Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  “—bleeding,” Andy Gage says, crouching beside her.

  Mouse lies on her back, blinking up at the sky. She can feel a lump rising on her forehead, blood trickling down the side of her scalp; her neck hurts. She’s calm now—in shock—but her heart is sick, and she is disgusted with herself: bloodied, muddied, laid out in the dirt. Insane.

  “Penny?” Andrew says.

  “I am shit,” says Mouse, and then the tears start, dribbling out of the corners of her eyes, adding to the mess. “I’m a crazy, pathetic, worthless—”

  “Penny…”

  “—piece of shit.”

  “Penny, stop it,” he commands, and she does. Stops saying it, that is. Inside her head, where the Society lives, she goes right on thinking it: Worthless piece of shit.

  Then Andrew says: “Do you remember the little girl in the diner?”

  Mouse, still crying, closes her eyes. Go away, she thinks. Go away, I am a worthless piece of shit, leave me alone.

  “Last Monday,” he persists. “The little girl whose father hit her, you remember? Penny?”

  “Yes,” Mouse says. Of course she remembers.

  “Do you remember what he called her?”

  “Yes.”

  “‘This fucking kid,’” Andrew says. “‘This fucking kid.’ Do you think that was right, for him to say that?”

  “No,” says Mouse.

  “No,” Andrew agrees. “It was a terrible thing to say. An awful thing. Now what if he’d called her a worthless piece of shit, instead? Would that have been right?”

  “No…”

  “No. It would have been bad. Wrong, and not true. Just like it was wrong and not true when your mother said it to you.”

  She rolls her head sideways, feeling a sharp twinge from the back of her neck, and looks at him. “Who…who told you about my mother?”

  “You told me,” says Andrew.

  “I never—”

  “Not you personally. Your Society.”

  “They aren’t mine,” Mouse protests.

  “Yes, they are. You called them out, to help you cope with something that was too terrible to handle all by yourself. And they’re still there, still trying to help you, mostly, but they’ve got their own needs and wants now, and that complicates things.”

  “It’s crazy.”

  “No,” he says. “You could have gone crazy, with what your mother did to you. Or you could have turned mean, like the man at the diner. But you didn’t. You did something creative. And that’s great; only now you’re going to have to be even more creative, if you want to get your life together.”

  Mouse sits up, slowly; Andrew helps her. She tries to turn her head to look around, but her neck and shoulders are really hurting now. “Where are we?” she asks, grimacing.

  “In the woods behind the Reality Factory. About half a mile past the Reality Factory, actually; I almost lost you. I had to call out Seferis to keep up.”

  “Seferis?”

  “It’s complicated,” Andrew says.

  Mouse thinks: Everything’s going to be complicated now.

  “Tell me anyway,” she says. “Tell me everything.” Giving in: “Tell me what I have to do.”

  12

  Three days later Mouse is in another cluttered sitting room—this one in Poulsbo, Washington, on the Kitsap Peninsula—wondering whether the doctor in the wheelchair is more like her mother or her grandmother.

  Both Grandma and Verna Driver suffered crippling strokes. Grandma died very quickly from hers—one day she was fine, the next she was in intensive care, and the day after that she was gone. Grandma Driver’s death was the saddest event in Mouse’s early childhood, the loss so traumatic that, shortly after the funeral, Mouse retreated into the dark and went to sleep for a whole year, her longest blackout ever.

  Mouse’s mother’s death was more protracted, and traumatic in a different way. Where Grandma had gone into a coma following her stroke, Verna Driver remained alert. Bedridden, too weak to move and unable or unwilling to speak, she tracked Mouse relentlessly with her eyes, glaring. The nurses who attended her told Mouse not to make too much of this; until they could establish definite communication (several attempts to get her to answer questions by blinking had proved unsuccessful) they couldn’t know for sure how much awareness she had of her surroundings. But Mouse didn’t need any additional communication beyond that ceaseless stare: her mother was aware, all right. Aware, and angry, and wishing with every last fiber of her being that she could force Mouse to change places with her.

