John Brandon - A Million Heavens

He left the main drag and walked up a hill, walking in order to avoid standing still, and found himself staring at what appeared to be a temp agency. It looked like a house, not a business. The sign was quaint. It said JOBS in large letters and down in the corner it said NEW GARDEN.

From the moment he walked in the front door, he was treated strangely well. The other two guys in the waiting room had red eyes and runny noses, older guys, like forty, and they were being treated civilly, but Arn was being fawned over. There were three men working in the office. They fetched Arn water and tried to give him a bagel. They were waiting for someone, a woman named Amber. Amber would be Arn’s liaison. They gave Arn no papers to fill out. The office was full of flowers and bookshelves.

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.