Set This House in Order (7 page)

She can get home from here. She is eager to do so, to change out of the obscene tank top and get rid of it, along with the foul-smelling sweater. But first, at the Navigator's insistence, Mouse checks around the inside of the car for a list.

Today's list is stuffed in the Centurion's glove compartment, along with a half-empty pack of Winston cigarettes and a vodka flask that Mouse pretends not to see. Hastily jotted on a crumpled bar napkin, the list enumerates half a dozen chores and appointments, with space to check off each one after it is completed. Item number one, in letters twice as high as the rest, reads:
REALITY FACTORY
—8:30
A.M. DRESS NICE! BE ON TIME
!!!

In one sense, Mouse does not need to be reminded about her new job. She has thought of little else since Friday evening, when she first found out about it. In fact it was mainly to stop herself worrying—to get it out of her mind for a few hours—that she hit on the idea of going to see a movie last night, and took down the bottle of wine from her cupboard.

But
last night
feels like it was less than an hour ago, and Mouse still has it in her head to think that her new job starts tomorrow. The list drives home the fact that tomorrow has become today. Mouse looks at the bank clock again and realizes with dismay that she does not have time to go home. If she still lived in her old U. District flat she might make it, she might even manage a quick shower, but her current apartment on Queen Anne Hill is a fifteen-minute drive in the wrong direction. If she wants to get to Autumn Creek by 8:30, she needs to get on the freeway in the next ten minutes.

“Oh God…” Mouse tugs at the hem of the sweater she is wearing, feels how filthy it is. She looks at the bank clock. “Oh God.”
DRESS NICE,
says the list,
BE ON TIME,
but there is no way now that she can do both. She hasn't even started her new job yet and already she has screwed up.

“You worthless piece of shit,” Mouse says, catching sight of herself in the Centurion's rearview mirror. She slams her fist down into her thigh, pounding rhythmically, hard enough to bruise: “Worthless piece of
shit,
worthless piece of
shit,
worthless piece of
shit—”

The bank clock marks another minute gone by. Mouse stops hitting herself; she switches on the Centurion's engine and guns it, drives screeching out of the lot. Two blocks down, stopped at a traffic light, she feels indecision tearing at her again. Which is worse: to come to work late but well-groomed, or to come to work on time but looking like trash?

A loud bang interrupts her reverie. A big man in a U.W. Huskies sweatshirt, crossing the street in front of her, has just bounced a basketball off the Centurion's hood. It wasn't an accident; the man noticed that Mouse was talking to herself and decided to scare her. Catching the ball on the rebound, he laughs, happy to have made her jump.

It is too much. Mouse disappears. Malefica comes, Malefica the Evil-Doer, who is Maledicta's twin sister. She taps the accelerator pedal; the Centurion lurches forward into the crosswalk, catching the Huskies fan in the shins. It's just a nudge, just enough to make him drop the ball and fall face forward onto the hood. Just enough to scare him.

It
does
scare him, for a moment. Malefica sees the fear in his eyes. But then he makes a bad mistake: he thinks to himself that Malefica is just a little girl, that she does not really know what she is doing here, who she is
messing with. His fear turns to anger; he starts pushing himself up off the hood, meaning to come around and rip open the driver's door.

Malefica depresses the accelerator pedal again, holding it down. The Centurion rolls forward at five, then ten miles per hour, pushing the Huskies fan backwards. Fear recaptures him. “Hey!” he shouts, the soles of his shoes skidding over the pavement, his palms slapping at the car's hood. “Hey!
Hey! HEY!”
Fear becomes terror as he locks gazes with Malefica through the windshield and reads her intention; he throws himself to the side even as she floors the accelerator.

Still gathering speed out the far side of the intersection, Malefica checks the rear view: back at the crosswalk, the Huskies fan is picking himself up off the ground. He is shouting something after her, waving his fist, but it's hard to look threatening when you've just pissed yourself.

Malefica laughs. She is a little girl, yes, but a little girl with a
big fucking car,
and no one had better try to fuck with her. At the next corner she rolls right past a stop sign, scattering another three pedestrians with a blast of the Centurion's horn.

—and Mouse is driving east on Interstate 90 towards Autumn Creek, her decision made, though she does not recall making it. The air in the Buick is dense with cigarette smoke; Mouse takes a hand off the wheel to slap at a dribbling of ash on the front of the stolen sweater and nearly loses control of the car.

