t achieved in ages.

  She would leave her car in the garage and her daughter would have to pick it up. The piano teacher imagined the phone call and could already savor her daughter’s outrage. She’d tell her daughter she was staying a week and wouldn’t tell her daughter where, and then after a week she’d tell her she was staying another week. She’d have to return eventually. It wasn’t a permanent escape. She would run out of money, for one thing, and that’s what her daughter would be most worried about. Maybe the piano teacher would spend every penny she had and force her daughter to pay to fly her home.

  She exited the interstate. The road that led into the airport was lined with towering terra cotta pots and the pots were imprinted with symbols and drawings that could have meant anything. Wherever the piano teacher ended up, she was going to buy a crappy piano that was all hers and play it just for herself, and she was going to keep it until the day she died. Her daughter would have to ship the thing home and the shipping would cost more than the instrument. The worst piano she could find. Maybe with a family of mice in it. The piano teacher felt a physical craving for her fingers against keys, felt a need to put organized noise into a cranny of the world. The piano teacher would soon be near an ocean, in a place with vines and moss and high-hung fronds, a place that appeared on the verge of swallowing itself. The piano teacher was going to listen to the noise of honest blue waves spending themselves until she couldn’t remember the noise of this broken desert wind that, for once, seemed to be at her back.

  CECELIA

  During the vigils, she never heard songs. She heard only what was meant to be heard, the noise of the sand and pebbles and gravel and whatever else was slight enough to be brushed about by the wind. The gusts came from one direction and then another, as if the wind meant to sweep the world’s scattered ingredients into a pile.

  Only one other still attended, the elegant woman whose boyfriend had quit. The woman was different than usual. She was focused. She was looking up at Soren’s window but Cecelia could tell she wasn’t thinking of Soren. Cecelia had stubbornness, but this woman had been surviving ordeals long before Cecelia had, and Cecelia had no idea if she could outlast her. At least Cecelia knew who her most worthy opponent was. Cecelia knew who she had to beat. She had authority over whether she won or lost. Nothing could stop her from showing up here except herself, and she wasn’t going to stop. This chick with her pricey coat and soft makeup was in for a struggle.

  Cecelia hadn’t received a song for many days now, the longest she’d gone without receiving one. She wondered if she’d had control the whole time, without knowing it. She’d made a definite wish not to receive any more, and now she wasn’t. She was glad she’d received them, and glad now for a break from them. Maybe Reggie had simply run out. Maybe he was doing something else. He might be in a good place. He might have a view of a distant bay full of burnished boats, none of the boats having a thing to do with him, all owned by strangers and visitors. In this place, every person has a strong heart and a share of important work to do. In this place, the future placidly becomes the past. In this place, each person feels the dignified solitude of one engaged in a lost cause. And there were realms sweeter than this, realms that would suit Reggie precisely, that Cecelia could never envision. A million heavens waited, a million people scuffling around the desert hoping not to see their heaven too soon, failing to believe in the afterlives that awaited them and would have them in time, whether they kicked and screamed or closed their eyes and sighed, whether they tried to do good and could not or tried to do bad and succeeded.

  Cecelia thought of Soren. She pictured him as she always did, with fawn-colored hair, slender and wan, but she knew he could look any way. He could be husky, with a black crew cut. He was losing the happiest part of his life on earth, the part before you noticed what w
as missing, before you thought in terms of fixing anything. Soren himself needed to be fixed. He might have authored a miracle, but now he was awaiting one.

  After the vigil Cecelia headed to campus. She was drowsy so she stopped off and bought a huge iced coffee. She took a sip and balked at the taste—cloying and scorched—then drove the rest of the way to campus with the unwieldy beverage sweating onto her jeans.

  The university was deserted except for a homeless guy sleeping on a bench and a few nibbling critters. The dorms, where people might be up and about, were on the other end of campus. Cecelia approached the rehearsal spaces. She’d turned her keys in when she’d gotten fired, but Marie had let her copy the music building master. Cecelia had the key and she had a pocketknife her mother had given her as a child, a pink Swiss Army knife, and she was still lugging the iced coffee, which was wetting down her gloved hands.

