John Brandon - A Million Heavens

Dannie pulled the last of the bacon out of the pan and rested the strips on top of the others, a paper towel layered in between. She got syrup and ketchup out. What Arn did was put the bacon in the middle and put a saucer of syrup on one side and a saucer of ketchup on the other and alternate strip for strip. Arn struck Dannie as a carrier of desirable sperm not because he had lots of dazzling positive attributes, but because he had no negative ones. Dannie had come to believe it was more important to not be an asshole than it was to set the world on fire. Arn wasn’t stubborn, moody, jealous, fickle.

It was a few minutes till six. Dannie missed Arn in an embarrassing way, the way teenage girls and old women missed men. Lately she’d been breaking down crying at songs on the radio. And she craved gossip all of a sudden, something she had no dependable way to get because she no longer had any friends. She’d had friends in L.A. but she hadn’t spoken to any of them since moving to New Mexico. She wasn’t angry with them, hadn’t gotten into a spat or anything. She’d simply stopped calling them back or answering their e-mails. She’d opened a new e-mail account and had stopped checking her old one. Dannie had felt powerful and brisk, being able to stop friendships in their tracks like that. She’d isolated herself, had broken ties with L.A. Now, she knew, she was approaching the point of no return. If she didn’t get in touch with her friends to let them know she’d met a twenty-year-old kid and was trying to get knocked up, she’d never be close to any of them again.

She knew she was not going to call them. Something was wrong with her. She was going to let her friendships dry up and blow off. She was going to stand by and allow that to happen.

Professor Rose’s door was open a crack. He was Cecelia’s music history teacher. She peeked in and saw him at his computer, clicking around with the mouse. He was looking at women. Cecelia knocked and he shoved off from his desk, rolling across the small office on his chair. He pulled the door all the way open.

“Office hours?” said Cecelia.

Professor Rose frowned. “By all means.”

He opened a folding chair for Cecelia, then he sat back down. He didn’t get rid of what was on the computer screen, a couple dozen girls in bikinis.

“I need to drop your class,” Cecelia told him.

“Isn’t it too late?”

“Today’s the last day.”

“It’s not a demanding class, is it?”

“I can’t study. I can’t listen to music right now.”

Professor Rose scratched the corner of his mouth.

“It’s Reggie,” Cecelia said.

“I know you guys were close.”

“We had a band.”

“I see.”

“We used to listen to the music for this class together.”

Each girl on the computer screen had her hometown and occupation under her picture. Three of them were from Scottsdale, Arizona. Professor Rose’s office was cramped with record albums. He had a well-trimmed beard that somehow made him appear more troubled than if he’d had an unruly beard.

“I’m sorry you lost your friend,” he said. “He seemed like a good guy. I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend die on me. I’ve had a couple betray me. I don’t know what I should say to you. I never know what to say.” He looked amused, not genuinely. “People just stop living. They’re alive one day and not the next. It’s very weird, when you think about it. Isn’t it? It’s so strange. See, I’m terrible at this.”

“No,” Cecelia said. “You’re not terrible.”

Professor Rose opened a drawer, closed it. “What instrument do you play?” he asked.

“Just guitar.”

“What do you mean, just guitar?”

“Guitar,” Cecelia said.

“That’s better.”

Professor Rose unhurriedly ran his eyes over the shelves and shelves of records. His screensaver popped on, obliterating the women.

“Drop my class if you wish,” he told Cecelia, “but you should still listen to the music. If you’ve really got music, then music is all you’ve got. Look at me . I could’ve been playing in bands the last five years or I could’ve been teaching at this shithole. They let me stay here for five years, using me on the cheap.”

Cecelia nodded, not really understanding what Professor Rose was talking about. She didn’t like feeling sorry for Professor Rose. She didn’t feel like she needed to feel sorry for anyone.

“I’m not going back to giving lessons,” he said. “No more teaching of any kind. They say it’s satisfying, but I have to disagree.”

Cecelia sensed she needed to make her escape. She should’ve dropped the class over the computer and been done with it. It had seemed like the right thing to do, to let your professor know to his face you were quitting his class, but Cecelia now suspected that was an outdated custom. She suspected she’d always been too concerned with following the customs.

