Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  “It depends,” I told her. “How much does Penny herself know?”

  “Penny,” Thread echoed. “You know, it’s really kind of you to call her that.”

  “Instead of Mouse?”

  Thread nodded. “Mouse is what Penny’s mother always called her. And after Penny died—”

  “After that fucking cunt killed her,” Maledicta interjected.

  “—Mouse is all that was left. She still thinks of herself as Penny, and I think she could still be Penny, if…well, with your help. And you calling her Penny, knowing to call her Penny, even after you’d been told otherwise—that was just a really good omen.”

  “I had some help figuring it out,” I confessed.

  “I did get a little worried when you wouldn’t talk to us,” Thread continued. “I’m sorry about the e-mail Maledicta sent you—she slipped that past me, so I didn’t understand your reaction at first. It was very rude of her.”

  “It’s all right. I know that—”

  “…and then when I got your e-mail back, I didn’t know what to think. I—”

  A sharp pain spiked at the center of my forehead, blurring my vision for a moment.

  “—Mr. Gage?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, massaging my temples. “I’m sorry, I…I’m kind of tired. Could we maybe pick this up again tomorrow, or Sunday? I promise I’m not trying to run away from you again, I just…right now I really need to get inside and rest.”

  “Of course,” Thread said. She handed me a slip of notepaper. “That’s Penny’s home number. Call us anytime—if Penny answers, just say who you are, and one of us will take over.”

  “OK,” I nodded. “I’ll call you this weekend, for su—”

  She was leaning across the seats towards me again. At first I thought she meant to hug me, but at the last second she tilted her head sideways and pressed her mouth against mine.

  “Sweet thing,” a new soul said, breaking the kiss. She traced a finger down the side of my face.

  Outside the Buick, another car honked its horn. Penny’s head snapped around towards the sound, eyes narrowing. “What the fuck is she doing here?” Maledicta said.

  I was scrunched back against the passenger door, still trying to process the kiss. “I’m going to go inside now,” I said.

  “Sure,” said Maledicta distractedly. “But hey! Don’t lose that fucking number!”

  “I won’t…” I stumbled out of the car, and Maledicta took off, nearly sideswiping the Cadillac that had pulled up across the street. As the Centurion sped away, the Caddy honked its horn again.

  “Julie?” I said.

  “Andrew!” Julie called, frantically rolling her window down. “Andrew, what the hell is going on?”

  I crossed the street to the Cadillac with a good deal more trepidation than I’d felt approaching the Buick. “What are you doing here, Julie?”

  “What am I…Jesus Christ, Andrew, I’m looking for you! Where the hell have you been since yesterday?”

  “Didn’t you get my note?”

  “Note? What note?”

  “The one I left you at your apartment this morning.”

  Julie shook her head. “There wasn’t any note at my apartment.”

  “Yes there was. Under—”

  “First you cut out of work early yesterday, then you don’t return my phone call last night, today you don’t show up to work at all, and now…”—she looked over her shoulder, in the direction of the departed Buick—“…now Penny gives me this look like I’m the Son of Sam and nearly takes my back fender off.”

  “I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry if you got a little worried, too, but I did leave you a note.”

  “Saying what?”

  “Saying that the reason I wouldn’t be in today is that I was going to see Dr. Grey, in Poulsbo, to ask about getting some help for Penny. Like you wanted.”

  “Oh,” Julie said, instantly chastened. Then she said: “So how did it go?”

  “It went…OK, I guess. But listen, Julie…I know you’re anxious to hear about it, but I am really tired right now, so would it be OK if I held off telling you until Monday?”

  “Monday!”

  “First thing, I promise. I’ll come into work early, and we can—”

  “Come on, Andrew! You can’t leave me hanging all weekend, not after—”

  “Tomorrow, then,” I said. “I’ll call you tomorrow, and we’ll talk.”

  I could tell she wanted to say no—wanted to insist on hearing the whole story right then and there—but I guess my exhaustion was obvious enough that she couldn’t dismiss it. “All right, tomorrow,” she conceded. “Early tomorrow.”

