Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  She has to get out of here. The trailer’s outside door is in the far corner of the living room, by the entrance to the kitchenette; Mouse hurries to it. She puts on the sweater—it fits her more like a poncho, and reeks of beer and cigarettes—and opens the door. A chilly dawn wind blows in past her, rattling the beer cans on the table.

  And Mouse thinks: What about a coat?

  It was cold last night; wouldn’t she have worn a coat? On the verge of escaping, she turns back again, and spies two coats on the floor in front of the phony fireplace. One of them, a scuffed leather jacket, looks like it might fit her, although, like the panties and the tank top, she doesn’t actually recognize it.

  She hesitates. If it is her jacket, she should take it; she wants to leave nothing of hers behind, nothing that might allow him to trace her. On the other hand, she is already stealing the sweater; if the jacket is not hers either, and she steals it too, he might call the police. What to do?

  The sound of movement from the direction of the bedroom ends her indecision. She leaves the leather jacket behind and scoots out the door, even as a man’s voice calls sleepily: “Hello?”

  Outside, on the trailer’s wooden stoop, Mouse finds a copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, still wrapped in its plastic delivery bag. She checks the date, and learns that she was right: today is Monday, April 21st, 1997. She has only lost a night. It would be difficult to overstate her relief at this confirmation.

  Mouse’s car is parked in the street right in front of the trailer. No question that it’s hers; it is a Buick Centurion, an unmistakable big black hulk of an automobile. She bought it used for $1,000 down and forty-eight additional monthly payments of $150, which she is still making. It is not the car she wanted. The car she thought she was buying was a Honda Civic, much smaller and much more economical, but somehow she ended up signing a sales contract for the Buick instead.

  Whoever was driving the car last night has a thing or two to learn about parallel parking. Not only does it have one wheel up on the curb, it is facing the wrong way. But the driver was not totally careless: the Centurion’s doors are all locked, and Mouse can see looking through the window that the keys are not in the ignition. She checks the pockets of her jeans and discovers that the keys are not there, either.

  “No,” Mouse whispers. “No, no, no—” She was so close to getting away! She begins to go through her pockets a second time, turning them inside out.

  “Hey,” a voice calls to her.

  Mouse squeaks. A handful of pocket change goes flying; nickels and pennies patter across the roof of the Centurion like flat hailstones.

  The stranger is standing at the top of the stoop. Ignoring the chill, he has come outside wearing only a T-shirt and a dingy pair of boxer shorts. The leather jacket is slung over his arm, and with his left hand he is jangling a set of keys. “You won’t get far without these,” he tells her.

  Mouse swallows hard. Is he taunting her? The Navigator doesn’t think so; his tone is not malicious, and he seems preoccupied with blinking the sleep out of his eyes. But he does not come down off the stoop or make any move to offer her the keys.

  “Listen,” the stranger continues, stifling a yawn. He gestures lazily at the trailer behind him. “You want to come back in for some breakfast? Or if you wait a few minutes, we can go out somewhere…”

  Mouse shakes her head, trying not to look scared. But the stranger sees something in her expression; his own expression sharpens with concern.

  “Hey,” he says. “You’re not bugging out on me about last night, are you? I mean, I know we were both pretty fucked up, but…you do remember, right? I asked you, I asked you twice, if you were sure you wanted to come back here with me. And you said you did. You said sure.”

  Yes, his expression is full of concern. But it is not concern for her, she realizes; it is concern about her. “You remember that, right?”

  “I have to go,” Mouse tells him.

  “You said sure,” the stranger insists. “I mean, you want to regret it now, light of day and all, that’s your fucking prerogative, but what you said last night…”

  “I have to go,” Mouse repeats, louder this time.

  “Sure, in a minute. I just want to be clear we both understand what happened. I want to be clear—”

  Maledicta the Foul-Speaker, tiring of this bullshit, shoves Mouse aside and stalks forward, screaming: “Shut up and give her the fucking keys, cocksucker!”

