Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  “Oh great,” said Adam, who’d joined my father in the pulpit. “This should be entertaining.”

  “Your father?” Julie repeated.

  “Yes, my father.”

  She made a show of checking to see if there was someone standing behind me, first leaning sideways, then going up on tiptoe to peer over the top of my head. “Where?” she finally said.

  “In the pulpit,” I told her, after a quick backward glance of my own.

  “Pulpit?”

  “It’s a sort of balcony, on the front of the house. In my head.”

  “What are you, schizophrenic?” Julie said.

  “No, I’m a multiple personality. Schizophrenia is different.”

  “A multiple personality. You have other personalities sharing your body.”

  “Other souls.” Remembering what my father had told me, I added: “It’s a complicated truth.”

  “I’ll just bet it is.” It was at this moment, Julie later confided in me, that she decided I must be sincere or one of the best liars she’d ever met—either of which was interesting. “What was that you said about a house?”

  She ended up asking me out for a drink after I got off work, and I was so excited I said yes without checking with my father first. But he was glad to see me taking some initiative, and Adam officially pronounced Julie safe: “She’s not an ax murderer, anyway…although she’s probably wondering if you’re one.”

  So at quarter past eight that evening I met Julie in the parking lot outside the Warehouse. Usually I depended on public buses to get around, but Julie had her own car and offered to pick me up. When she found out I lived in Autumn Creek, she suggested a bar on Bridge Street that was only a few blocks from Mrs. Winslow’s. “My own place is right around the corner,” Julie added.

  The car was a 1957 Cadillac Sedan de Ville, “a minor classic,” Julie said, which she’d bought from her uncle and was planning to sell for a profit once she got it fixed up.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Pretty much everything.” Julie recited a list of the car’s defects and Adam pointed out a few more that she didn’t mention; as we drove out of the parking lot, something hanging off the undercarriage banged against the pavement, leaving a trail of sparks in the Cadillac’s wake. “It needs some serious work.”

  “Won’t that cost a lot of money?”

  “Some of the replacement parts will. But I figure I can handle most of the labor myself…Can you roll down your window a second? We need to make a right-turn signal here.”

  Maybe to get away from the subject of car repairs, Julie started telling me about herself. She was twenty-four, and came originally from Rhode Island, though she’d lived in a lot of different places since leaving home at sixteen. She’d attended Boston University for a couple of years, and had majored successively in physics, engineering, and computer science before dropping out without completing a degree; since then, she’d worked as a lab technician, a machinist, a gas-station attendant, a museum tour guide, a set designer for a low-budget horror film, a fire spotter, a short-order cook, a blackjack dealer, a sign painter for the Eugene, Oregon, Department of Public Works, and, most recently, an assistant to a physical therapist in Seattle. “Never a farmer, though,” she said, and grinned.

  Anyway, she continued, since things had gone sour with the physical therapy job she’d decided it was time to stop screwing around and put her life in order, get serious about a career. With the help of the same uncle who’d sold her the Cadillac, she’d secured a small business loan and taken out a lease on a building in Autumn Creek, where she planned to set up a computer software design company.

  “What kind of software are you going to design?”

  “Virtual-reality software,” Julie said. She looked at me as if I was supposed to know what that meant, but I’d never heard the expression before.

  “What’s virtual reality?”

  “You work at Bit Warehouse and you don’t know what virtual reality is?”

  “I haven’t worked there very long.”

  “Gee, I guess not.”

  “So what is it?”

  Instead of answering, she changed the subject again—or at least I thought she did: “Tell me about the house in your head.”

  We were at the Bridge Street bar by then, sitting in a booth near the jukebox. Julie had ordered us a Saturday Night Special, which I found out too late was a gallon-sized pitcher of dark beer. Drinking alcohol was against my father’s rules, and I’d meant to ask for a soda, but rather than admit the mistake I let Julie fill my glass and then left it untouched as we went on talking.

  I told her about the house: about the dark room in Andy Gage’s head, and my father’s struggle to create a geography there. I wasn’t as clear as I would have liked; it was my first time telling a story to someone, and I was nervous, unsure which details to include or what order to put them in. It also didn’t help that I had a critic. My father had left the pulpit to give me some privacy, but Adam was still up there. He thought I was being far too candid with this stranger.

  “But why shouldn’t I be? You said yourself she’s not dangerous.”

  “I said she’s not an ax murderer. That doesn’t mean it’s OK to tell her everything about us.”

  “I’m not—”

  “So Horace Rollins is your father?” Julie asked, not realizing she was interrupting.

  The question startled me. “Not my father,” I told her. “Andy Gage’s father. Andy Gage’s stepfather. He’s no relation to me at all. No relation to Andy Gage either, really.”

  “Your real father died?”

  “Andy Gage’s father,” I corrected her. “Silas Gage. He drowned.”

  “Andy Gage’s father…So when you talk about your father, you don’t mean Silas Gage, and you don’t mean Horace Rollins, you mean another personality. Another ‘soul.’”

  “Aaron,” I said, nodding. “My father.”

  “The one who called you out of the lake…who created you.”

  “Right.”

