John Brandon - A Million Heavens

All this wisdom, it felt familiar. The wolf felt he’d lost his instincts before. He’d gained and lost music before. He was in a cycle as surely as he was in New Mexico. The wolf had always believed the desert had nothing to hide and no place to hide it, but perhaps he was the secret. Perhaps he’d been here through all of it. The stitching of the land with train rails. The human borders shifting this way and that. Gold discovered. The wolf had seen human after human lowered into the parched earth in boxes of cold wood. He’d seen them left unburied as expedition after expedition became ill-fated. He had tried not to cower on the night birds of fire chased away the bats and burned the forest to sand. Albuquerque was founded and could have withered like any other town. Orphanages were established. Squash and beans raised. All of it had been bound inside books, all of it but the wolf.

He couldn’t tell if he’d reached the blue mountains because as he got closer they were no longer blue. He had been trying to touch the horizon. His naivety was a comfort, as wisdom is to the young. He had used the pages of the atomic history as kindling for a fire, and then decided that if he didn’t have the scientists he didn’t want the Bible either. He’d never seen a Bible burned. Something happened to Bibles, otherwise the world would be overrun with them, but the gas station owner had never seen one destroyed. He had burned his cash. He had broken his knife. He was out of jerky and pretzels. He had some coffee left but no water to brew it with. He had a headache from lack of whisky and lack of food and lack of caffeine and there wasn’t a cloud to be found in the shallow bowl of the sky.

It had been three days since the last evening shower. There’d been nothing to get under, so he’d stretched atop his pack to keep it dry and had opened his mouth to the heavens and shivered the long hours until the clear black night appeared. He had expected to fall ill but he hadn’t. No self-respecting illness wanted anything to do with him. The next day he’d wrung a mouthful of water from the filthy leather of the pack before the desert air stole it all. His little notebook had stayed dry, and he took it out now with the stump of pencil that he no longer had a way to sharpen, and he marked the closing act of another day, the twenty-sixth day, knowing his own closing act was ready to commence all around him.

She headed toward the vigil, her car driving like new, running with a whisper. Her uncle had taken it one night and had every important part replaced. Cecelia didn’t know why her uncle had fixed her car. She knew he’d done it for himself as much as for her, to make himself feel better, but he’d still done it. It had cost him money and time. He’d solved one of Cecelia’s ongoing and growing problems. Cecelia had been a little jealous that he’d been able to make headway with her mother, but she didn’t feel that anymore. She was grateful. And whatever the motives, she was grateful about her car. All the handles and knobs worked. The only light on in the dash was the one telling Cecelia her seatbelt wasn’t on. Her brake light was back, she assumed. It even smelled nice in the car, like mint. She’d never missed her uncle, not really, but if he wanted to be good to her she was going to let him. He was an oaf. Cecelia wasn’t going to make anything hard on him. She was going to wait and see what he did next, and in the meantime, if she saw him at the house or in town, she wasn’t going to avoid him like usual. She was going to thank him. Cecelia pressed the Scirrocco to go faster and faster, and the sound of the engine stayed smooth and healthy. Whoever had worked on the thing was a hell of a mechanic.

Cecelia still hadn’t received another song. They’d stopped. She could finally settle in to whatever she was going to feel toward Reggie, toward his memory. When he’d died, she’d felt cheated, and then she’d gotten a bunch of him she hadn’t expected. She was going to miss him, but she didn’t feel as shortchanged. The songs had given her so much practice missing Reggie, she now felt equipped to do it on her own. She hoped Reggie was in that placid place she’d imagined, near the sea, that place with gently bobbing docks and like-minded strangers.

She pulled into the clinic parking lot, the concrete like carpet under her new tires, the clouds disappearing as they crossed the moon. She parked and walked over to the spot where she always sat. After a few minutes, the other woman appeared in her sleek white car. She came over and sat close but not too close to Cecelia and settled in. Cecelia watched the woman gaze into the black yonder above the clinic building. The woman didn’t look at Cecelia at all. Cecelia felt doubt. She felt that this woman could outlast her. This woman was better at existing than Cecelia was. This woman was putting forth no effort. She’d lost her boyfriend and it hadn’t fazed her. She was preoccupied in a way that could only aid her endurance. She was present only physically, and didn’t seem to even realize that Cecelia was competing with her.

Cecelia squirmed so she was facing away from the woman. She tracked a cloud all the way across the sky, and then another. Normally, at the vigil, the world seemed to slow down around Cecelia, but tonight she was the one who felt slow. She felt way behind. She’d been trying to be a jerk and had been succeeding. She’d been a jerk on many fronts, but with her mother especially. Cecelia was mad at her, but that didn’t give her the right to avoid the woman like the plague. The world might have been rotten, but her mother wasn’t. Cecelia was acting like because she was younger than her mother she shouldn’t have to be the adult. What did being an adult have to do with anything? What was an adult anyway? Some people could locate their spirit when it was wandering lost in the hills. Some people could line their unruly energies up single-file and march them. Cecelia could, her mother could not, but what was Cecelia marching toward? She rested her face in her palms. She should’ve started a new band by now, writing her own songs. She should’ve gotten another job by now. Months were going by — months that had every right to be memorable. Cecelia wasn’t advancing her life. She did not want any more songs. She didn’t want more of the fucking things. She wanted to be okay with her mother and to be able to relax at the vigil. There was a happy self in her and she’d been doing everything she could not to find it.

At the clinic, Dannie’s thoughts were clear. At home, her mind was mush already, soft around the edges. At home she was leaving milk out on the counter and finding it hours later. She was missing her TV shows and putting jeans in the washer with pockets full of gum. Dannie hadn’t told anyone she was pregnant. In her belly was the start of a person who would one day make small talk, who would one day make an effort to eat more servings of fruit, who would have to choose a shampoo out of the hundreds, who would drink coffee on trains.

A cat pawed up to Dannie and the other vigiler, the college girl. Dannie had no idea how many more weeks this girl planned to stick it out. Dannie didn’t know what she’d do if she were the last one. It was a responsibility Dannie didn’t want. She didn’t want to be alone and she didn’t want to be the one who let the vigils lapse away. The cat approached the girl and Dannie watched her make no acknowledgement. It was a Siamese cat, but something else was mixed into it. It had the look of an orphan, bored and wily.

Dannie felt childish in this girl’s presence. She needed to be an adult now, but she had no confidence that she was. Dannie had grown impatient because she hadn’t gotten what she wanted from Arn right when she’d wanted it, because everything hadn’t happened according to her timetable, and so she’d run him off. She hadn’t been capable of simply being happy and enjoying him. Dannie was supposed to have been the grown-up in the relationship, was supposed to have known what was good for her and what was good for Arn. She didn’t know what was good for anyone, and now she was going to have a little son or daughter to guide. She was missing Arn’s presence in her future child’s life, she understood, but she was also missing the way his breath wheezed when he slept, not quite a snore, and she missed the ropey muscles of his arms and his belly and the way he never gave away his mood with his voice, and Dannie missed Arn’s wise, patient innocence, which she thought she could use about now.