  Mouse blinks. She has teleported from the curb to the bottom of the stoop. Her hands are balled into fists, and her throat is tight, as if she’d just been shouting. The stranger is staring at her.

  “All right,” he tells her, his voice placating. “All right, Jesus, calm down! I’m not trying to keep you here, I just—”

  “—fucking bitch!” Mouse is back at the curb, holding the leather jacket and turning a key in the Centurion’s driver’s door. Over her shoulder she sees the stranger, now at the foot of the stoop, staggering in a circle with one hand cupping his groin and the other pressed to the side of his face, which appears to be bleeding. “You fucking bitch, what did you—”

  Silence. Mouse is sitting in her car in the parking lot of a bank. The car’s engine is off but the keys are in the ignition; the leather jacket lies on the passenger seat beside her. Outside, the sky is brighter than it was.

  Mouse just sits with her hands gripping the steering wheel, waiting to see if the scene will shift again. She watches a digital clock-thermometer on the side of the bank-building cycle from time to date to temperature; the time slowly increments, and the temperature rises by a degree, but there are no sudden jumps and the date remains constant.

  Mouse begins to relax, and as she does, it occurs to her that she knows where she is now. The bank building is new, but across the street from it are a number of older storefronts that she recognizes. She is in Seattle’s University District, not five blocks from the basement flat where she lived when she was a student at the U. of Washington.

  She can get home from here. She is eager to do so, to change out of the obscene tank top and get rid of it, along with the foul-smelling sweater. But first, at the Navigator’s insistence, Mouse checks around the inside of the car for a list.

  Today’s list is stuffed in the Centurion’s glove compartment, along with a half-empty pack of Winston cigarettes and a vodka flask that Mouse pretends not to see. Hastily jotted on a crumpled bar napkin, the list enumerates half a dozen chores and appointments, with space to check off each one after it is completed. Item number one, in letters twice as high as the rest, reads: REALITY FACTORY—8:30 A.M. DRESS NICE! BE ON TIME!!!

  In one sense, Mouse does not need to be reminded about her new job. She has thought of little else since Friday evening, when she first found out about it. In fact it was mainly to stop herself worrying—to get it out of her mind for a few hours—that she hit on the idea of going to see a movie last night, and took down the bottle of wine from her cupboard.

  But last night feels like it was less than an hour ago, and Mouse still has it in her head to think that her new job starts tomorrow. The list drives home the fact that tomorrow has become today. Mouse looks at the bank clock again and realizes with dismay that she does not have time to go home. If she still lived in her old U. District flat she might make it, she might even manage a quick shower, but her current apartment on Queen Anne Hill is a fifteen-minute drive in the wrong direction. If she wants to get to Autumn Creek by 8:30, she needs to get on the freeway in the next ten minutes.

  “Oh God…” Mouse tugs at the hem of the sweater she is wearing, feels how filthy it is. She looks at the bank clock. “Oh God.” DRESS NICE, says the list, BE ON TIME, but there is no way now that she can do both. She hasn’t even started her new job yet and already she has screwed up.

  “You worthless piece of shit,” Mouse says, catching sight of herself in the Centurion’s rearview mirror. She slams her fist down into her thigh, pounding rhythmically, hard enough to bruise: �
��Worthless piece of shit, worthless piece of shit, worthless piece of shit—”

  The bank clock marks another minute gone by. Mouse stops hitting herself; she switches on the Centurion’s engine and guns it, drives screeching out of the lot. Two blocks down, stopped at a traffic light, she feels indecision tearing at her again. Which is worse: to come to work late but well-groomed, or to come to work on time but looking like trash?

  A loud bang interrupts her reverie. A big man in a U.W. Huskies sweatshirt, crossing the street in front of her, has just bounced a basketball off the Centurion’s hood. It wasn’t an accident; the man noticed that Mouse was talking to herself and decided to scare her. Catching the ball on the rebound, he laughs, happy to have made her jump.

