A Million Heavens (18 page)

She returned to the music building. The card in the slot outside rehearsal space 4 said Thus Poke Sarah's Thruster, and from inside there was noise. Cecelia peeked in the window, knowing that no one inside would spot her because she didn't care if they did. Apathy was her camouflage. Nate was behind his drum set, banging on it, an obnoxious look on his face. He was keeping the beat exactly. He always could do
that
: hold the beat like a metronome. The song they were playing wasn't one of Reggie's. Cecelia had never heard it.

The guy on bass and the guy on guitar looked like brothers, the sort who bicker constantly but never want to be apart. They didn't seem like anything special. There was another guy, on keyboards. He was the talent. He had on a loose-fitting ski cap and no shoes. He didn't have to think about what he was doing, didn't have to contort his soul. Yes, they were a band. No denying it.

Cecelia didn't want to stick around long enough to hear them play one of Reggie's songs. She felt as though she'd gotten a bead on an enemy, and she wasn't sure if hearing Nate and his minions tromp around on the hallowed ground of Reggie's imagination would add fuel to her fire or discourage her. She was shrinking her soul, and discouragement was an indulgence. She backed away from the studio door as if children were sleeping behind it and descended onto the main walk, blending herself in with
a late-day stream of amiable young people who were filled, each and every, with vague intentions of making themselves better. Cecelia hid among them, walking how they walked. Her intention was to be worse, and so far what she'd accomplished was stealing twenty-five dollars and mouthing off to a cop. She needed to escalate her tactics. She needed to reach a darker height. If she couldn't, then she was as feckless as any of these girls in their ballerina shoes or these soft-eyed unshaven boys who'd never have it in them to do anything despicable. Cecelia had enemies and now she was learning how to
be
an enemy. This herd of kids Cecelia was walking along with, all hats and fancy cell phones, was on its way nowhere.

Soren's birthday came and went. He was a year older. He was aging, at least on paper. Soren's father had not bought his son a gift. The bike he'd bought him for Christmas was still at home, in the utility closet behind the washer. He hadn't gotten Soren a cake or even a card. He hadn't mentioned the birthday to Gee. One of the nurses had stopped by and asked if Soren's father wanted the staff to do anything, to gather and sing or bring up balloons, but he'd declined. Soren had missed his own birthday, and Soren's father had to entertain the possibility that he might miss another. The two of them could be sitting in this same room with the same expressions on their faces a year from now. That wasn't out of the question. It very much
was
the question. Soren could be in a coma a year from now and he could be in a coma a year after that.

Soren had been skinny before but now his legs were sticks. He'd gotten taller but weighed less than before the coma. Soren's father hadn't done a pushup in ages and his arms were feeble. He and his boy were shrinking. Soren's father wondered how many birthday cards had come to the clinic for Soren. Maybe none. Maybe the only strangers still interested in him were the vigilers, and there were only about twenty of them left, the true believers, the zealots—or at least they
wanted
to be those things. Soren's father had sold off another lunch truck, to the same guy who'd bought the
first one. He didn't like having a truck sitting outside the clinic waiting for him. Maybe he didn't
want
to resume his route. Maybe he'd been sick of driving that fucking truck. Maybe he'd been sick of smoking cigarettes, sick of the smell of heat-lamp beef tips. Maybe he wanted to blow the cash from the trucks taking Gee out to fancy dinners. Maybe thinking about the future, tomorrow or next month or next year, was the most futile thing a person could engage in.

Soren's father stood at the window of the clinic room looking out at the expanding desert instead of looking at his son, who'd had a haircut that day and didn't look right. The haircut made him look older and dopey, and he was young and sharp. Soren's father gazed out past the quadrant of the parking lot where the vigilers always sat, missing them a little despite himself, looking forward to Wednesday and their mute company. There was an auto body shop and a cell phone store. There was a vacant lot beyond the interstate where a hot-air balloon crew was sitting around munching on apples, waiting for tourists. Above everything was a blue sky, a sky the precise color of a pickup Soren's father had owned when he was young, back when a blue sky meant something.

