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.
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.