Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  Mouse was taken aback by the matter-of-factness of the question; from his tone, he might have been asking whether she needed a cavity filled, or the tires checked on her car. “Y-yes,” she said.

  “OK, great,” he said; there was a sound of shuffling papers in the background. “So for our first session, how does a week from Wednesday sound?”

  “A week…” exclaimed Mouse.

  “Sorry it can’t be sooner,” Dr. Eddington apologized. “I’m booked solid tomorrow, Wednesday is my secretary’s wedding, and on Thursday I fly to San Francisco for a seminar that lasts through the weekend. So I really can’t do anything until next week. Unless…”

  “Unless?”

  “Well, I’m just thinking…my last regular appointment tomorrow ends at five o’clock, and then I’ve got a karate class at 5:45. I could grab a quick dinner and come back to the office after that, say around half past seven. Would that work for you?…Penny?…Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” Mouse made herself say. Her disappointment at being told that she would have to wait had been replaced in the blink of an eye by a powerful reluctance, a last wish that she could forget about treatment and just go back to the way things used to be—a miserable life, sure, but one she’d grown accustomed to. But that wasn’t an option now. “Yes, OK…half past seven tomorrow, I’ll be there.”

  “OK,” said Dr. Eddington. “Let me give you directions.”

  Dr. Eddington’s office is in Fremont, the hippie/Bohemian enclave on the north bank of the Lake Washington Shipping Canal. Though not technically a slum, Fremont is still the sort of neighborhood Mouse’s mother would have turned her nose up at; it is also a neighborhood where, twice in the past year, Mouse has awakened in strangers’ beds after a lost night. She will have to take care, coming and going from Dr. Eddington’s, not to catch the eye of anyone who “knows” her.

  Mouse doesn’t mind meeting with the doctor in the evening; the only bad part about it is having to kill time between the end of her workday and the start of the appointment. Ever since the hypnosis session at Dr. Grey’s, the Society have gotten bolder. They aren’t content to just send written memoranda anymore, or leave messages on her answering machine; Mouse has begun to hear voices. Sometimes the voices are just whispers, like daydream thoughts that aren’t her own. Other times they are loud and clear, as though someone were talking over her shoulder. The voices can come at any time, but they are most apt to speak up in moments of idleness, when Mouse is alone with herself. For this reason, she had hoped to spend the hours before her appointment with Andrew, or with Andrew’s father. But Andrew is off somewhere with Julie, and if he is unavailable, so is Aaron, by definition.

  It’s amazing what a difference a week makes. When Andrew first offered to introduce her to his “father,” Mouse only agreed out of desperation; now she actually wants to talk to him. It would still be going too far to say she enjoys talking to him—Aaron Gage is not what you would call a pleasant conversationalist—but she is grateful to have met him. In part it is simply a relief to learn that once you get past the initial strangeness of somebody else occupying Andy Gage’s body, it’s not that strange; and if having multiple personalities doesn’t make Andrew a complete freak, then maybe there’s hope for Mouse as well.

  It’s also true, what Andrew said: his father does understand what Mouse is going through. “Of course you’re scared to death at first. You’ve always secretly believed that you’re crazy, and now it’s like the evidence is snowballing, so you’re not going to be able to hide it anymore. People are going to find out. And along with the fear, there’s guilt, because you’ve also got this idea that it’s your fault, that you’ve brought this on yourself somehow, even if you can’t remember what you did…so not only is the whole world going to know that you’re nuts, they’re going to know you’re evil, too…”

  “Yes…so what do you do?”

  “If you’re like me, you waste a lot of time being scared. Years, maybe. Then one day you decide you’re sick of that, you don’t want to be afraid or guilty anymore, and you try to get help. And if you’re lucky, and you get the right help, and you don’t get betrayed…eventually you work past it. When it stops being scary and starts being a pain in the ass, that’s when you know you’ve made real progress.”

