Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  “I’m surprised you’re willing to sacrifice the cottage. But I guess Adam was right, you have no choice: there’s no swimming pool.”

  “Andrea, I’m serious.” Chief Bradley’s thumb cocks the hammer of the gun back. Mouse, hearing the click, lets out a squeak and starts to crawl backwards. The gun’s aim shifts, Chief Bradley saying: “Don’t.”

  Andrew sidesteps, interposing himself between Mouse and the gun. “Do you think my mother would be impressed by this?” he says. “Do you think it would make her fall in love with you?”

  “Andrea, goddamnit…”

  “You’re being very selfish, Chief Bradley,” Andrew says. “I’m sorry you didn’t get what you wanted; I’m sorry too you’re afraid to face the consequences of the things you’ve done. But if you put that gun down, then whatever else happens, you’ll have the consolation of knowing that you made at least one right decision…”

  “Andrea…” Chief Bradley’s tone is unreadable. He might be wavering, or he might be preparing to pull the trigger.

  “But if you won’t put the gun down,” Andrew continues, “if you aren’t going to let us go, then I’m not going to help you pretend that you aren’t doing a really bad thing. You’re going to have to shoot me; and when you do, I’m going to scream my mother’s name, so that for the rest of your life, whenever you think of her, you’re going to remember this moment, remember choosing to do what you know is wrong…”

  “Andrea…Andrea, goddamnit…”

  “Althea,” Andrew says. “Althea. Beloved Althea…”

  “Goddamnit…” The chief’s voice cracks, and Mouse claps her hands to her head, anticipating the shot, but even as she goes to bury her face in the grass, she sees the light move.

  Chief Bradley has lowered his arms. The gun and the flashlight are pointed at the ground now, and the chief’s shoulders are shaking. He is sobbing: Mouse sees Chief Bradley’s tears gleaming on his cheeks.

  Gleaming…but it isn’t the moon or the stars, or the reflected light of the flash, that makes his tears shine like that. A new glow fills the air, and with it a new sound: the roar of an engine.

  A car is coming. Chief Bradley realizes it at the same time Mouse does. He turns towards the front yard, even as headlights sweep around the last curve in the road.

  There is a squeal of brakes: the car is coming too fast, the driver not expecting the cottage so soon. The light damps down again, and then goes out completely, as the new car slams into the back of Chief Bradley’s cruiser. The cruiser leaps forward in chain reaction, and smashes into the front of the cottage.

  The whole cottage shudders with the shock of the impact. Timbers groan and windows shatter; there is a shriek of tearing wood.

  And Mouse, rearing up, feels Andrew’s hand on her shoulder, dragging her backwards out of harm’s way. Chief Bradley tries to get clear too, but his heel catches on one of the bracing planks, and with no one to steady him he stumbles over backwards.

  “Oh hell,” Chief Bradley says, flinging his arms up over his face.

  The cottage falls on him.

  III

  ORDER

  LAST BOOK: EPILOGUE

  29

  Later that night, after the rescue team had dug him out from under the cottage, Chief Bradley confessed.

  He wasn’t too badly hurt, though that wasn’t obvious at first. He’d broken his arm and a few ribs, and a four-inch wooden splinter had pierced the shoulder of his broken arm; he was bruised and in shock. The doctor who examined him at the Seven Lakes clinic didn’t find any evidence of a head injury or damage to his internal organs, but just to be safe, it was decided to transfer him to a hospital in Muskegon. Officer Jimmy Cahill rode along in the ambulance, and on the way asked Chief Bradley questions about some disturbing things we had told him. Chief Bradley, his tongue loosened by painkillers (and maybe by the fear of dying with a guilty conscience), told Officer Cahill everything: what he had done to Horace Rollins, and what he had thought of doing to us.

  Then the next day, when the painkillers wore off and it became clear that he wasn’t going to die of a broken arm, he recanted his confession. He told the detectives who came to see him that he had been confused the night before, and that Officer Cahill had twisted his words. He said that he was the victim of a conspiracy, orchestrated by a mentally disturbed young woman who for some reason had decided to blame him for her stepfather’s accidental death. He suggested that Officer Cahill’s affection for this mentally disturbed young woman was being used to manipulate him.

