Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  Loins dances until the music stops, until the dream-world is switched off and the virtual-reality headset is lifted from her brow. Then she gives way to the Brain, who fixes PCs and writes code…

  By the time Mouse comes back, the morning is over. She returns to find herself inside another, smaller tent. She sits in a wooden folding chair, while Julie speaks to her from behind a beat-up desk. A digital clock on the desktop informs her that it is now 12:12. Mouse has a headache but is not tired, and the Navigator surmises that it is 12:12 P.M., not A.M.

  “—have a sit-down with Dennis after lunch and hash out exactly what you’ll be working on,” Julie is saying. Mouse doesn’t really pay attention to the words. Instead, as discreetly as she can, she checks herself: she looks down and sees that she is wearing the sweater, that her tank top is once again covered, if in fact it was ever uncovered. That brief flash she had of Julie trying to strip the sweater off her—maybe that was a hallucination too, like the floating checkerboard.

  But if she did hallucinate, if she had some kind of psychotic episode, what did she actually do while it was happening? Did anybody else notice? Mouse observes Julie for a moment, and decides that the way Julie is talking to her—calm, relaxed—is not the way she would talk to someone she had seen acting crazy a little while ago. Still, Mouse thinks, 12:12—that’s three and a half hours since she got here. What happened?

  “—hungry?” Julie asks.

  “What?” says Mouse. Julie smiles indulgently at her. “I’m sorry,” Mouse says. “I…I drifted off for a second…”

  “It’s all right,” says Julie. “I asked whether you were hungry. I was thinking, maybe I’ll dip into petty cash, round up the guys, and take everybody out to lunch on the company. How’s that sound?”

  “OK,” Mouse says. What Mouse would really like to do is go home, call up Rudy Krenzel, and plead for her old job back. But that doesn’t appear to be an option—it’s not on her list.

  Mouse stays close as Julie goes to get the others. By paying careful attention, she is finally able to put names to two of the men. The boyish man is called Andrew; the troll—whose shirt is hanging wide open when they find him, earning him a sharp rebuke from Julie—is Dennis. Mouse still can’t catch the name of the third man, but he is so quiet that she decides it doesn’t matter; you don’t need to know what to call someone if they don’t talk to you.

  They go outside, where Julie expresses concern that they will not all fit comfortably in her car, due to unspecified problems with the backseat cushions. “That’s OK,” Mouse tells her, not unhappy with this development. “I can follow you in my car.”

  “I volunteer to ride with Mouse!” Dennis shouts, and Mouse cringes. But Julie comes to her rescue: “No, Dennis,” she says, “you ride with me. I need to talk to you about something.”

  “What, right now? We can talk at the diner.”

  “No, Dennis,” repeats Julie. “Andrew, why don’t you ride with Mouse? Make sure she doesn’t get lost.”

  “Get lost?” Dennis exclaims. “What the fuck, Commodore? The diner is on Bridge Street. All she’s got to do is turn right out the gate and drive straight.”

  “Just get in the damn car, Dennis.” Grumbling, Dennis stomps around to the passenger side of the Cadillac, where the quiet man is already waiting for Julie to unlock the doors. “You ride in back!” Dennis bellows, shoving the quiet man aside.

  As soon as they are seated in the Caddy, Julie and Dennis start arguing with each other again, but the car’s windows are rolled up and Mouse can’t make out the words. She turns to Andrew, who is mumbling to himself and seems lost in thought. After a moment he snaps out of it, looks at Mouse and shrugs apologetically. “When Julie makes up her mind to do something in a certain way,” he says, “there’s not much point in fighting it.” He nods his head in the direction of Mouse’s Centurion. “Want to go?”

  Andrew makes polite small talk on the way to the diner. It’s a good effort, but not good enough to hide the fact that he is uncomfortable being alone with her. Mouse wonders if he saw something that Julie missed. What was I doing this morning between nine and twelve? she thinks of asking him, but of course she doesn’t say that. Wounded by his apprehension, Mouse decides that she doesn’t like Andrew.