  “I’ll call you as soon as I’ve finished breakfast,” I promised. “Good night, Julie.”

  I started to turn away, but she reached out through the window and caught my arm. “Andrew?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re not mad at me, are you?”

  “Mad at you? Why would you think I’m mad at you?”

  “Well…” She glanced over her shoulder again. “Never mind. But listen: instead of calling me up after breakfast tomorrow, why don’t you come over to my apartment and have breakfast with me?”

  “Come over—”

  “Yeah, like old times.” She smiled, and her eyes shone. “You know, I really miss hanging out like we used to. I think about it, sometimes. I think about it a lot, actually.” She let go of my arm and reached up to caress my cheek, the exact same gesture that that nameless soul of Penny’s had made after kissing me. “What about you, Andrew?” Julie asked. “Do you ever think about that?…Andrew?”

  FOURTH BOOK: MOUSE

  10

  The envelope from the English Society of International Correspondents is sitting on Mouse’s kitchen table when she wakes up on Sunday morning.

  Sunday morning: Mouse is only sure of that after she’s checked both of her date clocks, the plug-in one beside her bed and the backup battery-powered model on top of her dresser. Sunday, April 27th. Much of the preceding week has been lost time, especially Thursday and Friday, which she recalls only brief, confused flashes of. Friday night she must have been drinking again, because she woke up late on Saturday with a bad hangover (but alone, thank God, and in her own bed). She spent what was left of Saturday morning jittery and nervous, wanting badly to leave the apartment but unable to—every time she started to go out, she found herself turned around and coming back in again. Finally, on her fifth attempt, she discovered a piece of newsprint taped to the inside of her front door, with WAIT FOR THE FUCKING PHONE TO RING scrawled on it in black Magic Marker. So she gave up and stayed inside, and around one o’clock the phone rang, and then it was Saturday night.

  And now it is Sunday morning. Mouse pads out to her kitchen in her bare feet, wiping sleep from her eyes, trying to decide if she is hung over again. Probably not—she has a headache, but not that kind of headache, and although her mouth is dry, there is none of the vile aftertaste that she woke up with yesterday.

  She fills a glass with water at the kitchen sink. Raising the glass to her lips, she starts to turn around, spies the envelope out of the corner of her eye, turns further—and jumps.

  It isn’t the envelope that throws a fright into her. It is her mother, whose image she sees refracted through the bottom of the drinking glass. Her mother, sitting in a chair beside the kitchen table, hands folded primly in her lap, fingernails sharp.

  “Little Mouse,” her mother says, quite distinctly. “You’ve got a letter.”

  Mouse squeaks, hacking water out through her nose; the glass tumbles from her hand and smashes on the floor. On tiptoe now, coughing violently, Mouse sees that the chair is empty, that her mother is not really here—of course not, how could she be?

  The envelope is real, though: a crisp white rectangle, propped up against the napkin holder. Mouse goes to pick it up, stepping gingerly. Despite her care, the ball of her left foot comes down on a sliver of broken glass, provoking another
squeak, and she ends up limping to the table.

  The envelope is cut from fine, thick parchment, the kind used for wedding invitations and royal summonses. It is an expensive envelope, or would be if it weren’t stolen—shoplifted, most likely, from one of the stores in Pacific Place mall. There’s no stamp. If Mouse were still living with her mother there would be one, a fancy UK stamp chosen more for its appearance than its denomination, but that pretense at least has been dropped; this envelope was not mailed from England, or indeed from anywhere.

  Mouse studies the return address, written by hand in an elegant black script that manages to be graceful and mocking all at once:

  English Society of International Correspondents

  1234 Catchpenny Lane

  Century Village, Dorset 91371

  ENGLAND

  Though she has seen it on dozens of occasions, Mouse is struck anew, each time, by the falsity—the obvious fakeness—of this address. Even as a teenager Mouse knew that British postal codes are not five-digit numbers. 91371 is an American zip code; more to the point, it’s Mouse’s birthdate: September 13th, 1971. Then there are the street and town names: Catchpenny Lane; Century Village. And the county, Dorset: a real place, sure (Mouse looked it up once), but also her mother’s maiden name.

