John Brandon - A Million Heavens

“What’s so interesting out there?”

“Nothing,” said the man. “I don’t like looking at poachers, is all. It makes me sick to look at a poacher.”

The gas station owner performed a sigh. “Poacher” seemed a trumped-up term for somebody who caused an occasional trespassing elk to become dinner. Obviously this ranger guy thought he was something special. That was why he was poking around in the middle of the night instead of during business hours. He thought he was some desert hero. The gas station owner wasn’t going to ask about the late hour. He was going to pretend it was noon instead of midnight. “Look, I’m pretty busy with my whisky. How does this go? How long do you keep staring into space and making accusations? I could get insulted and demand a duel, if that’ll speed things along.”

“You’re not permitted to mention fighting a duel to me,” said the man. “That’s threatening a state employee.”

“Your checks say State of New Mexico on them and you’re proud of that?”

“You got a nice setup here.” The man took his hat off his hair then squeezed it back on. “Real nice.”

“So I’ve been told.”

The man cleared his throat in a way he believed was meaningful and walked off. After he turned on his heel the gas station owner only heard his first few steps. He wanted to call after the man, but kept his peace. After a minute, the car could be heard. It ran smooth — a well-kept government car. The gas station owner sat back down, not sure he wanted more whisky. Maybe he was done for the night. Maybe it was time to head home. That ranger or whatever he was probably wouldn’t be back. He’d wanted to let the gas station owner know he was aware, wanted to scare the gas station owner. And maybe it had worked. The gas station owner didn’t hate the idea of getting mixed up with the law, but he also didn’t love elk meat. He’d taken it because it was there. That’s how he lived his life — accepting what came along — and now they were hassling him even for that. He was tucked away, living a nothing existence, and the world still couldn’t leave him be. The desert wasn’t aiding or abetting him. It was goading him. The desert couldn’t wait to give him up, even to some uniform from the city. There was no man the gas station owner feared, but the desert could put a shudder into him. That true loneliness, that lack of ill will. The desert had no respect for him. It wasn’t goading him. It was going to stay quiet and unfathomable. It was a distracted murderer, this land they all lived on. The gas station owner was drunk, but these were the right thoughts.

He’d let the mail build and now was reading it all in one afternoon. Mostly crazy people — a woman claiming to have conceived her daughter immaculately, a young man from Japan who’d written a song for Soren. Several were professional requests. A lady at a college in California was doing a study. A guy in Boston was working on a book about extraordinary children and wanted to focus a chapter on Soren before the coma, on his everyday habits and personality. Of course, support groups had sent literature. And someone had sent a prayer shawl, though Soren’s father didn’t know what religion it was for or how it worked.

Women told their winding stories, some calling Soren’s father an inspiration and deeming Soren an angel. These women considered themselves mystics, considered themselves misunderstood. And then there was one that seemed different, succinct and confident, from a woman in Santa Fe who thought Soren’s father might need a break from the clinic and wanted to keep him company when he took that break. This woman’s way of wording things was neither rash nor sappy and she didn’t say much about herself except that she would be around when Soren’s father decided he wanted a comrade for a couple hours — someone with whom, she said, to duck away from the gusts and flash floods of life. I’m not going to claim to be normal , she’d written, but I will report that this is the first letter I’ve written in years .

Soren’s father slipped this woman’s letter under a sweater that was folded on the dresser, and the rest of the mail he carried down the hall and dumped into the trash chute. He walked down to the nurses’ station and told the nurse behind the desk, a plump gal with perfect fingernails, that he didn’t want any more of his mail, that he wanted it thrown out. The nurse drifted back from the counter in her rolling chair and slipped a blank sheet out of a printer. She told Soren’s father to write his request out and sign it, and he did so, his fingers feeling untrained, childlike.

“I’m not sure if we’re allowed to dispose of mail,” the nurse said. “I hope we are. For some reason, that sounds like fun.”

The wind had done something to the TV antenna, leaving Cecelia and her mother with one fuzzy network and two religious stations. Cecelia wasn’t about to mess with it. Her mother was the one who sat in front of the set all day, and apparently losing the bulk of her viewing options wasn’t going to change that. Cecelia wanted her to show some interest in getting the antenna fixed — even calling Cecelia’s uncle, even getting out the phonebook and flipping to TV repair, even just getting upset about it. Her mother almost never watched the network. She watched the church channels. On one people were always giving testimonials and asking the viewers to sow a financial seed, and on the other scores of black folks in robes sang all day, their arms outstretched to the heavens. Cecelia’s mother had received brochures from these channels. She’d mailed off for them. The brochures sat in a tall pocket on the side of the wheelchair. They were gaily colored, on heavy paper. Once you were on the mailing list they had their hooks in you.

Cecelia went in to her bedroom and closed the door. The semester was winding up and she was not excited about the prospect of having nowhere to go for three weeks, of having to manufacture excuses to leave the house. She could say she had band practice, since her mother still had no idea that her band was gone. She could say a lot of things. It wasn’t like her mother was going to give her the third degree. So long as she had her stupid chickens and her unnecessary wheelchair, Cecelia’s mother wasn’t going to do much detective work concerning her daughter.

Cecelia cleared some things off her floor, then began taking down each one of her postcards, a steady line of them that spanned all four walls at about head height. There were over a hundred. Cubist prints. Album covers. A boxing ape. An old lady with an Uzi. The postcards had been meant to inspire Cecelia’s songwriting. She didn’t need them anymore. She was through creating. She was doing nothing, a tourist in the war of her life. She let the postcards fall, one by one, into a garbage bag, dropping the pins into an old sneaker and then into its mate. The postcards felt like nothing in the garbage bag. They had taken her years to compile and now they were nothing. Cecelia tried not to look at them, tried not to have parting moments with any of them. All the postcards down, her room larger and brighter now, she rested the sneakers, stuffed with pins, inside the garbage bag. She’d won some ribbons when she was young, for debating. She couldn’t think of anything less important to her now than debating. She had a couple soccer trophies, though she’d never been any good. There were other items, certificates and plaques. Cecelia took it all in the one bulging bag out to her car and drove up the old Turquoise Trail, the bag next to her in the passenger seat, rippling in the wind.

She got out and toted the bag through the cacti. There wasn’t going to be a ravine or a cliff. In the desert you couldn’t get rid of anything. The desert held what you gave it until people from a different era came poking around. Everything was a fossil from the first day it existed. Cecelia took the sneakers out and set them aside, then rested the bag under an embittered evergreen shrub. She told her fingers to let the bag go and they obeyed. She loosened the laces of the sneakers, dug a little hole with her foot, and poured the thumbtacks in, covering them back over and tamping like they were seeds.