John Brandon - A Million Heavens

“He’s starting a new band and he’s going to use Reggie’s songs. Their first gig is tomorrow.”

Marc took this in. He brought his hands above the tabletop. “We’ve already had a ceremony, putting those songs to rest.”

“You had a ceremony for Reggie?”

“For the songs. We scored each one out as sheet music and put the papers in helium balloons and released them. No one’s supposed to ever play them again. That’s the meaning of the ceremony.”

“It’s despicable, right? What Nate’s doing. It’s a crime.”

“Of that, there’s no doubt. No doubt at all.”

Marc was starting to stew, but the ball was still in Cecelia’s court. She had to be specific.

“What I want is for you guys to do your thing,” she said. “I want you to show up at Nate’s gigs and make sure they don’t become popular. Like you did with us — scare everyone off. I don’t want Nate making money off Reggie’s songs.”

Marc rubbed his earlobe softly between two fingers. He knew how to enjoy mulling something. “The situation grieves me, but I cannot do what you ask. I wouldn’t take my fanhood lightly that way. I wouldn’t fake devotion and I wouldn’t ask anyone else to.”

“Just this once?”

“I’m sorry.”

“For Reggie?”

He made a disappointed face at Cecelia, his lips pressed tight, and she knew she wasn’t going to ask him again. What he was saying was correct and she knew it. She’d insulted him, maybe. He had no idea what Cecelia was going through and she couldn’t tell him — no idea she was being entrusted with new songs of Reggie’s by means she couldn’t fathom and that she needed to keep the old songs safe for reasons of principle but also because it was important that Nate suffered a loss. She was a curator of the mystical and was also a contestant in a common feud. Another song had arrived that morning, and Cecelia had recorded it on the cassette tape. She’d started to feel like a piece of machinery herself, equipment. She was compatible with a boxy, not-new tape recorder and also compatible with the hereafter. The song from this morning had been bluesy and the lyrics told of a man who’d tried to build his own river. The man digs the river out by hand and constructs docks on the river’s edges and rests boats down on the dry waiting dirt and plants thirsty trees up and down the shore. Then he has to wait for a storm. The chorus was whistling, and Cecelia could still hear a trace of her own voice whistling away. She had begun to wonder if this happened to other people, if others received transmissions from higher planes of existence. Why would it only be her? It was tiring to walk around like everything was normal when really you were a participant in a secret supernatural entanglement, but maybe lots of people were living under these conditions. Maybe Cecelia wasn’t anything special. Scores of folks were walking around with knowledge they couldn’t share and that, if they did share it, no one would believe.

“What are they called?” Marc asked.

“Nate’s new band? Thus Poke Sarah’s Thruster.”

“I’ll remember the name and pray for their failure. That’s all I can offer. I can’t do more than that. I’m a devotee, not a warrior. And anyway, I can’t hear those songs again. If I went to their shows, I’d hear the songs, and that part of my life is over.”

“I’ll take your prayers,” said Cecelia. “I’ll take whatever I can get.”

“I’ll truly do it. I’ll get down on my knees.”

Cecelia asked Marc if his group was following anyone else, if they’d found a new band, and he said they were considering a metal trio that sang half the time to Christ and half the time to Satan. He used both hands to adjust his sunglasses.

“Thanks for meeting me,” said Cecelia.

She got up and walked to her car, leaving Marc at the table. She was not disheartened. She knew it was better if she battled Nate on her own. She knew that. To have help would defuse the prospect of finding out what was inside her, finding out what she would do to win. That’s why feuds persisted, so people could test themselves.

She was still in a mood and spent the night cleaning the condo. The furniture was dusty. There was grease on the stove and countertops from all Arn’s bacon. It was even on the floor. Dannie wiped down the sticky honey jars and then got up on a chair and threw away a bunch of canned goods the trucker had left in a high cabinet. It felt good to clunk them right in the trash rather than setting them aside to be donated. Arn had tracked clumpy red dirt into the front hall and Dannie vacuumed and then banged a pair of his shoes out on the front stairs. She looked out at the night and there was a weak ring of light around the whole horizon. Dannie didn’t know where it came from. She went into the bathroom and got on her knees with a bunch of harsh products and started scrubbing. The only reason the toilet needed cleaning was that Arn couldn’t pee straight. There was a bar of soap in the shower drain. Dannie wanted to be pregnant, and Arn was proving no help with that. Dannie had thought she was falling for him, falling in love, but now she couldn’t even tell what that meant. It meant fights and secrets, in Dannie’s experience. Arn was the one who should’ve been young enough for love, but who knew what was going on in his heart? Dannie had begun to resent sleeping with him. She could feel the start of that. She wasn’t getting pregnant so she was just giving away her body and her roof and her food. The resentment was there. And resentment never did anything but grow.

When Arn got home, Dannie told him he had to be neater in the kitchen and that he had to help out with chores and that she wasn’t doing another shred of his laundry. She told him not to drop her soap that had cost eleven dollars a bar at a shop in Pasadena into the drain and leave it there, and also to pull the curtain open after he showered so it wouldn’t get mildewed.

He was looking at her with that look like he was about to smile or cry. He was going to do neither. He only said, “Okay, Dannie.” He hardly ever called her by her name.

“You haven’t bought me one solitary gift,” Dannie said. “It’s one of those customs humans observe when they’re courting. The male buys the female a gift or two.”

Dannie gave Arn a chance, but he had no idea what to say. He no longer looked like he was about to smile.

“You’ve never cooked me a meal,” she said.

“I don’t know how to make anything good.”

“You have to figure it out. You have to make an effort to learn. You have all night sitting up there doing absolutely nothing.”

“All right,” he said.

“Take your shoes off and leave them outside. Where do you find mud, anyway? We’re in the middle of the desert.”

Arn sniffed. He turned around and went back down the hall and Dannie retreated to the kitchen. She sat and listened to the sound of Arn patiently removing his sneakers. He was being patient with her and she didn’t know how she felt about having an ignorant child act patient with her, like he was exercising forbearance in the course of dealing with a crazy person. This kid had one important task to accomplish and hadn’t accomplished that task. She did know how she felt about it. She fucking resented it.

He went to Gee’s house thinking that if the opportunity arose to stay the night he would take it. Gee had some of those otherworldly roadrunners stooping here and there in her flowerbeds. She didn’t sell them, she told Soren’s father. She gave them away as gifts. Gee’s house had a big skylight in the roof and a decked-out kitchen with a hundred pots and pans hanging overhead. Gee cooked Chinese food, Szechwan she called it, and while she cut peppers and pounded on steaks that were already thin, she told Soren’s father about her son, who was grown and lived in what Gee described as a soulless suburb of Phoenix, where he sold real estate and dated women who sold real estate. When Gee and her ex-husband had split, they’d given the boy his choice of who he wanted to live with and he’d chosen his father and Gee had never forgiven him. The boy had been a teenager then, old enough to know his own mind. Gee and her son had a series of nasty arguments and had become estranged. Gee planned to attempt reconciliation, but it hadn’t been long enough for the anger to dissipate. More time had to pass or else something bad had to happen. Someone in the family had to pass away or something like that. Soren’s father listened, trying and failing to imagine a scenario in which he would refuse to speak to his son, hoping there was no scenario in which his son would refuse to speak to him.