  The doctor in the wheelchair is angry too. She keeps it under control for the most part, but it gets away from her a couple times: once when the woman who cares for her is a little too aggressive in offering assistance, and then again when Andrew is slow to take the hint that the doctor wants to talk to Mouse alone. (“Why don’t you go see if Meredith needs help in the kitchen,” the doctor suggests, to which Andrew replies, “Help with what?” “With whatever she may need,” the doctor tells him. But Andrew just sits there, still not getting it, and finally the doctor snaps: “Take a walk, Andrew! Come back in an hour.”)

  Andrew warned Mouse in advance that the doctor had a temper—“she’s a little prickly sometimes,” is how he put it. He assured her that it was nothing to be concerned about, but she’s still nervous as he leaves the sitting room.

  The doctor senses this, and immediately apologizes. “I’m sorry,” she says. “That was very unprofessional of me. I’m supposed to set you at ease, not on edge. But I’m afraid I’ve always had an abrasive personality, and this”—she pats the side of her wheelchair—“hasn’t helped. I hope you’ll be patient with me.”

  This is a new experience for Mouse: someone asking her forbearance, and not even for getting mad at her, but for getting mad around her. “It’s OK,” she says.

  “Good,” says the doctor. “Now, getting down to business…I understand Andrew has told you about his own multiplicity. Is that correct?”

  Mouse nods, wincing a little from her still-tender neck.

  “And what was your reaction to what he told you?”

  “My reaction?”

  “What did you think?…It’s OK, you can be honest. I won’t repeat anything you say outside this room.”

  “It was…I thought it was very strange,” Mouse says. Too strange, she doesn’t say—her initial curiosity, her hope that some light was at long last about to be shed on her own condition, being gradually worn away as it dawned on her that the person Andrew referred to as his “father” was not, as Mouse had assumed, a biological parent, but a psychological one, an earlier Andy Gage. And he, the Andrew she spoke to, was not his father’s biological son, but a member of his father’s Society—a special member, maybe, but still essentially a figment of his, of the original Andy Gage’s, imagination.

  Too strange. Crazy. And Mouse would not be sitting here right now if not for the fact that her own Society had left her no choice in the matter. When her alarm clock went off this morning, she found identical to-do lists taped to every wall and door in her apartment. Her answering machine was blinking too, and though she erased the message without listening to it, she knows what she would have heard if she’d pressed Play: a voice, very like her own, warning her not to skip her appointment with Dr. Grey, and probably tossing in a few insults for good measure.

  “‘Strange,’” the doctor says, as if mulling over the possible implications of the word.

  Mouse lowers her eyes. “I know I’m crazy. But at least I’m…I’m real.”

  “And you think Andrew isn’t?”

  Mouse hesitates, not wanting to say anything bad about Andrew, who has been nothing but nice to her. “He says his…his ‘father’…made him up.”

  “Well,” says the doctor, “all personalities are creations, after a fashion. People often speak of reinventing themselves, for instance; that doesn’t mean those new selves are fakes.”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “M
aybe not exactly the same. But I’m confident Andrew is real. As for whether you’re a multiple personality, that I don’t know yet.”

  Mouse is suddenly hopeful. “You mean I might not be?”

  The doctor shrugs. “Certainly it’s possible. Although, from what Andrew has told me, you do seem to have many of the experiences that an untreated multiple personality would be expected to have. The blackouts; the things done, evidently by you, that you can’t remember doing. Tell me, what do you think is going on?”

  “What do I think…”

  “How do you explain it? To yourself, I mean. When you wake up in a strange place, or get an anonymous message making reference to things that only you should know about. What do you tell yourself has happened?”

  “I don’t.” Mouse spreads her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “It’s not…I don’t explain it. It just happens.”

  “But you’d like an explanation.”

  “I’d like it to stop.”

  “All right,” says the doctor, nodding. “Let’s see what we can do. What I’d like to try, if you’re willing, is to induce one of your blackouts. Only this time—”

  “I can’t make them happen,” Mouse objects. “I wish I could sometimes, but I don’t control—”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” says the doctor. “But this time, I’d like to see if we can get you to remain conscious while the blackout is happening.”

