John Brandon - A Million Heavens

On her way to the agriculture building for a repair call, walking out around the Natural History museum and then past an acre or so of pepper plants, the next song arrived. Cecelia had been taking her time getting to the building, knowing she was going to go all the way over there and climb stairs and locate the classroom and interrupt the class all for no reason, because there was no way she was going to be able to help — she never could — and she heard it, another song. It seemed to grow out of the wind and quickly became louder than the wind. She smelled the peppers and heard the notes. This song was running the same course as the last, arranging itself, getting organized, but this one was coming together much faster. There was no need for Cecelia to hum. She was already getting the gist of the melody, and could already tell it was unfamiliar. Another song. Cecelia felt the same apprehension, the same spark of joy. Something impossible was happening. Cecelia racked her brain. Maybe Reggie had played the songs while she was asleep sometime and her subconscious had kept them buried until now. But Cecelia had never slept around Reggie. Not once. Maybe what was happening was akin to when mothers lifted pickup trucks off their children. Cecelia missed Reggie so badly she was having an adrenaline rush of the spirit, doing the extraordinary. Maybe the songs weren’t being given to her, maybe she was taking them. She felt sweetly defeated. She was living proof that nobody knew anything.

Inside the building, she found 209 and knocked on the open door. The professor was wearing dress shoes and ratty jeans and looked familiar to Cecelia. He looked more familiar than someone would from seeing them around campus, but she couldn’t place him. He had his phone hooked up to the A/V cabinet. His images were appearing on the computer screen but nothing was coming through the projector. Cecelia nodded at him confidently, hearing parts of what he was saying but mostly hearing the song, looking at the professor’s phone but also looking out at the waiting students, who didn’t seem to be rooting for or against Cecelia.

She touched a couple dials under the cabinet, staying down there for what seemed like long enough. When she stood, she said, “The projector isn’t responding at all. That’s not a positive sign.”

The professor didn’t seem disappointed. He thought it might be the phone’s fault. He seemed resigned to malfunction in general. Suddenly Cecelia remembered why he looked familiar. He’d come to the vigils for a few weeks, back at the start of them. That was it. There’d been one night in particular that he’d sat close by her. He’d dropped out. He’d dropped out like all the rest would eventually. At the most recent vigil, two days before, there’d been only a dozen people. The high-strung painter was still sticking it out, but it was only a matter of time for him. The haughty guy with all the pins on his coat was unreadable, a threat. The guy who always hid behind sunglasses even though it was night out and was always playing with a pen — Cecelia hoped he’d be the next to go. There were the middle-aged fat women with their reassuring expressions who seemed to believe that everything wrong with the world wasn’t really wrong, that it was all part of some convoluted grace. There was the pretty girl in her thirties and her young boyfriend. Who knew what they were doing? They were trying to prove something to each other or using the vigils as part of their dating or something. The woman seemed rich, from her car and her clothes. Cecelia didn’t know why someone with a cute boyfriend and a new car would spend her time in a parking lot. None of the other vigilers had as much right to vigil as Cecelia had. They would all fall away, just like the redheaded hippie woman with the tacky earrings and the weightlifter dude.

“It’ll be fixed by the next time this class meets,” Cecelia told the professor. It was what she always said.

“I’m a farmer,” the professor said. “If it was a tractor, I could fix it.” Cecelia scribbled down the serial numbers of the machines in the cabinet and the classroom number and departed the agriculture building. There was a bench on the edge of the pepper field and she sat on it. Most of the peppers were a shade of green, except one row that was bright red, the peppers as big as eggplants.

The song was mostly assembled, mostly clear. It was an acoustic punk song. It was short and fast and there wasn’t one moment when it slowed down. Each verse was the same. The song was about the sounds a person hears while falling, about flowers with snow on them, about children asleep in their church clothes. There could be another song after this one, and another, and though Cecelia knew the songs were bad for her, she wanted more of them. It was hard to determine when this punk song ended and restarted, but Cecelia could tell. She could sense when it crossed the finish line, which was also the starting line. Cecelia sat up straight against the back of the bench. She didn’t know if she was being tormented or rewarded. The sun broke the haze, and a glare settled on each smooth pepper in the field before her, turning the world into endless blinding acreage.

Pulling his dirty clothes out of a tall canvas bag and filling one of the washers in the Javelina laundry room, he found himself holding the shirt he’d worn on his last visit to Santa Fe. He peeled a sock off it and held it up by the shoulders. It was blue with a collar of lighter blue, with oversized buttons and a breast pocket that snapped closed. The air in the laundry room wasn’t easy to breathe and the overhead light was flickering. Mayor Cabrera set the shirt aside and filled the washer the rest of the way, extracting a mint from the pocket of some pants he must’ve worn to the diner and a pen from the pocket of another shirt. He dumped in the detergent and started the water running and then turned back to the blue shirt, lifting it and pressing his face into it. It was there, Dana’s scent — right in the middle of the chest where she’d nestled her head back into him — a clean, powdery smell but also the smell of something baked, something flaky and not too sweet. He was holding the shirt with his fingertips so he wouldn’t ruin the scent. He’d chosen that shirt to wear to Dana’s because it was stiff and made his shoulders look broad. He’d worn it up to her place a bunch of times. He’d worn that shirt the time all those bees were on Dana’s little balcony and Mayor Cabrera had called over an exterminator and hadn’t let Dana pay for it. That meant something, didn’t it, that she’d allowed him to pay for that exterminator? The visit after that he’d brought her a stuffed bee, which always sat on a shelf of her entertainment center and stared with its bug eyes out into the living room. This was the shirt Mayor Cabrera had worn the time Dana had let it slip that she wanted to go see this guy named Roderick or Broderick something who was performing in downtown Santa Fe. Dana was sheepish about mentioning the concert because it was Mayor Cabrera’s evening, his once-a-month appointment, and she was a professional, but Mayor Cabrera could tell something was on her mind and had dragged it out of her. The show was sold out but a number of tickets were being held at the venue for anyone willing to wait in line, and so Mayor Cabrera overcame Dana’s protests and they went down and got seventh and eighth in line and sat along an adobe wall that grew warm after a while against their backs. The strangers they conversed with assumed them to be a couple, and Dana didn’t say otherwise. She had stories about other times she’d seen this guy play, down on the Gulf Coast and up in Colorado. Once the doors opened, Dana and Mayor Cabrera went to the bar and then found a cozy spot off to the side. Dana didn’t want to sit and she didn’t like to be right up front either because she liked to see the audience as well as the band. She liked to see the backs of the people’s heads as they nodded along raptly. Afterward they went to a crowded diner. They hadn’t gotten home until three in the morning and Dana’s eyes had been heavy in the car, so Mayor Cabrera got her to agree to go ahead to sleep and she promised she’d make it up to him the next day, that she’d settle all accounts in the AM. But the next morning Mayor Cabrera had to get back to Lofte early and when he departed Dana was still zonked under her comforter and Mayor Cabrera snuck out without a sound.