Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  “Just passing through,” Mouse says simply, in answer to his question, and he nods, like it’s no big coincidence that she’d just happen to drive three hundred miles and show up at the same rest stop he’s at. “But what about you? I thought you were going to fly to Michigan last night.”

  “Oh,” he says, missing a beat. “Oh, it, uh, turned out I couldn’t get a flight.”

  “Oh,” says Mouse. “Well that’s too bad.”

  “Yeah…after you, after you dropped me off at the airport, I, there must not have been, there were no flights available.” He gets lost for a moment, then continues: “It’s OK, though, I got a ride on a truck.”

  “Oh.” Mouse makes a point of looking around. “Is the driver—”

  “Well actually, it’s not totally OK,” he interrupts her. “The way I understand it, the truck was supposed to take me all the way to Chicago—that’s near Michigan, right?—but then the truck driver and I had a, I guess you’d call it a personality conflict, and he made me get off here. Which is not a very responsible thing to do, going back on a promise you made, even if you decide you don’t like a person…So do you think it’ll be hard for me to get another ride?”

  Mouse hesitates, trying to gauge how much subtlety is required here. Probably not much. “I could give you a ride,” she says.

  “Yeah?” He hesitates too, and Mouse can tell he’s debating whether to ask if this ride will cost money.

  “No charge,” Mouse says, sparing him the question. “I feel bad that your plane ride didn’t work out.”

  “Oh, well…that’s not your fault, I’m sure. So you’re driving to Michigan now?”

  Mouse nods. “I’m hoping to see a friend there.”

  “Well, OK then…let’s go!” Ready to leave that instant, he starts to get up from the table, notices that Mouse isn’t doing the same, and pauses, confused. “Oh,” he says, after a moment’s thought, “are you…did you want to eat something first?” He gestures at his leftover pancake stack. “The waitress brought me two orders by mistake. So if you’d like…”

  “No thank you,” says Mouse. The cigarettes Maledicta smoked have temporarily suppressed her appetite, and when it comes back she’s afraid she’s going to be sick to her stomach, so eating someone else’s leftovers is probably not a good idea. “But there is one thing,” she says. “I know you don’t want to make any detours, but I am going to have to stop and rest for a few hours.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been driving all night. I need sleep, or at least a nap. Not right away—I could go another hour yet, probably—but then I’m going to need to stop at a motel for a while.”

  He frowns. “A motel?”

  Mouse nods, thinking: Someplace off the Interstate, where you’ll be stranded while I call Dr. Eddington.

  “And how long would you want to stop?”

  “Not long,” Mouse promises. “A few hours.”

  “A few hours…well…”

  “I understand you don’t want to delay, but I’d be worried that if you stay here, you might not get a ride at all…at least, not a free ride…”

  It doesn’t take much of this to persuade him. Once he’s agreed, Mouse asks: “By the way, what’s your name?”

  “Xavier,” he tells her. “Xavier Reyes.”

  “Hello, Xavier, I’m Penny.” Mouse shakes his hand, then adds: “Now you just wait here a second while I go use the bathroom, OK? I’ll be right back.”

  Mouse intends to freshen up quickly and then duck outside to the pay phone to try Mrs. Winslow’s number again, but when she comes out of the bathroom, Xavier is waiting by the door for her. He jerks his head impatiently, indicating that they should go, and Mouse has little choice but to follow him.

  Outside, he walks straight to her car without bothering to ask where she’s parked—and instead of standing aside and waiting for her to unlock the doors, he steps up to the driver’s side and holds out his hand for the keys. “I think I’ll drive for a while,” he says. “Since you’re so tired.”

  “You’ll—”

  “…Mouse,” he adds, grinning savagely.

  Him. Mouse draws back fearfully and very nearly disappears; only the alltoo-recent memory of being trapped in the cave mouth stops her from giving up control. Instead she gathers herself to run away physically. But he doesn’t pounce, or try to grab her; in fact he makes no threatening overtures at all, except for that nasty grin.

  “Now you listen,” he says. “I’m not stealing your car, all right? If you want to tag along with me, that’s fine—but I’m not going back to Autumn Creek, and I’m not going to tap my toes at some motel while you call for the men in the white coats.”

