by Matt Ruff
Mouse is sorry that her mother destroyed them all, but the pictures remain sharp in her memory—it is almost as if she has actual copies of her grandmother’s scrapbooks in her head, that she can leaf through whenever she wants to. And the after-prom photograph—that sits on a mantel in Mouse’s mind now, as tangible as ever.
It’s not immediately clear why Andy Gage should remind her of that photo. Standing on the sidewalk in front of the Harvest Moon, he is not trying to hitch a ride, or even paying attention to the traffic. His dress is casual but neat—jacket on, collar buttoned. He isn’t bleeding from his forehead. What it is, she decides, is something in his bearing. Andrew stands at ease, comfortable in the world, in a way that Mouse almost never is, in a way that she imagines her father always was, at least until he got married.
As she drives closer, she sees that Andrew is talking to himself. Telling himself jokes, maybe—he just burst out laughing. This is crazy behavior, but Andrew seems completely unself-conscious about it. When he notices Mouse in her Buick, instead of acting caught out—the way Mouse would, if someone had seen her talking to herself—he just smiles and waves. Comfortable in the world.
Mouse drives into the lot behind the diner, and parks in the corner farthest from the entrance so that she will have as much time as possible to compose herself. She checks herself in the rearview mirror, then checks her list to see if any new instructions have been added to it. None have; there are still no clues about what Andrew has to tell her, no hints about what might be expected of her beyond listening.
She opens her door and gets out. Andrew is walking towards her across the lot, his hands in his pockets. Now he looks self-conscious. He is not as uneasy as he was last Monday, when they drove here together from the Reality Factory, but he is clearly thinking hard about something.
“Hi,” Mouse says, just to get things rolling, and to make it seem like she knows what she’s doing.
Andrew, for his part, is content to appear confused. “Penny?” he inquires, as if they’d never met in person before. Mouse resists a powerful urge to reply, “Yes, it’s me,” and merely nods.
After that, there is an awkward pause. Mouse’s instructions are to listen, not talk; besides, she needs Andrew to talk first, so she can follow his cues. But Andrew acts as if he’s working off the same list, waiting for her to say something.
Finally, he breaks the silence: “You don’t know why you’re here, do you?”
Mouse blinks. She wonders whether she misheard, but Andrew follows up with an even more startling declaration: “When you got up this morning, you didn’t have any plans to come out to Autumn Creek today. But then you got a message—a note, or maybe a list—telling you to meet me here at—”
They’re in a park, sitting on opposite ends of a long wooden bench. Mouse’s cheeks are flushed, and she’s a little out of breath; Andrew’s cheeks are flushed, too. He’s still got his hands in his pockets, and he’s holding his arms close to the side of his body, occupying as little of the bench as possible, as if trying not to crowd her.
They don’t appear to be in the middle of a conversation—Andrew’s not even looking at her—so Mouse swivels her head, takes a quick look around. She doesn’t recognize this park, or any of the houses in the adjoining street, but she assumes they are still in Autumn Creek. The Navigator points out that the sun has not changed position in the sky, so she can’t have been gone long.
“Five minutes,” Andrew says.
Mouse stares at him.
“We left the diner parking lot about five minutes ago,” he tells her. “This is Maynard Park, four blocks south of Bridge Street. You were walking very fast.” He stops to take a breath, and turns his head very slowly to face her. “Penny?”
Mouse gets it now: why he says her name as if it were a question: he knows. He knows about her blackouts, and he knows about her lists. What else does he know?
“I’m sorry if I spooked you back there,” he continues, looking away again. “My father told me to be blunt. I hope that’s right—I’ve never actually done this before.”
How do you know about the lists? Mouse thinks, but doesn’t say.
“You’re wondering how I know about your lists,” Andrew tells her. “And your b—”
Mouse is standing with her back up against a tree, and she is very out of breath now, hyperventilating. Her eyes are shut tight; she forces herself to open them, and sees more trees, all around her. She’s in the woods, alone.
No, not alone: “Penny?” His voice, quiet but close, nearly frightens her away again. Mouse begins to fade but then rebounds, ejected from the darkness by the mental equivalent of a shove in the back.
“Penny, please don’t be afraid of me,” Andrew says. “I’m not trying to scare you; I just want to help. I know what you’ve been going through, and I need you to know that I know, so that we can talk about it…”
Mouse turns her head and he is there, about ten paces off to her left. He shuffles sideways into her field of view, keeping his hands in the air, like a bank robber trying to surrender. “I just want to help,” he says again. He doesn’t try to get any closer to her; instead he drops down where he is, and sits on the ground. “I’ll just stay over here, OK?”
This act—plopping down casually in the dirt, like it’s no big deal if his pants get muddy—makes Mouse think of her father again, her grandmother’s version of her father. The thought doesn’t completely calm her down, but it does distract her, momentarily, from the fact that she’s frightened. She comes off the tree, and turns fully to face him.
“I’m sorry if this is upsetting to you, Penny,” Andrew says. “But I do know about your blackouts, and about—”
“How?” The word comes out as a high squeak, but he understands.
