John Brandon - A Million Heavens

“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.

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.