by John Brandon
So now he had something to Bet and something from Bet. He went toward the spare room, walking softly but not being sneaky, and eased the door open. The brains and now the package and the letter—his privacy felt invaded from within and without, like things were happening to him that were none of his business. He didn’t know what any of it meant, didn’t know what he was being told.
Over the next couple days, Mitchell started leaving the door to the spare room wide open, but the brains made no move to wander. He read sections of the Russian novel aloud, but they did not acknowledge his voice. At times he stood at the threshold of the spare room and observed them, like a rich man watching his exotic pets. There was absolutely no way to tell them apart. He wondered if the brains all knew the same things or if their knowledge was complementary. He wondered whether they were accruing new information or working with what they had.
One evening, Mitchell skipped dinner. He sat in the folding chair and as night fell, the light behind the blinds blooming with sunset and then hushing to blue, he confided in the brains. He was talking to himself, he knew, but in a way he never did when he was truly alone. He spoke of his travels. He told the brains how Bet had always rented their places sight-unseen because she liked to be surprised, liked to adapt. In Colorado they’d lived in what amounted to a shantytown, their neighbors all Mexican illegals. In Oregon they’d enjoyed a luxurious studio overlooking a quiet cove. In Florida they’d dwelled in the villa of a deceased old woman, hastily rented out by her children, the place packed to the gills with figurines and discount-brand canned goods and crowding fake trees. They’d driven through Kansas, the sunflowers leaning to face them. In California they’d rolled around in a vineyard. Mitchell could still see the clusters of heavy late-harvest fruit outlined against the sun, barely hanging on.
Mitchell told the brains about the letter he still had not opened, and the package that had just preceded it. He had left the letter unopened on his kitchen table, sitting there at a casual, haphazard angle, and now he glanced at it each time he passed. The box he had put in the corner.
Bet might’ve had a change of heart, Mitchell told the brains. Bet could’ve begun to miss old Mitch. She could be moving again and could want him to rejoin her. She could be heading on to Flagstaff and wanting someone to pal around with for ski season. Maybe she was regretting the way she’d left, acting like it was so obvious she and Mitchell were bad for each other, were holding each other back, like if he didn’t recognize that there was something wrong with him. Throwing all her things back into her fancy luggage after two days, but of course not roughly enough that anything might break—her ivory ink pens and handmade bracelets and a pair of engraved teacups someone had given her as a gift. Everyone bickered, Mitchell had told her. Bickering didn’t mean anything. Bet had put Mitchell in the position of begging her to stay, and maybe now she saw how low that had been, how degrading to them both. Mitchell had made the mistake of being honest. He and Bet had agreed, back in the early days, never to start saying they loved each other. As soon as you started saying that, it was a matter of time before you were forced to say it, before you were saying it without meaning it, before you resented saying it. They’d both seen what happened when you went down the love road. Mitchell had followed the agreement all those years, but in the heat of Bet saying she needed a change he’d lost track of himself. When he’d uttered the forbidden phrase, Bet had seemed frightened. She’d packed up the rest of her things as hastily as she could and had driven off. She’d abandoned him, Mitchell proclaimed into the fusty air of the spare room. She’d abandoned the only person in the world who truly cared about her, but maybe now she’d come to her senses. Maybe that was what the letter was about.
***
Nestor Employment called. This was an outfit in the tangled middle of Albuquerque where Mitchell had filled out a cursory application and left it with a man who had acted like Mitchell was interrupting his day by looking for work, like Mitchell’s lack of a job was acutely inconvenient for him. The man was calling because Nestor was switching to an all-electronic system. He was entering Mitchell’s information and couldn’t read his handwriting. For a moment, Mitchell could not think of his address. When he finally came up with it, the man said, “You sure about that?” This guy thought he was the greatest thing ever because he had a stupid little job to go to. Mitchell wanted to tell him that anyone could do his job, that anyone who walked into that office could switch sides of the desk with him and no one would notice. Mitchell wanted to tell the man that he had no skills and no knowledge and that the universe had simply granted him the pity he was worthy of.
