Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  It’s late. Mouse takes the wheel, and drives across the Mississippi River into La Crosse, Wisconsin. They find a motel. Mouse, ready to nod off again, pays scant attention as Andrew negotiates the check-in.

  Loins isn’t so sleepy.

  “Twin or queen-size?” the girl at the check-in counter asks.

  “Huh?” says Andrew.

  “One bed, or two?”

  “Oh…Two rooms, please.”

  “No, that’s all right,” Loins interrupts, deftly putting Mouse under. “We can share a room. I don’t mind.”

  “You’re sure?” Andrew says.

  “I’m very sure,” Loins tells him, trying hard not to give herself away. “There’s no need to waste money on a second room.”

  “All right…” He turns back to the check-in clerk. “Two beds, then.”

  “Excuse me.” Loins leans across the counter and whispers something in the clerk’s ear that starts them both laughing.

  “What?” says Andrew.

  “Oh, nothing,” the clerk giggles. “Here you go, room 230.”

  They go up to the room, which only has one bed. Andrew frowns when he sees it. “Sorry,” he says, like it’s his fault. “Let’s go back down and fix th—”

  “It’s all right,” Loins says, stepping past him into the room. “It’s a big bed.” She sits on a corner of the mattress and bounces up and down a few times to test it. “We’ll both fit.”

  “Uh, Penny…”

  “I’m really tired, Andrew,” she says. “I don’t want to go through the hassle of changing rooms. I’ll just curl up small on one side, and you won’t even know I’m here.”

  “Penny…” He knows something’s off, but not what. “Maledicta?”

  Loins laughs. “Do I sound like Maledicta? It’s me, Andrew.” She gets up quickly, and goes into the bathroom to wash her face and hands. When she comes back out, Andrew is still standing by the open door. “What’s the matter?” Loins asks him. “You’re not going to stand there all night, are you?”

  “Penny…”

  “At least close the door.”

  “Penny, what—”

  “You know what you need?” Loins says. “A good shower.”

  “A shower?”

  “Yeah.” She nods. “To relax you. Wash the day off.” She tosses her head and smiles in a way that she knows is seductive. “Or maybe a nice hot bath…I’m going out to get a soda, anyway, so while I’m gone, feel free…”

  “You’re going for a soda? I thought you were really tired.”

  “Oh, I am,” says Loins. “But I’m really thirsty, too.” She steps past him again, unable to resist stroking his cheek with her finger in passing. “See you when I get back…”

  Five minutes, Loins tells herself, as she makes her way to the ground level. She finds a soda machine in an open breezeway that runs between two sections of the motel. There’s a cigarette machine, too, but Loins barely glances at it; she doesn’t actually like to smoke, and only does it for effect. But Andrew, her intuition tells her, isn’t someone who finds smoking sexy.

  But speaking of sexy smokers…as Loins is making her selection, a cigarette coal flares in the shadows farther down the breezeway. The cigarette’s owner is a shaven-headed man in a jogging suit. He’s cute enough to make Loins forget about Andrew momentarily.

  “Hi there,” she says, making her voice a purr. “Looking for some company?”

  The smoker smiles at the come on, but then holds up his left hand and waggles the digits; a wedding band glints on his ring finger.

  “Your loss,” Loins informs him. She takes a can of 7-Up from the soda machine, and—although the night air is cool—presses it to the side of her neck as if she is very, very hot. “Sleep well…”

  When Loins gets back upstairs, the bathroom door is closed and the water is running in the shower. She drops the soda can on the bed, primps briefly in the mirror above the dresser, and goes to join Andrew.

  “Hi there,” she says, pushing the bathroom door open without knocking. “Want some comp—”

  The bathroom is empty. The shower-sounds Loins heard are coming from the room next door.

  “What are you doing?” Andrew says from behind her.

  She whirls around. Andrew is sitting in a chair by the door with his arms crossed. Coming in, Loins must have walked right by him.

  “What are you doing?” Andrew asks again.

  Loins smiles and gives a little shrug. “Just checking to see if you needed any help…”

  “You aren’t Penny.”

  “You caught me.” Loins raises her arms in a fetching display of surrender, but Andrew’s not fetched.

