He had taken to drink, had become a permanent shadow in the bar that at first he’d had no use for and later had warmed to. It was now his favored haunt in the hall. He wasn’t sure whether he could get drunk like living people, but everything was softer once he’d made a dent in a bottle. Sometimes, drinking, he felt the presence of time in the hall, of progress. Sometimes he felt he could achieve real sleep. Sometimes he felt he was learning, becoming wise, but that was what all drinkers thought. He was keeping close to the liquor to avoid a problem of the mind, as anyone might, but there was a practical problem he wasn’t going to be able to ignore much longer: the bottles had quit refreshing themselves. The hall had been pleasant enough as long as Reggie had been producing songs, but now that he was blocked there was no breeze for the hammock, the hall was chillier and dimmer, and when he left the bar and took his shirt off and stared at the keys and then put his shirt back on and returned to the bar, the bottles were not full. There had been a few empties, and then the number of empties and fulls had been equal, and now Reggie had only three unopened bottles and a splash left in the bottom of a fourth. Reggie didn’t feel he was being bullied or coaxed like before, but rather that he was being neglected. The hall wasn’t shrinking, but it wasn’t being tended. It smelled musty. There was a crack in one of the walls that Reggie could fit his fingertip in that ran from as high as he could reach all the way to the floor.
Reggie had come to understand that he’d been writing songs for Cecelia. He had not been writing songs he believed she would enjoy, but had been writing songs about her, about his feelings for her. He’d come to understand that. He’d learned from his own songs how much he had loved this woman, Cecelia. And when he got down to two bottles, two amber allotments of twenty-six-year-aged St. Magdalene scotch, he could see that all the songs he’d written in the hall were insufficient. They were songs of Cecelia that weren’t good enough, that did neither his affection nor its object justice. The songs were about love, like all songs, and they were clogged and fettered by Reggie’s talent, by his know-how. Talent was perfectly meaningless. He needed to write a song that laid the cards on the table with no cleverness. Not write it, just deliver it. Art was Reggie’s trouble. He needed to bring forth a song that couldn’t get in the way of itself, a song devoid of style. He didn’t know if he knew how to do this but if he couldn’t then he wouldn’t be here. He’d be somewhere else with some other impossible assignment.
Reggie cracked the next bottle. He’d sensed all this from the first moment he’d been blocked, and that was why he’d resigned himself to the bar. It wasn’t only weakness, escape. It was because he had a better chance of stumbling upon the song he needed than of searching it out. It was because this time instead of dividing his love by writing it into a song, he had to let a song be nothing but love. Reggie had picked his love into strands and woven it into artifice.
THE WOLF
It had been so long without a song, he hardly remembered what it felt like to hear one. He wondered if he was already dead whenever the buzzards passed overhead like a gathering stream, calling themselves to fresh meat, and he felt no pull to track them to their confluence. His instincts were a ghost town. There would be no end to this accruing of knowledge, this piling on of the hollow wisdom of common lives. He would drag it around the desert until the desert was again a sea.
He felt on the brink of an extinction that could never be complete, a lone wolf in the midst of countless coyotes who got snakebit and tracked by cougars and poisoned by small-time ranchers and who had their young carried off by hawks and were torn limb from limb by their own packs and were shot for fun by the sons of doomed towns.
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.
THE GAS STATION OWNER
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.
CECELIA
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.