“Oh God…” Mouse steadies the Centurion and pulls it over into the slow lane. She rolls her window down; the smoke clears, but the rush of cold air does nothing for the sweater, which still reeks.
She
still reeks.

Maybe she can say she was sick last night. Sick to her stomach: she ate something bad for dinner, and was up half the night with cramps…and too late, she realized that she'd forgotten to do her laundry…

Yes,
Mouse thinks, with a thrill of elation. It is short-lived. Yes, they might believe that—they might even be proud of her, coming in on time for her first day, despite having been sick. But Mouse knows full well that there will be other mistakes, other screw-ups requiring excuses, and there are only so many lies she can hope to get away with. Eventually, they will see through her. Eventually, inevitably, they will know her for what she truly is.

Worthless piece of shit
…

Mouse isn't exactly sure how she lost her last job. It ended without warning three days ago, but whether she quit or was fired is something she really can't say; all she knows is that Julie Sivik was somehow involved.

The repair shop where she worked, Rudy's Quick Fix, is tucked into a narrow storefront just off Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle. Rudy Krenzel, the shopowner, has been in the same location for forty-five years. For the first thirty of those years, he fixed mainly typewriters, stereos, and television sets, but since the 1980s, his business has focused more and more exclusively on the repair of computer equipment, with college-age “apprentices” doing most of the work.

Mouse applied for the apprentice position last August, after Rudy's previous assistant left to attend graduate school in Boston. The job interview started out badly, with Mouse fumbling her answer to Rudy's question about how much experience she had fixing PCs. The truth was she had a lot of experience; she must have. She'd held other jobs that required her to maintain and repair computers, and had been complimented on her work—she'd been told she had a real gift for it, in fact. But because she couldn't remember a single instance of actually fixing a machine, her description of her talents came out sounding disingenuous, as if she doubted her own résumé. Rudy picked up on this, and became suspicious. “If you're such a hot shot,” he asked her, “how come you want to work for
me
?” And Mouse blurted out: “It was on the list.”

After that she was sure he wouldn't hire her. But Rudy decided to test her before kicking her out of his store. He led her back into a crowded workroom, where four broken PCs were lined up on a table. “Show me what you can do with those,” Rudy said. For a moment Mouse just stood there, without the slightest idea of how to begin. Then Rudy cleared his throat impa
tiently, and Mouse took a step towards the nearest PC, and the next thing she knew she and Rudy were back in the front of the shop, shaking hands.

“—see you tomorrow morning,” Rudy was saying. “I've got a big backlog piled up since Larry quit, so you can start first thing.”

“OK,” Mouse said. Rudy held the door open for her; she walked out, dimly aware that she had gotten the job after all. But she didn't really believe it until she saw the next day's list.

She'd been at the Quick Fix nearly eight months by the time Julie Sivik showed up. Eight months at the same job was a record for Mouse; her average was closer to three months, and her previous job, at the Cybertemps temp agency, had lasted only three weeks. Three
good
weeks, it had seemed like, until it suddenly all fell apart. Right up until the end her supervisors had been telling her what a valuable employee she was, what a hard worker, the companies she'd been hired out to all said so; and then one day she'd come in to the Cybertemps main office for a new assignment only to have the receptionist demand of her: “What the hell are
you
doing back here?”

“Getting a new placement…” Mouse said.

“Not here you're not,” the receptionist told her. And before Mouse could learn what had happened, a security guard arrived to escort her from the premises.

Why had Cybertemps fired her? Mouse tried to pretend she didn't know, but it was obvious: because she was a bad person, that's why. The fact that she was also a good worker—or at least capable of faking it—had disguised her basic rottenness at first, but in the end she'd slipped up somehow, shown her true colors, and her employers had turned on her. It was the only rational explanation.

So she was surprised as month after month went by, and Rudy Krenzel showed no signs of starting to dislike her. It must have had something to do with the nature of her new work environment; Mouse had noticed in the past that she seemed to last longest in jobs where she had little contact with other people. Though the Quick Fix shop was small, she and Rudy didn't talk much. They said hello in the morning, and good-bye in the evening, but for most of the day, Mouse was back in the workroom while Rudy stayed up front. She fixed computers; he dealt with customers. When business was slow, Mouse worked on the daily crossword puzzle in the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
and listened to the radio; Rudy read from a stack of James Michener books he kept stashed under the front counter. They sat less than ten feet apart, but might as well have been in separate buildings.