  Mouse looks forward to the day when hearing voices is only “a pain in the ass.” For now it’s still scary. But she tries to follow Aaron’s advice: “Dr. Grey probably told you to think of your Society as allies. It’s true, they are. But you can also think of them as rude houseguests. When they act up, instead of panicking or feeling ashamed, try being annoyed, the same way you would if a visitor left you with a sink full of dirty dishes. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’ll help keep you from jumping out a window until you can get some real therapy—which you should do, soon.”

  All right, she’s doing it. But she still has a couple of hours to kill. Mouse doesn’t go home after work; she goes to Seattle’s University District and pokes around the shops on University Avenue. She loses some time while she’s doing this—seven o’clock comes sooner than it should, and when she checks her wallet, she’s short at least fifteen dollars—but she only hears voices once. That happens just before seven, at an all-but-deserted pizzeria where Mouse has stopped to get a bite before heading to Fremont. She only wants a cheese slice and a soda, but the counterman, deeply engrossed in a phone conversation, won’t serve her, or even acknowledge her presence. Losing patience, Mouse finds herself thinking what a fat fucking slob the guy is…then realizes with a start that that’s not her thought at all, it’s Ugly, Maledicta, lurking in the cave mouth. “You cut that out!” Mouse says, which, to her acute embarrassment, finally gets the counterman’s attention. “Hey, you chill out,” he tells her, and the next thing she knows she’s driving down Fremont Avenue with the remains of a McDonald’s Extra-Value Meal scattered over the Buick’s dashboard. So much for getting annoyed, she thinks.

  Dr. Eddington’s directions lead her to a three-story wood-frame building. There’s a small garden out front, enclosed by a chain-link fence; as Mouse comes up on it—she parked her Centurion a block away and is on foot now—she sees a man hunched down in the dirt, patiently weeding a flower patch. He’s dressed in khaki pants and a light cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up; his bare forearms are tanned and muscular, and his hair—short, dark, and finger-combed—looks freshly washed.

  “Dr. Eddington?” Mouse addresses him.

  He looks up, and for the second time in two weeks Mouse is confronted by the ghost of her father. But this time the impression is much stronger than when she saw Andrew laughing in front of the diner. Dr. Eddington actually looks like Morgan Driver, physically resembles him: he has the same eyes, the same nose, the same jawline. He is older than Morgan Driver ever got to be—Mouse guesses Dr. Eddington is in his mid-forties—but if you smoothed away the early crow’s-feet and put a drooping cigarette in the corner of his mouth, what you’d have would be a reasonable facsimile of the face in her father’s morning-after-prom-night photo.

  “Hello, Penny,” Dr. Eddington says, and Mouse has to hook her fingers through the fence to keep from falling down. She doesn’t know what her father’s voice sounded like, but the way Dr. Eddington’s voice sounds—that’s the way it should have sounded. “It is Penny, right?”

  Mouse manages a nod. Dr. Eddington stands up, starts to brush his hands on his pants, thinks better of it, and brushes them against each other instead. Then he reaches out and shakes Mouse’s hand, and his grip, warm and friendly and firm, makes her feel two years old.

  “So,” he says, releasing her hand, “come on inside.”

  His office is on the second floor, in a converted two-bedroom apartment. He leads her down a hallway past a room whose desk and filing cabinets are piled with what look to be several hundred bridal magazines. At the end of the hall is another, larger room, with bookshelves on three walls and a desk off to one side. Like Dr. Grey, Dr. Eddingto
n offers his patients a choice of seats: there is a fancy leather-upholstered executive swivel chair, and a decidedly less fancy chaise, covered in soft fabric overprinted with panels from the Dennis the Menace cartoon strip. “Garage sale,” Dr. Eddington explains, grabbing a second swivel chair from behind the desk for himself. “Please, sit where you like.” Mouse picks the executive chair, not because she doesn’t like cartoons but because it is closer to Dr. Eddington.

  “So,” Dr. Eddington says, “tell me about yourself.”

  Mouse blinks, not sure what he’s asking. “Didn’t…didn’t Dr. Grey already tell you…”

  “She told me that you might be seeking treatment, and why,” Dr. Eddington says. “And that you’re a friend of Andrew’s. But I meant, tell me about yourself personally. What are you like?”

  What is she like? “I’m…” Mouse begins, meaning to say “I’m no one special,” but losing the last word: “I’m no one.”

