Ruby called back every few hours for the next couple days, forcing him to turn off his ringer, but he could still hear the phone vibrating against the kitchen counter or the floor or wherever he’d left it.
He never picked up the letter but he shifted it here and there into different positions on the high round table in the kitchen. The envelope was no longer flat, from getting baked by the morning sun over and over. It looked brittle, wizened.
Mitchell brought home another meatball sub. He slid Bet’s letter out of the way and sat at his kitchen table and got down as much of the sandwich as he could, which wasn’t a lot. He folded the whole mess up in its wrapping and, rising off the stool, caught sight of something over on the living room floor that shouldn’t have been there, on the other side of the couch, looking at a glance like a bunch of loose slippers or something. Mitchell walked over there and stopped short before the spectacle. He felt himself nodding in appraisal. It was the brains. All seven of them. He was clutching the balled-up sub to his chest, the even ticking of the clock behind him somewhere. The brains, out of the spare room, arranged in a soft-pointed diamond, all of them still spaced equidistantly. This was a migration. It had taken them an hour to get this far. Maybe more. Several hours. Here they were, on the move, each one following the subdued hum of the others.
Mitchell returned to the kitchen and stuffed the sub in the trash can, then went around and closed all the blinds, twisting the clear plastic staffs. He washed his hands at the sink, came back to the living room and flipped the overhead light off. He’d begun to lose faith, but now something was happening. Mitchell was wearing a T-shirt with long sleeves and he tugged the sleeves up to his elbows. His hands were clammy, like that first day. His mind’s eye was so crowded it was blank. The brains looked the same as ever. There was no such thing as effort for them. They were all oriented in the same direction, advancing toward the front of the condo, aimed, in fact, straight at the front door. That had to be where they were going; there was nothing else over there but the door. They were leaving. Whatever they’d been doing here, they were finished. Dusk was taking hold outside. They would leave overnight — judging by the distance they still had to cross, sometime in the wee hours. Mitchell didn’t know what he should think of this. He felt tired in his body but alert in his mind. He could smell the brains now. Their peanut musk was drowning out the odor of the meatball sub. Relieved, obviously. That’s how he should feel and he did feel it. This problem of his was finally working itself out. He’d indeed handled it correctly. He’d kept it to himself and had kept his mind intact and now this trouble was taking its leave of him. He’d endured it. Mitchell sat on the arm of the couch and watched the brains for a few minutes. Of course, they moved too slowly for him to perceive it. That had always been the way. You had to leave them alone and come back later, like they said about getting water to boil.
He stood up and paced across the living room in a composed manner, ready to take some inventory, feeling tired in a welcome physical way rather than just feeling sick of himself, feeling weary in his legs but excited about the future. He went into his bedroom and raised the window, shimmying it around to get it unstuck. The temperature was dropping outside. Mitchell stuck his head out and the night sky looked familiar. He had been caught in a pernicious orbit but it was about to break apart. His eyes were dry and keen. He could see the puppetlike silhouettes of the desert birds perched on the cacti, could see their little beaks snapping open when they called. He could see the shadowy features of every rough hill, all the way to the flats where he’d conducted his fire.
Mitchell looked at his bed, made up with its sharp-cornered olive sheets as it had been since the day Bet left. He hadn’t slept in it since she’d gone. He doubted he was going to sleep tonight, but if he did it was going to be here, in a bed like a normal person, on this perfectly good queen mattress. Mitchell went over to the closet and slid the doors all the way open. Besides the sneakers he was wearing, he had two pairs of shoes — boots and dress shoes. He took the sneakers off and lined them up smartly with the other pairs on the closet floor. He organized the clothes he had on hangers, the two coats together, the handful of dress shirts together, a light pair of pants and a dark pair. Next he opened the top drawer of his dresser — a few balled-up pairs of socks, nail clippers, a receipt from a vegan coffee shop he and Bet had stopped at in Santa Fe, a travel-size bottle of leather conditioner. He left the socks where they were, and everything else he took out and set on top of the dresser. Mitchell looked forward to facing his life again. He knew he could do it; he could participate. He was going to iron his shirts and shine his dress shoes. He was going to pick out a day and finish that damn Russian novel in one go. He thought of the letter, still sitting out there on the kitchen table, almost smirking. He didn’t care anymore what was in the letter. Mitchell felt now that he could throw the letter out, another bit of tidying on tomorrow’s agenda. He didn’t need to imagine good news in it anymore. No good news could come from Bet. She thought it was one-sided, that Mitchell needed her and she didn’t need him, but she’d find out sooner or later that she wasn’t going to find anyone better than Mitchell. And then it would be too late. Mitchell was going to move on with his life and she was going to keep avoiding hers, and by the time she saw the error of her ways it would be too late. Way too late.
Mitchell stepped lightly back into the main area of the condo. He circled around behind the brains, checking their position in relation to the couch, and they had definitely moved a little more toward the door. A couple inches, at least. Their formation had lost its shape, now more an oval than a diamond. It was happening, just as he’d thought. They were leaving. It was night now, the first act of the darkness. He only had to be patient.
Mitchell padded back to the bedroom. He kept his money under the bed, paper-clipped, and now he got it out and counted it. He counted it again, and a third time. It would be enough for another month. He was going to double his efforts to find a job. Triple them. If they wanted him to stack boxes and sweep floors, he’d be grateful to do it. If they wanted him to clean bathrooms, no problem. He was going to catch a break and find employment, and he was going to cook balanced dinners and exercise. Maybe he would ask a woman out on a date, a woman as different from Bet as possible, a woman who stayed in one place and wasn’t afraid of being attached to someone — afraid at her own expense. He could get a job and a girlfriend and a dog from the pound. He could keep a hardy little cactus on his table. This was the United States. If you wanted to get with the program, they had to let you. Maybe Mitchell wasn’t all that old. He could turn the spare room into a study. There was no telling what he could accomplish with all this peace and quiet. He would get a haircut, get his long-suffering little car washed, buy a comfortable pastel-colored patio chair for his front steps.