John Brandon - A Million Heavens

Cecelia couldn’t miss a class doing this. Or work. She couldn’t be noticed as absent from anything. Cecelia could see the red tile roof of the house above the pale wall that enclosed the yard. The wall would provide Cecelia plenty of privacy.

Every ten minutes or so a car rolled past on the main drag, mostly women on cell phones guiding glimmering sedans down the center of the street. The houses around her were in clashing styles — Tudor, French Chateau, ranch houses, even an occasional Southwestern spread with all the outdoor fireplaces. Nate’s family’s house was in some Spanish style. A carpet of lush grass covered the neighborhood. If you saw green lawns in the desert you were either in a cemetery or an exclusive part of town. Here came another one, another woman on a phone, this one in a little coupe. Cecelia couldn’t tell their ages. They were older than her but they weren’t old.

Cecelia pulled her tickets out and took another look at them — heavy and sharp-cornered and with a shiny red stripe down one side. Nate and his band had booked their first gig already, and he’d left two tickets for her in an envelope up at the A/V booth. The tickets had been printed by a local version of Ticketmaster. Thus Poke Sarah’s Thruster would never sell out, but to be safe you could go to a kiosk and get tickets in advance. These had come from the kiosk on campus. The bar was called Antivenin. Cecelia and Reggie and Nate had played there a few times. Cecelia had to hand it to Nate for not wasting any time. His band had a set list, probably composed mostly of Reggie’s songs, and now they had a gig, and he hadn’t even neglected to taunt Cecelia.

A woman stumbled by up on the sidewalk, yanked this way and that by a dog with bulging muscles. The woman wore a jogging suit and her hair was done. Cecelia bet the dog cost more than Cecelia’s car was worth. If you were an artist you weren’t supposed to care that other people had money, and that was more proof that Cecelia was not an artist. Not like Reggie had been. Reggie’d had vision, while Cecelia’s cobbled-together songs were always blatant and derivative. Reggie hadn’t harbored uncharitable thoughts, and all Cecelia could think was that the people in this neighborhood were dense and shallow and didn’t deserve anything they had.

A car turned down the side street Cecelia had parked on. She tensed a moment, but the car pulled into a driveway four or five houses up. Another one of these women. This one was wearing a short-skirted business suit. She loaded her arms up with grocery bags, leafy vegetables sticking up out of them like in a TV commercial, and made it to her front door without ever getting off her phone. She had dropped something and it had rolled to a stop under the back of her car. Cecelia watched the woman disappear into the house and then she waited a minute before cranking her ignition. She watched all the warning lights come alive in her dashboard. All fluids were low. Every gasket was worn. Her exhaust was toxic and her belts loose. Her upholstery sagged. Her tires were bald. And of course she knew she had a blown brake light.

She rolled around the corner so her car would be out of view, then shut the engine back off. She was feeling customarily cheated in the big picture, but at least she was going to do something to allay that feeling. She’d been playing by rules in a game that rules rendered pointless. She’d been faking something that now she felt genuinely, a disregard for consequences. The rules of the universe were off if Cecelia had access to Reggie’s unknown songs and the rules of Cecelia’s life were off now too. She still wasn’t hearing a song, was still living in quiet as she had been since yesterday, and a fresh loneliness was building in her.

Nate was at school and his dad was at the restaurant and his mom was off doing God-knew-what, whatever she’d always been doing when Cecelia had gone to Nate’s for rehearsal. Cecelia got out of her car and took a gas can from the hatchback. She cut through a few lawns and came up to a side gate, opened it, slipped inside. The gas can was heavy but Cecelia knew it would be light on the way back. She rounded the house. There it was, that hacienda-style barn, that red-roofed play garage.

A rabbit hopped in the grass not far from Cecelia, startling her. It was grazing on the succulent blades.

“How’d you get in here?” Cecelia asked it.

The rabbit only looked at her.

“Might want to back up,” she told it. “Friendly advice.”

Cecelia opened the door of the barn. The doorframe was strung with little wooden skeletons, a repellent to evil spirits. The skeletons weren’t going to work on Cecelia. She was flesh and blood. She looked up and saw the hot tub still hanging inside, waiting up there. She thought about the great number of enemies Nate and his family must have. Cecelia paced the inside walls, dumping gasoline in sloppy glugs. It was getting on her sneakers and jeans, but she had a change of clothes in her car. These sneakers and jeans were putting in their last day of service. It wasn’t easy to use all the gasoline. She had to do three laps. She loomed in the doorway a moment and then lit a match and watched the flame flare.

He was a vegetarian who owned a pampered goat for the purpose of making his own cheese. He had a shop in his backyard that he’d converted into a creamery and he’d turned his flowerbeds into herb gardens, and the cheese he made he donated to a program that fed the poor. The wolf had left his goat alive.

After the attack, the goat’s demeanor softened, as if she’d been taken down a peg. When she had milk she was generous with it. She quit butting the fence posts. She was still fed as well as a human, and now when the teacher arrived with her supper she ambled right over and nestled her head into his palm. Of course the goat had a limp now, her hind legs chewed up as they were. Of course she wouldn’t be allowed to stay in the backyard anymore, grazing all night on elk grass, nothing but a short fence separating her from the wild desert.

He had a cot in the room. The clinic called it a bed but it was a cot. He didn’t use it. He sometimes roughed up the bedding before morning so nobody would know he stayed in the chair all night watching the red tail-lights disappear into the Southern flatlands. He wondered how many of the cars were the same ones night after night, and how many of them had started their journeys somewhere other than the desert and would wind up somewhere other than the desert.

It was at night that he thought of Soren’s death, and he could never think a minute past it, like thinking of the end of the world. Soren’s father wondered if his son’s face would pinch or broaden the moment before he passed away, if his eyes would pull open briefly or if any light he saw would emanate from a place no one could see until they were going there. He wondered if the room would grow perfectly silent, Soren’s breath gone, before the machines began sounding off. To not be in the room when Soren came to, when he blinked himself conscious and tried to jerk away from his monitors and probably cried out with confusion, to not be waiting for him when he returned, would be terrible, but to not be in the clinic when his son expired, the thought of that locked up Soren’s father’s chest.

He looked out the window at the straight road that led into the greater dark. It was the time of night — too late even for the night owls and not yet early enough for anyone else — where several minutes could pass without a car and the cars that did appear were probably on the road because of bad news.

She was going to try. She was going to make a grand effort with Arn. She packed water and a piece of fruit and a stick of lip balm, then she put on a bikini and over that a big sweatshirt and sweatpants, gathered a warm hat and gloves and good sneakers. She positioned the telescope. She located the big rock shaped like a totem pole, the one with the scrappy, twisted pine growing from the top of it, and to the left of that was a wide spot in the trail where Dannie had often seen hikers take rest breaks. Dannie focused the telescope and secured it against the banister and kept it in place with a couple heavy bookends plundered from the trucker’s stuff in the extra bedroom. She tightened the wheel that held steady the height of the tripod.