Set This House in Order Read online

  “Good morning, my dear,” Aunt Sam said grandly. Aunt Sam’s breakfast portion consisted of a cup of herbal tea and a slice of wheat toast with mint jelly; she used to smoke half a cigarette, too, but my father made her give it up in exchange for a little extra time outside. She sipped at the tea and nibbled daintily at her toast until Adam got impatient and started clearing his throat from the pulpit.

  “Good morning, gorgeous,” said Adam with mock flirtatiousness. Adam likes to pretend he is a great ladies’ man. In reality, women between the ages of twelve and sixty make him nervous, and if Mrs. Winslow’s hair hadn’t been gray, I doubt he’d have had the courage to be so fresh with her. As he devoured his breakfast—half an English muffin and a bacon strip—he gave her his idea of a seductive wink; but when Mrs. Winslow winked back, Adam startled, sucked bacon down the wrong pipe, and ended in a fit of coughing.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Winslow,” Jake said, his high voice raspy from Adam’s choking fit. He dug awkwardly into the little bowl of Cheerios she set out for him. She poured him a tiny glass of orange juice, too, and he reached too quickly for it. The glass (which was really made of plastic; this had happened before) went flying.

  Jake froze. If he’d been with anyone but Mrs. Winslow, he would have fled the body altogether. As it was, he hunched up, fists clenched and muscles tense, bracing for a smash across the knuckles or a punch in the face. Mrs. Winslow was careful not to react too suddenly; she pretended not to even notice at first, then said, very casually: “Oh dear, I must have put that too close to the edge of the table.” She got up slowly, crossed to the sink, and wet a rag to mop up the spill.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Winslow!” Jake blurted. “I—”

  “Jake dear,” Mrs. Winslow said, wiping the tabletop, “you do know that Florida is a huge state, don’t you? They have lots of orange juice there; plenty more where this came from.” She refilled his glass, handing it directly to him this time; he took it gingerly in both hands. “There,” Mrs. Winslow said. “No harm done. It only looks like gold.” Jake giggled, but he didn’t really relax until he was back inside the house.

  Seferis only nodded good morning. His breakfast was the simplest of all: a small plate of salted radishes, which he popped into his mouth one at a time and crunched like candy. Mrs. Winslow had started in on her own breakfast by then, warmed-over biscuits with marmalade. When the lid stuck on the marmalade jar, she offered it to Seferis.

  Seferis’s size ratio to the body is the inverse of Jake’s: his soul is nine feet tall, and crammed into Andy Gage’s modest frame he radiates energy and strength. He got the jar lid off with a simple twist of thumb and forefinger, a trick I couldn’t have managed even using the same muscles.

  “Efcharisto,” Mrs. Winslow said, as Seferis handed the jar back to her with a flourish.

  “Parakalo,” Seferis replied, and crunched another radish.

  When the last of the food had been consumed, Mrs. Winslow switched on the little black-and-white TV on the kitchen counter, and poured a fresh mug of coffee for my father, who came out to visit with her for a while. They liked to watch the news together. Mrs. Winslow used to watch with her husband, and I guess my father’s company brought that back for her in some way; likewise, sitting with Mrs. Winslow gave my father a sense of the normal family life he’d always wished for. But this morning was less pleasant than most. The lead news item at the bottom of the hour was an update on the Lodge camping tragedy; it upset my father even more than the VCR clock, and blackened Mrs. Winslow’s mood as well.

  Maybe you remember the Lodge story; it never received as much national coverage as it might have, because of another similar case in the news at the same time, but people did hear about it. Warren Lodge was a groundskeeper from Tacoma who’d gone camping in Olympic National Park with his two daughters. Two days after the start of the camping trip, the state police spotted Mr. Lodge’s jeep weaving between the lanes on Route 101 and pulled him over. Mr. Lodge, who appeared delirious and had a deep scratch across his scalp, claimed that a cougar had invaded the campsite and attacked him, knocking him unconscious. When he came to, he found his daughters’ tent slashed to ribbons, their sleeping bags torn and bloody; the girls themselves—Amy, twelve, and Elizabeth, ten—were nowhere to be found, although he’d searched for many hours.

  It could have been true. Cougar attacks are not uncommon in the Pacific Northwest, and Mr. Lodge looked strong enough to survive a wrestling match with a big cat, if he got lucky. But watching him on TV—the day after the police pulled him over, he called a press conference to plead for volunteers to help search for his girls—I felt a growing sense of unease. Mr. Lodge’s story could have been true, but something about the way he told it was wrong. It was Adam, looking out from the pulpit into Mr. Lodge’s tearstained face, who first put my intuition into words: “He’s the cougar.”

  Ever since then—almost a full week, now—we’d been waiting for the police to reach the same conclusion. So far there hadn’t been a whisper of a suspicion in public, although Adam said the cops had to be thinking about it, unless they were totally incompetent. My father, meanwhile, had pledged that if Mr. Lodge weren’t arrested soon, he was going to call the Mason County DA’s office himself, or have me do it.

  “Do you really think he killed them?” Mrs. Winslow asked now, as the newscast replayed Mr. Lodge’s plea for volunteers; the update was just a rehash of previous reports, with an added note that the searchers had all but abandoned hope of finding the girls alive.

  My father nodded. “He killed them, all right. And that’s not all he did to them.”

  Mrs. Winslow was quiet for a moment. Then she said: “Do you think he’s insane? To kill his own children?”

