Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  “No,” says Mouse. “Even a discount ticket would be more than that.”

  “I have this, too,” he tells her, and produces a credit card. “It was hidden,” he adds proudly, showing her a secret fold in the wallet, “but I found it.” His pride deflates. “But I don’t know how much credit is on it…If I tried to buy a plane ticket and I went over the limit, do you think I’d get in trouble?”

  “I don’t know,” says Mouse. “Probably not, if…if it’s your credit card.”

  He doesn’t respond to that, just stuffs the money and the credit card back in the wallet.

  “You know what, though,” Mouse continues, “if you need some more cash, I bet I know where you could get some. There’s a house, just a few blocks from here, and if you came with me I’m sure the lady who lives there would—”

  “I should try to get a taxi, I guess,” he says, putting the wallet away. “If there are no more buses tonight.”

  “I could give you a ride,” Mouse offers.

  His brows knit in suspicion again: “How much?”

  “For free…and like I was saying, if you need more cash, we can stop at this house…”

  But he shakes his head. “I shouldn’t make any detours. I really need to get to Michigan as soon as possible.”

  “Why?” Mouse asks, for the third time. By this point she’s not expecting an answer, but her persistence pays off.

  “I have to collect the inheritance, OK?” He sighs impatiently. “The money I was supposed to get from the stepfather.”

  “The stepfather…Andrew’s stepfather?”

  “Of course Andy’s stepfather.” He seems amazed by the question. “What other stepfather would I get money from?”

  “So he died?”

  In the same tone of voice used to complain about the missing bus schedule: “He should have. He looked like he was dying. He was on the floor in the living room, and there was blood all over the carpet…” Unhappily: “But I didn’t stick around. I was cold, and I just wanted to get away.” He hugs himself. “So you don’t think I’d get in trouble if I used the credit card?”

  “I-I don’t know,” says Mouse, struggling to maintain her composure. “But, but listen, why don’t we—”

  He steps out over the curb, glancing up and down the street. “Where would I go to get a taxi?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if you can, here.”

  “No taxis, either? What kind of place is this?”

  “It’s a small town,” Mouse says.

  There’s a pause, and then his head starts bobbing. “Where I’m going in Michigan is like that too,” he tells her. “They don’t even have buses there.” He frowns again. “How far is the airport?”

  “Pretty far,” says Mouse. “Too far to walk. But I could drive you.”

  He looks at her: “No detours?”

  “No detours,” Mouse lies. She is thinking: if he needs to ask what part of the country he’s in, he probably won’t be able to tell that she’s driving him back to Mrs. Winslow’s before they actually get there. She can drive right up on the lawn if need be, right up to the porch, where Mrs. Winslow, with her psychic powers and her bionic ear, will surely be waiting—and between her, Mouse, and Dr. Eddington, they should be able to keep Andrew from running away again.

  “Free of charge?” he says, still uncertain.

  “Sure,” says Mouse. She gestures towards her Buick. “Come on.”

  The offer of a free ride quickly overcomes his suspicions; within moments they are seated in the Centurion. “Nice car,” he says, checking over the interior.

  “Thank you,” says Mouse.

  “If you need to get gas,” he adds magnanimously, “I could probably chip in for that. If it’s a long drive to the airport, I mean.”

  “OK,” says Mouse. Half a block from the bus stop, she has to stop for a red light. She tries to appear nonchalant as she flicks on her blinker.

  The light goes green. Mouse depresses the accelerator and starts to turn right…and a third hand grabs the steering wheel, fighting the turn. Mouse has to hit the brakes to keep from plowing into the curb at the far side of the intersection.

  “Wh—” Mouse starts to say, her voice rising to a squeak as she sees what has become of her passenger.

  He’s changed again. He seems bigger, somehow, and the spirit that animates him has transformed from the flighty, manic individual Mouse bantered with at the bus stop into someone far more sinister. Mouse recognizes the dark soul she got a glimpse of on her first day at the Reality Factory: the one who called Julie Sivik a meddling cunt.