  “Remain conscious…?” Mouse shakes her head at the contradiction. “How?”

  “Well answer me this,” says the doctor, “and try not to think too hard about it before you do. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that your blackouts involve more than you simply passing out. Let’s suppose that they actually involve you being transported somewhere. What do you imagine that place is like?”

  “I don’t…I can’t…”

  “Don’t think about it, just answer: where do you go when you’re missing time?”

  “Into the dark,” Mouse says.

  The doctor nods approvingly. “Good safe place, the dark. But what we’ve got to do is shed some light on it. Could you get that box over there, please?”

  She points to a small white box on the mantel above the parlor fireplace. Mouse picks it up and attempts to hand it to the doctor, but the doctor says, “No, it’s for you.”

  Mouse sits back down on the sofa with the box in her lap. She lifts the lid, and sees a gleaming hemisphere of yellow plastic. It’s a safety helmet. A plastic hardhat, with a miner’s light attached to the front.

  “You want me to wear this?”

  “If you would,” says the doctor. “It may be a little big on you, but the inside headband is adjustable.”

  Mouse lifts up the helmet, and gently places it on top of her head. It is too big on her, and it’s heavy. It hurts her neck. After a moment she takes it off again.

  “No good?” says the doctor.

  “It hurts my neck,” Mouse says.

  “That’s all right,” the doctor says. “Just hold onto it for now. It’ll fit you better presently. And don’t worry about the lamp—that’ll come on by itself when you need it.”

  The doctor is leaning forward in her wheelchair, setting up another sort of lamp on top of the coffee table: a small strobe-light. She angles the strobe’s reflector so that it is aimed at Mouse’s face, and switches it on. “Focus on this, please, Penny,” she says.

  Mouse doesn’t want to look in the light—its brilliance dazzles her, and it emits an ugly tweet with each flash—but she can’t help herself; her eyes move of their own accord. As her gaze fixes on the center of the strobe’s reflector, the quality of the light changes, cohering into waves, moving walls of luminance that slide over and through her. The tweets draw out, dropping into a lower register, bass tremors synchronized to the waves of light.

  The doctor speaks again, and her voice is changed, too, having become broader, all-encompassing, the voice of a preacher or a burning bush. “I want you to relax now, Penny,” she says. “Relax, and stare at the light, and try not to be afraid. In a moment I’m going to ask a member of your Society to come forward and speak with me. Normally when this happens you go down deep inside yourself, into the dark place, and sleep until you’re called out again. This time I want you to remain close to the surface, and awake—to make a place for yourself to stand, if you need to. The helmet you are holding in your hands will come inside with you; it will fit you properly there, and comfortably, and it will keep you safe from all harm. The headlamp will come on automatically in the dark, so that you’ll be able to look around and see the place that you’ve made. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” says Mouse, not sure whether she does.

  “Good. I’m going to count to three, and then I’d like to speak to the person called Thread. One…two…th—

  —ree.”

  The room telescopes, with the doctor, the coffee table, and the strobe-light going one way, and Mouse and the sofa flying back the other way.

  No, that’s not it. The sofa isn’t moving; nothing is moving, except Mouse herself, being yanked back into…into…

  Into where?

  She is standing now, on a hard—or at least solid—surface. Looking straight ahead she can still see the sitting room, but smaller, and framed in jagged darkness, as if she were peering out through a hole in a wall, or the mouth of an unlit cave.

  From just outside the cave mouth Mouse hears a voice—her own voice, but with a new cadence—echoing back to her: “Hello, Dr. Grey.”

  A hand comes into view from below the cave mouth. It’s her hand; Penny Driver’s hand. It reaches out, across the coffee table—dipping, briefly, to switch off the strobe—and shakes with the doctor.

  “Nice to meet you,” the doctor says. “Are you Thread?”