  Dr. Eddington gives her a pained smile, like he can’t believe that’s true. “Where are you from?”

  “Ohio.”

  “You still have family there?”

  Mouse shakes her head. “They’re all dead.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” says Dr. Eddington. “Recently?”

  “Recently…?”

  “When did they die?”

  “Oh. My father died when I was very young, and my grandmother—my father’s mother—died when I was nine. I never knew any of my other grandparents.”

  “Uh-huh,” says Dr. Eddington. “And what about your mother?”

  “She…died more recently,” Mouse says. “Seven years ago.” She looks away, worried that he’s going to ask for specifics, but the next thing he says is: “So it’s just you now.”

  “Yes,” says Mouse. Then, remembering why she is here: “Well…”

  “Right.” Dr. Eddington smiles. “What about friends? You still have friends back in Ohio?”

  “No. I never did, really…”

  “What about here in Seattle?”

  Mouse starts to answer no again, then reconsiders. “There’s Andrew, I guess.” She looks to the doctor for confirmation. “Dr. Grey did say that he was my friend, right?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Right, so Andrew, and I guess…I guess maybe Julie Sivik, too. Although she’s also my boss.”

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “It’s a virtual reality company.”

  “Cool!” says the doctor. “So you’re a computer programmer?”

  “I guess so,” says Mouse. “I mean yes, that’s my job, I’m a programmer, only…I’m not really sure what I do at work. What happens, I go in in the morning, I come home at night, and in between, I go to lunch, I have conversations with the other people at the Factory, but I can never remember actually working. And it’s always been that way, with every job I’ve ever had: the work gets done, it gets done well, even, but I, I’m not aware of doing it. Which is OK, I guess, since most of the jobs I’ve had I’m not really qualified for—if I had to think about the work, consciously, I probably couldn’t do it.” She stops, amazed to be confessing this so openly.

  Dr. Eddington accepts it all routinely. “You know,” he says, “there are people who would really envy you…but I realize it’s not so much fun from your perspective.”

  “It’s not not fun,” Mouse tells him. “It’s just what happens.”

  “So you lose time at work,” says Dr. Eddington. “And other times too, I take it?” Mouse nods. “And when this happens, do you just blank out, or do you sometimes find yourself watching, like you’re a spectator to your own actions?”

  “Well, it didn’t used to be like that,” says Mouse. “It used to be I’d just…go away. But since Dr. Grey hypnotized me—” She stops, catching the change in his expression. “What?”

  “Dr. Grey hypnotized you?”

  “Yes,” says Mouse. “Why?”

  “What happened when she hypnotized you?”

  Mouse tells him: how the room stretched out, how she found herself in the cave mouth with the Ugly twins, and how, trying to escape the sound of her own voice, she went deeper down into the cavern. She mentions the sleepers, too, but omits the appearance of the little girl with the sack, saying only: “I didn’t like it in there. I came back out, into the, into my, body, and told Dr. Grey I didn’t want to go inside again. And she said I didn’t have to, not until I was ready, but then, on the way home…” She describes Maledicta’s brief takeover on the way to the ferry landing.

  Dr. Eddington is frowning now. “Have there been other incidents since then?”

  “Some,” says Mouse. In fact she’s only found herself back in the cave mouth a couple other times—most of her blackouts are still just that, blackouts—but she figures the voices also count as “incidents.” “What is it?” she asks. “Did Dr. Grey make a mistake? Should she not have hypnotized me?”

  “It’s a judgment call,” Dr. Eddington says, sounding more diplomatic than truthful. “My own preference is to reserve hypnosis for ongoing therapy; I don’t think it’s appropriate for a one-time visit. Especially not with a suspected MPD case.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, as a general rule, you don’t risk stirring things up with a patient unless you know you’re going to be there to help settle them down again. But Danny is…ambitious. Overambitious, sometimes.”

  “Oh,” says Mouse. It’s disconcerting to think that Dr. Grey’s eagerness might have gotten the better of her professional judgment, but Mouse cannot honestly bring herself to feel betrayed. She knows that Dr. Grey was trying to help her; and she also knows that even without the hypnotism session, the Society would still be making trouble for her now.