  He tells her: “That’s not the way to Michigan…Mouse.”

  Mouse disappears in a cascade of fright. Maledicta comes out, teeth bared…but she’s scared too. This fucker in the passenger’s seat has the same gleam in his eye that Mouse’s mother used to get, just before she really went off. So Maledicta is scared, but she doesn’t show that she’s scared: “Get your motherfucking hand off my steering wheel,” she snarls.

  “Pardon me,” he says, smirking, and lets go of the wheel. Good thing for him: Malefica is up next, and she’s not scared, she’s pissed. But Andrew—whoever the fuck he is right now—isn’t interested in pushing his luck. Quicker than Malefica can make a fist, he opens his door and steps out. “Thanks for the lift,” he says, “but I’ll make my own way from here.” With mock courtesy, he eases the door shut, waves good-bye, and trots off into the night.

  “Yeah,” says Maledicta, resurfacing. “You’d better fucking run.”

  —and Mouse is staring at the empty passenger’s seat, while a car horn blares beside her. She puts out a hand to confirm that Andrew is really gone; she checks the back seat, too. Only then does she look outside to see who’s honking.

  Her car is still in the middle of the intersection, stalled out. The late-night Bridge Street traffic has been detouring around her, but now a minivan wants to get by on the cross street. Mouse restarts the Centurion and backs it up; with a last blast of the horn, the minivan rolls by.

  Mouse parks the Centurion at the corner. She sits for a moment, gathering her wits, then checks the rearview mirror and sees that, half a block behind her, the bus shelter is empty now. She gets out of the car and takes a longer look up and down Bridge Street, and up and down the cross street as well; she doesn’t see Andrew anywhere. She feels relief, and damns herself for it; Andrew has gone out of his way to help her, and now, in return, she’s failed him. She gets back in the car.

  What to do? She didn’t black out for long—a couple minutes at most, she thinks—so Andrew, if he is still on foot, can’t have gone far. With a bit of luck, Mouse could probably find him again. But then what?

  Another option, probably the best one, would be to go back to the house and let Mrs. Winslow and Dr. Eddington know what just happened. But that would mean telling them how she actually had Andrew in her car, only to let him get away a second time. Besides, last week, when the shoe was on the other foot and it was Mouse who was on the run, Andrew didn’t waste time getting help, he came after her himself; if he hadn’t, she might still be stumbling around in the woods behind the Factory.

  Maybe she can strike a compromise: she will look for Andrew on her own for the next ten or fifteen minutes. If she doesn’t find him, she will go and tell the doctor and Mrs. Winslow what happened. If she does find him, she won’t try to confront him, she’ll just track him, follow him until he stops somewhere; then she will find a phone and call Dr. Eddington.

  It’s a plan. But before she can put it into practice, there’s a piece of information she needs, and to get it she will have to pass a test of courage.

  Mouse rests her hands lightly on the rim of the steering wheel, takes a breath, and looks up into the rearview mirror. Into it, not just at it. Catching her own eye in the glass, she imagines the mirror is large enough to show her whole face, her entire body; imagines that it reflects, behind her, not the back seat of the Buick, but the mouth of a darkened cave.
>
  “All right,” Mouse addresses the figures who gather there, the Society members responding to her summons, “you tell me, whoever saw it…which way did he go?”

  II

  CHAOS

  SEVENTH BOOK: TO THE BADLANDS

  19

  I was rocking back and forth in the dark.

  I had fallen into the lake; I knew that. It had happened in a blur, I’d only been semiconscious, but it seemed like only moments ago so I knew that it had happened, and that I must still be down there, down in the black waters at the bottom of the lake, my soul curled in a fetal position, rocked by the dark currents.

  The water was freezing. It flowed around me like a cold wind, caressing my skin, ruffling my hair. It tugged at my whole soul, trying to sweep it away, but my hands had caught in the weeds that grow from the lake bed, each hand grasping a ropy strand, and a third strand of lakeweed had wrapped itself around my left forearm, cinching tight. The weeds stretched but didn’t break, and with the ebb and flow of the currents pulling at me I was rocked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

  I opened my eyes.