  “Who are you?” Mouse asks.

  He ignores the question, and gestures impatiently with his outstretched hand. “Give me the keys.”

  She shakes her head.

  “Fine,” he says, and shrugs. “I’ll just get another ride, then. Feel free to follow me if you think you can stay awake…” He starts to walk away.

  “Wait!”

  He turns back.

  “I don’t,” Mouse stammers, “I don’t trust you.”

  “I don’t trust you either,” he says, “and I’ve got better cause not to. But I’m not going to hurt you, if that’s what you’re afraid of—not unless you try to hurt me first.” He holds out his hand again. “Keys.”

  Mouse takes her keys out of her pocket but doesn’t hand them over. “You…you’re sure you can drive?”

  “I might be out of practice,” he allows, “but I won’t fall asleep at the wheel.”

  “What about your head? You were awfully drunk last night…”

  “That wasn’t me.”

  “It was your body.”

  “Yours too, by the smell of things.” He shrugs. “Maybe I am a little hung over this morning—I’m tough, I can cope with that. It’s not my hangover. And I did get some sleep in that truck, once I got the driver to shut the hell up…” Losing patience again: “So are we doing this, or not?”

  Still full of misgivings, but with no idea of what else to do, Mouse gives him the keys. As he snatches them out of her hand, the panic comes welling up again: she’s a fool, he’s tricked her, he is going to steal the car, just drive off and leave her here…

  He reads the fear in her eyes, and laughs. “I could leave you behind,” he says, “but I won’t. I’m going to need you to drive when I get tired.” He unlocks the Centurion’s back door for her, and opens it. “Go on, lie down—I’ll wake you when it’s your turn.”

  She gets in, but she doesn’t lie down. Though no less tired than she was five minutes ago, she can’t imagine sleeping now. Instead she sits up straight, her hands worrying at the Buick’s rear seatbelts, which are tangled and frayed and have never buckled properly anyway.

  “God,” he says, sliding in behind the wheel, “what a stench!” He looks over his shoulder at her. “Not your fault, I suppose.”

  “I,” Mouse begins, and then gives up. He doesn’t really care whose fault it is that the car smells; he’s just taunting her.

  Moving slowly, like a pilot at the controls of an unfamiliar plane, he gets the Buick’s engine started, then spends a long moment studying the dashboard gauges and indicators, the blinker switches, and the gearshift. Mouse expects him to be reckless behind the wheel, like Maledicta, but just the opposite is true—when he finally releases the parking brake and gets moving, he turns out to be even more cautious a driver than Mouse herself. On the way out of the rest stop, he yields to every vehicle that crosses his path, and at the top of the highway on-ramp hesitates so long before merging, waiting for the perfect gap in traffic, that other cars and trucks stacked up behind him start to honk. Once on the Interstate, he keeps to the right-hand lane and holds the speedometer at fifty, twenty-five miles per hour below the posted speed limit.

  “So,” says Mouse, thinking to make small talk, maybe learn his name and something about him, but he cuts her off.

>   “Don’t distract me while I’m driving,” he says.

  “Sorry,” Mouse apologizes. Chagrined, she slides down in her seat a little—

  —and the car is stopped again, and she’s being shaken awake. When Mouse opens her eyes and sees him leaning over her, a hand on her leg, she lets out a sharp squeak, and he starts, thumping his head hard against the roof of the car.

  “OW!” he roars, stumbling backwards out of the Centurion, hand pressed to the back of his skull. “Damn it, you stupid bitch!…I wasn’t trying to hurt you, it’s just your turn to drive…”

  Mouse sits up. They’re parked at another rest stop. It’s smaller than the last one, set in a broad green valley among snow-capped mountains, the Rockies most likely. Mouse checks the dashboard clock: 11:25. “Where are we?”

  “Montana,” he tells her, wincing. “Past Missoula, coming up on Butte. I just got us gas…Ow!”