  Still, she has to ask: “Can you undo it? Put me back the way I was?”

  “Is that what you want?” Dr. Eddington asks.

  A week ago the answer would have been yes. But thanks mostly to her discussions with Andrew’s father, Mouse’s attitude has changed. She still doesn’t want to go through the process of therapy—doesn’t want to face that little girl in the cave—but the result, if it works…

  “No,” says Mouse, “I guess not.” Looking him in the eye: “You couldn’t undo it anyway, could you?”

  “No,” Dr. Eddington admits. “Probably not.”

  “Then I want treatment,” Mouse decides, with finality. “I want to…to build a house, or whatever it takes. If you’ll help me.”

  “I’ll help you,” Dr. Eddington says. In another room, a phone begins to ring. “What we’ll do, we’ll set up regular sessions, starting next week.” The phone continues to ring, and Dr. Eddington gets up. “Just a second,” he says. “I think I left the answering machine off.”

  While Dr. Eddington is on the phone, Mouse sinks back in her chair, listening to the drone of the doctor’s voice from the other room and swiveling back and forth contentedly. Drifting, she fantasizes an alternate life, one in which her mother died in the plane crash and her father survived. She imagines a man a lot like Dr. Eddington walking hand in hand with a girl a lot like herself. It’s wicked, but it makes her happy.

  In the other room, Dr. Eddington hangs up the phone. He comes back into his office looking distressed.

  “What is it?” Mouse asks him, a part of her still lost in the daydream.

  “That was Meredith Cantrell,” he says.

  “Dr. Grey’s helper?”

  Dr. Eddington nods. “Danny had another stroke this afternoon. She’s dead.”

  It takes a moment for the news to penetrate, and when it does, Mouse finds she isn’t all that surprised. “Oh no,” she says, more for Dr. Eddington’s sake than her own. Then she notices that Dr. Eddington is watching her—waiting to see if she’s going to break down, or turn into somebody else. “I’m OK,” she assures him. “I…it’s sad that she’s dead, but I wasn’t that close to her. I didn’t have time to be. Are you—”

  “I was close to her,” Dr. Eddington says,
going off in his own head for a moment. Then he says: “Anyway, I don’t mean to cut our meeting short, but I have to go out to Autumn Creek now, and break the news to Andrew.”

  “Andrew…oh God.”

  “Yes,” Dr. Eddington says. “I have to see that he’s all right…it’s part of a commitment I made to Dr. Grey.”

  “Sure,” says Mouse, starting to get up. “Of course. I’ll just—”

  “Would you like to come along?”

  “Sure. If you think—”

  “I think it would be good for Andrew to have a friend there,” Dr. Eddington says. He smiles at her, and Mouse can’t help but feel a rush of pleasure. He looks so much like her father.

  “OK,” she says.

  “OK,” says Dr. Eddington. “I’ll just switch the answering machine on, and we’ll go…”

  17

  Mouse was in her first semester at the University of Washington when her mother had her stroke. It took a while for the news to get to her, and there were times in the months that followed when she wished it had never reached her at all.

  That she was in school in Washington state was due, she knew, to the Society. Of course Mouse’s mother had wanted her to “attend university”—as all fine young ladies did these days—but the original plan was for Mouse to go to a college close to home, ideally within half a day’s drive, so that her mother could keep an eye on her. With her mother’s help, Mouse applied to Oberlin, Antioch, Notre Dame, and Northwestern; at the same time, applications in Mouse’s name were sent to Oxford, Stanford, and the University of Washington…and those were just the schools Mouse later found out about.

  Stanford rejected her, and she was never really sure what happened with Oxford. But the University of Washington not only accepted her, it offered her a modest scholarship, which, by means of a Society-authored cover letter, got inflated into a major honor—the kind only awarded to the most exceptional candidates. So Mouse went off to college at the UW. Her mother wasn’t happy about the long distance, but she could hardly insist that Mouse refuse the “great honor,” especially given her belief that the school had chosen Mouse without any prompting.