  Soon enough they are at the Harvest Moon, a Fifties-style malt shop with lots of chrome and neon. Mouse follows Julie’s Cadillac into the lot behind the diner. She barely has time to set the parking brake before Andrew exits the car. “Cocksucker,” Maledicta grumbles at his back.

  Inside the diner, Dennis tries to sit next to Mouse, but once again Julie Sivik intervenes; she takes the seat to Mouse’s left for herself and insists that Andrew, not Dennis, sit on Mouse’s right.

  “What the hell is this, Dial-a-Date?” Dennis complains loudly. “What do you keep putting him next to her for?”

  “Here Dennis,” says Julie, handing him a menu. “You’ll feel better once you’ve got food in front of you.”

  A waitress takes their orders, and while they wait for their lunches to arrive, Julie tries unsuccessfully to get a conversation going. More specifically, she tries to get Andrew and Mouse to have a conversation; she does this by asking Andrew a series of set-up questions, like “So Andrew, did you know that Mouse once worked at Bit Warehouse, same as you did?” But Andrew won’t follow her lead, and between his obvious discomfort, and Dennis’s jibes about Dial-a-Date, Julie is soon forced to give up. No one says anything else until the food comes.

  It is while they are eating that the thing happens that changes Mouse’s mind about disliking Andrew. Within sight of their table is a booth in which a man sits with a young girl of four or five. The man saws mechanically at a large T-bone steak, forking one piece of meat after another into his mouth. The girl isn’t hungry; there is a plateful of peas and mashed potatoes in front of her, but rather than eat any of it, she just uses a spoon to push the peas around and trace patterns in the gravy. Eventually she grows bored with this; as an experiment, she taps the rim of the plate with the bowl of her spoon. Pleased with the sound it makes, she begins striking it repeatedly, like a gong.

  The man sets his fork down. He grabs the girl’s spoon hand, stilling it; he doesn’t speak, but his eyes flash a warning. The girl, momentarily chastened, goes back to pushing peas. The man returns to his steak. Then the girl, growing bored again, clinks her spoon against the side of a water glass.

  This time the man doesn’t bother to put his fork down; he just hauls off and backhands her across the face. It is a powerful blow: the girl is knocked sideways in her seat and nearly falls out of the booth. Her face turns purple and she begins to cry, softly. A few of the other diner patrons look around at the sound, and look away again.

  Then Andrew stands up. (“Oh Jesus,” says Dennis, “here we go,” but Andrew ignores him.) He walks over to the booth, positioning himself on the girl’s side of the table, and stares at the man, who has gone back to sawing at his steak.

  “Excuse me,” Andrew says.

  The man in the booth takes a moment to finish chewing a bit of gristle. “What do you want?” he finally asks.

  “Is this your daughter?” asks Andrew.

  “Yes, it’s my daughter,” the man in the booth says. “What do you want?”

  “You could have broken her eardrum, hitting her like that,” Andrew informs him. “Or her jaw. Or”—he points to the fork clutched in the man’s fist—“you could have put her eye out.”

  The man drops the fork into his plate and brushes his hands together. He sighs impatiently. “Get out of my face, asshole.”

  “Don’t call me an asshole,” Andrew says.

  The man in the booth seems amazed to hear these words coming out of Andrew’s mouth. He is bigger than Andrew by a fair margin, and much meaner-looking; he wears a suit, but it is rumpled and worn, as if he spends a lot of time engaged in hard physical labor…or administering beatings to people who annoy him. “Would you like me to poke your eye out?” he says.
“Or rip out your fucking—”

  “Don’t threaten me,” says Andrew, his own voice not threatening but firm, the voice a father—a good father—might use to dissuade a child from pursuing a dangerous course of action: Don’t play with those matches, honey!

  And the man in the booth hesitates, confused by Andrew’s lack of fear. He studies Andrew’s face for a moment, then looks down—checking Andrew’s hands, Mouse realizes, to see if he is holding a weapon. He isn’t. And though Andrew is physically fit, he doesn’t carry himself like a fighter. It is a conundrum.

  “What are you, crazy?” the man in the booth asks. Andrew lets the question hang there, and the man in the booth continues, wary now: “How I treat my kid is none of your business, pal.”