“I commend you on your temporary avoidance of failure,” Mitchell said into the phone. “Foul luck is afoot in many quarters, and you seem to be evading it.”
Mitchell caught himself considering the possibility that the brains were not his invention. He knew it couldn’t be so, but if the brains were not products of his imagination, that would mean they’d chosen him. That he’d been deemed suitable. He was thinking about this predicament from all angles, which was inevitable and probably healthy. He caught himself in the thought that he would be the ideal person to be chosen, because for better or worse he was more decent, more possessed of discretion, more open of mind than anyone else he’d ever met. It didn’t mean anything, but it was a fact: if there were fragile, unnatural beings looking for harbor, Mitchell would be the safest choice, the best choice. Mitchell didn’t want to have thoughts like these, but when they came he couldn’t chase them away. Beer didn’t help. The Russian novel certainly didn’t help. He knew the brains weren’t real. He knew that.
He was watching a desert jay tinkering around industriously outside the window, and when the bird flitted away Mitchell walked across the living room and down the short hallway. He closed the spare room door, giving the brains the illusion of privacy, and then got down flat on his belly in the hall and spied through the little space underneath, his eye to the floor. He wanted to catch the brains doing something other than what they always did, but of course he discovered nothing. He wanted to catch them piling onto one another affectionately or huddling under the window and aspiring to the sky.
Mitchell went into Anchor Workforce Solutions and hung up his coat and a friendly woman in a blouse began giving him instructions. Her desk was as big as a barge. She told him all the skills he was going to be asked to exhibit and then pointed to a room where he could be by himself.
First Mitchell had to type. He had to read paragraphs out of a booklet and punch them into the computer as quickly as he could. He did this a minute at a time, no idea if he was typing fast, no idea if he was supposed to go back and correct his mistakes. He had to read a series of eighty statements and next to each had to mark either STRONGLY AGREE, AGREE, DISAGREE, or STRONGLY DISAGREE. The questions were concerned with work ethic and being punctual, and most were meant to be strongly agreed or strongly disagreed with. There was a skills checklist, full of tasks Mitchell had never had occasion to perform but was sure he could if someone showed him how. There were math problems. There was a stack of policy statements Mitchell had to sign, about not doing drugs or harassing people.
By the time Mitchell was finished with all this, his shirt was sopping with sweat. He went in the bathroom and took a piss. He washed his hands and face, then dried off with the paper towels. Breathing deliberately, he fixed his gaze upon himself. He’d always thought he was building up character with all this temp work, with all this scrambling around for low-rung gigs, but where was all that character now? If he had it, where was it?
***
When he got home, Mitchell slid the beat-up box that had come for Bet onto the kitchen table, slit the tape, and began pulling everything out—papers and notebooks, folded letters and clipped documents. He set the empty box aside and began putting like with like, and then organizing chronologically. While he was poring over the contents of the box it became evening. They were the papers of a guy named Tom Spelher—only a
fraction of his papers, it seemed. Vast stretches of time were missing in his correspondence. Contracts were unsigned, notebooks unrelated.
Bet had mentioned this guy. She had talked about writing his biography. The box hadn’t been sent by a university or an auction house, but instead, Mitchell gathered, by Tom Spelher’s sister. Spelher was dead now. There were letters of recommendation in the box for various grants Spelher had applied for and never gotten.
Mitchell went out to a colorless wash of earth a couple hundred yards behind his building, gathered a bunch of spiny dead shrubs, and started them on fire. He surrounded the fire with a circle of rocks. He arranged withered cactus paddles in the flames, a heavy cottonwood branch. He jogged back to his building and grabbed a lawn chair that had been in the condo when he and Bet had moved in, and he grabbed the beat-up box and shoved all of Tom Spelher’s property back into it. He went out and sat in the lawn chair and burned the papers one by one. Tom Spelher, he decided, would remain a dignified unknown. Mitchell would do Tom Spelher that favor. He stood and looked around occasionally, but no one was going to say anything to him about his fire. Nobody was watching him except the stars.
Mitchell was nowhere near the leg of the Russian novel where people would begin getting what they deserved. He could only read about five pages at a time before he lost concentration. He was never going to finish the thing, he saw. It would be like his TV—another purposeless item to carry around for the rest of his life.