He sat on the bench at the piano, the gashed upholstery pinching the backs of his legs. He did not feel bound by time. He was free of the burden and crutch of seconds and centuries. He sat on the bench, his feet resting on the pedals instead of on the cold ground and his hands resting in his lap. There was no dust whatsoever on the piano. The air in Reggie's tiny chamber was the purest he'd ever breathed. Reggie removed his shirt, something he'd often done when he wrote songs back when he was alive. He folded the shirt and rested it up on top of the piano.

He was at the mercy of the afterlife whether he surrendered the songs or not. To act like he wielded any leverage was delusional. Reggie told himself he wasn't giving in because of the deteriorating living conditions, nor to squelch the shrill vibration in his brain, nor even because the solitude
was too much for him, the lack of answers, the lack of everything—love, hunger, sleep. He was giving in because there was nothing noble about holding out. There was egotism and defiance in holding out, and probably even toughness, he could admit, but nothing truly noble. Reggie had been able to accept in life that he couldn't have all the answers, and he would accept the same in death. He knew that the notion that one got what one deserved was childish and his obstinacy concerning relinquishing his songs had become a form of begging. Begging for answers about the day of his accident, on that straight, familiar road, answers about this new life that wasn't a life at all and wasn't new anymore. Reggie was going to wind up where he wound up. Someone had a plan for him and that plan was none of his business.

Reggie tried not to hold his breath. He raised his hands and let his fingers fall upon the keys and felt a great relief at acting rather than resisting action. He was a man, though a dead man, and what brought him peace was work. The notes were strong and Reggie was not rusty in his playing. The song danced out through his hands, the buzzing in his head subsiding, the notes filling the void that was Reggie's world. He had never cried as a grown person and didn't know how, but he felt the trials he'd endured swelling up in his heart. It was hard not to play too fast. He was finally complaining. The song was a lament. The little room without a ceiling had the most robust acoustics Reggie had ever heard. It felt like he was composing the song as he went, though that could not have been true. He'd been writing the song all along in a secret part of his brain, the part where he'd hidden Cecelia from himself for all that time. As the song opened up before Reggie he wondered what Cecelia would think of it. He wished she could hear it. It was good, he knew. What he wanted was to see Cecelia frown at it, pleased.

She woke up groggy, her throat dry and stomach unsettled. Her mind was as quiet as a closed theater, but there was turmoil in her body, in her
midsection and limbs. She felt like she'd been breathing something other than air all night. Cecelia had already gotten used to leaving her mother in bed, leaving her mother to deal with the morning on her own, but this morning she was pointedly thankful at being able to slip into clothes and swish some mouthwash and sneak out of the house unmolested. She felt like she hadn't slept all night but she had.

It wasn't until she was in her car, after pulling up onto the interstate and settling into the right lane as was her habit, that she realized she was humming. She wasn't a person who hummed or whistled, but she was humming and not stopping. Maybe she wasn't stopping because she wanted to know what the song was. She didn't recognize it. It wasn't a finished melody. She could hear notes in her head that corresponded to the notes she was humming. She could've stopped, but for some reason she wasn't. She heard piano, fluttery at first but jostling into a song, and then suddenly decisive. She wanted to speak out but she didn't. She kept her window closed. Cecelia had had songs stuck in her head before, but these notes were way inside, like trace amounts of lovely poison. They continued as she drove and drove, the sky getting clearer along with the music. The discomfort in her body was fading. Her stomach felt okay. Her head didn't feel normal but it didn't ache. The song sounded like it was being played on a very old piano, like a lot of the songs in the History of Music class Cecelia had dropped. This song wasn't from History of Music. Cecelia had never heard it before. She'd never heard anything similar. She wasn't humming anymore. It wasn't necessary. Her throat was quiet and she heard the song all the more clearly.