  “A grown man beating up a little girl is everybody’s business,” Andrew tells him; he says this in a loud voice, and once more heads begin to turn. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “A shamed of myself!” the man guffaws. He looks out of the booth, seeking a confederate among the diner patrons who are staring at him. His gaze settles on Julie. “Do you believe this guy?” he asks her. “He thinks he’s my goddamn conscience!”

  “Maybe you need one,” Julie says.

  The man bobs his head. “Well,” he says, turning back to Andrew, “well, there you go. That’s one vote for you.”

  “I don’t need votes,” Andrew says.

  “No, of course not,” says the man. “You know you’re right, right? You’re an expert on childcare. But let me tell you something: if you had to put up with this fucking kid—”

  “If she were my daughter, I wouldn’t call her ‘this fucking kid.’ And she wouldn’t be crying while I stuffed my face.”

  For an instant it looks as though the man is going to take a swing at Andrew after all. But Andrew doesn’t blink or flinch, just goes right on looking him in the eye, and in the end the man in the booth decides not to risk finding out why Andrew isn’t afraid. “Fine,” he says. He twists in his seat, digs frantically in one of his pants pockets. “Fine, tell you what: you go get yourself a kid, OK? You get yourself a kid, live with it for a couple years, then you come back and lecture me on how it’s done.” He slaps a twenty-dollar bill down on the table next to his plate. “Come on, Rebecca!” he barks, sliding out of the booth. He shoves Andrew aside and scoops up the little girl, who has been watching the confrontation with great interest, her tears forgotten. The man starts to carry the girl away; halfway to the door he stops, turns back, and points a finger at Andrew. “You’d better hope I never see you again. Asshole.”

  “If I hear you’ve been beating up little kids,” says Andrew, “you will see me again. And not just me.”

  “Crazy.” The man lowers his arm, shakes his head. Catching a waitress’s eye, he says: “You’ve got crazy people eating here, you know that?”

  He walks out, taking the girl with him. Andrew watches until they are gone, then returns to the table.

  “I wish to Christ you wouldn’t do that,” Dennis says.

  Andrew nods, and replies sadly: “I know you do, Dennis.”

  “That guy could’ve killed you. He could’ve pulled out a gun and shot you dead. It happens.”

  “I don’t think he had a gun, Dennis.”

  “He had a steak knife. He had fists…”

  Andrew shakes his head. “Adam didn’t think he’d hit me.”

  “Adam…” Dennis rolls his eyes. Putting audible quotes around the name, he says: “And what if ‘Adam’ was wrong?”

  “Then Seferis would have protected me.”

  “Seferis…you really are a mental case, you know that? That guy was right. And you know what the worst part of it is? It’s not going to make any difference. Do you really think that guy is going to stop hitting his kid just because you said ‘Shame on you’?”

  “It’s more likely than if I’d said nothing,” Andrew argues. But he looks unhappy, as if he fears Dennis may be right.

  “Nah,” says Dennis. “Nah, he’s not going to change.”

  “That doesn’t matter!” Andrew insists. “I mean…I mean it does matter, but you can’t just do nothing. You can’t just sit by while somebody does something wrong, and not call them on it.”

  “Why not? If calling them on it doesn’t make any difference…the next time that guy feels like slapping his daughter around, do you think he’s even going to remember you?”

  “No,” Mouse says, surprising herself by speaking up, “but the girl will remember.” Andrew and Dennis both look at her, and Julie smiles.

  After lunch they go back to the Reality Factory, where Mouse starts losing time again. It’s not unexpected; it happens just as Julie announces that it is time for Mouse to get to work. “OK,” Julie says, “let’s you and Dennis and I go sit down and start—”

  —and the next thing Mouse knows she is alone, crouching in the space between two close-set tents. Uncertain what she is doing there, she starts to get up, but pauses when she hears two voices coming from the tent to her left. One voice is Julie’s; the other is Andrew’s.

  “—textbook MPD,” Julie says. “I talked to three, maybe four different people.”

  “The parade,” says Andrew. “That’s what Adam calls it.”