  It is too much. Mouse disappears. Malefica comes, Malefica the Evil-Doer, who is Maledicta’s twin sister. She taps the accelerator pedal; the Centurion lurches forward into the crosswalk, catching the Huskies fan in the shins. It’s just a nudge, just enough to make him drop the ball and fall face forward onto the hood. Just enough to scare him.

  It does scare him, for a moment. Malefica sees the fear in his eyes. But then he makes a bad mistake: he thinks to himself that Malefica is just a little girl, that she does not really know what she is doing here, who she is messing with. His fear turns to anger; he starts pushing himself up off the hood, meaning to come around and rip open the driver’s door.

  Malefica depresses the accelerator pedal again, holding it down. The Centurion rolls forward at five, then ten miles per hour, pushing the Huskies fan backwards. Fear recaptures him. “Hey!” he shouts, the soles of his shoes skidding over the pavement, his palms slapping at the car’s hood. “Hey! Hey! HEY!” Fear becomes terror as he locks gazes with Malefica through the windshield and reads her intention; he throws himself to the side even as she floors the accelerator.

  Still gathering speed out the far side of the intersection, Malefica checks the rear view: back at the crosswalk, the Huskies fan is picking himself up off the ground. He is shouting something after her, waving his fist, but it’s hard to look threatening when you’ve just pissed yourself.

  Malefica laughs. She is a little girl, yes, but a little girl with a big fucking car, and no one had better try to fuck with her. At the next corner she rolls right past a stop sign, scattering another three pedestrians with a blast of the Centurion’s horn.

  —and Mouse is driving east on Interstate 90 towards Autumn Creek, her decision made, though she does not recall making it. The air in the Buick is dense with cigarette smoke; Mouse takes a hand off the wheel to slap at a dribbling of ash on the front of the stolen sweater and nearly loses control of the car.

  “Oh God…” Mouse steadies the Centurion and pulls it over into the slow lane. She rolls her window down; the smoke clears, but the rush of cold air does nothing for the sweater, which still reeks. She still reeks.

  Maybe she can say she was sick last night. Sick to her stomach: she ate something bad for dinner, and was up half the night with cramps…and too late, she realized that she’d forgotten to do her laundry…

  Yes, Mouse thinks, with a thrill of elation. It is short-lived. Yes, they might believe that—they might even be proud of her, coming in on time for her first day, despite having been sick. But Mouse knows full well that there will be other mistakes, other screw-ups requiring excuses, and there are only so many lies she can hope to get away with. Eventually, they will see through her. Eventually, inevitably, they will know her for what she truly is.

  Worthless piece of shit…

  5

  Mouse isn’t exactly sure how she lost her last job. It ended without warning three days ago, but whether she quit or was fired is something she really can’t say; all she knows is that Julie Sivik was somehow involved.

  The repair shop where she worked, Rudy’s Quick Fix, is tucked into a narrow storefront just off Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle. Rudy Krenzel, the shopowner, has been in the same location for forty-five years. For the first thirty of those years, he fixed mainly typewriters, stereos, and television sets, but since the 1980s, his business has focused more and more exclusively on the repair of computer equipment, with college-age “apprentices” doing most of the work.

  Mouse applied for the apprentice position last August, after Rudy’s previous assistant left to attend graduate school in Boston. The job interview started out badly, with Mouse fumbling her answer to Rudy’s question about how much experience she had fixing PCs. The truth was she had a lot of experience; she must have. She’d held other jobs that required her to maintain and repair computers, and had been complimented on her work—she’d been told she had a real gift for it, in fact. But because she couldn’t remember a single instance of actually fixing a machine, her description of her talents came out sounding disingenuous, as if she doubted her own résumé. Rudy picked up on this, and became suspicious. “If you’re such a hot shot,” he asked her, “how come you want to work for me?” And Mouse blurted out: “It was on the list.”

  After that she was sure he wouldn’t hire her. But Rudy decided to test her before kicking her out of his store. He led her back into a crowded workroom, where four broken PCs were lined up on a table. “Show me what you can do with those,” Rudy said. For a moment Mouse just stood there, without the slightest idea of how to begin. Then Rudy cleared his throat impatiently, and Mouse took a step towards the nearest PC, and the next thing she knew she and Rudy were back in the front of the shop, shaking hands.

