Further Joy (24 page)

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Mitchell had spent six years with Bet. Bet had family money and fancied herself a writer and moved every few months, on whims. Mitchell had met her when she'd passed through Chattanooga. He'd agreed to tag along with her, had left his crappy adjunct job at a branch of the state college to drive the open parts of the country with the windows down. That was the kind of thing he'd always been able to do—make his escape when others were afraid to. He'd come to know Bet better than he'd ever known another person, and perhaps they'd grown
too
close. This last move they'd wound up in some bleached, dusty town out east of Albuquerque, and after only two days Bet had said she wanted to pack back up and move again. She'd said she had complaints, but they weren't really about New Mexico. There'd been a convoluted fight during which Bet had used the term “curdled” to what she believed was great effect, and then she'd left. Six years. She'd driven away in her tasteful little SUV, crying in sharp breathy yips. It was the same way she cried at anything—the death of an animal, songs. She produced these high-pitched whimpers and her nose got stuffed up, but only a tear or two would fall. It was one of the only things Mitchell didn't like about her, her crying, and he was glad that this was the last image he'd had of her as she left. If she'd driven off with one of her resigned frowns, it would've crushed him. If she'd flashed him that look of distanced amusement, the one cheek bunched up and her eyes barely squinting, he'd probably still be standing out there, frozen at the edge of the parking lot like a cactus.

Mitchell had been alone for a week now. He could see that he was worn out too, though not of Bet. He was tired of the road, of packing and unpacking, of learning new streets and new restaurants and new neighbors and new weather and suffering new allergies and not knowing the name of the county he lived in. He was tired of looking for work.

He had a two-bedroom condo all to himself and the first month and security deposit were paid. He had a last-legs Isuzu Stylus he'd bought cheap a couple stops ago, when the only job he could find was twenty miles outside of town. He was a bachelor. That was the situation. Big clean appliances. He had nothing to put in the second bedroom but a folding chair and a lamp. He had $4,100.

Left to his own devices, he ate twice a day, all his meals working out to about $7. Sandwich and potato salad and a Coke. Burritos and a Coke. Three stiff slices of pizza and a Coke. Chicken fingers and cheap beer. He knew his crappy diet was one of the reasons he felt sluggish. He and Bet had always gone out to good restaurants, usually on her dime, or if they ate in they had salads and expensive cheese.

Bet had taken her laptop, which they'd used to read articles or listen to the radio. Mitchell had an old box TV, but they'd never used it as a TV. It hadn't been plugged in since Chattanooga, and had become an ornamental artifact. At a villa he and Bet had rented in Maine, they'd used the TV as a centerpiece for their dining room table. In Baltimore, they'd taped a tropical beach scene over the screen, something to look at during the winter weather. This condo Mitchell was in now didn't have cable hooked up, but he doubted the TV would work anyway.

Before Mitchell and Bet had driven to New Mexico, they had planned a number of desert outings, and now Mitchell couldn't find the gusto to undertake any of the outings alone. One of the places they'd planned to visit was a farm of gargantuan satellite dishes that monitored the webby corners of the galaxy for sonic anomalies. They'd planned to hike out into White Sands. Tour the pistachio groves. All these places had seemed foreign and enchanting before, but now, as a guy alone, they were just radio apparatus, just a wash of pale dirt, some nut trees.

Mitchell bought a package of heavy paper and drove to a small library the color of tired earth. He obtained a library card and sat down at a computer and typed an up-to-date version of his work history. He put his fancy paper in the library printer and came away with a purposeful stack of résumés. It was eerie to look at his new résumé, to see all the places he'd been with Bet, all the things he'd done with his hands for money, to think at one time of all the warehouses and mills and machine shops where he'd logged a
month or two, all these places he hadn't been suited for and that had already forgotten him. And teaching hadn't suited him either, if he was honest. He could remember clearly, even all these years later, feeling like an impostor in front of the students. He could remember acting like he cared about whether they learned, could remember drumming up just enough enthusiasm within himself before each class meeting.