  Things might have gone badly from there, but at this point, Mrs. Winslow intervened. Hobbling on crutches—she’d broken her foot when her airport rental car rammed into the back of Chief Bradley’s police cruiser—she paid a visit to the chief in his hospital room. She was alone with him for more than an hour. What passed between them remains their secret, but when they were done, Chief Bradley called the detectives back in, admitted he’d been lying, and reaffirmed his original confession.

  That wasn’t quite the end of it. We still had to stay in Michigan while an official inquiry was held. We spent most of the time at a motel in Muskegon, keeping our fingers crossed that Dr. Kroft wouldn’t show up with a team of men in white coats. But neither he nor anyone else from the state psychiatric bureau ever appeared, and finally we were told we were free to go home.

  On the same day that Chief Bradley was due to be officially charged with the killing of Horace Rollins, we took a last drive up to Seven Lakes. Officer Cahill—who’d been temporarily appointed acting chief of police—was waiting for us on the Gage property with a demolition crew.

  The cottage had only partially collapsed, which was one reason why Chief Bradley hadn’t been more badly hurt. One wall had come down, and about half of the roof, but the majority of the structure, its frame still propped by that telephone pole, remained intact. It probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer in any event, but Officer Cahill had decided to declare it a public-safety hazard and bulldoze it into the ground; and he’d invited us to come watch.

  “Does anyone want to say anything?” Officer Cahill asked, when we were all gathered in the front yard. He looked at Andrew, who seemed lost in thought, and Andrew roused himself and said, “No, I don’t want to say anything, but…give me a minute, OK?” Officer Cahill nodded, and Andrew faced the cottage, his expression going through a whole series of changes as a parade of souls came forward for a final look at the place. I recognized some of them—Aaron, Jake, Samantha, Seferis—but there were others I don’t think I’d met before.

  Then Andrew was back, and he turned to Officer Cahill and said, “Go ahead.” Officer Cahill signaled the bulldozer.

  The cottage was down in just a few minutes, but Officer Cahill had the bulldozer operator drive back and forth over the wreckage for a while, mashing it flat. Finally Officer Cahill turned to Andrew again and said, “Enough?” Andrew nodded.

  Officer Cahill gave another signal, and the bulldozer rolled off into the backyard. Meanwhile Andrew’s face changed again, taking on a mischievous expression: Adam. He walked up to where the cottage’s front door had been, and took out a salt shaker that he’d stolen from Winchell’s Diner that morning. He unscrewed the top, poured the salt into his hand, and sowed it over the ruins.

  When Adam was done he tossed the shaker away and gave the body to Aunt Sam. Sam went over to Officer Cahill, surprising him by giving him a big kiss on the cheek, and surprising him again by saying: “You’re still a bastard, Jimmy, but thank you for this.” Then Sam gave way to Andrew, who stepped back red-faced and muttered, “Sorry.”

  “It’s OK,” Officer Cahill said, “I understand. Or actually, I don’t, but…I’ll live.”

  There was one more crash as the bulldozer knocked down the toolshed. The bulldozer operator leaned out of his cab and called to Officer Cahill: “Anything else?”

  “No,” the officer told him. “No, that’s good!”

  And then Andrew, looking tired, turned to me
and said: “What do you think, Penny? Are you ready to go home now?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m ready. Let’s go home.”

  30

  Surprised?

  I couldn’t resist including that, but at the same time, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea; Penny did not undergo any sort of miraculous transformation as a result of our adventures. It would take almost a year of weekly therapy with Dr. Eddington before she came to honestly regard herself as Penny rather than Mouse, and another year and a half for her case to reach its final disposition. As part of her therapy, Penny would eventually read through Thread’s electronic diaries—the same diaries I have drawn on in recounting her side of this story—and rewrite portions of them in the first person; but that came very late in the course of her treatment. In the nearer term, the fact that she was now in direct communication with her other selves did represent a major breakthrough, but it was only the first step in a lengthy process.