  The sitting room bobs up and down in a way that ought to make Mouse seasick, but doesn’t. “Like Ariadne’s thread,” the voice, Penny Driver’s voice, says. “Do you know that story?”

  Mouse, unwilling to listen to this—someone else having a conversation using her voice—turns around. Behind her is only darkness. It frightens her, but she is still holding the helmet that the doctor gave her, and she remembers what the doctor said about the helmet’s protective powers. She sets the helmet on her head again. This time it fits perfectly, with no discomfort. The pain in her neck is all gone.

  The miner’s light comes on, and she can see that she is in a tunnel, a cave tunnel. The tunnel narrows as it proceeds away from the cave mouth, becoming a single-file passage that slopes downwards. Even with the miner’s light, Mouse cannot see far down this passageway, but she somehow senses that before long it widens out again, into a much larger space. A warm draft of air blows past her, up from the depths, and she has a sudden impression of a huge crowd of people asleep on the floor of a cavern, the sleepers arranged in rows and exhaling in unison.

  “Hey, Mouse,” a new voice hisses, somewhere very near. Mouse turns towards the sound; her miner’s light illuminates a woman in a black leather jacket leaning against what was, just a moment ago, a blank section of tunnel wall. The woman is about Mouse’s height, although the steel-toed boots she’s wearing—black leather like her jacket, laced up to just below the knee—make her seem taller than she is. Her face, framed in an unkempt medusa tangle of raven locks, is badly scarred: her cheeks and forehead are covered with pockmarks, and even the unpitted portions of her skin are rough and chapped. Her eyes are a mean icy blue, frozen chips of disdain, and her cracked lips are drawn out in a permanent sneer.

  “So,” she says, “you finally decided to come inside with your fucking eyes open, eh?”

  Mouse lowers her gaze and sees a second woman, crouched on the cave floor in a gargoyle posture. This woman is a twin of the first, with the same clothes and the same features, only even more hideous, if that is possible: her pockmarks deeper, her hair more tangled, her eyes colder.

  Mouse, not saying a word, begins to back away from the evil-
looking pair. Amazingly, she’s not scared; just…repulsed.

  “Little fucking Mouse,” the first woman snarls. “What, you think we’re here to fucking hurt you? Or are you just too fucking good for us? Cunt.”

  Ugly and Uglier, Mouse thinks, trying to come up with names for the women. Trashy, and Trashier. Mouse doesn’t know what their intentions are, but she wants nothing to do with them.

  “Fucking Mouse,” Ugly/Trashy repeats, actually sounding offended. “Fine then, cunt, you go fuck yourself…” She makes an obscene gesture, and she and her twin both vanish.

  The doctor’s voice echoes back from the cave mouth: “—memory trace?”

  “Well, I know a lot of what goes on,” Penny Driver’s voice says. “I keep a journal—two of them. One is just a diary of day-to-day events, things that happen to us. The other is a historical record, things I know or suspect were done to us by Penny’s mother. It’s to help Mouse, when she’s ready to start putting her life back in order.”

  “Mouse is Penny?”

  “Mouse was Penny.”

  Mouse enters the narrow passageway, descending. The voices from the cave mouth fade as she goes down; soon the only sound is the warm breath-wind, blowing past at regular intervals.

  Then, right where she is expecting it to, the passage opens up again, into a space so large that its dimensions cannot even be guessed at. The miner’s light is powerful, but as Mouse sweeps her head back and forth like a searchlamp, she sees only a rough stone floor stretching away into the gloom, perhaps to infinity. And yet despite its enormity, the space is somehow intimate, too; the draft has resolved itself into individual breath sounds, a harmony of snores. Mouse still can’t see the sleepers, but—peering straight ahead into the darkness, now—she knows that they are close.

  She takes a few steps forward and then stops, curious but nervous. What if she gets lost down here? Mouse looks for something to mark a path with, so that she will be able to find her way back to the exit passage. A pile of distinctive white pebbles—exactly the sort of thing she is looking for—appears in the lamplight as she swings her head around. She stoops, and begins to gather up the stones.