John Brandon - A Million Heavens

“If you learned to write songs from Reggie, wouldn’t your songs naturally sound something like his?” Marie asked.

The pizza guy broke in. “Doesn’t work that way. If you can’t write a certain kind of song, you can’t write a certain kind of song.”

“That doesn’t sound true.” Marie shifted her smooth, soft weight on Cecelia’s leg.

“I can tell it’s his song,” Cecelia said. “Like the way you could pick a relative out of a crowd, even if you’d never met them.”

“That doesn’t sound true, either.”

“Believe her,” said the pizza kid.

Marie scoffed kindly. “I say she’s not giving herself credit. She wrote a song and for some reason she’s not taking the credit. As a rule, songs don’t get telepathically transmitted. They get written.”

Cecelia shook her head.

“Maybe that’s how geniuses work,” Marie continued. “The songs appear in dreams. Maybe you’re a genius and you didn’t know it until today.”

“I wish,” said Cecelia. “I’m many things, but I’m no genius.”

“What’s the first line?” Marie asked. She lit a cigarette. Cecelia had never seen her smoke before.

“The curbs in the suburbs all rhyme with each other.”

“Okay,” said the pizza guy. “What’s the second line?”

“That’s why you kick them like you kicked your little brother.”

Finally, at sunrise, Cecelia and Marie arrived back at the high-rise with all the balconies. Cecelia got on the road headed for Lofte and fought to stay awake. This was going to be the first time since she’d started college that she would blow off an entire day. She hadn’t missed an hour of work when Reggie died. Today she was going to miss work entirely and the same with all her classes. She drove under a hot air balloon and then could not relocate it in her mirrors. It seemed to climb to a point directly above her whining Scirrocco and vanish.

At home, Cecelia snuck inside and went to her bedroom. She could hear the TV in the living room. It was the black gospel singers, their voices like revelers heard from across a lake. “Tears for all woes,” they sang. “A heart for every plea.” She could hear the gospel singers and she could hear Reggie’s song. Cecelia wondered if her mother knew she was home, wondered if her mother was out of bed. She wondered if her mother had the wherewithal to worry about her. She hadn’t told her mother anything important in a long time and she sure didn’t want to explain that a guy Cecelia had considered her best friend and who Cecelia’s mother had never met had died and then, dead, had written a song Cecelia was now in possession of, a song about a neighborhood that held none of your history and all your pain.

Cecelia sat up and took the Rubik’s Cube from the nightstand. It was cool against her fingertips and against her forehead. When it wasn’t cool anymore she set it down and stood up from the bed. She pulled the closet doors open, pulled the string that snapped on the bulb. She reached into the back of the closet and took out her guitar and positioned a chair, pulled an old tape recorder over and plugged it in. Cecelia pressed PLAY and RECORD and began stroking her guitar. It was the same old guitar and these were her same old fingers. It took her a few bars to clear out her throat. She looked around at her bare walls. No postcards, but then she wasn’t in need of inspiration. She was in service to someone else’s inspiration. She looked at the interminable line of tiny holes where the tacks had been, hitting notes and strumming heavier.

It was daytime but the moon was out, a tarnished coin in the ozone. The wolf had given up his rounds. His territory was all he had and he’d been patrolling it since before he could remember and he’d forsaken it and wanted nothing more to do with Albuquerque. He haunted the basin now, a lost land that would offer a lost animal no aid, a land where the dunes shifted overnight and scorpions feared their own stinging tails. The wolf frequented old Rattlesnake Park, an area that didn’t seem owned by any particular human, a place marked off with NO TRESPASSING signs that had been posted by trespassers. Closer to Lofte there was a copse of doomed pine trees on a defunct golf course and the wolf used the branchless woods as cover. The days were not bright and the nights were not dark. The wolf was subsisting on nothing but butterflies, snapped from the wind and swallowed in fluttery gulps.

There was no reason for the wolf to do rounds. No animal could encroach upon the wolf, and if the humans encroached, which they had and would and did, it was temporary. Their empires fell. Their great cities burned and blew away like cigarette ash. The basin was littered with wind-scorched ghost towns. Many more settlements had perished than survived.

Everyone who lived in Lofte lived on the edge of Lofte. The wolf watched people soap their cars. He watched them run in groups. One house had a backyard full of chickens, and the wolf found himself gazing down at the penned birds from his perch on a hard hill that seemed high in the daytime but at night seemed so far from the stars. The chickens behind the little house were kept in a fence meant to thwart coyotes. The wolf should’ve slipped down and plucked a few, but he didn’t want them to be gone. He was able to imagine loneliness now and he suspected that once the chickens were gone he would feel it. His rounds had been misguided, but they had kept the wolf busy and exercised. The chickens were unwittingly keeping him company and in a way he was guarding them.

Though often there was no car parked at the house with the chickens, the wolf knew there was always a human inside. Sometimes the wolf saw her ease the back door open and spill feed in the yard. Sometimes he saw her through the window, sitting in her kitchen, sometimes in a chair with big wheels and sometimes in a normal chair. He’d seen her lean against her ice box and cry. There was this older one who never left the premises and there was also a girl who came and went. The girl had arrived home a short time ago, in her low, groaning car. The wolf gave up his promontory and eased down the hill toward the house so he could hear the chickens and so he could frighten them a little, put them on edge for their own good. They didn’t notice him until he was right there at the fence. They had no pride and precious little cunning, but the wolf felt affection for them. A couple of cars were coming up the street and the wolf hid behind a shed in the next yard. The cars passed and the wolf heard the chickens again, clucking softly, a sound like water dripping on wood.

The wolf saw a window with no blinds toward the front of the house and he saw the form of the girl inside, the one who came and went. He stayed put and after a short time the wind died out altogether and the wolf heard the strumming. It was a guitar. It stopped and the wolf stood still until it started again. The music was coming from behind the window where the girl had been standing. The wolf heard the girl trying out her voice, reedy and full of an emotion the wolf couldn’t grasp. He crept out into the open and crossed over from the neighbor’s yard and put himself against the wall of the house with the chickens. There was never a way to tell, once music began, how long it would last. He was panting and his breath was out of rhythm with the song. The wolf got right under the window, pinned between the stucco and a line of tough shrubs, and he felt — now that he’d quit his rounds and quit his appetite and quit trying to figure out what power the human music held — now he felt this girl’s song pressing on him pleasantly from without and within. He didn’t have to discern anything. The song wasn’t chasing him or being chased. The song was doing a lap of its own natural rounds, a lap that somehow wouldn’t wind up in the same place it had started. The song had a good fate and maybe the wolf did too. He felt the angst that had been building in him begin to evaporate. There was peace in his soul and if he had a brain he didn’t hear it. The girl convinced her voice to rise with purpose and the strumming rose with it. The wolf felt quick and dumb. This music could have been anywhere and he could have been anywhere but they were both here. The song was going to end but that didn’t matter because whenever it ended would be too soon. If it ended in a human minute that would be too soon and if it ended when morning broke that would be too soon.