  It’s so blatant that even now Mouse can’t help being disgusted by her mother’s credulity, so impressed by the nice paper and pretty handwriting that she never even suspected the fraud. Stupid woman, Mouse thinks, or starts to think. Stupid old—

  But sudden dread smothers the heretical thought before it is fully formed, the terror so intense that Mouse disappears for a moment, leaving Maledicta to observe, fearlessly: “Well, she was a stupid old cunt.”

  —and Mouse is back, clutching the envelope in her fist hard enough to wrinkle the expensive paper.

  She’s bleeding from the cut on her foot. She should see to that; she should clean up the broken glass, too. But first she needs to find out what secret message the “Society” has sent her. Risking further injury, she recrosses the kitchen floor to the silverware drawer beside the sink, and fishes for a knife to slit the envelope with.

  She has always gotten strange mail. There are the lists, of course, the anonymously authored itineraries that allow her to maintain a semblance of order in her life. There are the graffiti, the surprise pop-up messages and harangues like the newsprint scrawl that appeared on her front door yesterday morning. And then there are the memoranda, detailed missives delivered sporadically from nowhere, that either warn Mouse of an unperceived danger or give her advice on how to overcome a problem she has been grappling with.

  Now that her mother is dead and buried there is less to worry about, but when she was younger and still living in her mother’s house, under her mother’s power, Mouse was acutely aware that some kinds of mail were more dangerous than others. Lists were generally safe, unless they included a “to do” that violated her mother’s ever-changing rules; Mouse’s mother actually approved of the lists, thinking that Mouse herself wrote them. (“Good little Mouse,” she recalls her mother crooning, “that’s a good idea, keep that little scatter-brain of yours on track.” This memory is entwined with another, of her mother pushing her down onto an unmade bed, shouting, “What did you forget? What did you forget?” and twisting Mouse’s nipple until she screamed—the memory so vivid that just thinking of it makes Mouse gasp and cup her breast defensively.) Graffiti were slightly more dangerous, although they typically showed up in places where Mouse’s mother couldn’t see (in Mouse’s locker in school, on the chalkboard of an empty classroom where she sometimes went to hide) or where they could be quickly disposed of (on a frosted windowpane, or a foggy bathroom mirror that could be cleared with one swipe of an arm).

  Memoranda, though—those could be perilous. Mouse remembers one time in particular when she was in junior high school and a boy named Ben Deering had tried to pretend that he liked her. Ben had come over to her during lunch period one day—Mouse had been sitting alone, as usual, at a tiny table near the back of the cafeteria—and asked, “Hey, is it OK if I sit with you?” Mouse glanced up at the sound of his voice, looked back down just as quickly, and said nothing. Ben interpreted her silence as a yes, and sat down. “So,” Ben said, poking at a congealed mass of refried beans on his lunch tray, “whaddya think of the food here?”

  Mouse didn’t respond to this, or to any of his other attempts at conversation. She didn’t even look at him again. His acting friendly towards her was obviously a trick of some kind. Ben was a popular boy in the school, whereas Mouse was a nonentity, as good as invisible except when she was being picked on; it made no sense that Ben would really want to talk to her. So she ignored him, hoping that he would soon give up and go away.

  But Ben didn’t give up; he stayed the whole lunch period, in good spirits, too, as if getting the silent treatment from Mouse was one of the best things that had ever happened to him. When the bell rang for class, he got up, still smiling, and said, “Thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  As promised, the next day he came and sat with her again, drawing stares and titters from some of the other kids in the lunchroom, who had belatedly noticed his odd behavior. Mortified by the laughter, Mouse sank deeper into herself, and once more refused to speak; Ben, in turn, continued to act as though he couldn’t get enough of Mouse’s deaf-and-dumb routine.