  So we went home to Washington and resumed the course of our lives there, a return to order that went much more smoothly than I, at least, had any right to expect. Not only did we still have our jobs at the Reality Factory, but Julie, in an incredible act of generosity, insisted on paying us full wages for the time we’d been away. “Medical leave,” she said. “All the best companies offer it.”

  Julie. One of the first things I did after getting back to Autumn Creek was write Julie a long letter of apology, which I delivered to her in person. After she read it, we went out to dinner (by unspoken agreement, we chose a restaurant with no liquor license) and had a long heart-to-heart talk. I won’t claim that we worked out all our issues, but by the end of the evening I felt like we’d repaired most of the damage to our friendship.

  Of course, Julie being Julie (and—let’s be fair—me being me), there were always new challenges. My second week back I started my own course of therapy with Dr. Eddington. My appointments were on Friday afternoons at four. Penny drove me; we’d leave the Reality Factory around three and head into the city. Coming back I’d take the bus sometimes, but most often Penny would drive me home, too—or Maledicta would drive Aunt Sam, if they’d both been good. Penny’s own sessions with Dr. Eddington were on Wednesdays, and I took to riding along on those, as well; I’d let Adam, Jake, and the others explore Fremont while Penny was with the doctor, and afterwards, depending on Penny’s mood, we’d go see a movie, or take a walk along Lake Union, or—if the session had been an especially bad one—just sit in Gas Works Park and talk.

  All of which was nice, but it did mean that we were both leaving work early twice a week. At first Julie was perfectly fine about this—anything to keep us from running off to Michigan again—but by midsummer she began to grouse about the lost work hours, saying it was “hurting productivity.” I don’t think it was hurting productivity; I think Julie was just jealous of all the time Penny and I were spending together. Penny got her therapy sessions rescheduled to Friday, directly after mine, to cut down on the lost worktime, but Julie continued to complain anyway, and I surprised myself by not caring all that much.

  As it turned out, the Reality Factory’s days were numbered. In September, a big venture capital deal that Julie had been working on for months fell through. She called a meeting and informed us that unless she could find a new source of funding, the Factory would soon be bankrupt. Then Dennis dropped his own bombshell: bankruptcy or no bankruptcy, he said, he had decided to move back to Alaska.

  “What are you talking about?” said Julie. “You can’t just leave! How are we supposed to finish the project without—”

  “Come on, Grand Poobah,” Dennis said, fanning himself with his open shirtfront. “You know as well as I do that it’s never gonna be finished. I’m sick of it.”

  Penny and I slipped out during the ensuing bloodbath. Irwin was right behind us. “I’m not going back to Alaska,” he announced fiercely, and fell to silent brooding until Julie came to tell us it was all over: we were out of business.

  By the middle of October, Dennis had gone. Irwin, true to his word, and much to his brother’s surprise, chose to remain in Washington, though he left Autumn Creek. He moved to Renton, and got a job with a fantasy card-game company that was headquartered there; Jake was pretty envious when he heard.

  Penny and I both landed jobs at Bit Warehouse. Yes, that same one. I know what you’re thinking, but it turned out Adam’s joke was true: enough time had passed for them to forget about my “drug problem.” Actually, high employee turnover had produced a conveniently selective memory loss. Mr. Weeks was long gone, as were all my father’s closest coworkers. But my father’s mostly positive work record was still on file, so I had very little trouble getting rehired, as a cashier rather than a restocker this time. Penny went to work in the Technical Services Department, fixing and upgrading computers.

  As for Julie, I’m not altogether sure what she did for work in the months following the Reality Factory’s closure. I know she did a number of odd jobs for her uncle, and she spent a lot of time in Seattle, probably temping. But she didn’t like to talk about it. Much of her time was taken up by a lawsuit: when she tried to break the lease on the Factory lot, the landlord sued her for unpaid rent and for her failure to complete the promised improvements to the property. The case was eventually settled out of court, with Julie paying the landlord a couple thousand dollars (don’t ask me where she got it) and letting him keep all the gear inside the shed, or at least that portion of it that hadn’t already been seized by the Factory’s other creditors. The computer equipment was sold for cash, and the Honey Bucket, I hope, was taken out and burned, but as far as I know the tents are still there, gathering dust and mildew and waiting for the next visionary entrepreneur to come along.

