Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  Julie let out a hiss. Then I started to apologize again, and she said: “Just get out of the car. Just get out, and let me shut the door.”

  I got out. With my weight out of the front seat, the right side of the Cadillac bounded up a little, lifting the edge of the door from the curb; but when Julie slid over to pull the door closed it sank down again. Cursing, she tried to scoot her butt as far to the left as possible without letting go of the door handle.

  “Maybe I should do this,” I said.

  “I’ve got it!” Julie snapped. With a last curse, she gave up the delicate approach and yanked the door shut, scraping off another layer of paint. There was a loud click as she slapped the door button down.

  “Good night!” I called to her. “Thanks for inviting me out!” If she said good night back I didn’t hear it; as I bent down to the passenger window to wave good-bye, Julie revved the Cadillac’s engine and pulled away. Just up the street she hit a pothole, generating another huge shower of sparks; this time it sounded like something had actually fallen off the car’s undercarriage, but Julie never even slowed down.

  I woke up the next morning with a splitting headache. A present from Adam: though he’d taken half the drunk, he left me the whole hangover. It felt like the house was on fire.

  To make things worse, my father was angry with me: “You shouldn’t have given Adam the body.”

  “Well I wouldn’t have,” I said, “if I’d known he was going to behave that way.”

  “How he behaved is beside the point. Running the body is supposed to be your job.”

  “But Julie asked to speak to Adam!”

  “And that’s why you gave up control? Because Julie asked you to?”

  “Well…”

  “Well?” my father demanded.

  “I was confused…I didn’t really understand what Julie wanted, and Adam said he did, so—”

  “No,” my father said. “That’s no good, Andrew. You’re in charge of the body—but you won’t stay in charge if you give Adam the idea he can come out whenever you’re confused. From now on, when we’re out in public, I don’t want you giving up the body for any reason other than a life-and-death emergency. Understood?”

  “Understood,” I said. “But…”

  “Andrew—”

  “But what if somebody asks to speak to Adam, and I’m not confused about it, but I just don’t want to be rude? What do I do then?”

  “If somebody needs to speak to Adam, you come talk to me about it first. And then I’ll make sure Adam behaves.”

  He decided not to punish me, figuring the hangover was punishment enough. The hangover, and also the consequences of my mistake—once my head started to clear, it dawned on me that Julie and I hadn’t exchanged phone numbers, so I had no way of getting in touch with her. She did know my address, and for a few days I held out hope that she might drop by, but after a week with no visit I reluctantly concluded that Adam had scared her off.

  Then about a week after that I was walking on Bridge Street when some tourists stopped to ask me for directions. They were French Canadians who didn’t speak English very well, and I ended up calling Aunt Sam out to the pulpit to help translate. It was a laborious process—Aunt Sam would tell me what the tourists had said, and I would tell her what I wanted to say back, and she would give me the French, and I would try to repeat it out loud. After the tourists finally drove off, I turned and found Julie Sivik standing beside me, smiling and shaking her head.

  “Amazing,” she said. “Like watching someone receive a satellite transmission. So who’s the French-speaker in the family? Your cousin Adam again?”

  “No,” I said, “my Aunt Samantha—really she’s my cousin too, but we call her Aunt Sam because she’s older.” I went on: “Adam’s still being punished for what he did in the bar.”

  “Punished? How?”

  “Well, for a while after he drank the beer he wouldn’t come out of his room, so my father locked him in for three days. He’s got the run of the house again now, but he still can’t come out on the pulpit for another week.”

  “Sounds pretty harsh,” Julie said, but there was an undertone of approval in her voice.

  “What Adam did to you was very rude,” I said. “And I was wrong too, to just let him out without warning you.”

  “Yeah, well, I was kind of freaked out by that,” Julie admitted. “I was also pissed about the car…”

  “I’d be happy to pay for repainting the door,” I offered.

  “Nah, it’s no big deal…The paint job wasn’t so great to begin with, to be honest.”

  “No, really, let me pay for it…Or at least, let me pay you back, once I start my new job.”