Sometimes Mitchell thought it would help him to break something but there was nothing in the condo to break, no china or anything. There was nothing in the condo but basic furniture and the TV and twice he picked the TV up to hurl it against the floorboards but was able to stop himself.
He ate a couple handfuls of stale granola and swept his kitchen and then shut the door to the spare room and sat in the living room with his phone in his hand. His tongue tasted like cardboard and his eyes were watery. He dialed the number of the woman who ran the complex, an almost-old lady with red hair named Ruby, and when she didn’t answer he left a calm, clear message saying he wanted to switch condos as soon as possible. He said at her nearest convenience he wanted her to get him into another place. He didn’t like the sun in the morning and preferred a west-facing unit, a one-bedroom if she had it.
Mitchell hung up and rested his chin on his fists. It would take him half an hour to fully move out of this condo. Half an hour tops and there wouldn’t be a trace of him. He wanted a fresh start. Different walls. Something else out the window. There was nothing wrong with New Mexico. He just needed to hit the reset button. He reclined back on the couch, letting his shoulders go slack, and tried to trust the small spring of calm that was running through him.
When the call came back, just ten minutes later, Mitchell couldn’t coerce himself to answer it. He was full of panic, staring at the thin black phone in his palm. He saw RUBY REYNOLDS on the screen and listened to each incurious ring until there wasn’t a ring, until one of the silences in between drew out and no ring came. He went and set the phone on top of the TV, happy to get it out of his hand. This wasn’t good, that he hadn’t answered the phone. It was unwise, the wrong fork in the path. He could tell himself he didn’t want to run away from his problems, but that wasn’t true. He had no qualms about running from problems. Somewhere inside him he wanted to see how this was going to turn out. He was curious about the brains, about what end they might come to. If he had brought them into existence, he wanted to see how he was going to get rid of them. If he hadn’t brought them into existence, which was unlikely but couldn’t be totally dismissed, then he wanted to know their purpose, wanted to wait until he could learn something important about them. If he fled them, he’d have to wonder forever. He’d never be in his right mind again.
Ruby called back every few hours for the next couple days, forcing him to turn off his ringer, but he could still hear the phone vibrating against the kitchen counter or the floor or wherever he’d left it.
He never picked up the letter but he shifted it here and there into different positions on the high round table in the kitchen. The envelope was no longer flat, from getting baked by the morning sun over and over. It looked brittle, wizened.
Mitchell brought home another meatball sub. He slid Bet’s letter out of the way and sat at his kitchen table and got down as much of the sandwich as he could, which wasn’t a lot. He folded the whole mess up in its wrapping and, rising off the stool, caught sight of something over on the living room floor that shouldn’t have been there, on the other side of the couch, looking at a glance like a bunch of loose slippers or something. Mitchell walked over there and stopped short before the spectacle. He felt himself nodding in appraisal. It was the brains. All seven of them. He was clutching the balled-up sub to his chest, the even ticking of the clock behind him somewhere. The brains, out of the spare room, arranged in a soft-pointed diamond, all of them still spaced equidistantly. This was a migration. It had taken them an hour to get this far. Maybe more. Several hours. Here they were, on the move, each one following the subdued hum of the others.
Mitchell returned to the kitchen and stuffed the sub in the trash can, then went around and closed all the blinds, twisting the clear plastic staffs. He washed his hands at the sink, came back to the living room and flipped the overhead light off. He’d begun to lose faith, but now something was happening. Mitchell was wearing a T-shirt with long sleeves and he tugged the sleeves up to his elbows. His hands were clammy, like that first day. His mind’s eye was so crowded it was blank. The brains looked the same as ever. There was no such thing as effort for them. They were all oriented in the same direction, advancing toward the front of the condo, aimed, in fact, straight at the front door. That had to be where they were going; there was nothing else over there but the door. They were leaving. Whatever they’d been doing here, they were finished. Dusk was taking hold outside. They would leave overnight—judging by the distance they still had to cross, sometime in the wee hours. Mitchell didn’t know what he should think of this. He felt tired in his body but alert in his mind. He could smell the brains now. Their peanut musk was drowning out the odor of the meatball sub. Relieved, obviously. That’s how he should feel and he did feel it. This problem of his was finally working itself out. He’d indeed handled it correctly. He’d kept it to himself and had kept his mind intact and now this trouble was taking its leave of him. He’d endured it. Mitchell sat on the arm of the couch and watched the brains for a few minutes. Of course, they moved too slowly for him to perceive it. That had always been the way. You had to leave them alone and come back later, like they said about getting water to boil.