  One day near the end of the following summer, Julie took me out to lunch and announced that she too would be leaving Autumn Creek. “And you’ll never guess where I’m going: Alaska.”

  “Alaska?” I said. “What, are you planning to track down Dennis and get even with him?”

  “No, I’ve already forgotten all about Dennis…I mean, OK, if I do come across him, and if he happens to be standing at the edge of a cliff with his back turned to me, who knows, but no, I’m not planning to kill him.” What she was planning to do, she said, was get work aboard a fish processor, which is a kind of big factory ship that goes to sea for months at a time, catching thousands of pounds of cod and haddock and processing them right on board into frozen fillets and fish sticks. From Julie’s description, it sounded like the worst job in the world—sixteen-hour shifts, hazardous work conditions, crews composed largely of male ex-convicts, etc.—but Julie insisted that, if she survived, it would be well worth it: “They pay you a percentage of the proceeds, which if the catch is big can be a huge amount of money.”

  “What if the catch isn’t so big?”

  “Well, that’s why you’ve got to pick the right ship…don’t worry, it’ll work out. I’ll spend a few months in hell, make my fortune, and then I’ll come back here and we’ll start a new company.”

  She had a couple of going-away presents for me, even though she was the one who was leaving. The first was her Cadillac. “I can’t take it with me,” she said. “It wouldn’t survive the drive up, and even if it did, three months in an Anchorage parking garage would kill it for sure.”

  “Well I’ll be happy to watch it for you, Julie, but you know I still don’t have a driver’s license.”

  “You’ll get one,” Julie said. “Penny tells me you’re a really good driver…”

  Which brought us to her other going-away gift. Julie’s apartment lease ran through next February, and after all the hassle over the Reality Factory’s lease she didn’t want to risk breaking it. So she’d arranged to sublet the place to Penny, whose current apartment in Queen Anne rented on a month-to-month basis. “Lose one neighbor, gain another,” Julie said. “Now I know you won’t be lonely.”

  I had no objection—I thought it would be great to have P
enny living in Autumn Creek—but I said: “It’s still not going to happen, Julie.”

  “What’s not going to happen?”

  “You know perfectly well what. You’re matchmaking again. But Penny and I are just friends.”

  “Matchmaking? Me?” She smiled the fake-innocent smile I knew so well. “You’re imagining things, Andrew. Still…the two of you would make a cute couple…”

  She left for Alaska in September. In December I received a letter from her saying that the fish-processing job hadn’t panned out, and she was working a concession stand at the Anchorage Zoo. “Big joke, really. We’re only open during daylight hours—ten to four this time of year—and half the exhibits are hibernating right now. Still it’s a living. P.S. I need you to sell my car and send me the money.”

  I sold the Cadillac, for a sum far smaller than Julie had once hoped to realize, and sent her a cashier’s check padded with a little extra money from my own savings. Since then I have received occasional letters and e-mails from her, providing sketchy details of her life in various Alaskan cities and towns—she seems to be moving closer to the North Pole as time goes on. Her last postcard read: “Wedding plans canceled. I am in Fairbanks taking flying lessons & by spring should be a licensed bush pilot. XXX, Julie.”

  That was seven months ago. I haven’t heard another word since, though I would be willing to bet that Julie has not, in fact, become a bush pilot. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine. I hope that whatever she is doing, she is happy. I still love her, of course, and while I accept now that it was not meant to be, I will never wish her anything other than the best.

  And no, I have no idea what wedding plans she was referring to.

  If this were a made-up story, Julie’s matchmaking efforts would ultimately have succeeded: Penny and I would have fallen in love and lived happily ever after. Reality has (so far) fallen well short of that, though not as short of it as I would once have predicted.