  “New job?” Julie said. “That’s right, I heard you were looking for work.”

  “Heard from who?”

  “Your old boss. I was out at Bit Warehouse the other day and I asked for you, but the manager told me you’d quit.”

  “You asked for me? Really?”

  “Yeah, well…once I calmed down, I felt kind of bad about just dumping you in front of your place that night. I had to pick up some things at the Warehouse anyway, so I thought I’d see how you were. But you were gone. So what’s the new job?”

  “I haven’t actually found one yet,” I said. “I’m having a little problem with references.”

  Julie nodded. “Yeah, the guy I talked to at the Warehouse mentioned something about a drug problem.” She raised an eyebrow. “Adam again?”

  “Not exactly…It’s kind of a long story.”

  “Another ‘complicated truth’?” Julie grinned. “What kind of work are you looking for?”

  I shrugged. “Anything, really. As long as it’s something I can learn on the job.”

  “Any objections to working with computers again?”

  “No…except that I still don’t know that much about them. Why?”

  “Just a thought,” Julie said. “My lease starts today—my commercial lease, the one for the business I’m starting?—and I was actually just on my way down to check the place out. I could use an extra pair of hands while I’m setting things up…and who knows, there might even be a long-term position in it for you.”

  “I don’t see how,” I said. “I mean, I’ll be happy to help you get your office set up, but I honestly don’t know anything about virtual reality.”

  “Oh, but you do, though. You know more about it than anyone I’ve ever met.”

  “I don’t know anything about it!” I protested. “I don’t even know what it is. You never told me.”

  “Put it this way: it’s a lot like what you’ve got in your head.”

  “You mean it’s like the house? But that can’t be right. The house isn’t real.”

  “Well, neither is virtual reality.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s OK,” Julie said, smiling at my confusion. “You’ll learn.” And then she surprised me again, by linking her arm in mine as if we were old friends and the incident in the bar had never happened. “Walk with me. I’ll explain my master plan along the way.”

  3

  There are actually two bridges on Bridge Street. The west bridge, which passes over the creek that gives Autumn Creek its name, is the main route out of town. The east bridge is used mostly by timber trucks. It spans a gully called Thaw Canal, a springtime tributary of Autumn Creek. Beyond the canal, East Bridge Street is only paved for the first quarter mile, after which it turns into a gravel-top service road.

  On the morning I met Penny Driver, I hiked to work across the canal bridge, following the same path I’d first taken with Julie Sivik two years before. The Reality Factory was located on a half-acre lot alongside East Bridge Street’s last stretch of asphalt. My father thought the lot had originally been a truck depot—there was an old fuel island with rusted-out diesel pumps at one end of the property—but for several years before Julie took out her lease it had been a storage facility. The main building, the one that became t
he Factory, was a long, concrete-walled shed. Shed anyway is what Julie called it, although it was huge, as big as Bit Warehouse inside, with nothing but a double row of support columns to break up the space.

  I got to the Factory a little after eight. Julie had arrived ahead of me; her car was parked on the lot, under an awning by the diesel pumps. It was the same ’57 Cadillac sedan she’d been driving two years ago, still in the process of being fixed up. You might be thinking she can’t have worked very hard at repairing it, but in fact she had, at least off and on—but for every problem she fixed, another seemed to develop, so that the overall condition of the car never really improved. Julie still insisted she was going to sell it one day, though she no longer talked about making a profit.

  I went around to the side door of the Factory and let myself in. Inside, Julie’s voice echoed from the shed’s rafters—she was back in the maze of army tents somewhere, having an argument with one of the Manciple brothers. Probably Irwin, the soft-spoken younger Manciple; only Julie’s half of the argument was audible, and that wouldn’t have been true if she’d been fighting with Dennis. Humming to myself so as not to overhear what didn’t concern me, I made my way to the captain’s tent that served me as an office and sat down to check my e-mail.

  I should explain about the tents.

