A Million Heavens

THE WOLF

The nighttime clouds were slipping across the sky as if summoned. The wolf was near the old market, a place he remembered enjoying, but he resolved not to go inside, resolved to maintain his pace, an upright trot he could’ve sustained for days. He was off his regular route. He had passed several lots of broken machines that weren’t even guarded by dogs and now he was crossing kept grounds—the trees in rows, the hedges tidy, the signs sturdy and sponged. He cleared the first wing of a well-lit building, catching his trotting reflection in the mirrored windows. His head jerked sidelong toward a parking lot and there he saw the quiet humans.

The wolf understood that he had stopped short in some sort of courtyard and he understood that these humans had snuck up on him, or he had snuck up on them without meaning to, which was the same. He retreated into the shadows. The humans hadn’t spotted him. They seemed lost to the world. They sat with their legs folded beneath them. Not a whisper. Not a sigh. The wolf couldn’t tell what these humans were doing. A lot of knowledge was obvious to the wolf and hidden from humans, but they had their own wisdom—deductions they’d been refining for centuries, beliefs they would cling to until they could prove them.

The wolf slipped into the neighboring truck dealership and crept under a row of huge-tired 4×4s. He snuck around behind the humans, who were all concentrating on the building in front of them. Not one of them was eating or drinking. Their hands were empty of telephones. The wolf could tell this had happened before. This gathering had occurred untold times, and the wolf had known nothing about it. He resisted the urge to clear his snout and break the quiet. The humans. They were even more vulnerable in the night than in the day. They’d convinced themselves they were in their element by raising buildings and planting trees, but the wolf knew that seas existed and that humans belonged near those seas and eventually would return to them. These humans were stranded in the desert and above them hung a moon that was also a desert.

This domain, this fin of the poor neighborhoods south of town, had not been part of the wolf’s rounds for many seasons. He checked in down here from time to time and the area seldom changed. The clinic had been built, the wolf didn’t remember when, and the market had shut down. The wolf would’ve liked to explore the old market, cruise the sharp-turning passageways of trapped air, but he could not pull himself away from these humans. He was putting himself behind schedule. The wolf could not have named any specific entity that threatened his territory, but that was irrelevant. He had rounds. The wolf was as trained as the terriers that slept in the humans’ beds. The wolf had been trained by his instincts, by forefathers he’d never known. He didn’t roll over or beg, but his trick was rounds, starting each evening near Golden and veering below Albuquerque to the loud safe flats near the airport. Up to the windless park where the humans’ ancestors had drawn on the rocks, then farther to Rio Rancho, where the scents from the restaurants were milder and children on glinting bikes coasted the hills. Bernalillo. The big river. The property where the Indians were kept. With plenty of time before dawn, the wolf would pick his way around the base of Sandia Mountain, winding up near Lofte, the northern outpost of the eastern basin, and there he would watch the new sun turn Lofte’s handful of buildings, which from a distance appeared to be holding hands like human children, the urgent red of hour-old blood.

The wolf’s paws were planted, his senses directed at the humans. Whatever they were doing, it wasn’t in order to have fun. Maybe they were deciding something, piling up their thoughts. Or perhaps they were waiting. The wolf knew about waiting. But humans, unlike the wolf, rarely waited without knowing what they were waiting for.

It was dangerous and without profit for the wolf to get intrigued with human affairs. At present he was huddled into the wheel well of a hulking pickup truck, putting himself behind schedule, because he wanted to hear the humans speak, wanted them to break their silence, because he wanted an explanation. He stood in continual anticipation of hearing a voice. A question asked. Human laughter. He worked his tongue around his teeth, tasting nothing, tasting his own warm breath. An involuntary growl was idling in his throat and he stifled it. The wolf could wait no longer. He perked his ears one last time, the wind dying out for him—still nothing to be heard. He forced himself to back out from between the two trucks that were hiding him and forced himself to skip the old market and make for the airport. He cleared his snout decisively. He resumed trotting, but after three or four blocks, while passing some weedy basketball courts that stood empty behind a high fence, he broke into a flat run and the scents he smelled then came mostly from the furnace of his own body.

