Further Joy

by John Brandon

  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.

  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.

  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.