  “And when exactly was that?” Julie wanted to know. “That you were called out?”

  I’d been hoping she wouldn’t ask that. Contrary to Adam’s accusation, there were a number of things I’d consciously avoided telling Julie. In most cases these omissions were instinctive, and I couldn’t have explained the reasoning behind them at the time. But I knew perfectly well why I’d been vague about my birthdate: I was embarrassed. Julie had so much life experience, and I had so little, I was afraid she wouldn’t want to be friends once she found out how immature I really was. But there was no helping it now.

  “A month ago,” I admitted. “I came out of the lake a month ago. I know I probably seem really naive—”

  “Wait,” Julie said. “You’re a month old?”

  “No,” I said, confused. “I’m twenty-six years old. I was born a month ago.”

  Julie shook her head. “How can both of those things be true?”

  “They just are,” I told her. “What’s the problem?”

  “So it’s your physical body that’s twenty-six?”

  “No, the body is twenty-nine.”

  “Then what part of you is twenty-six?”

  “My soul.”

  Julie shook her head again. I went to Adam for help.

  “All right…Adam says, because your body and your soul have always been joined together, they’re basically reflections of each other. They’re like twins.”

  “You mean they look the same? Souls have an appearance?”

  “Of course.”

  Julie laughed. “So my soul has crooked teeth?”

  “I guess,” I said, glancing at her mouth. “If your body does. And it’s got the same-color eyes, and the same build, and the same voice—and the same age. But for us, it’s not like that. None of us is in the body all the time, so there’s not that same connection. Adam says—”

  “Who’s Adam?”

  “My cousin.”

  “
This is another soul? Like your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how old is Adam?”

  “Adam is fifteen.”

  “Has he always been fifteen, or has he gotten older?”

  “He’s gotten a little older,” I said.

  “How much is a little?”

  “Well, it’s hard to say exactly. It depends on how much time he’s spent outside. Adam used to steal time in the body, the same as the others; if you added up all that stolen time, plus the time he’s been allowed out since my father took over and started building the house, that would tell you how much older he’s gotten. My father thinks it’s about a year, but Adam won’t say.”

  “He doesn’t want your father to know how much time he really stole,” Julie guessed.

  “He doesn’t want to have to explain what he did with it,” I told her.

  “Souls only age when they’re in control of the body?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. That’s just the way it works.”

  “What does Adam say about it?”

  “Adam says…Adam says it’s the same reason you don’t get better at poker unless you play for real money. I’m sorry, I don’t know what that means.”

  “That’s OK,” said Julie. “I think I do.”

  She picked up the pitcher to pour herself some more beer, and noticed that my glass was still full. “What’s wrong?” she said. “You don’t like stout?”

  “I don’t drink, actually,” I confessed, feeling caught out. “House rule.”

  “You sure?” She held up the pitcher, which still had more than half the gallon in it. “If I finish this myself, you may have to carry me out of here.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have said something.”

  “No, it’s all right. I should have asked.” Julie gestured in the direction of the bar. “Do you want something else?”

  “No, really, I’m fine.”

  “Suit yourself…” She refilled her own glass, then said: “So tell me something about your soul.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Well, what do you really look like? If I could see your soul and compare it to what I see now, what would be different?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Not that much, actually. I look a lot like my father, and my father looks more like Andy Gage than any other soul except…well, it’s a very close resemblance.”

  “But there are differences?”

  “A few. My hair’s darker, and my face is thinner—it’s put together a little differently, too.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, scars.” I pointed to a jagged line above Andy Gage’s right eye. “Jake—he’s another one of my cousins—Jake did this one time when he had the body. He tripped and fell against the edge of a glass table. Jake’s soul has the same scar, but mine doesn’t, because—”

  “Because it didn’t happen to you.”

  “Right.”

  “What about this one?” Julie touched a spot on the body’s left palm, just above the ball of the thumb. Her fingers were cool and damp from the beer glass, and felt good in a way I hadn’t experienced before. But when I realized what she was talking about, I pulled the hand away from her.

  “That’s just something my father did once,” I said. “He stuck himself on a bill spike.” I think Julie could tell there was more to the story than that, but she didn’t press me on it.

  “Any other differences?” she asked.

  “Just some little things. Nothing major.”

  In the pulpit, Adam let out a snort. “Sure, nothing major. Nothing except—”

  “Adam!” I warned.

  “What?” said Julie.

  “It’s nothing,” I told her. “Adam just said something very rude, is all.”

  She leaned forward, curious. “What did he say?”

  “It’s nothing, really. Just Adam being a pest.”

  “Has he been listening to us this whole time?”

  I nodded. “Listening and commenting. It’s what he does.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  It was an innocent request, and, as I eventually learned, a common one. Like a lot of Julie’s other questions, though, it caught me by surprise; instead of recognizing that she was simply curious about Adam, my first thought was that she didn’t want to talk to me anymore.

  “What did I do wrong?” I asked Adam.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong. She’s not mad—she just wants to see a trick.”

  “A trick?”

  “A magic trick.”

  “You want to see a magic trick?” I asked Julie, confused again.

  “What?” said Julie.