  I wasn’t at the bottom of the lake. I was outside, in the body, in the open air, in daylight. I was sitting in some sort of swing or sling, and a dinosaur was smiling at me.

  I blinked.

  A dinosaur was smiling at me: a green and purple brontosaurus. A ladder was fixed to its side, and a slide ran down the length of its back and tail.

  I looked left and right, and saw more dinosaurs: a bright red pteranodon whose wings formed a seesaw; a trio of baby triceratops, yellow, orange, and blue, each one set on a thick, coiled spring, their backs saddled, handholds jutting out from behind the armored ruffs of their collars.

  And standing right beside me, arcing over me: a tyrannosaurus. A goofy, smiling, kid-friendly tyrannosaurus, its arms outstretched, its fists holding the ends of the chains that suspended the swing I was sitting in. To keep little fingers from getting pinched in the links, the chains had been sheathed in plastic tubing, flexible and slick to the touch.

  I lowered my legs to stop the swing. I slid my hands up the plastic-covered chains and pulled myself to my feet, feeling a sharp pain in my left forearm as I did so. I looked past the brontosaur, past the chain-link fence that surrounded the playground (I was in a playground; I was outside, in the body, in a playground—but where?), and saw a rough grassy plain extending towards a line of jagged hills. The hills were barren, almost lunar, their stark weathered faces striped in dull horizontal bands of gray and brown.

  Strata, I told myself: Those bands are called strata. The word, till now no more than a dictionary definition to me, took on new meaning, and I was frightened. This was an alien landscape I was looking at: I didn’t know where it was, but I knew it wasn’t anywhere in Autumn Creek, or anywhere near Autumn Creek, either.

  Something small and white came fluttering down out of the sky, danced for a moment on the air currents in front of my face, lit briefly on my nose, and blew away again.

  A snowflake, I thought. A snowflake? It was—it had been—the first week in May. It doesn’t snow in May…no, wait, that wasn’t true, it can snow in May, it’s just not that common, not in Autumn Creek anyway. So OK, I wasn’t in Autumn Creek, that much was already established. Maybe I was somewhere farther north, or at a higher elevation; maybe it was a freak spring cold front; maybe the “snowflake” was just a piece of windblown lint.

  Maybe. Or maybe it wasn’t May anymore. I knew I’d lost time, but what if I’d lost lots of time? What if it was November now? What if I’d lost six months…or worse, worse still, what if I’d lost years? How old was the body now?

  My legs got rubbery, and I had to grab the swing chains to steady myself. I felt the pain in my arm again; this time, seeking a distraction, I looked to see what was causing it. My arm had been bandaged; almost the whole length of my forearm had been wrapped in gauze. It looked like whoever had done it had used an entire roll of the stuff: the gauze was so thickly layered that my shirt sleeve had had to be left rolled up above my elbow.

  My shirt sleeve!

  “Oh thank God,” I exclaimed, collapsing into the swing seat.

  My shirt sleeve: it was the same shirt I’d been wearing when I blacked out!

  Wait. Wait. Was it the same shirt? I remembered falling down drunk in the middle of the street, remembered the tick of a button bouncing away. I checked…yes! The shirt was missing a button. I bent my head, sniffed the fabric…yes! It stank of scotch. And my pants, socks, and shoes were all the same ones I’d been wearing that night, too.

  OK. OK. So it hadn’t been years or months. A few days maybe, probably, but no more than that. I hadn’t blacked out a huge chunk of my lifetime.

  I rocked in the swing, laughing with relief.

  Of course, this didn’t mean that everything was fine. I was still a long way from home, in space if not in time. I still didn’t know where I was. I also didn’t know what the body had been doing, what acts I’d have to take responsibility for; though I did know that before blacking out completely, I’d willfully broken the house rules, and embarrassed myself in front of both Mrs. Winslow and Julie.

  Julie…oh my God.

