Further Joy (25 page)

He headed up the frontage road, the shopping strips growing larger and cleaner, until a proper mall materialized. Being around people might help, he thought. He strolled up and down the vaulted corridors, both floors, at an even pace, considering the stores, considering the young couples and old men, smelling the pretzels and Chinese food. He'd bought a suit in the last mall he'd visited, in Sacramento; he'd gone to a department store with Bet because an uncle of hers was getting married.

He sat down on a bench in front of a fountain, across from a straight-backed kindergarten-age boy with no parents to be seen. The mall was not helping. He knew when he got back to his condo he would see the brains. Mitchell couldn't see his way to a reasonable outlook on this fact. Sometimes in life, denial was the sound policy; sometimes there was nothing to do but continue on with blinders. But how reasonable was it to contradict your own senses, to start arguing with yourself about what was sitting right in front of you?

Mitchell drove across the Eastern basin as slowly as the other cars would allow, and didn't return home until past dark. He didn't stall, after that. He strode over and looked in the spare room and they were indeed still in there, unchanged, unconcerned. He came back to the living room and sat on the sofa. His hands were still chilled but his back was soaked. He'd been sweating all day, he gathered. He pulled off his shirt and draped it over the
arm of the sofa. He thought there was a chance the brains would disappear at midnight, a one-day affliction. That was something to hope for. If they stayed past midnight, into tomorrow, then there was no telling how long they'd be in there. But then, midnight wasn't even real. Midnight was a contrivance. Mitchell was tired and he wasn't going to have any correct thoughts. He hadn't had any all day.

The next morning the brains were no less real. Mitchell forced himself to drink some water, then drove in the opposite direction he'd driven the day before, out into the empty wilderness. The sky was hazy, an adulterated white. He'd never come out here before. The road was straight as a high wire. Snatches from the wee hours of the previous night came to Mitchell, glimpses from his troubled sleep. He'd had a dream in which he told someone about the brains—he couldn't recall whom now, but knew it wouldn't have been Bet—and when he'd awakened and realized it was only a dream, that no one knew what was going on with him, he hadn't been sure how to feel. He'd known relief wasn't the appropriate emotion.

He came to a hairpin curve that made him slow way down, and it seemed as good a place as any to pull off. He turned off his engine, picked his way out through the spiny shrubs, and sat on a flat warm rock. He could hardly open his eyes against the glare. He was out here with the lizards now, the hardscrabble reptiles, all the way off the grid. Solitude was something he'd craved and romanticized most of his life, but maybe he was out of practice at it. He heard birds but he didn't know where they were.

The ideal resolution to what was happening was to let it run its course. People had put up with a lot worse. He could manage for a few days, even longer if necessary. The brains would leave when it was time for them to leave.

He spent the rest of the day in the condo. It was where he lived, he decided, and he wasn't going to be chased out of it. He kept drinking water, roaming
from room to room to compare the differing views out the windows. He couldn't help but peek in on the brains every so often, taking a careful step into the spare room, into the close fleshy scent, moving his eyes from one identical brain to the next.

He scrubbed the shelves of his refrigerator. He wiped down the windowsills, disinfected the sink. Everything was clean already and he made it cleaner. He neatened the bedroom closet, then he sat in the living room and stared at his dead TV.

The next day Mitchell got called into an agency named ATN Staffing that needed to make a copy of his social security card and his driver's license. This was the world giving him something productive to do, and he was grateful. The agency was run by two gay men who were clean-shaven and wore polo shirts and boots. While Mitchell waited in the lobby, contemplating having a monetary value again assigned to the hours of his life, he heard the gay men responding to phone call after phone call from friends of theirs. It was Friday afternoon and apparently the men were throwing a party that evening. Their agency specialized in seasonal retail help, but even with the holidays approaching, they finally admitted, they had no work to offer. He was at the top of their list, but there wasn't a single thing right now.

Mitchell still had his same backpack from college, and he fished it out from under the bed and removed a stout blue book from it. This was a Russian novel Bet had bought him over a year ago in a bookstore in Kansas City, an ornate edition with silver embossing on the cover. In the course of a conversation he'd admitted he had never read this particular work, and Bet had treated this as a meaningful, terrible shortcoming, a situation to be swiftly rectified. She'd found a bookstore on her phone and dragged Mitchell away from his lunch.