  “Sorry,” says Mouse, though she isn’t, really. She gently fingers the back of her own neck; she’s mostly recovered from her run-in with the tree, but there’s still some residual tenderness, and she’s going to have to watch that it doesn’t flare up again. For now, though, she feels OK.

  She’s also starving. She climbs out of the car, and looks around to see what the rest stop has to offer in the way of food.

  “I’ve got you covered,” he says.

  “What?”

  “You’re hungry, right?” He points to a white paper sack on the roof of the car. “I got you a hamburger and fries. There’s a Pepsi in there, too.”

  “Oh…thank you.” Of course he’s not really being considerate; he just doesn’t want to have to worry about her sneaking off to use the phone. Mouse thinks about going into a restaurant anyway, just to defy him—now that she’s seen him bump his head, he’s not so scary anymore. But scary or not, he’s still got the car keys, and if he gets mad he might drive off without her.

  Despite the snowy peaks, it’s actually warmer here than at the Idaho rest stop. The sky is clear and the sun is almost directly overhead; the midday wind is gentle and not so cold. Mouse eats standing up beside the car. He leans against the front hood and smokes a cigarette—a Winston, Maledicta’s brand.

  “Are you going to tell me your name?” Mouse asks between bites.

  He shakes his head, exhaling smoke.

  “What do I call you, then?”

  “Try ‘Andrew.’”

  “No,” says Mouse. “I don’t think so.”

  He scowls at her. “I am Andy Gage, you know,” he says. “More than any of those others. They aren’t even real, they’re just…delusions with egos.”

  “What about Xavier?”

  “What about him?”

  “Well, it seems like the two of you are…working together, sort of. Is he a delusion?”

  “Xavier is a tool,” he says. “A useless tool,” he adds, annoyed. “I mean, you’ve met him: he was supposed to be clever, but it turns out he’s got about as much guile as a hubcap. A housefly could outwit him. And he’s also a coward…”

  “A coward?” says Mouse.

  He puffs on his cigarette.

  “Did you,” Mouse tries a different tack, “did you make Xavier? Call him out, the way Aaron called out Andrew?”

  He chuckles, as if she’s just said something amusing, but he doesn’t answer the question.

  “Finish up,” he tells her a moment later, dropping his cigarette butt on the ground and stepping on it. “I want to keep moving.”

  “All right…” Mouse pops a last french fry into her mouth and looks around for a place to dump her garbage…but he takes the bag and the half-empty soda can from her and tosses them on the ground beside his cigarette butt. “Come on,” he says.

  He hands her the car keys and climbs in the back. Mouse gets into the driver’s seat. She doesn’t like having him behind her, but it’s more discomfort than fear now; she’s all but certain he has no intention of harming her. And even if something happened where he did try to hurt her, she can sense Maledicta and Malefica lounging near the cave mouth, ready to step forward to defend her.

  A realization hits her then, and she can’t help laughing.

  “What?” he says. “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing,” says Mouse. She uses the sound of the engine start to mask another snort of laughter. No, nothing’s funny, except that against all expectation, and without meaning to, she’s taken Dr. Grey’s advice and started thinking of her Society as allies.

  The realization leads to another: she may have allies, but evidently he doesn’t. He called Xavier “useless”; and it doesn’t sound like there are any other souls he can call on in a crisis. So maybe if Mouse could precipitate a crisis, create a situation that he couldn’t handle on his own, maybe that would cause someone else, a non-ally, to come out—Andrew, or Andrew’s father, or at least someone who could put her in touch with them.

  It’s something to think about while she’s driving. She does think about it, even going so far as to discuss the idea, silently, with Maledicta. But Maledicta’s not much help; when Mouse asks what would be a good way to shock their passenger into giving up control of Andrew’s body, Maledicta replies: “Why don’t you let Malefica tie him to the back bumper and drag him for a few miles?” She says this like she’s not kidding.

  “I don’t want to hurt him,” Mouse says. “At least, I don’t want to hurt Andrew.”

  “What you need to do,” another Society member speaks up, “is get him talking about himself. Find out what he’s afraid of.”

  It’s a good idea, but he’s not interested in talking, particularly not about his fears. “Just keep driving,” he tells her.