He stood up and paced across the living room in a composed manner, ready to take some inventory, feeling tired in a welcome physical way rather than just feeling sick of himself, feeling weary in his legs but excited about the future. He went into his bedroom and raised the window, shimmying it around to get it unstuck. The temperature was dropping outside. Mitchell stuck his head out and the night sky looked familiar. He had been caught in a pernicious orbit but it was about to break apart. His eyes were dry and keen. He could see the puppetlike silhouettes of the desert birds perched on the cacti, could see their little beaks snapping open when they called. He could see the shadowy features of every rough hill, all the way to the flats where he’d conducted his fire.
Mitchell looked at his bed, made up with its sharp-cornered olive sheets as it had been since the day Bet left. He hadn’t slept in it since she’d gone. He doubted he was going to sleep tonight, but if he did it was going to be here, in a bed like a normal person, on this perfectly good queen mattress. Mitchell went over to the closet and slid the doors all the way open. Besides the sneakers he was wearing, he had two pairs of shoes—boots and dress shoes. He took the sneakers off and lined them up smartly with the other pairs on the closet floor. He organized the clothes he had on hangers, the two coats together, the handful of dress shirts together, a light pair of pants and
a dark pair. Next he opened the top drawer of his dresser—a few balled-up pairs of socks, nail clippers, a receipt from a vegan coffee shop he and Bet had stopped at in Santa Fe, a travel-size bottle of leather conditioner. He left the socks where they were, and everything else he took out and set on top of the dresser. Mitchell looked forward to facing his life again. He knew he could do it; he could participate. He was going to iron his shirts and shine his dress shoes. He was going to pick out a day and finish that damn Russian novel in one go. He thought of the letter, still sitting out there on the kitchen table, almost smirking. He didn’t care anymore what was in the letter. Mitchell felt now that he could throw the letter out, another bit of tidying on tomorrow’s agenda. He didn’t need to imagine good news in it anymore. No good news could come from Bet. She thought it was one-sided, that Mitchell needed her and she didn’t need him, but she’d find out sooner or later that she wasn’t going to find anyone better than Mitchell. And then it would be too late. Mitchell was going to move on with his life and she was going to keep avoiding hers, and by the time she saw the error of her ways it would be too late. Way too late.
Mitchell stepped lightly back into the main area of the condo. He circled around behind the brains, checking their position in relation to the couch, and they had definitely moved a little more toward the door. A couple inches, at least. Their formation had lost its shape, now more an oval than a diamond. It was happening, just as he’d thought. They were leaving. It was night now, the first act of the darkness. He only had to be patient.
Mitchell padded back to the bedroom. He kept his money under the bed, paper-clipped, and now he got it out and counted it. He counted it again, and a third time. It would be enough for another month. He was going to double his efforts to find a job. Triple them. If they wanted him to stack boxes and sweep floors, he’d be grateful to do it. If they wanted him to clean bathrooms, no problem. He was going to catch a break and find employment, and he was going to cook balanced dinners and exercise. Maybe he would ask a woman out on a date, a woman as different from Bet as possible, a woman who stayed in one place and wasn’t afraid of being attached to someone—afraid at her own expense. He could get a job and a girlfriend and a dog from the pound. He could keep a hardy little cactus on his table. This was the United States. If you wanted to get with the program, they had to let you. Maybe Mitchell wasn’t all that old. He could turn the spare room into a study. There was no telling what he could accomplish with all this peace and quiet. He would get a haircut, get his long-suffering little car washed, buy a comfortable pastel-colored patio chair for his front steps.