Mitchell had read a dozen of these fat tomes when he was young, but for the last decade they had seemed like too much to deal with. He knew
what he would find in the book. Each character would adhere to a different philosophy of life; there would be vodka and epaulettes and peasants. But the story would get him out of his own mind, which had to be good right now.

Mitchell got on the couch and read the biographical information about the author. There was a timeline, noting when this author had met other authors, and in what cities the meetings had taken place. The introduction, written by a scholar whose name Mitchell vaguely recognized, was forty pages long. He figured he'd get through that today. After a few minutes he began reading aloud, preferring the way his voice sounded in the air to how it sounded in his head. The scholar admired the author's vision, but was wryly skeptical of any declarations the man made about his own work.

When Mitchell reached a stopping point in the introduction, he set the book on the floor, using a hair ribbon Bet had left in the bathroom as a bookmark. He drank a glass of water and then went over to the spare room. These things were his doing, his creation. He'd never believed in the supernatural, and he still didn't. He wasn't going to change his beliefs because it might be convenient.
He'd
put these things in here. Their scent had come from him. The way they hovered slightly above the floor and moved incrementally, never colliding, was his doing. He crouched down and put his eye close to one of them, thinking he might be able to see the workings within its translucent flesh, but he could see nothing. It was like trying to peer to the bottom of a muddy pond. The brains weren't something to solve. Trying to figure them out would only make things worse. He went back out to the couch and read a little more of the introduction. There were things the author had claimed to love, but didn't. Things he'd claimed to hate that he couldn't have hated. Mitchell let the book slip back to the floor and fell asleep, hoping for uninvolved dreams.

He didn't know how long he'd been napping when a sharp knock at his front door awoke him. He eased himself upright and rubbed his eyes clear. One of his arms was half asleep. He got to his feet and padded quietly to the front of the condo. What he could see through the smudgy peephole was a tall figure in uniform, cradling something. Mitchell looked back toward
the spare room. He dragged a breath in through his nostrils and pulled the door open enough to stick his head out. It was a delivery guy holding a box. The delivery guy said Bet's name and held out a clipboard and a pen and then Mitchell was alone again and now
he
was holding the box. The box had once been white, but had been battered in a way that didn't seem like ordinary shipping wear and tear. The return address was worn off.
VA
, Mitchell could make out.

Nothing had come to the condo since he'd been there. No one had even knocked on the door. The box wasn't light or heavy, and when he shook it there was a scratchy, papery sound. Mitchell thought of a pound of feathers and a pound of rocks—how they weighed the same amount. He set the box down gingerly and stepped back outside. The delivery guy was gone. It was the middle of the afternoon, not a person to be seen anywhere in the condo complex. A car was in a driveway here and there. A deflated basketball sat in a yard across the street. The air smelled of concrete and seeds. Mitchell had never paid attention, but he saw now that there was a flowerbed along his front wall, with a row of low, pale shrubs in it.

A mail truck rounded the corner and advanced up the street. Mitchell watched as it got closer, the little doors opening and closing, the bundles being deposited. Mitchell didn't get mail. He didn't know many people anymore; the only person who had this address was Bet. He'd walked down and looked in the mailbox once, and there hadn't even been anything to throw away.

There were three boxes banked together there, at the bottom of the walk, and Mitchell watched as the mailman slipped something into the first, then the second, and then, to his surprise, into Mitchell's. The white flash of a letter. The mailman noticed him and gave a quick friendly wave, then motored on.

Mitchell stalled a moment, letting the mailman get out of sight, then strode down and yanked the letter from the box. It was from Bet. As it had to be. It didn't have a return address but the postmark said Tucson. Mitchell had never been to Tucson. The envelope was crisp and Bet's handwriting on it betrayed nothing.

Mitchell took the envelope inside and sat down on the couch with it. He brought it to his face and inhaled, but it didn't smell like anything other than an envelope. He looked at the back, where it was sealed tight. After a while he understood that he was not going to open it, not yet. Whatever it was, he wasn't ready now. He was rattled and he could admit that.

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.