  She went in and eased the door closed, set her drink down on the floor. The place smelled like insulation. Cecelia looked around the room for cameras, scanning the high corners. She knew there weren’t any cameras. She stripped off her jacket but kept on the gloves.

  She walked over to Thus Poke Sarah’s Thruster’s guitars, three of them, one a bass, all leaning at the same angle against a step, and one by one she held them by their necks, business end on the ground, and stomped on them until they cracked in half. The guitars made a low crunch when they gave way, like a bone breaking, and then they hung in one piece by their strings. Cecelia dropped them all in a heap. She went over and did what she could to Nate’s drums with the pocketknife, slicing up the taut hides. She got her iced coffee and poured it down into the biggest amp. The liquid drained without hurry down through the machinery and onto the floor. Cecelia had felt her blood humming when she’d come into the room, but now it was stagnant. She didn’t feel triumphant or even tough. When she’d burned the barn she’d told herself she had no fear, but now she really didn’t. Fear was what made anything worthwhile. Without fear, she was going through motions. She had the sensation that she’d been driving for days without stopping and had forgotten her destination. She felt like a madwoman, but it didn’t feel good.

  She moved on to the keyboard, her blood tepid. Cecelia stared at the thing. Her eyes had adjusted to the dim light. Cecelia saw the kid’s name on the keyboard, in silver marker: T. ANDERTON. She sat down at the instrument. She flipped the power switch and red lights appeared all over the control panel. You could set it to sound like an organ if you wanted or like a synthesizer or like a regular piano. It had a bunch of dials and pedals. Cecelia didn’t touch any of them.

  She heard footsteps approaching the door outside and it didn’t take her long to resign herself to being caught. She was engaging in a criminal act, damaging property, and in a moment someone would catch her. All there was to do was wait and see who that someone was. It could be a security guard who’d be thrilled to finally bust someone for a serious crime. It could be that homeless guy from the bench looking for a warmer spot to bed down.

  Cecelia heard the doorknob turning and then a moment later she and a guy about her age were looking at each other with identical frankness. The guy had on a tight-zippered sweatshirt with a hood and long plaid shorts. He didn’t pull his hood off. Cecelia recognized him from when she’d spied on Nate’s band. He released the knob and the door shut. He was the keyboard player. He looked at the carnage of the guitars and then at the drum set, then he squinted and said Cecelia’s name.

  “How do you know me?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” the guy said. “I do, though.”

  He looked at her coat on the floor, not far from where he stood.

  “Are you up late or early?” Cecelia asked him.

  “I’m always up at this time.”

  The guy looked around again and shook his head, seeming both disappointed and impressed, then he walked over and sat on the bench next to Cecelia. He seemed like a person with a reasonable, fair burden. He understood that things got complicated. He tapped one of Cecelia’s gloved hands with his finger.

  “Fashion or fingerprints?”

  “At first they were to keep my hands warm,” Cecelia said.

  “You don’t seem drunk.”

  Cecelia shook her head.

  “You’re, like, a badass.”

  Cecelia could smell the guy. He didn’t smell bad.

  “Barry and Sam are going to lose their shit,” he said. “Those dudes pride themselves on their bad tempers.”

  “You’re not mad?”

  “The only thing that makes me mad is when people don’t keep secrets, but I can forgive that too.”

  “Nate will replace all this stuff,” Cecelia said. “Probably with better stuff.”

  The guy yawned, then he said, “He’s kind of a dickwad, I know. I’m not going to tell on you.” He pulled his hands out of his sweatshirt, both of them, like he was going to do something with them. “They don’t know I write songs,” he said. “I come early, when everybody’s asleep. I write pop songs. I write songs they can play at the beginning of sitcoms. I’m not a delicate genius.”

  Cecelia thought of when that kid had caught her on his screened patio. She could remember feeling confused, about everything. Now she didn’t feel confused. Not that she’d figured anything out, but at least she was in charted territory.