SOREN’S FATHER

He of course hadn’t run his lunch truck route since he and Soren had arrived at the clinic, and his route was where he’d always sorted out his troubles, paltry as his old troubles seemed now with his son lying here in creepy serenity day after day. On his route—the traffic swelling and subsiding, the billboards sailing above with their slogans, the hungry awaiting him at the next stop—Soren’s father had counseled himself through the workaday decisions of parenting and running his small business. He was a creature of habit and his habits were now mostly wrecked. He still knocked out his pushups, four sets of fifty, right down on the linoleum floor of the clinic room. The floor was perfectly clean, waxed to hell and back, and Soren’s father, if he dropped a crumb from his food tray, always knelt down and picked it up and dropped it into the little wastebasket that was continually empty. The final ten pushups of the final set brought grunts out of Soren’s father that he could not stifle, and sometimes Nurse Lula came and peeked in the door and saw Soren’s father flat on his front. Nurse Lula was the one who’d shown Soren’s father the secret smoking spot, so he didn’t have to descend all the way to the ground floor and walk out front and stand under the carport. There was a landing that jutted from the sixth floor staircase. The door to the landing was marked DO NOT OPEN ALARM WILL SOUND, but this wasn’t true. You could walk right out there and see in every direction. There was a casino in the middle distance, and way off a spine of maroon peaks. Soren’s father didn’t enjoy cigarettes as much as he had before, the smoke chugging out his half-open truck window as he navigated the city; now he used smoking to take breaks from the clinic room the way the folks he served on his route used smoking to take breaks from their factory jobs. Sometimes Lula was out on the landing. She had wide-set eyes and a gentle manner that made her seem holy. When she spoke to Soren’s father she avoided talking about her children but sometimes she slipped. They were girls and the younger one was taller than the older one.

Soren’s father was losing weight already, but it wasn’t because of the hospital food. Everyone complained about the food, but Soren’s father was used to eating from his truck—a soft, odorless sandwich or half-stale apple fritter or limp hot dog. He’d always fed Soren well enough, taking him down to the fancy grocery store with the hot bar and letting him point out what he wanted, but as for himself, he couldn’t see wasting the leftovers from the truck. He was accustomed to eating in traffic, so when he ate his dinner in the clinic room his chewing sounded monstrous against the quiet. He was eating as much as he ever had, so it must’ve been pure worry that was taking the pounds off him. There’d been a scale in the room and Soren’s father had Lula take it away.

It was hard to know what to do with the quiet. Soren’s father couldn’t get used to it. The quiet was impure, same as if you were up in the woods somewhere. The woods had chipmunks and falling pinecones and tunneling beetles and in the clinic there were machines beeping and whirring and nurses shuffling around in their chunky white sneakers and the rattling of carts. Soren’s father had never watched much TV and Soren, back when he was awake, hadn’t shown any interest in it either. Soren’s father used to try putting cartoons on their living room set and Soren would stare at the screen suspiciously for a minute and then move on to something else. Soren’s father had long since stopped trying to watch the news, which was both depressing and uninformative. He was a reader of science fiction, a habit he’d picked up to fill downtime between stops on his route, and now he read in the room, occasionally aloud, wanting Soren to hear his voice. Soren’s father’s interest in interstellar goings-on was waning, but with a paperback in his hands he was not completely at the mercy of the clinic’s busy, endless hush. He could put words into his mind and, when he felt like it, into the still air of his son’s room. One of the characters Soren’s father was reading about had been cast into a trance by means of a dark art that was part science and part magic, and Soren’s father had begun to skip those passages. He didn’t want to reach the end of the book, where the noble young trooper would predictably awaken.

It was Wednesday, and evening now, so the vigil had begun. Soren’s father hadn’t heard them gathering but they were down there. Soren’s father’s mental state was one of being acutely aware that he was in a fog, and the vigils weren’t helping clear that fog. He parted the blinds. This was the third Wednesday and their numbers were growing. They were far below, most of them bowing their heads, and it disconcerted Soren’s father that he couldn’t see any of their faces. They were like those schools of tiny fish he remembered from boyhood filmstrips that moved in concert like a single inscrutable organism. They seemed practiced, experienced, but where would they have gotten experience at this sort of thing? Nurse Lula said there had been vigils at the clinic before but it was usually a one-time thing. She remembered last year a cop had been shot in the abdomen during a traffic stop and a crew of folks in uniforms had come one night with candles and had each slurped down one bottle of the cop’s favorite beer. These people showing up for Soren didn’t light candles and they didn’t drink. Soren’s father didn’t know how he was supposed to feel about them. He worried that they knew something he didn’t, that they had access to a gravity of spirit that was beyond him. And the vigilers made him feel exposed too, onstage, so whenever they were gathered out there he stayed hidden behind the meticulously dusted blinds.