  “Here,” Adam offered, “I’ll show you what I mean. Just let me have the body for a second…”

  I should have refused; even a month out of the lake, I knew better than to trust Adam’s generosity. But he sounded so self-assured, and I was so at a loss, that I stepped back into the pulpit and let him take over.

  Now it was Julie’s turn to be startled. People who have never seen a switch before often expect some dramatic physical transformation, like a werewolf sprouting hair and fangs under a full moon. In reality it’s much more subtle—the body doesn’t change, just the body language, which can actually be a lot more unsettling. I’m naturally a little shy, and though I try to keep eye contact for courtesy’s sake, I have what Aunt Sam calls “a politely unintrusive gaze.” Adam, of course, is the opposite of unintrusive. The first thing he did when he took the body from me was flash Julie his crudest adolescent leer. I could tell by the way she reacted: she stopped smiling and shifted back defensively in her seat. It was my first hint that I’d just made a big mistake.

  “Hello, Julie,” said Adam, in a silky voice that even spooked me a little. “Watch closely.” He lifted up his right arm and waggled it in the air. “Nothing up this sleeve…” He did the same with his left arm. “…and nothing up this one.” He lowered his arms and brought them together, hands clasping around the sides of the beer pitcher. “Watch…”

  “Oh no,” I said. “Adam! No!”

  The beer: of course: it was the beer that he wanted. Alcohol is against the rules of the house, but Adam doesn’t care about the rules—he is Gideon’s son, after all. And he loves drinking, even more than he loves Playboy.

  As he brought the pitcher to his lips I tried to wrest the body back from him, but he was determined to hang on until he finished. He didn’t need to hold me off for long. Blitz-drinking is one of Adam’s most refined “talents”: he just threw his head back, and the stout in the pitcher slid out of sight like rainwater washing down a drainpipe, with no pause for swallowing.

  “Aaaaaaahhhh—” Adam slammed the empty pitcher down on the table. He drained the glasses next, grabbing Julie’s in one fist and mine in the other, tossing them back as if they were no more than thimble-sized, and ending with a flourish: “TA-DAAAA!!!” Then he leaned forward across the table, opened his mouth and belched explosively, right in Julie’s face.

  And that was all. Cackling hysterically at his joke, Adam fled the body and ran back into the house, leaving me to deal with the aftermath.

  Julie looked as though she’d been slapped: she sat bolt upright, palms flat and rigid against the edge of the table as if frozen in the act of pushing away. From inside the house I could hear my father roaring in fury, and beneath the roar a door slam as Adam, still cackling, barricaded himself in his room, but that was all very distant. The immediate universe was made up of Julie and her wide-eyed expression of shock.

  I jerked back in my own seat and my hands flew up to my mouth, as if I could somehow cram Adam’s belch back inside. I would have given a lot to be able to abandon the body myself just then, to push it and the whole situation off on another soul; but that wasn’t allowed. I could call on Seferis to handle physical threats, but coping with embarrassment was my own responsibility—even when it wasn’t my fault. House rule.

/>   “I’m so sorry…” The words came rushing out, muffled by the hands still pressed to my mouth. “I’m so sorry, Julie—”

  Julie blinked and came back to life. “That was Adam?” she asked me.

  I nodded. “That was Adam.”

  “You were right,” she said. “He is a teenager.”

  The evening ended pretty soon after that. I kept apologizing, even as Julie insisted that she hadn’t been offended. “I’m just a little stunned, is all.” But she seemed more than stunned; she seemed wary and withdrawn. She didn’t ask me any more questions, and the conversation fumbled to a standstill.

  I started to feel strange, light-headed and nauseous. Adam had taken as much of the drunk with him as he could, to savor it in private, but there’s enough alcohol in a half gallon of stout to make two souls woozy. Julie saw my eyes glazing over and said: “I think it’s time for you to go home.”

  “No,” I said, head weaving side to side, “I’m fine, really, I just—” But Julie had already slipped out of the booth and gone to settle the tab. I stared at a bit of foam on the lip of the beer pitcher until she came back. “Come on,” she said, prodding me in the shoulder. “I’ll take you home.”

  Her fingers didn’t feel so nice this time; when I looked up, her expression was unsmiling and cold. “I can walk home,” I suggested.

  “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “Are you sure you can drive?”

  Julie let out a terse bark of a laugh. “Yeah, I think so,” she said. “I only had the one glass, remember?”

  It was a very short ride, but by the time we reached Mrs. Winslow’s I was starting to nod out. “Is this it?” Julie asked, nudging me awake. “You said 39 Temple Street, right?”

  I swung my head up. We were parked in front of a Victorian, but it took a moment to be sure it was the right Victorian. “I think this is it,” I said. “But it looks funny. Everything looks funny…”

  “Go inside,” Julie commanded. “Go to bed.”

  “All right…” But before getting out of the car, I tried to apologize one more time. Julie cut me off: “Go to bed, Andrew.”

  “All right,” I said. “All right.” I tugged at the door handle; the latch seemed stuck, so I shoved hard and the door swung open with a screech, scuffing off paint in a broad streak against the curb.