On his rounds, the moon high and shrunken above him, he encountered an injured bird. The bird was young and its wing was cleanly broken and when the wolf nosed in to examine, his breath on the bird, it did not wail in alarm. It was proud, perhaps. It shivered though there was never any wind over in this park, in this enclave where humans of bygone centuries had drawn their fears and their gratitude on the rocks. The young bird, the wolf knew, was likely the victim of young humans of the current century practicing at fun, young humans who were not afraid of nor grateful for anything. The wolf was stuck. He was trying to hear his instincts but if his instincts had been working he wouldn’t have to try to hear them. Normally he would’ve passed the bird without a thought, but he found himself considering the suffering of the little creature, found himself considering that the bird was young and proud and quiet. The wolf had to kill the bird. He wasn’t going to eat it because it would be a choke of feathers and brittle bones, but he had to kill it. The wolf gave himself a shake as if after a rain had caught him out in the open. There was no wind so the scent of the bird was gathering. The wolf looked up at the moon and it was even smaller. The bird’s eyes were set on the wolf. It had never seen a wolf and was never meant to see one. This bird was none of the wolf’s business. Its beak was a vivid yet translucent orange. Its feet looked disposable, not like they were meant to last a whole lifetime. They had, though — the bird’s life was at a close. The bird finally looked away. It was smaller than the wolf’s paw. The wolf realized suddenly that the bird, though tiny, was not young. The bird was fully grown and had survived a lot and that’s why it was proud. The bird was old like the wolf.

The wolf moved away a stride at a time, staring ahead at the silhouettes of the broken hills that marked the edge of the park, waiting for a new scent, and he even began to trot before he slowed and stopped again. He’d moved his body away but some other part of him was still standing over the bird. He turned, backtracking. He never backtracked. But he did now. He returned to the bird and without looking at the tiny animal he crushed the life out of it with his paw and shoved the carcass under a rock and fled.

The wolf darted through several clusters of half-built houses and then to make up time he cut through a vast shopping complex that had been built in the northern part of Albuquerque. He swiftly passed a bank of loading docks and then an area where plants were kept in pots and then a bunch of dumpsters that smelled like nothing, that smelled of steel and cardboard. There was a shop that reeked of cut hair and then the wolf rounded a restaurant and as he passed the back of it he noticed a radio sitting on an overturned crate. There were a bunch of other overturned crates and an ashtray that was empty because of the wind. The wolf smelled the humans inside the building. He smelled singular harsh liquids. The wolf did not know this area well and should not have been loitering. He sidled up to the dormant radio and tried to make sense of it. It was plugged into the wall and was producing only static. The back door of the restaurant was propped open and the wolf could see down a long, empty hall. He began nosing the big flat buttons on the radio and he found the one that changed the numbers on the screen. He was changing the station. The radio smelled like grease, which to the wolf was a clean smell. He changed the station and changed it again, trying to be gentle because each time he nudged the front of the radio it teetered. He heard voices and deeper voices and he heard human laughter. He heard music but it was drowned in static. He heard an organ, and a woman singing softly, and blocks of wood being tonked together. The static came in waves. The wolf didn’t understand enough about the radio. He looked behind him, into the open, and saw the parking lot give way to a pebbly field of nothing and he knew that beyond what he could see from this vantage the pebbly field gave way to a low road that led to the great, raised road. The wolf was far behind schedule. The business with the bird and now this radio. If the wolf was stopping here it should’ve been because he smelled food the humans had discarded. His rounds had once been his life, a duty that defined him, the most important part of him. The night had been everything and the day only a time in between that had to be tolerated. The wolf began poking all the buttons with his snout. There had been one red light on the radio’s front and now there were three. The noise was louder but still mostly hissing. There was chatter in several languages. Only when the radio clattered backward off the crate, skittering a bottle hard into the wall, did the wolf breathe full again. He knew what to do finally, knew to run away, to push himself to a righteous sprint that might get him to where he needed to go.