Soren’s father had seen them arriving that first Wednesday, before he knew they would become a vigil, when they were merely a half-dozen people loitering in the corner of the parking lot. A security guard had approached that first week and looked them over and elected to leave them be. Last week, with close to fifty people in the troop, a news van had rolled into the lot and a girl in an orange scarf had tried to talk to the vigilers. She didn’t get a thing out of them. Not one word. They didn’t stay long, the news folks. Nobody was beating drums or getting drunk or holding signs. No one was crying. Nobody was doing anything that could be readily mocked.

THE PIANO TEACHER

The lie she had come up with was that a library branch on the other side of town was screening old monster movies each Wednesday evening. She couldn’t tell her daughter she was going to sit outside a defunct flea market half the night, watching people a football field away as they vigiled. Her daughter wouldn’t understand vigiling and she certainly wouldn’t understand spying on a vigil from the high ground of an adjacent lot. And she also couldn’t tell her daughter she wanted to be near the boy. The piano teacher had climbed into the car her daughter had given her as a hand-me-up, a high-riding silver station wagon, and had sat at swaying red light after swaying red light and crossed Route 66 and now she slowed passing the clinic, which was out of place here on the edge of town, the only tall building in sight. The vigilers huddling in the parking lot were like cattle awaiting a storm.

The piano teacher passed them by and rolled onto the grounds of the market. She didn’t feel she was superior to the other vigilers, and in fact observed the rules she knew they followed—didn’t speak during the vigils, or turn the car radio on—but she was more than a vigiler. She was one of the forces that had put them in the parking lot of that clinic. She could do what they did, could open her windows and endure the chill air rather than running the heater in her car, but the vigilers could never do what she’d done, which was to halt a miracle. The others, hugging themselves loosely in the sand-swept parking lot, were hoping to gain something, but the piano teacher was only hoping to feel sorry enough.

So here she was in the dark in a part of town she wouldn’t have visited in a hundred years. The moon was strong and the piano teacher could see the writing on the market stalls, all in Spanish, cartoonish drawings of vegetables and shoes. Between the market and the clinic was a used car lot full of tall gleaming pickups. From this distance the clinic looked like a spaceship that had run out of gas. Or like a miniature of itself, a toy.

The piano teacher had thought for sure she’d seen something moving in the shadows, and now she saw a creature ambling across the parking lot that must’ve been an enormous coyote. He was big for a coyote. The creature seemed male, though the piano teacher wasn’t sure why. He moved with a strut. The piano teacher watched him pick his way along the fence, which he probably could’ve jumped at any time. He came into the moonlight and passed back out of it and was gone in one complete moment, and the piano teacher, after the fact, thought of rolling up her windows. The piano teacher could not have said what color the animal was, one of those dark shades of the desert that was more a feeling than a color. He hadn’t even glanced at her. The piano teacher looked at the sky, at the clinic, down at her hands, at the buttons that locked the doors and ran the windows up and down. The boy had really played that music, had written it or channeled it or who knew where it had come from. He had played his soul, without ever having previously touched a piano. If he’d stayed conscious there would’ve been calls coming in from all over to hear the boy play, from the wealthy craving a novelty and maybe even from conservatories wanting another prodigy. But the boy didn’t know how to play. The boy had played what he’d played but he had no idea about piano. He was in a coma now, so instead of a prodigy many thought of him as some sort of angel, though they were afraid to use that word. He didn’t know how to play piano but he was an instrument himself, they believed. And of course many were firm that there had to be a medical explanation, folks who would cling to their practicality to the end. And none of these people had even heard the music. They knew it had been played and that experts had deemed it original, but only about a dozen people had heard the music and the piano teacher was one of them, and she was the only one who’d heard it that first time, who’d heard the boy play it live. If anyone knew the truth it was the piano teacher, but she knew nothing. She was a dumb witness. There wasn’t a thing wrong with Soren physically, the newspaper had been clear about that until they’d finally let the story drop because there were no new developments. There was nothing at all wrong with him except he was not conscious.

The piano teacher had decided she would always depart last. She would remain until every last vigiler down in the parking lot was headed back to regular life. She would wait for the exodus that would occur between one and two in the morning, and after the last car had left the clinic and the wind was the only sound again, she would turn her key and leave the market and steal the last faraway glance at Soren’s blank window up on the top floor.

CECELIA

She stayed in line with a convoy of cars leaving the clinic until the interstate loomed up. Car after car pulled onto the west ramp, heading toward other parts of the city, and only Cecelia broke off and climbed the ramp going east. She was already on the outskirts, and after she cleared the jutting foot of Sandia she would be clear of town entirely. She lived out in Lofte, a stagnant outpost on the once-lively Turquoise Trail, about a twenty-minute drive into the desert and then another ten minutes on the state road. She had a stop to make before home, at the cemetery that served Lofte and the other basin towns—Golden, Hill City, Cromartie. There were few other cars on the road this late, and they either screamed past like rockets or drifted around in the right lane. Though it was nowhere near morning, light was bleeding up from the corners of the sky.