Mitchell looked at job listings on the Internet, ads for general labor. Some wanted his résumé emailed to them. Some jumped Mitchell to other sites, seemingly unrelated, where he was supposed to fill in questionnaires and compose statements about loyalty and tolerance. Mitchell's time on the computer ran out and he logged off and wrote his name on the sheet again. He spent a half hour reading a science fiction novel and then looked up numbers for every temp agency in Albuquerque and called them all and made appointments to come in and drop off his résumé and do whatever else they had people do. He called three different numbers advertising “environmental jobs” and got no answer. He went and sat in a squeaky chair and scanned the want ads in the newspaper. People wanted HVAC technicians and exotic dancers.

It wasn't uncommon for men in a predicament like Mitchell's to turn to hard drinking or worse, but Mitchell couldn't find the impetus. He didn't want liquor. It didn't really make you forget anything—nothing you
wanted
to forget. He sipped at his beers from the corner store and they perhaps dulled his bitterness. He would open the kitchen window for the wash of dry air and drink three or four watery cans of Budweiser at a spell, and what he would miss most about Bet, he admitted, was walking down an unfamiliar street with her, holding her hand, watching her face to gauge her reactions to whatever they encountered. Some days they'd keep to themselves and some days they'd talk to fifty strangers. Bet would always have a superb coat on, and superb shoes, and Mitchell always had the sense that she belonged to the rest of the world as much as she belonged to him. It was what had kept him fascinated by her, the fact that her heart could never be pinned down.

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Mitchell awoke on the couch in the living room, where he'd been sleeping since Bet left. He could sense that something had occurred. Something about the condo was odd. Something was different. He felt like he'd been robbed, except nothing was missing. There was nothing
to
rob. The TV maybe, but there it was in front of him, dark and mute. He shuffled into the kitchen, which looked the same as always. He yanked his jeans straight and stretched his back until it cracked. He could hear something innocuous and steady from outside, a distant tractor-trailer or maybe only the wind with nothing to whistle against. He went over to the bathroom. Everything looked normal there too. He peeked in the shower. Square-cornered bar of soap. Tiny hotel shampoo. He came out into the hall and paused in front of the spare room. He was listening, he still didn't know for what. He pushed back the door and leaned his head into the room and there on the floor were six or seven brains. Seven. Human, as best he could tell. Mitchell blinked hard a few times. He could feel himself breathing, his chest rising and falling gently as ever. He was lightheaded but not at all dizzy. They looked like brains and that's exactly what they were—sleek, oyster-colored lobes, firm yet vulnerable. Those perfect hemispheres. They weren't moving, but Mitchell could tell they were alive. If they were dead he'd have known it, the way you know anything is dead. He was outside himself, watching himself stare. The blinds were closed against the morning but the room wasn't dim. The light hitting each brain seemed to hide it rather than illuminate it. Mitchell felt like a child who'd walked in on something shameful. There was no humor in the room, no humor in Mitchell.

He retreated clumsily to the kitchen, using his hand against the wall, and sat on his stool at the high, round kitchen table. He spoke aloud in the third person, a tactic he'd used since he was a child to ground himself. He said his name, then recited what season it was, and what day of the week. “It's morning,” he said. “Or depending when you woke up, late morning.” His voice sounded fine, maybe a touch reedy. Everything else was normal. Everything else looked the same. It was cold outside but he was sitting in
a patch of sunlight from the window. He drummed his fingers rather than doing nothing at all with them. He found himself almost savoring his shock, fully aware that his shock was irrelevant. He looked at the calendar and it seemed like the wrong year, like it was marking time that had already passed.

Mitchell smoothed his T-shirt and made his way back across the condo to the spare room. They were still in there, all seven of them. He went ahead and entered the room this time, cautious where he stepped. He sat down in the chair and clicked on the lamp, and in the artificial light the brains were translucent. Mitchell turned the lamp off and unscrewed the bulb and held it in his palm. The brains were not veiny. They were not in distress. Mitchell could not find it in himself to disbelieve what he was seeing, to dismiss his senses out of hand, and he knew that that was the wrong way to think. He knew he shouldn't give that kind of thinking an inch.

