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.
***
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.