About the only time Mouse was really aware of Rudy's presence was
when one of his old army buddies dropped by the Quick Fix. Around these men—big, heavyset guys in gray crewcuts—the normally soft-spoken Rudy Krenzel became boisterous, cracking dirty jokes and laughing so loud it hurt Mouse's ears. Sometimes, if the visitor hadn't been by before, Rudy would call Mouse up front and introduce her. She would say hi and shake hands, and as soon as possible would excuse herself and go back into the workroom, shutting the door and turning up the radio.

One afternoon in April, Mouse heard a new voice in the front room, a woman's voice. That was unusual; women in the area who needed computers repaired usually went to the PC Doctor up on Third Avenue, which charged twice as much as the Quick Fix but didn't look so much like a pawn shop. But this woman sounded more like one of Rudy's army buddies than a customer. Curious, Mouse opened the workroom door a crack and peeked out.

The woman was leaning across the counter to brush away a crumb that had gotten caught in Rudy's beard stubble. It was a flirty gesture—the woman's bosom pressed against Rudy's arm as she was grooming him—and Rudy blushed and said something about his ex-wife that made the woman laugh.

Mouse opened the door a little wider so she could hear better. She told herself she wasn't really eavesdropping, just waiting for Rudy to call her out and introduce her, but she stayed so quiet that neither Rudy nor the woman noticed she was there. They went on talking, and from their conversation Mouse learned that the woman's name was Julie Sivik, that she was the niece of a Corporal Arnold Sivik who'd served in Rudy's outfit in Korea, and that she'd come to the Quick Fix to pick up a package that “Uncle Arnie” had left for her. Mouse wasn't sure what the package contained, but she gathered that Rudy was uncomfortable having it in his shop; in fact he might even have gotten angry about it, if he hadn't been so disarmed by Julie's flirting.

“I've got no problem doing Arnie a legitimate favor,” Rudy said at one point, “but I'm not running a warehouse for hot property here. I don't need that kind of heartache.”

“Hey,” Julie Sivik said, putting her hand on Rudy's arm. “That stuff is not stolen. Not
really
stolen, anyway…”

“Uh-huh,” said Rudy. “That's not the impression I got from Arnie.” Pulling his arm away, he got up off his stool and turned towards the workroom. Mouse ducked back out of the doorway.

“It's down in the basement,” Rudy said, entering the workroom and
making for a set of stairs in the back. “Arnie told me to keep it out of sight, which is a funny request for something that's not
really
stolen.”

“Rudy…” Julie Sivik said. She tried to follow him, but he stopped her at the head of the stairs.

“Just wait up here,” he said. “I'll bring it to you.”

Mouse bent over the worktable, pretending to focus on the PC in front of her. She grabbed a tool at random—a tiny screwdriver with a red plastic handle—and used it to poke at the inside of the open case.

“Hi,” Julie Sivik said, from two feet away. Mouse squeaked and threw the screwdriver in the air.

“Whoah!” said Julie. “Whoah, hey, don't be so jumpy!…”

Mouse pressed a hand to her chest. “I…I thought you were over there,” she said, gesturing towards the stairs.

“I was,” Julie said. She offered her hand to shake. “I'm Julie Sivik. And you are…?”

“Penny. Penny Driver.”

“Mouse,” Julie said, hand back at her side. “That's a cute nickname. Kind of suits you. So, what's wrong with it?”

“With my nickname?”

“With the computer you're fixing.”

“Oh,” Mouse said. “It…it's broken.”

“I see,” said Julie. “I guess that would explain why you're fixing it, huh? But
how
is it broken?”

“I…don't really know yet. I just started on it.”

“Uh-huh,” Julie said. She glanced inside the PC's open case. “So tell me something, Mouse: do you always pull the power supply out of a computer before you know what's wrong with it?”

“Tell
me
something, you nosy cunt,” Maledicta snapped. “Do you always fucking interrogate people when they've got work to do?”

“The power supply,” Mouse stammered. “The power supply is…it's
part
of the problem, but I had to take it out to, to see what else is wrong. So it's still, I'm not really sure yet…” She paused, noticing how the color had drained from Julie's face. “Is something the matter?”