He sat silent in the spare room for a long time. His back hurt but he ignored it. He was thinking a hundred miles an hour. Here were plain facts, seven in number. Why seven? So neutral, seeming not to care about Mitchell a bit. They had no ill will in them, no kindness. These brains weren't possible, yet he felt he'd been awaiting them or something like them for some time. A memory came to him of those summer afternoons when he would steal an hour from the fun everyone else was having and sit by himself in a culvert or under the public dock at the river, taking a rest from the blustery cheer of his neighborhood. He remembered being hidden in the cool. He remembered the tirades of the birds above, who weren't used to trespassers in their out-of-the-way dominions.

It turned out they
were
moving, the brains, just very slowly. He had to close his eyes for several minutes in order to mark their advancement across the hardwood. Mitchell gathered the courage to crouch down and touch one with his thumb, feeling ludicrous and fearful, and it didn't seem to bother the brain a bit. The brain felt like a snake, smooth and muscled and dense. The brains smelled like wet peanut shells. They produced a dull hum that never grew louder.

Mitchell put on his sneakers and locked his door and drove slower than
the speed limit in the approximate direction of town. The sky was a faultless, inscrutable blue. In a featureless area of the desert he passed a vagrant wearing a beret. The man was limping down the roadside with no hope of catching a ride, and after Mitchell had passed him, the man turned around and started walking the other direction, doubling back toward wherever he'd come from. Mitchell watched the man until he disappeared from the rearview. He passed a clinic for animals, with a thirty-foot ironwood in its front yard and an array of colorful garbage bins lining the drive. He passed some low, isolated settlements, and then a vast car dealership loomed up, festooned with pennants, some of the vehicles displayed on ramps, some of them with their doors thrown open in welcome. Mitchell had reached the outskirts. He pulled into the near-empty parking lot of a movie theater. He went in and selected a movie and sat in the dark. Passive jazz music played over the speakers. Mitchell wasn't doing great—people who were doing great, who were doing fantastic at the moment, didn't see vital organs living in their spare rooms. But maybe he wasn't doing that badly either. Maybe no worse than a lot of people. He was unemployed, but that was common nowadays. He'd probably wasted the prime of his life, but who didn't? Aside from athletes and rock stars, who used their primes proudly? Mitchell remembered certain weekends with Bet, how he'd felt pleasantly disconnected from everything, how the two of them could be their own slow little city, losing whole days in naps, getting the world's bad news long after the worst was already over, insulated from the failing economy by Bet's money.

He'd forgotten to get any candy or popcorn, but now the trailers had begun. He hadn't been in a movie theater in a couple of years. Bet had come up with the idea of doing all the worst things they could think of in a single day, once—they'd had breakfast in an Arby's and attended a boat show, listened to right-wing radio and read about Jessica Simpson online for a full hour. In the evening, they'd gone to see whatever Vin Diesel carchase movie had been playing, filing in with packs of teenagers. Toward the climax of the film, Bet had started making out with Mitchell, showily tongue-kissing him as nearby adolescents stared. He could remember other
trips, before that—times when he himself was in high school, driving into Chattanooga from his sleepy town and slumping alone in an art house matinee, feeling tragic and uncommon, then drifting outside afterward into the broad daylight, the world exactly as he'd left it.

The movie Mitchell had bought a ticket for was about a high-end catering company in Los Angeles. It was a comedy where all the characters sabotage each other, but at the end a guy gets fired and all his rival coworkers quit the company in solidarity. When Mitchell walked outside his hands were cold and bloodless, and he stood in the parking lot for several minutes holding them out in the sun. He could tell the brains were still in his condo; his mind felt the same as when he'd entered the theater. They were still there, and Mitchell didn't want to drive home and see them.