***
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.
Mitchell went out to a colorless wash of earth a couple hundred yards behind his building, gathered a bunch of spiny dead shrubs, and started them on fire. He surrounded the fire with a circle of rocks. He arranged withered cactus paddles in the flames, a heavy cottonwood branch. He jogged back to his building and grabbed a lawn chair that had been in the condo when he and Bet had moved in, and he grabbed the beat-up box and shoved all of Tom Spelher’s property back into it. He went out and sat in the lawn chair and burned the papers one by one. Tom Spelher, he decided, would remain a dignified unknown. Mitchell would do Tom Spelher that favor. He stood and looked around occasionally, but no one was going to say anything to him about his fire. Nobody was watching him except the stars.
Mitchell was nowhere near the leg of the Russian novel where people would begin getting what they deserved. He could only read about five pages at a time before he lost concentration. He was never going to finish the thing, he saw. It would be like his TV — another purposeless item to carry around for the rest of his life.
Sometimes Mitchell thought it would help him to break something but there was nothing in the condo to break, no china or anything. There was nothing in the condo but basic furniture and the TV and twice he picked the TV up to hurl it against the floorboards but was able to stop himself.
He ate a couple handfuls of stale granola and swept his kitchen and then shut the door to the spare room and sat in the living room with his phone in his hand. His tongue tasted like cardboard and his eyes were watery. He dialed the number of the woman who ran the complex, an almost-old lady with red hair named Ruby, and when she didn’t answer he left a calm, clear message saying he wanted to switch condos as soon as possible. He said at her nearest convenience he wanted her to get him into another place. He didn’t like the sun in the morning and preferred a west-facing unit, a one-bedroom if she had it.
Mitchell hung up and rested his chin on his fists. It would take him half an hour to fully move out of this condo. Half an hour tops and there wouldn’t be a trace of him. He wanted a fresh start. Different walls. Something else out the window. There was nothing wrong with New Mexico. He just needed to hit the reset button. He reclined back on the couch, letting his shoulders go slack, and tried to trust the small spring of calm that was running through him.
When the call came back, just ten minutes later, Mitchell couldn’t coerce himself to answer it. He was full of panic, staring at the thin black phone in his palm. He saw RUBY REYNOLDS on the screen and listened to each incurious ring until there wasn’t a ring, until one of the silences in between drew out and no ring came. He went and set the phone on top of the TV, happy to get it out of his hand. This wasn’t good, that he hadn’t answered the phone. It was unwise, the wrong fork in the path. He could tell himself he didn’t want to run away from his problems, but that wasn’t true. He had no qualms about running from problems. Somewhere inside him he wanted to see how this was going to turn out. He was curious about the brains, about what end they might come to. If he had brought them into existence, he wanted to see how he was going to get rid of them. If he hadn’t brought them into existence, which was unlikely but couldn’t be totally dismissed, then he wanted to know their purpose, wanted to wait until he could learn something important about them. If he fled them, he’d have to wonder forever. He’d never be in his right mind again.