“You aren’t the only person in the world this has ever happened to. There are others.”
Mouse raises a shaky hand, and points. “You?”
It’s a yes-or-no question, but he frowns and says, “Not exactly.” Then: “It’s complicated…My father had blackouts like you do. He lost time—sometimes minutes, sometimes days—and he had to keep lists of things to do to keep himself oriented. Even with the lists, he was always getting in trouble, getting blamed for things he didn’t remember doing. He couldn’t keep his checkbook balanced. He was constantly losing things that belonged to him, and finding things that didn’t belong to him—like clothes, for instance, not just individual pieces but whole wardrobes, clothes that fit him but that he hadn’t bought, that he wouldn’t have bought…”
Mouse, feeling faint, puts out a hand to the tree to steady herself.
“And the messages. He got anonymous notes, sometimes, or messages on his answering machine. Sometimes it was useful advice, but other times it was just meanness—insults, or even threats. Sometimes it was both at once, in the same message, like whoever was trying to help him was really fed up with him, too.”
“The Society,” says Mouse.
“What?” Andrew says.
“Oh,” Andrew says. “Penny?”
“Yes,” says Mouse, not standing by the tree anymore but squatting on her heels in front of him, with her arms wrapped around her shins and her chin on her knee. She’s caught her breath now, and she feels at least a little calmer.
“The souls—the people—who sent messages to my father didn’t have a special name for themselves,” Andrew continues. “They weren’t trying to fool anybody. I’m sure my father would have preferred it if they had been a little secretive—he couldn’t afford to live alone, and when his apartment mates overheard some of the answering-machine messages he got…well, sometimes it was pretty embarrassing.”
Was. Mouse hasn’t overlooked Andrew’s use of the past tense. She doesn’t want to ask this next question, but she needs to know: “What happened to your father?” Then, before Andrew can answer, she answers for him: “He got locked up, didn’t he? For being crazy?”
“What?” says Andrew, looking surprised. “No…I mea
n, no, he wasn’t crazy. He did have some trouble with a few people thinking he was crazy, but…”
“He got locked up,” Mouse says, nodding to herself.
“Not permanently,” Andrew says. “For a little while, once—OK, twice. But he got out again, both times, because he wasn’t really crazy. And eventually he got help: he found a way to stop the blackouts. Penny? There’s a way to stop the blackouts.”
He is lying to her; he must be. It is a cruel trick, to get the Society to order her out here just so he can frighten her with his knowledge of her insanity, and then lie to her.
Mouse sighs deeply, to keep from crying. “How?” she asks. “How did he stop the blackouts?”
“He built a house,” says Andrew.
This time she’s sure she’s misheard. “He…”
“He built a house,” repeats Andrew. He frowns again. “Look, this is hard…I want to be totally straight with you, but I’m worried that if I don’t explain this just right you’re going to end up thinking I’m crazy. Either that, or you’ll get scared and start running again. So will you do me a favor? Will you come with me right now and let me show you something? I don’t know if it’ll really help, but…it might. At least it might help me find the right words to say.”
“Come with you where?” Mouse says guardedly.
“To where I live. It’s not far—just a few blocks up, on the other side of Bridge Street.”
“OK,” Mouse says, thinking: Maybe he is crazy.
They stand up—Mouse’s knees are sore from squatting—and he leads her out of the woods, which turn out to be a part of Maynard Park. As they leave the park and walk north, Mouse notices that Andrew is talking to himself again. It’s mostly indistinct muttering, but Mouse catches her given name at least twice, and at one point Andrew exclaims “Cut it out!” loud enough to make her jump. Mouse is disturbed, not so much by the onesided conversation itself as by the fear that, if it goes on much longer, she may start hearing a second voice.
Mouse thinks: I’m not going to keep following him. When we get to Bridge Street, I’m going to turn off, go back to the diner, get in my car, and drive home. He can’t stop me.
She resolves herself to this, and takes another step, and then her hand is in her pocket, clenched around the Society’s list. In her mind’s eye, Mouse sees the last item, underscored:
4. LISTEN TO HIM.
They come to Bridge Street. Mouse does not turn off in the direction of the diner. Andrew crosses the street, and she follows him.
As they step onto the far curb, a voice calls to them: “Hey! Hey, Andrew! Mouse!”
It is Julie, waving frantically from down the block. When Andrew sees her he lets out a small hiss of annoyance. “Ah, Julie, not now,” he mutters.
“—means well. And I, I really do care about her. A lot. But sometimes…”
Julie Sivik and Bridge Street are gone. Andrew and Mouse are walking along a quiet residential avenue.
“Anyway,” Andrew concludes, as if winding up a lengthy oration. He gestures to a big house up ahead on the left. “It’s this one.”
A woman with white hair opens the front door of the house as they approach. “Hello, Mrs. Winslow!” Andrew calls to her. The woman waves, but her eyes are fixed on Mouse, and her expression is not altogether friendly. Mouse wonders if she and the woman have met before, and, if they have, what she might have done or said to make the woman look at her that way.