  “—see you tomorrow morning,” Rudy was saying. “I’ve got a big backlog piled up since Larry quit, so you can start first thing.”

  “OK,” Mouse said. Rudy held the door open for her; she walked out, dimly aware that she had gotten the job after all. But she didn’t really believe it until she saw the next day’s list.

  She’d been at the Quick Fix nearly eight months by the time Julie Sivik showed up. Eight months at the same job was a record for Mouse; her average was closer to three months, and her previous job, at the Cybertemps temp agency, had lasted only three weeks. Three good weeks, it had seemed like, until it suddenly all fell apart. Right up until the end her supervisors had been telling her what a valuable employee she was, what a hard worker, the companies she’d been hired out to all said so; and then one day she’d come in to the Cybertemps main office for a new assignment only to have the receptionist demand of her: “What the hell are you doing back here?”

  “Getting a new placement…” Mouse said.

  “Not here you’re not,” the receptionist told her. And before Mouse could learn what had happened, a security guard arrived to escort her from the premises.

  Why had Cybertemps fired her? Mouse tried to pretend she didn’t know, but it was obvious: because she was a bad person, that’s why. The fact that she was also a good worker—or at least capable of faking it—had disguised her basic rottenness at first, but in the end she’d slipped up somehow, shown her true colors, and her employers had turned on her. It was the only rational explanation.

  So she was surprised as month after month went by, and Rudy Krenzel showed no signs of starting to dislike her. It must have had something to do with the nature of her new work environment; Mouse had noticed in the past that she seemed to last longest in jobs where she had little contact with other people. Though the Quick Fix shop was small, she and Rudy didn’t talk much. They said hello in the morning, and good-bye in the evening, but for most of the day, Mouse was back in the workroom while Rudy stayed up front. She fixed computers; he dealt with customers. When business was slow, Mouse worked on the daily crossword puzzle in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and listened to the radio; Rudy read from a stack of James Michener books he kept stashed under the front counter. They sat less than ten feet apart, but might as well have been in separate buildings.

  About the only time Mouse was really aware of Rudy’s presence was when one of his old army buddies dropped by the Quick Fix. Around these men—big, heavyset guys in gray crewcuts—the normally sof
t-spoken Rudy Krenzel became boisterous, cracking dirty jokes and laughing so loud it hurt Mouse’s ears. Sometimes, if the visitor hadn’t been by before, Rudy would call Mouse up front and introduce her. She would say hi and shake hands, and as soon as possible would excuse herself and go back into the workroom, shutting the door and turning up the radio.

  One afternoon in April, Mouse heard a new voice in the front room, a woman’s voice. That was unusual; women in the area who needed computers repaired usually went to the PC Doctor up on Third Avenue, which charged twice as much as the Quick Fix but didn’t look so much like a pawn shop. But this woman sounded more like one of Rudy’s army buddies than a customer. Curious, Mouse opened the workroom door a crack and peeked out.

  The woman was leaning across the counter to brush away a crumb that had gotten caught in Rudy’s beard stubble. It was a flirty gesture—the woman’s bosom pressed against Rudy’s arm as she was grooming him—and Rudy blushed and said something about his ex-wife that made the woman laugh.

  Mouse opened the door a little wider so she could hear better. She told herself she wasn’t really eavesdropping, just waiting for Rudy to call her out and introduce her, but she stayed so quiet that neither Rudy nor the woman noticed she was there. They went on talking, and from their conversation Mouse learned that the woman’s name was Julie Sivik, that she was the niece of a Corporal Arnold Sivik who’d served in Rudy’s outfit in Korea, and that she’d come to the Quick Fix to pick up a package that “Uncle Arnie” had left for her. Mouse wasn’t sure what the package contained, but she gathered that Rudy was uncomfortable having it in his shop; in fact he might even have gotten angry about it, if he hadn’t been so disarmed by Julie’s flirting.