When Cecelia reached the grounds of the cemetery she couldn’t help but feel like she was trespassing, like she was going to get run off by a rent-a-cop, but the gate was wide open and the streetlights along the lane were burning. She pulled around a curve, assuring herself that she was using the cemetery precisely as it was meant to be used. No one could say what the right or wrong time was to visit the dead. The place was absolutely still. Going this slow, Cecelia could hear her engine gargling and hacking and she felt rude. She let the car cruise without touching the gas or brake. She didn’t hear any birds, didn’t hear an airplane in the sky. The place likely didn’t have a night security guard and Cecelia didn’t see any cameras on the lampposts, and in short order she went from fearing surveillance to feeling too unwatched. She wasn’t being monitored and she wasn’t being looked out for. She could do anything, but what she was going to do was absolutely nothing, just like the last time she’d been here. When she’d come to Reggie’s funeral almost a month ago she’d lost her nerve and stayed in her car, and the same thing was happening tonight. She had the same feeling, helpless and unhinged. She parked at the curb in the same spot as before and wound her window all the way down like before. She tipped her head toward the sky. There was no weather, not even the ambitious little clouds that had been blowing over the vigils.

There was a modest hill between Cecelia and the gravesite over which, the day of the funeral, she’d seen the tops of the tall men’s heads—Reggie’s father and uncles probably, men Cecelia had never met. The funeral party had been partially shaded by the cottonwood trees. The cut grass sprawling in every direction had struck Cecelia as the greenest thing she’d ever seen, the fresh flowers around the headstones jarring bursts of color. Even with the engine and the radio off, she hadn’t heard anything that was said about Reggie, any of the eulogy. She’d heard only a reasonable daytime wind that had little to whistle against. She’d been unable to raise herself from her car that day, unable to shut the door as gently as possible and blend into the group at the gravesite to cry and pray like everyone else. She’d sat behind the steering wheel in a black dress she’d picked up that day at a consignment shop. When the ceremony was over and the bereaved had begun descending toward the parking lot, Cecelia had fired up her engine and fled. And it had been only a couple hollow days later that Cecelia found herself at a vigil for a boy in a coma, part of a mild crowd hungry for unspoken rules. That she knew how to do. She knew how to vigil. She knew how to sit passively. She’d logged hours and hours down below the sixth floor of the clinic but after a month had still not laid eyes on her friend’s grave.

Reggie sometimes didn’t seem gone. He did but he didn’t. Cecelia had never met anyone like him and she had thought that even before he’d passed away. When Reggie had been doing nothing he never seemed to be wasting time, and when he was doing a lot he never seemed to rush. He’d spent his energy and his money and his mind at the correct rate, never hoarding or throwing to the wind. His temper was rare and expertly wielded. And yes, Cecelia had admired his hard-earned tan and his loose-limbed mannerisms and his arresting jawline. She had watched him with more than the curiosity of the bored as he did everyday tasks like making coffee or changing his shoes, and she’d listened with more than a bandmate’s professional interest each time he’d shared a new song in rehearsal. She was glad she and Reggie had never succumbed to any demoralizing trysts or clumsy grope sessions. Truly. Now that he was gone, she was grateful she’d be able to miss him in a straightforward way, as a fallen ally. She didn’t know how to grieve him, only how to miss him, as if he’d only moved away rather than died.

Cecelia breathed the night air, smelling neither flowers nor cut grass. She smelled her car. She didn’t want to go home yet, didn’t want to face her mother or the stupid chickens her mother kept in the yard. The chickens were all her mother cared about any more. Her mother wasn’t well. Mess around with chickens and watch television, that’s what the woman did. She didn’t do anything else. Cecelia didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to walk into that house that always stank of the elk stew her uncle liked to drop off on the doorstep. Chickens. TV. Elk stew. Cecelia squinted. It was the middle of the night but she could see everything around her, like the whole cemetery had moved off and left a shadow of itself. The upholstery was sagging from the roof of Cecelia’s car and she reached and pressed it back into place.

With the loss of Reggie, Cecelia had lost her band. She had been in a band and now that band did not exist. It was no more. No more rehearsal. No more arguing with Nate, the drummer. No more going to the tragic little gigs. Cecelia’s ears would ring no more. She would sing no harmony. She wouldn’t wear that men’s dress shirt with the wide collar that she always wore to shows. Was it a big deal, no more band? She couldn’t tell. Was school a big deal? Or the shell her mother was retreating into these days? Cecelia was a dormant guitar player. She was probably a dormant daughter.

