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.