  The guy told Cecelia he was only in a band to work on his stage presence, to get used to collaborating, access to instruments, rehearsal space. In time he was going to move to a music town like Austin or Seattle.

  “You’re a slimeball,” Cecelia said.

  The guy winked.

  He was more savvy than Cecelia and Reggie had been. He was using Nate.

  “What does the T stand for?” Cecelia asked him. “T. Anderton.”

  “Terry Anderton is who I bought this from. His parents got it for him, but he wants to be a veterinarian.”

  “Then what’s your name?”

  “It’s going to be Nevers. No one knows that. I’m keeping the name secret as long as possible. don’t tell anyone, okay? I don’t like when people tell secrets. I can forgive it, but I really don’t like it.”

  Cecelia reached behind the guy and with two fingers tugged his hood off. He looked upward with only his eyeballs. His hair was red and very short. His red hair and his tan skin clashed.

  Cecelia grasped his head with two hands and kissed him. He wasn’t ready. He put his hand out to brace himself and sounded a patch of keys. The noise was wrong but interesting, like his hair against his skin. The notes didn’t linger; the quiet they left wasn’t the same as the quiet from before. The guy, Nevers, tried to catch up, to get as much of Cecelia as she was getting of him. He shifted and pressed himself against her. She felt his fingertips descend the skin of her hip and she pulled out of the kiss. She rose off the bench and snatched her coat off the floor by its sleeve. She wanted to say something before she left, something reassuring. She wanted to tell Nevers that one day soon, when her mind was her own again, she would let him take her out to dinner and then she would sleep with him and then in the morning he might try to play her one of his pop songs.

  THE WOLF

  The songs had ceased.

  There had been the songs, and when there weren’t songs there had been the pets to calm him. The wolf had still not taken a chicken, and that meant something to him. It had become a vow. Now the songs had ceased. The pets would no longer be enough. The wolf could feel that. His hope was dead. The wolf had abandoned the gully near the house with the chickens and had taken up residence at the ugliest spot in the desert, a place where the humans had once produced drugs. There were a couple trailer homes rotting into the earth, stinking of science. The old bristlecones had perished. They’d survived a thousand years in the most discouraging soil in the world but had not survived human fun. Drugs were not merely fun for the humans, the wolf knew. It wasn’t that simple. Every creature in the world was laboring to escape the perils of human intelligence, and often
that went double for the humans themselves.

  The wolf’s foreleg had healed and his teeth were stained, but the pets would no longer be enough. Not without any songs. The wolf understood right and wrong now but didn’t prefer one to the other. He was living out season after season, endless unconvincing winters.

  The humans were on the lookout for the wolf but none had spotted him. All they had were their eyes. There were humans who were paid to look for things and they had never found this place. It hadn’t always been the ugliest spot in the desert. There’d been an explosion and a scattered buffet for the buzzards. If there were a human paid to look for the wolf, he would never imagine the wolf so close as the gully and he would never find this bankrupt place, would never smell the chemical-soaked carcasses of the trailer homes.

  The chickens may have been the only pets left unguarded in the whole of the basin now. The songs had been protecting the wolf and the wolf had been protecting the chickens. The songs had been made out of something pure, something like instinct. The pets, they gave nothing but momentary glee and permanent knowledge, and knowledge was the worst thing for the wolf. And now he needed the knowledge. He didn’t want it but he needed it. Like the humans with their drugs. It was bad for him, knowledge, and he could never give it back once he had it, not a useless shred.

  MAYOR CABRERA

  Finally Cecelia had come home at a reasonable hour. Mayor Cabrera parked around the corner. He’d already gotten a copy of the key from his sister-in-law, and she’d called him and said Cecelia was fast asleep. Mayor Cabrera opened the passenger door and then reached through and unlocked the driver door and went back around and lowered himself into the Scirrocco. He puttered down the block a ways before opening it up. He had a guy on the outskirts of Santa Fe who’d agreed to work at night, a German compact specialist. He’d told Mayor Cabrera there wasn’t anything he couldn’t fix before morning, except his marriage.