Mitchell's Story Pt 12

"Look!" Akemi said in the heat of sex. A liquid line connected them, slung from her body to his. Mitchell looked and smiled at the phenomenon, nodded. Natural it was all wet between them.

-

Mitchell kept talking after he came back from work. It was almost as if he was on a drug.

He started like this:

"Where's the baby?"

From his seat in the dentist's chair, Mitchell noticed on the floor by the wall a small stroller with yellow cloth seat.

"At home now," said Clara, the dentist Mitchell had been seeing for years.

"What? Really? I didn't even know you were pregnant." He'd been joking, assumed the baby wasn't Clara's.

He noted he hadn't seen the dentist in a year, not since his last annual checkup.

Clara smiled.

"When was it born?" Mitchell asked.

"Last week."

"Wow. Well, congratulations!"

"Oh, here she is."

The baby toddled through the wooden door to the left further on than the stroller, halfway to the window overlooking midtown Manhattan from on high. The door looked cheap, made of plywood, out of keeping for a dentist office in that neighborhood, expensive heart of the city. The infant ran on its own momentum over to its mother. maintaining balance long enough to plant its hands on her legs for support, more or less falling onto her but staying upright to the end.

"I can walk!" the little person said to both Mitchell and its mother, wasn't shy, knew it had an audience and was enjoying the spotlight.

"Talk too," Mitchell said. He realized that was impossible. Babies just a week old neither talk nor walk. Something didn't make sense. Mitchell woke in quick stages and told her his dream.

Was he thinking of us having a child?

--

He had an appointment for a test. Wanting to leave the position he'd held at the college, have a change for a while at least, he'd set his sights on a city job. The application required a passing score on a city civil service exam.

Test was held at the college, as a community service event. In the room were a lot of people applying for city jobs. They sat at long black tables, folding ones, the kind someone might use for a picnic. Everyone kept the mandated space between them to prevent cheating.

The first part of the test involved reading and answering questions about a short passage. Mitchell couldn't tell if the questions were deceptively simple, harder than they looked, or simply easy. Anyway he had trouble concentrating. Wondered if he'd finish in time. Realized he didn't know how much they were given.

Children at a table to his right and behind him began laughing. No doubt those were kids of some of the test takers. They either couldn't afford to hire babysitters or couldn't find one that day.

Mitchell raised his voice.

"Kids, please be quiet. This is serious for us."

"Yeah," someone else echoed. The kids from different parents had all been put at the same table, as if in the hopes that would lower the din of the restless teenagers.

Mitchell felt in the right. After all, when the test time ran out those children would go out and play same as ever, while Mitchell and others like him might depend on this job application for their future happiness, survival even.

--

Mitchell told me about that experience when when he came home. He added that he sometimes saw women at the college who reminded him of me, same race if not nationality, and that he responded to them in turn. I knew he cared for me but wondered if he also saw me as a stereotype, had a basically flawed conception of me, of our marriage.

--

Someone said that from reading the writing I sometimes post on line (will I this one?) they feel they know me. They offered advice as if we are friends.

--

Mitchell went to lunch with a group from the college and some friends of theirs who joined them. Conversation rose and fell. As it ebbed, signaling the meal was ending, Mitchell said to the person sitting across from him, "You eat slowly." That person's plate still had food on it. Everyone else's were empty or almost. Then Mitchell looked at his own in front of him.

"But I guess I am (eating) even more slowly." He realized people at the table were waiting for him, being polite about it. He had left a clump of rice, Spanish style, an orangish color from condiments. In it were small flat squares of ham. Mitchell found that a task not easily dispatched, like chipping away at a mountainside.

Why did he tell me that?

--

Mitchell was having trouble with his laptop computer that prevented him from making headway on project for work that he hoped to finish, put behind him. He didn't like doing work for the college at home, having his job intrude on his personal life.

An old friend of his from college, not the one where he teaches but the school were he studied, came over to help fix the computer glitch. Instead of tackling the immediate concern directly, Jason (Mitchell's friend's name- he had been a rival for his old girlfriend Deborah, by the way) began looking at the system overall. He suggested it probably had a lot more wrong with it than Mitchell saw.

Standing at the desk where Mitchell usually sat to work, Jason checked the memory and storage and software, clicking on one menu item or icon after another. Mitchell wasn't sure what he was doing but sensed he meant to remove clutter so the machine would run more efficiently.

"Let's see how many versions of Microsoft Word you have," Jason said. Opening folders Mitchell never did, he counted old versions of the popular writing application that had been replaced by newer ones. "Five. no, Ten! And I bet most are still on your computer." Clogging up the works. Jason looked pleased by his discoveries, enjoyed diagnosing hardware and software problems. But Mitchell stopped him.

"Look. I only want to fix that one thing I'm having trouble with at the moment so I can get back to my work. I don't need to clean up the whole system now though I realize that's what you'd like to do, and I appreciate it."

Jason, Mitchell said, seemed to have the whole afternoon free to tinker with Mitchell's machine. A small (short by sturdy) guy with bushy black hair and a dynamic intelligence, Jason accepted he wouldn't get the fun he'd hoped for from the repair visit. Simple fixes didn't interest him. He enjoyed exploring the overall state of a digital device, especially one as powerful as Mitchell's laptop, more powerful than Mitchell knew or needed. Jason liked seeing how the parts worked together or came into conflict. He saw a computer glitch like the one blocking Mitchell that day as more than an isolated malfunction. To his mind, its concrete aspect was less significant than the abstract implications. He approached the simple practical challenge at hand with the glee of a thinker tackling a problem in philosophy.

In other words, Mitchell told me all about his day. There wasn't time to touch on mine and he didn't ask, was tired from so much talking lol and too little sleep last night.