Rudy came back up the stairs, lugging a cardboard box with
U.S. ARMY SURPLUS
stenciled on its side. “Here,” he said, thrusting the box at Julie. She moved quickly to take it from him.

“Thanks, Rudy. I
really
appreciate this…”

“Yeah, yeah…you two introduce yourselves?” Rudy asked, with a nod to Mouse.

“Uh, yeah,” Julie said. “We were just getting acquainted…Mouse says you keep her pretty busy.”

Rudy chuckled. “She keeps
herself
pretty busy. Hardest worker I ever hired.”

“Really…Does she just do hardware, or can she debug code, too?”

“Why?”

“No reason. Just curious…”

“Don't get any ideas,” Rudy warned. “I have a hard enough time replacing mediocre assistants.”

“Ideas?” Julie beamed an innocent smile at him; but Rudy, past flirting now, answered her with a scowl. “All right,” he said, “I think it's time you and your not-stolen property hit the road.”

“On my way,” said Julie. “See you around, Mouse…” She walked out, and Rudy followed her, pulling the door shut behind him. Mouse turned up the radio and got back to work.

The rest of the afternoon passed in no time.

Mouse didn't go home after work that day; instead, as instructed by her list, she went over to the Elliott Bay Book Company. She found an empty table in the bookstore's basement café and got a cup of Earl Grey tea. While the teabag steeped, she set up a laptop computer on the table. The laptop had been in Mouse's possession for some time, though she couldn't have said exactly how long, or where it had come from in the first place. But she didn't worry about that now—just switched it on and started up Microsoft Word.

As the program was loading, Mouse glanced at the clock on the café wall; it was 6:25. The next time she looked up, the clock read 7:13, and Julie Sivik was standing beside her again.

“—anybody home?” Julie passed a hand in front of Mouse's eyes. “Mouse?”

Mouse reached out hurriedly to fold down the laptop's screen. She got a brief glimpse of the file she'd been working on—the title bar said “Thread.doc”—before it dropped out of view. Only after the laptop's latch clicked did she look directly at Julie.

“Hello,” Mouse said.

“Hello,” said Julie, eyeing the laptop. “I'm interrupting again, aren't I?”

Mouse didn't answer, just stared, waiting for Julie to state her business. After a moment, Julie said: “Well listen, first off, I wanted to apologize for being so nosy today at the shop…”

“Nosy?”

“Yeah…you seemed kind of upset by my questions.”

Mouse shook her head. She remembered being uncomfortable, but not upset.

“Well,” said Julie. “Well anyway, I
did
want to apologize, and also—”

“How did you find me here?”

“My car broke down,” Julie explained. “Triple A's got it at a garage right now, a few blocks from here. Supposed to be ready by eight o'clock. I came in here to kill some time; finding you was just good luck.” She smiled.

“
Any
way,” Julie continued, “I really don't want to be a pest, but seeing as I have run into you, I'm still wondering about that last question I asked at Rudy's.”

“About the power supply?” Mouse chewed her lip nervously; though she knew she'd finished repairing the broken PC sometime after Julie's visit—the machine's owner had picked it up just before closing—she still had no idea what had been wrong with it.

“Power supply…?” Julie said, then shook her head. “No. No, not that. The question I asked Rudy, about whether you did any work debugging code.” To Mouse's blank stare: “You know,
code
? Software code?”

“Oh,” said Mouse. “I—”

“See, here's the thing,” Julie said. She reached for Mouse's laptop; Mouse started to protest, but Julie was only moving it aside, making room on the table for a laptop of her own. She grabbed a chair and sat down, sliding in so close that her knee and Mouse's were touching. “The thing is,” Julie continued, “I've got this software company, and we've been working on this virtual-reality project for a couple years now. And my lead programmer, Dennis, he's a really sharp guy, but lately he's just not getting things done fast enough. So the past few months I've been thinking about bringing in somebody new, to sort of light a fire under Dennis's ass.”

Julie tapped on her laptop's keyboard, opening a window on the screen that filled with a scroll of letters, numbers, and symbols. Software code, Mouse guessed, though it might as well have been Chinese. “This is part of the source code for one of our program modules,” Julie explained. “Or rather, it was part of the source code—this version of the software turned out to have a bug in it. Nothing complicated; it only took Dennis a few minutes to track down and fix, once he got around to it. But I kept this copy of the original code to use as a sort of test for potential employees…” She looked expectantly at Mouse.