  The first time I saw the shed, it was a mess. The power was off, and the building had no windows, so Julie shined a flashlight around to give me some idea of how spacious the interior was. It was spacious, all right, but it was also full of junk: the flashlight beam swept over long heaps of broken metal pipe. Old scaffolding, Julie explained, that had once held racks of storage lockers. When the storage facility shut down, the lockers had been removed and the scaffolding cut up for scrap; only somehow the scrap got left behind. Our first order of business would be to rent a dump truck and haul all the scrap away. “I know it looks like a disaster area right now, but I think it’s got a lot of potential once we get all this crap cleared out.”

  “Oh sure…and I can definitely help with that, the clearing-out part. I can lift heavy things.”

  “Shouldn’t take more than a week or so, I figure, once we get into it. And after the junk’s all gone, we can start setting up the tents, and—”

  “Tents?”

  “One minor problem with this building.” Julie tilted her flashlight upwards, illuminating a peaked ceiling of stained wooden planks. “The roof leaks. Not terribly, I mean we’re not talking deluge, but still I wouldn’t feel safe leaving computer equipment exposed underneath it.”

  “So you’re going to set up tents in here? To keep the computers dry when it rains?”

  Julie nodded. “Surplus army tents. My uncle knows a quartermaster at Fort Lewis who can get them for me practically free—all sizes, as many as I want.”

  “Wouldn’t it make more sense to just replace the roof?”

  “I can’t afford to, at least not right away. Once the Factory’s up and running and I get some venture capital, or maybe some grant money—”

  “But why should you have to pay for it? If you’re leasing this place…”

  “It’s part of the deal I made. One of the reasons the rent on this place is so low, I agreed to make certain improvements to the property at my own expense.”

  “You promised to fix the roof yourself?”

  “Among other things, yes.”

  “But if you can’t afford to fix it…”

  “I can’t afford it right now,” Julie said. “But that’s OK, it doesn’t have to be done now, just sometime before the lease ends. But in the meantime there’s other stuff that’s more pressing, like getting this junk cleared away, and making sure the electrical system can handle all the gear I’m going to bring in…replacing the roof, that’s more of a long-term project. A project for you, maybe,” she added, “seeing as you’re architecturally inclined.”

  “It was my father who built the house,” I reminded her. “And the carpentry was all imaginary.”

  But she wasn’t listening. Caught up in her own imaginings, she had turned away and was sweeping the flashlight around again, measuring the space. Watching her, I had a sudden realization: Julie was not a practical person. I know you probably figured that out already, but it was a new thought for me. It was also the first character judgment I ever made entirely on my own, with no help from Adam or my father, and it gave me a weird sense of accomplishment, almost as if I’d discovered something positive about her. And maybe it was good that I felt that way—Julie’s inability to do things simply drove a lot of people crazy, but I was always able to be patient with her, and even find her impracticality endearing, because it confirmed my own perceptiveness.

  Besides which, her ideas weren’t always as impractical as they first appeared. Like Julie’s car, the Factory roof was never fully repaired—though I was up on it many times to patch leaks that had gotten too big to ignore—so the tents became a permanent fixture. But even if they hadn’t been necessary, we probably would have kept them anyway, because of a surprising side-benefit: in addition to keeping the equipment dry, the tents also made the Factory a lot cozier by dividing up the shed’s one big room into many smaller rooms. They created privacy, and while something similar might have been accomplished using standard office-cubicle partitions, the tents, in hindsight, were a more effective solution, not to mention more fun. Working at the Reality Factory was like working in a gypsy camp, especially after Julie got creative and had us paint the outsides of the tents different colors.

  My tent was sky-blue, with spray-painted clouds that Aunt Sam had shown me how to make stencils for. It was furnished with a big oak desk that Julie and I had salvaged from the same junkyard where we’d dumped the scaffolding, and equipped with a reconditioned Pentium computer. With Julie’s help, I’d set up my own Web site to exchange information with other multiples online. Julie had offered to get me a second computer to keep at Mrs. Winslow’s, but my father and I had jointly vetoed that idea—the last thing we needed was to have Adam and Jake fighting over Internet access.