  “Do you think it’s right, you pretending to be someone you’re not?” he asks her.

  “Right…?” says Loins, her tone implying: What a concept! “I think it’s fun.”

  “I think it’s rude. Rude to me, and rude to Penny, too. Did you even think to ask her permission before popping out like this?”

  “Ask permission?” Loins laughs. “She doesn’t even know me. She’s too boring to know me.”

  “I don’t think she’s boring. I think she’s a nice person, and a good friend—and I’d like to talk to her. Could you bring her back out, please?”

  “No, I couldn’t. I want to have some fun. If you’re not interested, fine, I’ll find someone else…”

  She exits the room in a huff. Descending once more to the breezeway, Loins thinks: All right, we’ll see what that wedding ring is worth. Five minutes, max. But when she gets there the smoker has departed—finished his cigarette and jogged back to his wife. Loins walks to the far end of the breezeway just to be sure, but she can find no sign of him, nor does she see any other prospects.

  Then she hears a whirring noise behind her—someone feeding money into one of the vending machines. She pastes on a sexy smile and turns around. “Hi there…”

  Her smile falters; it’s only Andrew. On the other hand, what the hell? “Changed your mind?” Loins purrs, approaching him.

  “No,” Andrew says. He retrieves a pack of cigarettes from the machine and holds it up so she can read the label: Winstons. “Catch,” he says, and tosses it at her.

  “…fucker!” Maledicta snarls, snatching the pack out of the air. She brandishes the smokes: “You think you can fucking bribe me with this?”

  “No,” says Andrew, “but I thought it would get your attention. And I trust you more with Penny’s body than that other girl.”

  “Trust!” sneers Maledicta. “Don’t get me started on fucking trust.” Then: “Fucking Loins…I swear, that fucking slut…”

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get to hang out with Aunt Sam this afternoon…”

  “You should be fucking sorry!”

  “…but I never promised it would be today. Now maybe tomorrow—”

  “Maybe? That’s what ‘please’ gets me, a fucking maybe?”

  “I’m tired, Maledicta. If I swear to let you spend time with Aunt Sam tomorrow—no maybes—will you go back up to the room and stay there? Make sure Penny stays there?”

  “Where are you going to fucking sleep?” Maledicta demands. “Not with me.”

  “No, not with you,” Andrew agrees. “I’ll get another room, I guess. Or maybe I’ll just sleep in the car…”

  “You’re not sleeping in my fucking car.”

  “Then I’ll get another room.” He holds out the key to room 230. “OK?”

  “Fucker…”

  “I noticed there’s a minibar in this one,” Andrew adds, parenthetically, as she takes the key. “Don’t go crazy.”

  —and so about seven hours later Mouse wakes up alone with cigarette breath and a mild hangover. There’s a note on the pillow beside her, in Maledicta’s hand: HES FUCKING AROUND. It takes all the concentration Mouse can muster to figure out that this is a reference to Andrew’s physical location.

  Mouse gets out of bed, showers, and brushes her teeth. She swallows three aspirin. She gets dressed
and goes out to the motel parking lot, and finds Andrew waiting for her by the car.

  “Something happened last night,” she says, walking up to him.

  “You switched,” he tells her. “I had to call out Maledicta to make sure you didn’t…wander off.”

  “Who was in control before,” Mouse wants to know, “that you thought Maledicta would be better?”

  “Well,” says Andrew hesitantly, “I’m not sure, but I think her name is Loins…”

  “Oh God,” says Mouse, when she hears what Loins did, or tried to do.

  “It’s all right, Penny.”

  “All right?”

  “I mean it wasn’t aggressive. She backed off as soon as I made it clear I wasn’t going to play along. I got the feeling she was used to dealing with men who didn’t resist.”

  “Great,” says Mouse. Then: “It’s not all right. You don’t know, but this…Loins…has caused me a lot of trouble. The night before I came to work at the Reality Factory…” But she can’t tell him that story.

  “Well, Penny,” Andrew offers, “if you don’t like the way she acts, you can always tell her to stop.”

  “Tell her?”

  He nods. “Track her down, inside, and let her know you’re not happy. Lay down the law.”