  “The funny thing is, I might not have recognized it if I didn’t know you. I might have just thought, ‘Wow, she’s really moody!’ But once you know what to look for…I got an inkling right away, when she snapped at me at Rudy’s. But it wasn’t until I bumped into her again at the bookstore that I was sure. After she got a couple drinks in her it was really obvious.”

  “You got her drunk?”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Julie says, sounding defensive. “I offered to buy her a glass of wine, and then she asked for a second. And then she went and bought three more glasses on her own.”

  “Julie!”

  “Well what was I supposed to do? I didn’t even know who was ordering those last three drinks.”

  “I hope you drove her home afterwards.”

  “I tried, Andrew. Really I did. She wasn’t acting drunk, but she’s so little, and after five glasses…but she wouldn’t let me give her a ride. When I pressed her on it, this new person came out who I hadn’t met yet, and he said—he was male, definitely male, and his voice was stone-sober—he said, ‘No, she’s going to need her car to get to work in the morning.’ And I said, ‘Are you sure she should be driving after all that wine?’ And he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll drive her home. I’ve done it before.’ Even then I didn’t just let her—him—go. I said good night, pretended to walk the other way, and then turned around and followed them. I figured I’d at least see that they got to their car all right. But they didn’t go straight to the car, they went into a coffee shop. So I hung around outside for as long as I could, until I had to go get my car, and they never came out, so I thought, OK, they’ll be fine, they’re waiting to sober up…I felt bad about it, Andrew, but what else could I do? It wasn’t—it wasn’t like that time you got drunk.”

  Andrew makes a sound that Mouse, listening through the tent fabric, cannot interpret. There is a silence. Then Andrew says: “So you offered her a job.”

  “Before she had the second glass of wine, yeah. And she said yes.”

  “Who said yes?”

  Julie laughs. “Yeah, that question occurred to me, too. She gave me her home number, so I called up early the next morning, partly to double-check that she really had made it home OK, partly to see if she remembered accepting the job offer.”

  “And did she?”

  “Somebody did. Whoever answered the phone. But when I talked to her again on Saturday she seemed kind of clueless, like all of a sudden she didn’t remember but was trying hard not to show it. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure she’d show up this morning.”

  Andrew asks: “Why did you offer her the job, Julie?”

  “Why?” Julie exclaims. She says it as if she is astonished that there could be any
question about the reason, but even listening through the tent wall, Mouse can tell that her surprise is faked. “Because she’s a natural programmer, that’s why. At least, one of her souls is. You should have seen after lunch today, even Dennis was impressed once he saw her in action.” A pause. “What, you don’t believe me?”

  “I believe she’s a good programmer,” Andrew says, “but Adam thinks there’s another reason why you hired her, and I think he’s right.”

  Another pause.

  “Well…” Julie says.

  “Well?”

  “OK,” says Julie, “OK, OK, here’s the thing. Her programming skills really are the main reason I hired her—I’d been thinking about bringing somebody new in, at least part-time, for a while now, so it really was in my head to sound her out about a job, even before I made the connection about the MPD. That’s the God’s honest truth, Andrew. But when I did make the connection, I thought…”

  “What?”

  “See, the thing is, she doesn’t know. I mean, some of her people know, obviously, like the one who told me he’d drive her home, but she—the woman you met this morning—she doesn’t know. I’m sure of it. So I thought, maybe you, you could—”

  “Oh, Julie…this is a bad idea.”

  “I remember you telling me what it was like for your father, back before he built the house. Before he knew. Like living in chaos, you said. Well…that must be what it’s like for her too, right? Like living in chaos.”

  “Probably. But Julie—”

  “So I would think, having lived through that experience yourself, you would want to help—”

  “I didn’t live through that experience myself,” Andrew says. “My father did. And neither one of us is a psychiatrist, which is what she needs.”

  “OK, fine, but how’s she going to get what she needs, if she doesn’t even know—”

  “If she doesn’t know, it’s probably because she’s not ready to know. And trying to force the knowledge on her could do more harm than good.”

  “You’re saying she’s better off being ignorant of her condition?”