John Brandon - A Million Heavens

After Reggie had been in the hall what felt like a couple weeks, a library appeared. It didn’t contain a desk, so it was a library rather than a study. It was attached to the main hall but the light was cleaner in the library, bright enough to read comfortably. Reggie didn’t read, though. He sat bolt upright in the library’s grand, creaky chair, which was covered in the same red leather as the piano bench, and flipped backward and forward through the ornate volumes, listening to the pages and smelling the bindings. He didn’t have what it took to read one of the books. It wasn’t a crisis of energy; it was that Reggie knew none of the books could help him. Reading a book seemed local and desperate. And the fact that people had sat down and written the books instead of doing pretty much anything else with their time on earth — taking a walk with a friend, eating chocolate, tinkering with a weed whacker in an oil-smelling shed — made Reggie sad. The thought of all the songs he’d written made him sad. All any writer could do was either document what was known or speculate. Reggie didn’t need to imagine a different world because he was in one. He didn’t want to celebrate or complain about the world he’d been snatched from, which was now so fathomable. It was easy for him to see now that the living world had always given him what he needed. This new place had no idea what to do with him. He sat in the big chair and ran his fingers over the rough cloth of the book covers. He shuffled through the pages with his thumb, picking out random words. When he needed to break the quiet, he snapped the books shut.

Reggie didn’t believe he was being punished, but it was possible he was awaiting punishment. He wasn’t religious, but of course he was aware of purgatory, familiar with the concept of the afterlife utilizing a waiting room. He didn’t think he’d committed any acts that warranted eternal justice, that warranted Hell or whatever, but he also knew sometimes you broke rules without knowing it. Or sometimes you were supposed to do something and did nothing instead, a sin of omission. And now and then, he wouldn’t have been surprised, your paperwork got lost or the person you needed to speak to was on vacation or whoever was in charge just didn’t like the look of you. At least this particular waiting room wasn’t cramped or foul-smelling. It didn’t matter how long he had to wait, Reggie reasoned — it wasn’t like he had to be somewhere. It wasn’t like he was going to be late to band practice or run out of daylight working on a yard.

The trouble was the solitude. In life, Reggie had never minded being alone, but this was different. Back in life, solitude was temporary. Even if a person was in jail, not that Reggie had been, there were guards and other inmates. If you were driving across the empty desert, you were on your way to see someone. If you were a child banished to your bedroom, you would accidentally fall asleep and before you knew it the morning was underway and here was Mom making pancakes. There was no waking up for Reggie because there was no sleep. There were no other inmates. No pancakes. No map on which to track his progress.

Reggie walked laps around the main hall, managing at times to feel like he was strolling instead of pacing. He felt he had very little peripheral vision, though he couldn’t be sure about this. He had no aches or itches to ground him, no hunger that could rise up and concern him. He still had his scars. He could feel that his tooth was still chipped from when an edger had shot a pebble up at him. He found himself fretting over the yards he’d tended back in the living world. He imagined them growing dumpy. It took more skill to keep a desert yard presentable than to run a mower over a lawn of St. Augustine grass. Not many people knew what they were doing with desert yards. Most guys dumped weed killer everywhere and plopped down some pots. Most guys did whatever was quickest and cheapest.

Once in a while Reggie stood in front of the piano and wondered if he felt like playing it. He didn’t. He didn’t want to play. He hadn’t even sat down on the bench. Reggie existed in a gray area and the keys of the piano were the whitest and blackest things he’d ever seen. He rested his finger on a low B-flat and pushed it down so gently that it didn’t make a sound.

His town was dying and its last best chance, it seemed, was a group of religious yahoos headed by a guy named Ran. Ran had told Mayor Cabrera over the phone that the group had 170 members. More importantly, they had enough money — their endowment, Ran called it — to build a facility and then sustain themselves in that facility for a hundred years. They were going to erect one plain building that would include housing, worship space, a gym, a cafeteria. Not being fancy was important to Ran’s group. Mayor Cabrera didn’t understand their religion. They started with the Bible but had no problem revising it whenever science proved it wrong. They thought one should be devout for moral reasons, not to cash in on everlasting life. They considered confession childish. They thought talking about Hell was wrongheaded. They never, under any circumstance, recruited. It was the opposite, Ran had told Mayor Cabrera. If someone wanted to join the group, that person had to be voted in. That person had to convince the members that he belonged, then survive a probationary period. These people were going to make their home either in Lofte or in some town in Oklahoma.

Some of Soren’s clothes were hanging in the closet of the clinic room, and Soren’s father pulled the doors shut so he wouldn’t have to look at them. He made a point to flip back the blanket every morning and put socks and shoes on his son, and he liked to be the one to remove the shoes when night fell. It was a habit, and habits were what he’d always counted on. The sight of the tiny polo shirts in their garish colors, adorned with dinosaurs and airplanes and tractors, made Soren’s father think of specific days he’d spent with Soren — at the zoo, at the plaza where the Indians sold toys, at that church where the old lady read stories — but the shoes were plain and brown and not particularly beat-up. They were any kid’s shoes.

There had been days when Soren’s father was convinced Soren was gaining color and had expected to return from a smoke on the secret landing to find his son blinking into the steady pale light from the window, but that was delusion. His son was absent as ever. He was elsewhere. He wasn’t recuperating. He was just elsewhere and nobody could guess when he might return. The doctors didn’t have a clue. In the first days of the coma they’d been comforted by their charts and tests, their metabolic abnormalities and cerebral cortices and CAT scans and MRIs and they even had a fancy name for the fact that Soren’s arms were bent at the elbows, hands resting on his chest, rather than straight down by his sides. “What does that mean?” Soren’s father had asked. “What does that mean that his arms are bent?” The doctor had clicked his tongue earnestly and said, “A lot of times it doesn’t mean anything at all.” They couldn’t say what had put Soren in a coma. Soren’s father wasn’t accustomed to medical doubletalk. This was the first medical problem of Soren’s life. He didn’t have allergies. He hadn’t even caught those ear infections all kids were supposed to catch.

Soren’s father made a point not to ask the doctors any more questions. It was up to him to consider questions he didn’t want to consider, like whether Soren was supposed to keep growing, how long it would take for Soren to lose all his coordination. Soren’s father didn’t know how much time had to pass before his son would have to relearn the alphabet and choose a different favorite animal and a different favorite food. Would he still know what an opposite was, a rhyme? Soren’s father didn’t even know if his son was dreaming.