The upholstery sagged down again, and this time Cecelia pushed it back in place with both hands, pressing upward on the roof of her car and pressing herself down into her seat. She pressed until her arms began to quake.

REGGIE

The piano sat in the center of what Reggie was calling the main hall. The room was spacious, but still the piano dominated it. The piano looked disapproving, dauntingly formal, like pianos often did in unfamiliar places. The instrument was ancient and well kept, of a dark but faded wood, and its bench was upholstered with leather the color of a radish. There was no ceiling to the hall Reggie was being kept in, or else it was too lofty to be seen. The place was blanketed in uniform shadow. It seemed alive, the hall, or at least not dead. If Reggie held his breath there was true quiet, pure of electricity running its course, of insect industry, of breezes.

Reggie had a mat to lie down on, even though he didn’t sleep. He rested, like a great fish might. There was no way to track time, so Reggie rested when he felt tired of not resting. He remembered real sleep, back in life, black and hard and oblivious to everything but dreams. He remembered waking full of unhurried purpose. His mat was right down on the floor, like a monk or a drug addict. It smelled worn and tidy.

After Reggie had been in the hall what felt like a couple weeks, a library appeared. It didn’t contain a desk, so it was a library rather than a study. It was attached to the main hall but the light was cleaner in the library, bright enough to read comfortably. Reggie didn’t read, though. He sat bolt upright in the library’s grand, creaky chair, which was covered in the same red leather as the piano bench, and flipped backward and forward through the ornate volumes, listening to the pages and smelling the bindings. He didn’t have what it took to read one of the books. It wasn’t a crisis of energy; it was that Reggie knew none of the books could help him. Reading a book seemed local and desperate. And the fact that people had sat down and written the books instead of doing pretty much anything else with their time on earth—taking a walk with a friend, eating chocolate, tinkering with a weed whacker in an oil-smelling shed—made Reggie sad. The thought of all the songs he’d written made him sad. All any writer could do was either document what was known or speculate. Reggie didn’t need to imagine a different world because he was in one. He didn’t want to celebrate or complain about the world he’d been snatched from, which was now so fathomable. It was easy for him to see now that the living world had always given him what he needed. This new place had no idea what to do with him. He sat in the big chair and ran his fingers over the rough cloth of the book covers. He shuffled through the pages with his thumb, picking out random words. When he needed to break the quiet, he snapped the books shut.

Reggie didn’t believe he was being punished, but it was possible he was awaiting punishment. He wasn’t religious, but of course he was aware of purgatory, familiar with the concept of the afterlife utilizing a waiting room. He didn’t think he’d committed any acts that warranted eternal justice, that warranted Hell or whatever, but he also knew sometimes you broke rules without knowing it. Or sometimes you were supposed to do something and did nothing instead, a sin of omission. And now and then, he wouldn’t have been surprised, your paperwork got lost or the person you needed to speak to was on vacation or whoever was in charge just didn’t like the look of you. At least this particular waiting room wasn’t cramped or foul-smelling. It didn’t matter how long he had to wait, Reggie reasoned—it wasn’t like he had to be somewhere. It wasn’t like he was going to be late to band practice or run out of daylight working on a yard.

The trouble was the solitude. In life, Reggie had never minded being alone, but this was different. Back in life, solitude was temporary. Even if a person was in jail, not that Reggie had been, there were guards and other inmates. If you were driving across the empty desert, you were on your way to see someone. If you were a child banished to your bedroom, you would accidentally fall asleep and before you knew it the morning was underway and here was Mom making pancakes. There was no waking up for Reggie because there was no sleep. There were no other inmates. No pancakes. No map on which to track his progress.

Reggie walked laps around the main hall, managing at times to feel like he was strolling instead of pacing. He felt he had very little peripheral vision, though he couldn’t be sure about this. He had no aches or itches to ground him, no hunger that could rise up and concern him. He still had his scars. He could feel that his tooth was still chipped from when an edger had shot a pebble up at him. He found himself fretting over the yards he’d tended back in the living world. He imagined them growing dumpy. It took more skill to keep a desert yard presentable than to run a mower over a lawn of St. Augustine grass. Not many people knew what they were doing with desert yards. Most guys dumped weed killer everywhere and plopped down some pots. Most guys did whatever was quickest and cheapest.

Once in a while Reggie stood in front of the piano