But then Andrew, bounding up the porch steps, says, “Mrs. Winslow, this is my friend Penny Driver,” and the woman smiles warmly and says, “It’s nice to meet you, Penny. Please come in and make yourself at home.”
“—put some coffee on,” Mrs. Winslow says, walking away down a hallway.
“Thank you, Mrs. Winslow,” Andrew says. He opens a door off the middle of the hall and gestures inside. “This way.”
But Mouse, instead of going in, turns nervously in place.
“Penny?” Andrew says.
“Yes,” says Mouse, with a tremor in her voice.
Andrew tilts his head. “Oh,” he says, and points. “The front door is right there, if you decide you want to leave. It’s not locked,” he adds.
“OK,” says Mouse, not bothering to question how he knew she needed to know this. “Thank you.”
She follows him through the door he just opened, into what he refers to as a sitting room. The room does have chairs in it—Mouse can see at least two, plus a short sofa—but it will take some reorganizing before anyone does any sitting. The room is fantastically cluttered, with the sofa, the chairs, the shelves that line the walls, and much of the available floor space piled with stuff: boxes, books, toys, clothes, diverse bric-a-brac, and junk. “Sorry,” Andrew says, seeing the look on her face. “I have kind of a space-allocation problem.”
One corner of the sitting room is taken up by a miniature house—not a dollhouse, but a professional-looking scale model, the kind an architect might build, complete with surrounding landscape. It sits on its own little table, and manages to stand out among the clutter. Mouse guesses that this is what Andrew has brought her here to see—he seems to be maneuvering towards it—but then he turns right, towards the sofa, gesturing at a large oil canvas that hangs on the wall above it.
It’s a group portrait. A crowd of maybe twenty people stand in the foreground. They look like relatives; most of them look like Andrew. There are a lot of men, a few women, one little boy, and one giant. They are in a large, two-story room whose walls are paneled in bright glossy wood and lined with incandescent light sconces. These lights cast a cheery glow over the lower part of the room; but up above, on the long gallery that makes up the room’s second level, the sconces are spaced farther apart and the bulbs burn less brightly. Along this shadowy overlook another group is gathered, larger than the first, its somber ranks composed almost entirely of sad-faced children. Their melancholy expressions unsettle Mouse; she is glad they are in the background, behind a railing.
The painting is signed “Samantha Gage.”
Andrew points to a dark-haired figure in the foreground group. “This is my father,” he says. The family resemblance is strong; Andrew and his father are practically twins.
Mouse indicates a fairer-haired figure at Andrew’s father’s side. “Is that you?”
“No.” Andrew frowns. “That’s Gideon.” He speaks the name as if it were an evil charm. Then he points to another figure at the far left of the group, who stands a little apart from the others. “That one’s me.”
“Oh, I see,” says Mouse, although the likeness isn’t as good. The face is wrong.
“Forget about me,” Andrew says, and puts his hand on the painting, covering the figure that is supposed to be him. “I’m a special case, anyway. But these others”—he gestures with his free hand—“these other people are my father’s version of your Society. Things are much better with them now, because they can all see each other, communicate face-to-face, soul-to-soul. But before, when my father was like you are now, this room you see here was nothing but dark space, and most of the souls in the dark were asleep…”
Mouse would like to be able to say at this point that she doesn’t know what he is talking about, but on some level she does know, and her understanding is coming clearer all the time. Staring at the painting as Andrew speaks, she feels a growing pressure in her temples, as if a mob of little people were assembling there, pushing at the inside of her skull like kids pressing their faces up against a plate-glass window.
“…so he had to create a place where they could all be awake together at the same time. A meeting place, inside his head.”
“Inside…”
“Right,” says Andrew. “Because that’s where they live. You do know that, don’t you, Penny? Your Society—that’s how they can always get messages to you, no matter where you are, and how they can take control of your body during your blackouts. They always know where you are, can always get to you, because they’re always with you.”
He is raising his arm.
“No,” says Mouse, stepping back—
—and falling, face forward, into an icy stream.
She comes up screaming, staggering. The water isn’t deep, but the current and the slippery rocks in the streambed keep her off balance. “Help!” she squeaks.
“Penelope!” a voice calls from behind her. “Stamata! Perimene!”
Mouse—
—runs through the trees, no little town park but true forest this time. The legs of her jeans are heavy with mud and leaves, but she keeps moving, sprinting for what seems like miles. Even the certainty that something terrible is gaining on her cannot keep her going forever, though; finally she has to stop, if only for a moment. She stumbles to a halt in a small clearing; she bends forward, hands on knees, and closes her eyes, listening for the sound of her pursuer.
When she opens her eyes again, words have been scratched in the ground at her feet: STOP THIS BULLSHIT. Mouse feels fresh dirt under her fingernails. There is a tingle on the back of her neck, the familiar sense of someone standing close behind her.
She doesn’t turn around. She fakes like she is going to, then springs forward, leaping into a run, trying to accelerate fast enough to leave her body behind.
She slams full-speed into a tree.