  “Would that work?”

  “Probably not the first few dozen times, but if you keep after her…” He shrugs. “It’s your household, Penny—or it can be, if you take charge of it.

  “I’m going to have to go inside myself today,” he adds, “to get some directions from my father, and finish a conversation he and I were having. And since I did kind of promise Maledicta that she could hang out with Aunt Sam, maybe we could coordinate: I’ll go inside to see my father, you go inside to talk to Loins, and we let Maledicta and Aunt Sam handle the next leg of the trip.”

  “Maledicta…” Mouse blinks with bloodshot eyes. “You think that’s a good idea?”

  “I can talk to Aunt Sam beforehand, impress on her that they’re not to take any side trips. And Maledicta, if you ask her nicely…”

  Mouse is skeptical, but she realizes that the real source of her reluctance is not concern over what Maledicta may do with the body, but fear about what she herself may encounter in the cavern. She thinks of the little girl in the party dress. “What if Loins and I don’t get along?” she asks. “Or what if I meet somebody else inside, who I don’t want to talk to at all?”

  “Tell them you don’t want to talk to them.” He thinks a moment. “When you had your meeting with Dr. Grey, did she do the thing where she has you wear a miner’s helmet?”

  “Yes.”

  “She had my father do that too,” Andrew says. “He said it really helped, before he got the sun going inside. Bring the helmet with you when you go to talk to Loins—it’ll keep you safe.”

  They check out of the motel. After breakfast, they go to a Shell station to get gas for the Centurion (Andrew, in his determination to go “just a little farther,” nearly ran the tank dry last night). Since gassing up the car is Maledicta’s self-appointed task, they do the switch right there—first Andrew calls out Sam, and then Mouse, more reluctantly, calls Maledicta forward.

  The miner’s hard hat is lying on the ground just inside the cave mouth. Mouse picks it up and places it on her head—the fit is as perfect as last time—and the lamp comes on.

  “I got it fucking figured, Sam,” Maledicta says, outside, talking around the cigarette in her mouth. “We stay on this road till the Illinois border, just to fucking make it look good, then we cut straight south and make a right turn at St. Louis. If we fucking floor it, and don’t stop to piss, we could be in fucking Santa Fe by dawn tomorrow…”

  That had better be a joke, Mouse thinks. On the other hand, if Maledicta and Sam do get up to mischief, it will provide a good excuse for cutting this exploration short.

  Mouse descends to the big cavern, pausing at its entrance to listen for the sound of footsteps. She hears none, just the steady inhale-exhale of the sleepers. Still she’s nervous, and it occurs to her to wonder whether the lamp in the miner’s helmet can be made brighter. She reaches up, and sure enough, there’s a knob set into the side of the lamp. Mouse gives it an experimental twist, and the light blazes up, bright enough to blind any approaching memories.

  Good. Mouse dials the knob back again, not wanting to see too much herself unless she has to.

  The pile of white pebbles is right where Mouse dropped them last time she was down here. She begins gathering them up again, then hesitates, thinking that it will be awkward, carrying a bunch of pebbles around; she’d rather have at least one hand free, in case she needs to turn up the lamplight. She looks around her immediate vicinity some more and finds a coil of heavy white twine, conveniently wound on a reel.

  Now, to anchor it somewhere…a handy stalagmite presents itself. Mouse ties one end of the twine around it, and gives a few hard tugs. The knots hold.

  “OK.” As an added precaution in case the twine breaks, Mouse decides to follow the cavern wall. She does eenie-meenie-meinie-moe to choose a direction, and strikes off to the left, unwinding the twine behind her as she goes.

  She hasn’t gone far when she hears a familiar sound—slap slap—and freezes. This time, though, it’s not approaching footsteps; it’s water. Splashing. There’s a smell, too, a salty musky smell, like warm brine. Suddenly sure she’s on the right track, Mouse continues, and comes to an opening in the cavern wall. The space beyond is awash in soft pink light.

  Mouse goes inside. It’s a grotto, like a sea cave or a desert mountain lair; at its center is a shining pool, lit from below, as if whatever force gouged it out of the grotto floor struck neon beneath the rock. Mouse steps forward to the lip of the pool, and sees herself floating in the gently steaming waters.