During her first class, she could barely hear the professor. The song was getting louder and the noises from the outside were falling away. Cecelia found she could slow the song down in her mind, but she couldn't stop it. It was either repeating or it had no end. Cecelia was grinding her teeth. She wished she had gum. There was a pop quiz and Cecelia wrote her name on the paper and handed it back in without answering any of the questions. The forced heat in the classroom was making her eyes water and her sinuses tingle.

When the class was dismissed, she went out and stood under a tree in
the liberal arts quad. She could hear singing now, along with the piano. She heard singing and the voice was her own. The lyrics were as unfamiliar as the music, but the voice singing them was hers. She looked around. Sorority girls and a yoga guy and a maintenance man. A professor from the journalism school. They were all going about their days, wishing to be better people. There were no leaves on the tree Cecelia was standing under. The ground beneath her was too soft. She didn't know what to do. She went to the student union and ate lunch off by herself. She tried thinking of another song and couldn't keep straight even the simplest, catchiest pop melody. She picked her sandwich apart and then pushed it away. She put her head down on her bag and tried to sleep and pretended to sleep, but she was nowhere near drowsy. The other kids were finding lines to wait in. They were getting out on the sidewalks and striding toward reasonable destinations. Cecelia couldn't blend in with them anymore. She felt ridiculous. She went to a deserted part of campus and sat under a sculpture that resembled a shipwreck and cried for a time in the shadows down under the hull.

By the time her afternoon class wrapped up Cecelia was way beyond liking or disliking the song. She'd spent a day with it. She knew every note and lyric by heart and she always would. She'd collected some handouts her religion professor distributed, but she couldn't remember a word the woman had said. The song was poppy but not upbeat. It groused impalpably, it's underlying tone one of grievance.

Cecelia went to her evening class, a class focused on the city of Paris during certain decades. The song was as clear as ever, but not as insistent as it had been. Or maybe Cecelia was exhausted. The song seemed to have gotten comfortable with her, too-loud background music. Cecelia could almost follow the thread of the lecture. Marie, the girl from the A/V booth who'd sent her the pizza, was in this class. She winked at Cecelia. Cecelia sat in the back and held a pen over a blank sheet of paper as ten minutes passed, then another ten, then another, admitting something to herself, a fact Cecelia had no idea what to do with but could no longer avoid. She knew what Reggie's songs were like and they
were precisely like this one. She had the same feeling in her guts, the same apprehensive joy, as when she'd first heard any of Reggie's songs. The structure, the lyrics—none of it was done in a manner that would've occurred to Cecelia or anyone else. Cecelia had written plenty of songs and they were a far cry from this one. This wasn't her style and it wasn't anyone else's in the living world. It was the unmistakable style of Reggie Mercer. A fact was a fact. The Paris professor was going on about plumbing and bearded painters, and Cecelia stared toward him dumbly, nodding as if she appreciated his knowledge, watching the piece of chalk he kept tossing up and catching.

After class, Marie came back and sat in a desk near Cecelia. She had colorful eye makeup on. Marie always invited Cecelia to go out with her at night, and this time Cecelia did not turn her down. Cecelia didn't want to be alone. She didn't want to go back home with this song in her head, didn't want to go back home regardless.

They walked together to the parking lot and then Cecelia followed Marie to a heavily balconied high-rise, where Cecelia parked her car and hopped into Marie's brand new volkswagen Bug. They drove across town and visited some people who lived in an old church building. There were a handful of young men around who were continually engaged in tasks. There were girls, all of whom had long pink fingernails, and they lolled about on the couches. It was an environment where a conversation would never survive, and Cecelia was glad for that. The young men kept bringing sweating pitchers and the girls kept emptying them into their glasses. Marie sat next to Cecelia with a hand on Cecelia's forearm. None of these people knew Reggie. Marie hadn't known him. Outside of Nate badgering her, Cecelia hadn't spoken about Reggie since his death. She never felt like explaining how she felt about him, explaining the quiet benevolent edginess he'd embodied, explaining what was happening now, his song.