  She keeps driving; she talks to herself. The Society keeps its collective eyes peeled for an opportunity to fool or force him into switching.

  By 2:45 on the dashboard clock they’re in Billings, where Mouse stops for more gas. Rather than hunt up Maledicta’s Shell card, she insists that he pay for it. After the gas station they go to an Arby’s to eat—he pays for that too, with one of Andrew’s twenty-dollar bills—and use the bathrooms. Once more Mouse tries to hurry her business, but when she comes out of the ladies’ he’s right there waiting for her. They go back out to the car. He’s ready to drive again, but Mouse, unwilling to give up control, says she’s good for another few hours.

  They cross the state line into Wyoming at 4:52. At 6:39 Mouse notices the sun starting to go down, which seems early, until she remembers: traveling east, almost a thousand miles from Seattle already, they’re in a new time zone. She thinks about resetting the dashboard clock, but Maledicta, up in the cave mouth, argues against it: “You want it set to the wrong time, to headfuck that fucker in the back seat. If you’re going to fucking change it, you should make it more wrong. Set it to fucking Tokyo time.” In the end, Mouse leaves the clock as it is.

  The Rockies are well behind them now; they are crossing a broad swath of grassland that stretches between the Bighorn Mountains and the Black Hills. Traffic is very sparse here, and the rolling sameness of the scenery makes for dull driving. Mouse, who has maintained a conservative sixty-five miles an hour for most of the afternoon, lets the Buick’s speed creep up to the posted maximum of seventy-five. Then Malefica, bored and in a mood for mischief, slips out in a moment of distraction and puts some real lead in Penny Driver’s right foot.

  —and so just as the sun dips below the horizon, flashing lights appear behind them, a siren wails, and Mouse looks to find the speedometer needle edging towards one hundred.

  “Oh God,” Mouse says.

  “—slow down, you idiot!” he yells from the back seat, has been yelling. “Slow down, slow down, slow down—”

  She is slowing down—her foot is off the gas, and the needle swings back, to ninety, eighty, sixty, forty. The patrol car is right on her tail now, its lights still flashing, signaling her to pull over. Mouse steers the Centurion obediently onto the soft shoulder.

  In the back seat he’s havi
ng a meltdown.

  “You stupid, stupid…” he sputters, at a loss for an epithet to use on her. “What were you driving so fast for?”

  “It…” Mouse sputters in turn, “I don’t think it was me.”

  “Oh great.”

  “I’m the one who’s going to get in trouble, you know,” Mouse points out. “I don’t see what you’re getting so upset about.”

  “You’d just better not try anything,” he warns. “You’d better not say anything, about…”

  “Don’t worry about it.” In fact Mouse has already considered the possibility, and rejected it. If she was unwilling to dial 911 from the Idaho rest stop, there’s no way she’s going to try explaining her situation to a cop who’s just pulled her over for speeding.

  The Wyoming state trooper is out of his car, one hand holding a flashlight, the other resting on the butt of his gun. He walks up, raps a knuckle on Mouse’s window. She rolls it down.

  “Good evening,” the trooper says. He bends his face down to the window and shines his flashlight around the Centurion’s interior. Mouse waits patiently and surprisingly calmly to be asked for her license and registration, but her passenger rocks anxiously in the back seat, sucking in his breath as the light flicks over him.

  The trooper’s nose twitches.

  Oh God, Mouse thinks, remembering. The car’s been aired out some since this morning—she had the front windows cracked through most of Montana—but it still smells like a distillery.

  The trooper shines his flashlight in Mouse’s face, in her eyes. “Have you consumed any alcohol this evening, ma’am?” he asks.

  “No,” Mouse replies, hearing another nervous inhalation behind her. “No, I’m sorry, I know how it smells, but…no, I haven’t been drinking.”

  The trooper waits, still shining the light on her.

  “We…I was at a party last night,” Mouse continues.

  “You had a party in your car last night?”

  “No!” says Mouse, her voice cracking a little now. “No, I was at a party, parked, and there was…an accident. A bottle of vodka got spilled, and I just haven’t had a chance to get it cleaned up. I, we, we’ve been driving all day.”