  The next day Ben was absent from school. At first when he didn’t show up for lunch Mouse was relieved, but halfway through the period she caught herself looking around the cafeteria, checking to see if Ben was really absent or if he’d just decided to sit with someone else. And the day after that, when Ben returned and once more came to sit at Mouse’s table, she answered his cheery “Hello” with a barely audible “Hi.”

  Ben smiled broadly, acknowledging the milestone. “Sorry I wasn’t here yesterday,” he apologized. “My little sister was sick, so I had to stay home and take care of her.”

  “That’s OK,” Mouse mumbled.

  Even then, they didn’t exactly converse. Mostly Ben asked her questions—“How do you like school?” “What’s your favorite band?”—which Mouse answered in a dull monotone, using as few words as possible. She didn’t understand how he could possibly find this interesting, and behind her stunted replies she tried to screw up the courage to ask a question of her own: “Why do you care?” Of course she didn’t come close to actually saying that—it took all the bravery she had just to tell Ben what kind of music she liked.

  At the end of the lunch period, Ben thanked her again and wished her a nice weekend. Then he asked, as if the idea had just occurred to him: “Hey, you want to come hang out with me after school?” Mouse was startled back into speechlessness by this proposal; she not-quite shook her head, then half-nodded, then opened her mouth and let out a truncated squeak. “Tell you what,” Ben said. “I’ll be on the front steps after last bell. If you want to hang out, you come meet me there.” With that, he collected his tray and marched off, leaving Mouse sitting mute at the table.

  She spent the rest of the school day anxiously watching the clock, fearing the final bell and wondering what she would do when it rang. She still could not begin to fathom Ben’s motive. If this were a trick of some kind, it was a very elaborate one: would Ben really waste three lunch periods just to set up a prank? On the other hand, if it wasn’t a trick, and Ben really did want to be friends with her…why? Why, why, why?

  What was she going to do? Mouse’s one consolation as the minutes ticked away was a growing certainty that it wouldn’t be her decision.

  Her anxiety peaked at about three minutes to three. As the second hand on the classroom wall-clock made its last few circuits, Mouse began to feel dizzy, light-headed and light-bodied, too; there was a tapping at the back of her skull like someone knocking at a door for entry. The final bell, when it came, was like a gunshot going off in her head. Mouse convulsed, hands clutching the bottom of her seat to keep her from flying away into the strato
sphere—

  —and she was home in her own room, sitting at her little writing desk watching the sunset through the window. Her head pivoted automatically towards the clock-radio. It was 5:17 P.M.

  Mouse was still dressed in the clothes she had worn to school that day, but her whole body was covered with a thin film of dust, and there was a smudge of mud on her right knee. A bramble had caught on one of her stockings, and there were scratches on her arms and the backs of her hands.

  The memorandum lay on the desk in front of her, a three-paragraph note written in two scripts. The pen used to write it lay on top of it; when Mouse picked the pen up to move it aside, it was still warm from the hands of the writers.

  The memorandum read:

  Sorry Mouse but it’s no good. After Ben Deering got tired of waiting for you on the school steps he went to South Woods Park and met up with two other boys, Chris Cheney (sp.?) and Scott Welch, and the three of them stood around joking about you. From what they said, Chris has bet Ben an old bicycle that Ben can’t get you to hold hands with him. I don’t know why, I guess Chris is just mean that way (although his girlfriend is Cindy Wheaton, the one who keeps tripping you in gym class, so maybe she’s got something to do with it) and I guess Ben really wants the bike.

  Anyway, it’s no good. Ben doesn’t really like you. It’s just a mean trick.

  Beneath this, a second, angrier hand had written:

  which you woud fucking KNOW already if you werent a COMPLETE FUCKING MORON!!!

  As the import of the message sank in, Mouse’s eyes began to fill with tears. Her grief was bitter but strangely detached, as if it were causeless—if asked, she could not have said whether she was crying out of disappointment, or hurt, or indignation. She just felt bad, that’s all; bad, and certain in her bones that whatever else was true, she had brought this on herself somehow.