  No, it’s not her: the soul in the pool may be similar in form—not an exact twin, but close—but in essence she and Mouse are light-years apart.

  Loins.

  She is naked, of course. She floats on her back, arms and legs moving languidly in the water, stirring up little waves that lap at her upturned breasts, at her…oh God that’s disgusting. Mouse stares, repelled yet fascinated, too.

  It’s the outward likeness that gets to her. Mouse—she doesn’t ever spend time thinking about this, but she knows it’s true—is no more sexually attractive than dirt; she’s never been sexy, not once in her whole life. But Loins is. It’s hard to say exactly why or how—she’s not actually doing anything, just floating there—but it’s undeniable, she just exudes it somehow, other people viewing this same scene would see it too. And if Loins can be sexy, and Loins resembles Mouse, then that would seem to imply that Mouse could be sexy too, that she’s got potential.

  This is not information Mouse wants. It’s shameful, another strike against her already tainted character. And yet for an instant—the barest millisecond, you could say—she feels an astonishment that is not entirely unpleasant.

  Then the shame comes welling up, and Mouse hears her mother’s voice condemning her, cursing her for wanting to throw away her good fortune, wanting to fuck it all away on some Trash Town boy. It is almost too much—Mouse has to fight to keep from blacking out.

  Loins notices her then. She splashes upright in the pool, and her hands come up to smooth back her wet hair, a gesture that has the side effect, probably intentional, of thrusting her nipples forward. Her mouth twists in a grin.

  “Well,” she says, “I didn’t ever expect to see you down here. Come for a swim?”

  Mouse makes a gagging noise.

  “I guess not,” Loins says, and giggles. She starts to get out of the pool; Mouse backs up in a hurry. “So what is your pleasure? Is this about last night?” Loins steps out of the water, and reaches for a towel that’s been draped over a boulder. She dries herself—hair, face, neck, arms, back, breasts, belly—always managing to hold the towel in a way that leaves the maximum amount of skin exposed to Mouse’s view. “Nothing happened, yo
u know. I tried to fuck Andrew, but he wouldn’t play along at all…” Dry above the waist, Loins places one foot up on the boulder, flips the towel between her legs and rubs vigorously, much more vigorously than necessary. Her head tilts back and she stops talking for a moment.

  Mouse shuts her eyes.

  “Oh, my!” Loins exclaims, her tone conveying much of what Mouse can’t see. “Hoo!…Excuse me. What were we talking about? Oh right, Andrew—he was a perfect gentleman.” She laughs. “Perfectly boring…although I suppose he was a sweet thing after all, trying to protect your virtue.” More laughter. “You know he really chewed me out…figuratively, that is.”

  Stop it, Mouse thinks.

  “Yeah, he read me the riot act. Pissed me off a little. He said some nice things about you, though…I don’t know, maybe you should try fucking him.”

  “Stop it,” Mouse says, her eyes open now but averted, which is no way to lay down the law. She forces herself to look at Loins directly: “Don’t say that.”

  Loins, done drying herself, has slung the towel around her neck—but it’s shrunk to the size of a washcloth, so it doesn’t cover anything. She’s still naked. “Don’t say what, ‘fucking?’ I’d think you’d be used to hearing that by now, hanging out with Maledicta. But then I guess it’s more of an adjective when she uses it.” She sits down on the boulder. “You want me to stop saying it, or you want me to stop doing it?”

  “Doing it.” Pushing the words out: “I’m tired of…of waking up with strangers.”

  “So you want me to stop picking up guys in bars.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes,” Loins echoes, for a moment sounding reasonable and accommodating, like it’s no problem, Mouse should have said something a long time ago. Then her smile turns wicked again: “Well, I guess we all want something, huh? Me, I want a good time.”

  “A good time.” Mouse loads the words with all the scorn she can muster. “Is that why you have to get drunk? Is that why you leave me to deal with them in the morning?”

  “Mornings are boring,” says Loins, unruffled. “And the drinking, half the time that’s not even me, and even when it is, it’s just part of the play. It is a good time—you’d know that if you had the courage to do it yourself once. You want to know what the best part of it is?”