The wolf did not enjoy these meetings. He did not enjoy watching the humans stifle their sneezes to preserve the quiet. They were young and old, these humans, men and women. None of them would laugh or cry. This parking lot, this hush, made the silly serious and the weak strong, but none of these humans would ever be as serious as the wolf. He was fascinated because the humans weren’t acting like humans, but there was nothing in this for him. And probably the humans were acting like humans — probably they were intentionally acting unlike themselves, which only humans would do. In some way the wolf could not detect, they were competing or bargaining.
It was not a struggle for the wolf to leave this time. He shimmied out from under the truck and galloped vacantly in the direction he always went. Like the moon, he saw everything, and seeing everything was the same as seeing nothing.
He galloped until he heard drumming, and when he snapped back into the moment he was startled to be in Rio Rancho. He could not recall his journey up the western flank of the city but he felt the fatigue of the journey. He tracked toward the drums, soon hearing other instruments too. This was music being made by live humans right this moment, deep in the night. He knew if he got close enough he would feel the music. It was the jubilant soundtrack of parades. The wolf was nearing the high school. He leapt a fence and crossed a grass field where he’d seen humans attempt to outrun each other. He snuck through a courtyard crowded with a thousand tiny locked doors and smelled the glue of books and smelled cotton and salt and the plant the young humans burned and inhaled.
When the wolf emerged from the school buildings he was socked by the thump of the drums and rising blasts of the horns and by the fragrance of the lush grass getting chewed under the boots of the band members as they pivoted this way and that. He took cover behind a closed-up concession stand. The bleachers were empty. The leader would stop the playing and raise his voice and then motion for the show to resume. The leader wasn’t wearing a hat like the others but he was wearing white gloves that seemed to glow. The wolf was enthralled and had no sense of what was behind him or whether he was obeying or defying his instincts. The music was so loud that for a moment he didn’t pay attention to the scents on the air. These arranged yet wild sounds would outlive the instruments that produced them and certainly outlive the young humans that played the instruments and the music would exist, somewhere, after even the wolf was dead and gone.
SOREN’S FATHER
After peeking to make sure all the vigilers had gone, he raised the blinds to the dark, petering foothills. His coffee had gone cold. It was hard to stand up straight. His back had begun to ache from the orange-upholstered armchair in the clinic room, but going out and locating a store and talking to a salesman and choosing and purchasing his own chair and having it brought up to his son’s room on the sixth floor was not something he was going to do. Everything was daunting. He had even been skipping his pushups. He wasn’t going to do them unless he could do the full two hundred, and when the time came to do them, after breakfast, light swelling into the window, he found that he was unable to get himself down on the floor. He thought he could already tell a difference, that his triceps were succumbing to atrophy. It didn’t take long at his age. He was even smoking less — one around midday and one after dinner and one late at night when he couldn’t sleep. The nurse who’d shown him the smoking spot, Lula, had switched shifts and the new nurse was too young and businesslike and made Soren’s father nervous when she came in, flashing her practiced smile, and shifted Soren so he wouldn’t get bedsores. Soren’s father had quit putting socks and shoes on his son each morning. He had stalled out on his science fiction novel, and he told himself it was because the shoddy sleep he’d been getting made his eyes ache. That wasn’t really it. The problem was that all the crises of the galaxy seemed either too large to fathom or too small to worry about. Things would work out in the book, and he didn’t feel he needed to know exactly how.
He knew how bad it was for him that he wasn’t running his lunch truck route. He had always run the route. It was the spine of his days. Everyone looked forward to seeing him on their breaks, waited for him and saluted him and marveled at how fast he made change. There were five trucks in his fleet, and only four were in use right now. Soren’s father’s truck was sitting in the parking lot, sand blowing into the grill and collecting around the tires.
Still nothing was wrong with Soren other than his coma. His vitals were strong. His skin was fine. No colds. No seizures. There would be no drama, no lesser trouble that might offer relief or distraction.
CECELIA
She was up in the booth. She had a view of four auditoriums, but only one was used at this hour, a class about architecture. This particular professor never needed anything complicated from Cecelia. He used an old-fashioned slide projector that never broke. The professor was very old, kindly. He was exactly what Cecelia believed a professor should be. He had white, mussed hair and patches on his sleeves.
A lot of the younger professors had latched on to the idea that they were doing something wrong if they didn’t utilize all available technology. They wanted to incorporate the Internet and show everything on big projectors that hung from the ceilings and could only be operated by remote control. They wanted every kid to have a laptop and have them all networked and downloading and everyone was supposed to wear headphones and use thumb drives. Despite her A/V job, Cecelia was not savvy in these matters. Whenever a professor had a problem that was over her head, she would go through the same routine. She’d shut the whole system down and power it back up, duck down and mess with some wires underneath the cabinet, press a few random buttons, put her hand to her chin and shake her head and say, “I’ve never seen it act this way before. Something’s really wrong with it. They’ll have to get a technician out here in the morning.” Usually the professors were understanding, but occasionally one would say, “I thought you were the technician.” So far, Cecelia’s boss seemed not to have caught on that she didn’t know the first thing about high-tech computer equipment.
Cecelia cracked open her poetry anthology and read a couple verses about small boys playing in backyards. The poems were hushed and reasonable and made Cecelia drowsy. There was another girl who was supposed to be in the booth with her this hour, who always helped keep Cecelia awake, but she hadn’t shown. The girl had a lot of friends and always came in with a different hairstyle. Her name was Marie.
Cecelia closed her eyes for a few minutes and then a knock came at the booth door. She looked down at the architecture class. Nothing was amiss. The professor was still pointing and lecturing.
“It’s open,” Cecelia said. She sat up straight and tucked her hair behind her ear.
A guy holding a pizza pushed the door back. He had a ponytail. “This is from Marie,” he said. “She felt bad about leaving you alone in here.” His T-shirt was bright yellow and it said YELLOW SHIRT across the front.