  No. Don’t think about her now. Get oriented first.

  “Where am I?” I said, aloud, and then inside: “Where are we? Hello?”

  No reply. But it wasn’t like there was no one in the pulpit to answer; it was like the pulpit itself wasn’t there. That scared me. I wanted to go inside and investigate, but I couldn’t leave the body unattended in this playground.

  I stood up again.

  All this time I’d been facing more or less in one direction. Now I made myself turn around and see what was behind me.

  A motel rotated into view. The playground was situated at the narrow end of a V-shaped parking lot; two single-level rows of guest rooms extended diagonally left and right along the lot’s outside edges, while a triangular island in the center held the motel office. A slowly turning neon sign on the office roof said BADLANDS MOTOR LODGE.

  I took a few steps out into the parking lot, moving cautiously, as if it were paved in black ice rather than asphalt. The lot opened out onto a four-lane road. Directly across the road was a pair of fast-food restaurants, but beyond them I saw what looked like private houses, and more buildings and rooftops beyond them, though nothing taller than two or three stories. A small town, then; I was on the edge of a small town, a town in the Badlands…wherever that was.

  I tried to imagine the chain of events that had brought me to this place—not the whole story, just the last ten or fifteen minutes. Was I staying at the motel, or had I just been passing by, seen the playground, and decided to have a swing? The latter was the kind of thing Jake would have done—like most little kids, he loves dinosaurs—but on the other hand, he’s not much for wandering around strange places on his own, and I couldn’t picture him just walking aimlessly down that road. Of course if house discipline had broken down completely, somebody else could have been doing the walking, only to have Jake pop out at the sight of the dinosaurs.

  I thought about going into the office to see if the motel manager recognized me. That might work, unless I’d signed in when a different manager was on duty. Then again, if the manager didn’t recognize me, I could try asking straight out whether I was registered at the motel—but what name should I ask for?

  Then it hit me: a key. If I was registered at the motel, I should have a key.

  I started checking my pockets. In one of them, a different one than I usually kept it in, I found my wallet. It was light; the last time I’d taken it out, at the bar in Autumn Creek, I’d had almost a hundred dollars in cash, and now I had less than half that. It looked like someone had been using my credit card, too; there’s a “secret” compartment where it’s supposed to be hidden, but the card had been moved to the center billfold, next to the remaining cash. The wallet’s other contents—my library and video rental cards, my father�
��s expired driver’s license, and a picture of Andy Gage’s mother—appeared untouched.

  I searched the rest of my pockets. I found my house key but no motel-room key. It occurred to me that that still didn’t settle the question—I might have left the key in the room when whoever-it-was decided to visit the playground. I scanned the rooms on both sides of the parking lot, looking for one with an open door. All the doors were closed.

  For the first time, I began to get a real sense of the chaos my father had lived with before the house was built—the chaos Penny Driver still lived with.

  Penny…wait a minute. In a parking space off to my left was a familiar-looking black sedan: a black Buick Centurion, with—yes!—Washington state license plates. I moved up for a closer look, and as I did so, the door of the nearest motel room swung open, and Penny herself came running out. She was barefoot, wrapped in a fuzzy green bathrobe with dinosaurs on it, her hair wet and plastered to her skull. When she saw me standing by the car, she pulled up short and let out a squeak.

  “Penny?” I said.

  At the mention of her name, Penny looked freshly startled…and suddenly hopeful. “Andrew?” she said. I nodded. “Oh thank God!…Andrew!…Finally!”

  “Finally,” I repeated, wondering just how much lost time that word represented. “What day is it, Penny?”

  “May 8th,” she told me. “Around ten o’clock in the morning, local time. It’s OK, it’s only been two days. You left Autumn Creek the night before last.”

  I nodded again, thinking that it wasn’t OK at all but that at least it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I looked back at the playground, at the landscape beyond it. “Where are we?”

  “South Dakota,” Penny said. “I don’t know the name of this town, but it’s close to Rapid City.” She frowned. “Or at least that’s what I was told.”