John Brandon - Further Joy

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.

***

Nestor Employment called. This was an outfit in the tangled middle of Albuquerque where Mitchell had filled out a cursory application and left it with a man who had acted like Mitchell was interrupting his day by looking for work, like Mitchell’s lack of a job was acutely inconvenient for him. The man was calling because Nestor was switching to an all-electronic system. He was entering Mitchell’s information and couldn’t read his handwriting. For a moment, Mitchell could not think of his address. When he finally came up with it, the man said, “You sure about that?” This guy thought he was the greatest thing ever because he had a stupid little job to go to. Mitchell wanted to tell him that anyone could do his job, that anyone who walked into that office could switch sides of the desk with him and no one would notice. Mitchell wanted to tell the man that he had no skills and no knowledge and that the universe had simply granted him the pity he was worthy of.

“I commend you on your temporary avoidance of failure,” Mitchell said into the phone. “Foul luck is afoot in many quarters, and you seem to be evading it.”

Mitchell caught himself considering the possibility that the brains were not his invention. He knew it couldn’t be so, but if the brains were not products of his imagination, that would mean they’d chosen him. That he’d been deemed suitable. He was thinking about this predicament from all angles, which was inevitable and probably healthy. He caught himself in the thought that he would be the ideal person to be chosen, because for better or worse he was more decent, more possessed of discretion, more open of mind than anyone else he’d ever met. It didn’t mean anything, but it was a fact: if there were fragile, unnatural beings looking for harbor, Mitchell would be the safest choice, the best choice. Mitchell didn’t want to have thoughts like these, but when they came he couldn’t chase them away. Beer didn’t help. The Russian novel certainly didn’t help. He knew the brains weren’t real. He knew that.

He was watching a desert jay tinkering around industriously outside the window, and when the bird flitted away Mitchell walked across the living room and down the short hallway. He closed the spare room door, giving the brains the illusion of privacy, and then got down flat on his belly in the hall and spied through the little space underneath, his eye to the floor. He wanted to catch the brains doing something other than what they always did, but of course he discovered nothing. He wanted to catch them piling onto one another affectionately or huddling under the window and aspiring to the sky.

Mitchell went into Anchor Workforce Solutions and hung up his coat and a friendly woman in a blouse began giving him instructions. Her desk was as big as a barge. She told him all the skills he was going to be asked to exhibit and then pointed to a room where he could be by himself.

First Mitchell had to type. He had to read paragraphs out of a booklet and punch them into the computer as quickly as he could. He did this a minute at a time, no idea if he was typing fast, no idea if he was supposed to go back and correct his mistakes. He had to read a series of eighty statements and next to each had to mark either STRONGLY AGREE, AGREE, DISAGREE, or STRONGLY DISAGREE. The questions were concerned with work ethic and being punctual, and most were meant to be strongly agreed or strongly disagreed with. There was a skills checklist, full of tasks Mitchell had never had occasion to perform but was sure he could if someone showed him how. There were math problems. There was a stack of policy statements Mitchell had to sign, about not doing drugs or harassing people.

By the time Mitchell was finished with all this, his shirt was sopping with sweat. He went in the bathroom and took a piss. He washed his hands and face, then dried off with the paper towels. Breathing deliberately, he fixed his gaze upon himself. He’d always thought he was building up character with all this temp work, with all this scrambling around for low-rung gigs, but where was all that character now? If he had it, where was it?

***

When he got home, Mitchell slid the beat-up box that had come for Bet onto the kitchen table, slit the tape, and began pulling everything out — papers and notebooks, folded letters and clipped documents. He set the empty box aside and began putting like with like, and then organizing chronologically. While he was poring over the contents of the box it became evening. They were the papers of a guy named Tom Spelher — only a fraction of his papers, it seemed. Vast stretches of time were missing in his correspondence. Contracts were unsigned, notebooks unrelated.

Bet had mentioned this guy. She had talked about writing his biography. The box hadn’t been sent by a university or an auction house, but instead, Mitchell gathered, by Tom Spelher’s sister. Spelher was dead now. There were letters of recommendation in the box for various grants Spelher had applied for and never gotten.