  This morning as I tried to dial in to our Internet provider, I kept getting error messages. This happened sometimes; after two years of troubleshooting, the Factory’s electrical grid was fairly reliable, but our connection to U.S. West was still chancy.

  I called out: “Dennis?”

  From the tent next door, Dennis Manciple called back: “It’s down.”

  “Is it the switchboard again?” I asked.

  “Irwin says no,” Dennis replied. “We’ve still got voice phone, you just can’t get online. Probably trouble at the other end. Give it a few minutes.”

  “Yeah,” Adam snickered. “Give it a few minutes, and the regular phone will go dead, too.”

  “Be quiet.” I left my computer idling and went over to Dennis’s tent, which was blood-red and riddled with fake bullet-holes, and had spray-paint portraits of Lara Croft and Duke Nukem guarding the entrance flap. As usual, Dennis was busy writing software code, but he was also fully dressed, which surprised me.

  The Manciple brothers were originally from Alaska. Their parents were homesteaders; Dennis and Irwin grew up in a bush settlement on the Yukon River, and were in their teens before they visited a town with more than a hundred people in it. The isolation of their formative years—they went to grade school by radio—had left its mark on them. It wasn’t so much that the brothers had no social graces, Julie Sivik once said, as that they had a different set of social graces than most of the rest of the world. (When I suggested that something similar could be said about me, Julie made a distinction that I’m still not sure I understand: “You’re just strange,” she told me. “The Manciples are odd.”)

  Dennis had a thing about clothes. Partly due to the climate where he grew up, and partly because he was fifty pounds overweight, he was always too hot, even in temperatures that would have most people wishing for a parka. He went around underdressed as a matter of course, and whenever he settled someplace for more th
an a few minutes, he started loosening and then removing the few clothes he had on. It was normal to find him in his tent wearing nothing but underpants and a back brace, but today he had on an actual shirt with buttons and a pair of short pants. And shoes.

  “Dennis,” I said, “you’re dressed.” I sniffed the air in the tent, which seemed fresher than usual. “And you bathed.” You could say things like that to Dennis, who never took offense at anything; Irwin you had to be a lot more delicate with.

  “Commodore’s orders,” Dennis said, meaning Julie. He called Julie made-up titles like “Commodore,” and “the General,” and occasionally “Bitch Empress,” though that last one didn’t sit well with her. “We have a new employee coming in today. A girl. I’m not supposed to let her see my chest hair for at least the first week.”

  “A new employee? Who is she?”

  Dennis shrugged. “Just somebody the Jewel met in Seattle last month.”

  “Julie didn’t say anything to me about it.”

  “Why should she? Are you married or something?”

  “No, but…what does this new person do? What’s Julie hiring her for?”

  “Beats me,” said Dennis. “I’m still not sure what she hired you for.”

  Not only did Dennis never take offense, he never worried about giving it, either. But I didn’t blame him for teasing me about my job description. Officially Julie had hired me as a “creative consultant” to the Reality Factory. It was a position I was uniquely suited for, she said, because I had firsthand experience with what virtual reality was ultimately meant to be: an imaginary universe where different people could meet, interact, and be creative together.

  Once I got past the obvious objection—my father had built the house as a means of crowd control, not to express his creativity—I had to admit it sounded intriguing. But it’s hard to be a consultant to a project that is years ahead of its time.

  My first virtual experience was particularly disappointing. It was a really awful home video-game called Metropolis of Doom that used a set of cheap stereoscopic goggles and a handheld trigger button. The goggles showed you a bright red 3-D line drawing of what was supposed to be a city. As you inched forward along the city’s main street, riding on an invisible conveyor belt, little flying pyramids meant to be attack jets would zip out from between the “buildings” and fire rockets at you. The object of the game was to shoot the jets down; the goggles could sense movement, and by turning your head you could aim a crosshairs that hung in the center of your field of vision. But the motion sensor was sluggish—you’d turn your head, wait a beat, and then the crosshairs would move—and by the time I shot down my first jet, I had a headache. Then the goggles fogged up.