John Brandon - A Million Heavens

Mayor Cabrera stepped out the bay door and sat on the flipped bucket where the mechanic had been sitting. It was a brisk night, the sky a brimming void. It felt strange being this close to Dana, being back in Santa Fe. He had told himself he would confront Dana once his family affairs were back on track, and at the moment, so close to the ground with the sky so far above, he felt that he would confront her, that he had nothing to lose by doing so, that he was a guy with a couple troubles like every other guy. Things were on track with his sister-in-law and now he was doing something for Cecelia that a real uncle would do.

The mechanic stood back up. “One step at a time,” he said. “That’s how we climb this mountain.”

The mechanic talked as he worked. He told Mayor Cabrera he was going through a divorce, and that’s why he didn’t mind being in the shop all night. He was moving into a new place, but it wouldn’t be ready for another week. Hotels were too expensive, he told Mayor Cabrera, and Mayor Cabrera did not try to sell him on staying at the Javelina. Mayor Cabrera was not a salesman. The mechanic said he was going to need every dollar he could get for lawyers and furniture. He’d spent a couple nights in the shop and a couple in the garage of his house and a couple in his Caprice Classic.

“I ordered a pizza to the car,” he said. “I told them where I was parked and they brought over a pepperoni pizza.”

Mayor Cabrera laughed. He wasn’t comfortable sitting on the bucket.

“She didn’t seem like the type to turn on you,” the mechanic said. Mayor Cabrera could hear him straining, and then something came loose. “She’s always doing volunteer work and drinking soy milk. Always listening to music you never heard of. She seemed like she wanted to live in the moment and be forgiving. Not the case.”

Mayor Cabrera rose and asked the mechanic if he could bum a smoke from the box on the desk. He said he was going down to the street to smoke it, and left the mechanic clanging around under the car. Mayor Cabrera found his matches. He tried to always carry matches. He stood in the middle of the road and lit up. He hadn’t had a cigarette since he’d been with Dana — since he’d been with Dana successfully. He was grateful to be stuck at the shop, his transportation dismantled. That way he didn’t have to consider the option of going over to Dana’s right now. He didn’t have to worry about rushing over there with no plan and pounding on her door and finding her there with someone else, another customer. He didn’t have to worry about not going to Dana’s, about not finding the courage. He didn’t have to worry about going to Dana’s and deciding not to knock on her door and winding up creeping around in the bushes, a grown man, a mayor, trying to spy on a professional lady.

He had never been blocked before. He had refused to write for a time when he’d first found himself in this mute gray afterlife, when he was new to death, but that had been his choice. What was happening now was something else. He would sit at the piano to compose and it simply would not work. It would not happen. He could feel the plan brewing in his mind, could sense the glorified math of music within him, but at the piano it wouldn’t bang out. And now all this music that refused to cooperate, that refused birth, was getting mixed up in his head and he was slipping further and further from being able to write a song. He’d never thought of himself as confident, because he’d never lost confidence. On several occasions he’d stayed in front of the piano for what would have been hours on end if hours existed in this place. He would sit there with these melodic spare parts and half-strategies tangled in his mind, and he’d feel a sneaking pleasure at not being in control of his self-expression. He’d feel a slight, ephemeral thrill at failure, he who’d always succeeded.

He had taken to drink, had become a permanent shadow in the bar that at first he’d had no use for and later had warmed to. It was now his favored haunt in the hall. He wasn’t sure whether he could get drunk like living people, but everything was softer once he’d made a dent in a bottle. Sometimes, drinking, he felt the presence of time in the hall, of progress. Sometimes he felt he could achieve real sleep. Sometimes he felt he was learning, becoming wise, but that was what all drinkers thought. He was keeping close to the liquor to avoid a problem of the mind, as anyone might, but there was a practical problem he wasn’t going to be able to ignore much longer: the bottles had quit refreshing themselves. The hall had been pleasant enough as long as Reggie had been producing songs, but now that he was blocked there was no breeze for the hammock, the hall was chillier and dimmer, and when he left the bar and took his shirt off and stared at the keys and then put his shirt back on and returned to the bar, the bottles were not full. There had been a few empties, and then the number of empties and fulls had been equal, and now Reggie had only three unopened bottles and a splash left in the bottom of a fourth. Reggie didn’t feel he was being bullied or coaxed like before, but rather that he was being neglected. The hall wasn’t shrinking, but it wasn’t being tended. It smelled musty. There was a crack in one of the walls that Reggie could fit his fingertip in that ran from as high as he could reach all the way to the floor.

Reggie had come to understand that he’d been writing songs for Cecelia. He had not been writing songs he believed she would enjoy, but had been writing songs about her, about his feelings for her. He’d come to understand that. He’d learned from his own songs how much he had loved this woman, Cecelia. And when he got down to two bottles, two amber allotments of twenty-six-year-aged St. Magdalene scotch, he could see that all the songs he’d written in the hall were insufficient. They were songs of Cecelia that weren’t good enough, that did neither his affection nor its object justice. The songs were about love, like all songs, and they were clogged and fettered by Reggie’s talent, by his know-how. Talent was perfectly meaningless. He needed to write a song that laid the cards on the table with no cleverness. Not write it, just deliver it. Art was Reggie’s trouble. He needed to bring forth a song that couldn’t get in the way of itself, a song devoid of style. He didn’t know if he knew how to do this but if he couldn’t then he wouldn’t be here. He’d be somewhere else with some other impossible assignment.

Reggie cracked the next bottle. He’d sensed all this from the first moment he’d been blocked, and that was why he’d resigned himself to the bar. It wasn’t only weakness, escape. It was because he had a better chance of stumbling upon the song he needed than of searching it out. It was because this time instead of dividing his love by writing it into a song, he had to let a song be nothing but love. Reggie had picked his love into strands and woven it into artifice.

It had been so long without a song, he hardly remembered what it felt like to hear one. He wondered if he was already dead whenever the buzzards passed overhead like a gathering stream, calling themselves to fresh meat, and he felt no pull to track them to their confluence. His instincts were a ghost town. There would be no end to this accruing of knowledge, this piling on of the hollow wisdom of common lives. He would drag it around the desert until the desert was again a sea.

He felt on the brink of an extinction that could never be complete, a lone wolf in the midst of countless coyotes who got snakebit and tracked by cougars and poisoned by small-time ranchers and who had their young carried off by hawks and were torn limb from limb by their own packs and were shot for fun by the sons of doomed towns.