  “Crazy people don’t try to hide their crimes,” my father said. “He knows what he did was wrong, but he doesn’t want to face the consequences. That’s not insane. That’s selfish.”

  Selfish: my father’s worst epithet. Mrs. Winslow didn’t ask the obvious next question, the one I always wondered about, which was Why? Even granting a total disregard for the welfare of others, what would make someone want to do to another human being what Mr. Lodge had done to his own daughters? Mrs. Winslow didn’t ask that question, because she knew my father didn’t have an answer, though he’d spent most of his life searching for one. She didn’t ask any other questions, either, only sat there in angry silence as my father finished his coffee and the newscast turned to other matters. Soon it was time for us to leave for work; my father kissed Mrs. Winslow on the cheek and gave me back the body.

  There was a family portrait that hung in the Victorian’s entrance foyer: a younger, darker-haired Mrs. Winslow with her late husband and her two sons, all of them standing on the front lawn of the Victorian back before it was renovated. I always slowed down a little going past that photo, ever since my father had told me the story of what happened; today I actually stopped, until Mrs. Winslow came up behind me and steered me forward out the front door.

  Outside, the sky was unseasonably clear, the only visible clouds huddled in a group around Mount Winter to the east. Mrs. Winslow handed me a bag lunch (one complete meal; lunch isn’t shared). She wished me a good day, then took a seat in the swing chair on the porch to wait for the morning mail. The postman wasn’t due for another few hours yet, but she’d wait just the same, just as she always waited, bundling up in an old quilt if it got too cold.

  “Will you be all right, Mrs. Winslow?” I asked before leaving. “Do you need anything?”

  “I’ll be fine, Andrew. Just come home safe, that’s all I need.”

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “If anyone tries anything, I’ll have them outnumbered.” This is an old multiple’s joke, usually good for a polite smile at least, but today Mrs. Winslow only patted my arm and said: “Go on, then. Don’t make yourselves late.”

  I started down the front walk. At the sidewalk I turned back to look; Mrs. Winslow had picked up a magazine and was reading, or pretending to r
ead. She looked very small against the side of the Victorian, very small and very alone—really alone, in a way I could only imagine. I wondered what that must be like, and whether it was easier or harder than always having other souls for company.

  “Don’t worry about her,” Adam said from the pulpit. “She’ll be fine.”

  “I think the newscast really bothered her.”

  “It didn’t bother her,” Adam mocked me. “It pissed her off. And it should. You want to worry, worry about people who don’t get mad, hearing about a thing like that.”

  I waved to Mrs. Winslow one last time and made myself start walking. When we were down the block and the Victorian was out of sight behind us, I said: “Do you think they’ll catch him? Warren Lodge, I mean.”

  “I hope so,” said Adam. “I hope he gets punished, whether they catch him or not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s just a thing that happens sometimes. Sometimes people think they’ve gotten away with something, think they’ve fooled everybody, only it turns out they haven’t. They get punished after all.”

  “How?” I asked. “By who?”

  But Adam didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “We’ll just hope a policeman gets him,” he said. Then he went back in the house, and didn’t come out again until we were almost at the Factory.

  2

  I worked at the Reality Factory on East Bridge Street. My boss there, Julie Sivik, was also the first real friend I ever made on my own.

  When my father first called me out, he was working as a restocker for Bit Warehouse, a big computer outlet store just off Interstate 90 between Autumn Creek and Seattle. The original plan was that I would take over for him there, just as I took over all the other aspects of running the body, but it didn’t work out. Being an effective restocker means knowing where things go, knowing where to find them again after they’ve gone, and—because of Bit Warehouse’s “Ask Anybody” customer service policy—knowing what they’re actually used for once they’re found. After three years on the job, my father had all that knowledge, but I didn’t.

  This is one of those metaphysical issues that people who aren’t multiple have a hard time grasping. Obviously, in creating me, my father had given me a great deal of practical knowledge. I came out of the lake knowing how to speak. I had a concept of the world and at least some of what was in it. I knew what dogs, snowflakes, and ferryboats were before I ever saw a real dog, snowflake, or ferryboat. So it may seem natural to ask, if my father could give me all that, why couldn’t he also give me the know-how to be a champion restocker? For that matter, why couldn’t he give me Aunt Sam’s understanding of French, Seferis’s martial-arts prowess, and Adam’s knack for lie-detecting?

  I wish I knew, because there are times when all of those skills would come in handy. Of course I can always have Aunt Sam translate for me, Seferis stands ready to defend the body at a moment’s notice, and Adam hangs out in the pulpit calling bullshit on people whether I ask him to or not, but none of that is quite as good as having the abilities myself. For one thing, help from other souls isn’t free—they expect favors in return, and not all of their wishes are easy to grant. It would be much simpler, and cheaper, if I could just borrow their talents somehow.

  The reason why such borrowing isn’t possible, my father thinks, has to do with the difference between information and experience. If you’d asked me on the day I was born to tell you what rain is, I’d have given you the dictionary definition. Ask me today and I’ll still give you the dictionary definition—but as I’m giving it, I’ll think of that moment on overcast mornings when you have to decide whether an umbrella is worth taking with you (the answer, in these parts, usually being yes). Or I’ll think of the upside-down world reflected in puddles, or the awful tacky feeling of a drenched wool sweater, or the smell of wet leaves in Lake Sammamish State Park. Experience hasn’t changed the form of my answer much, but the meaning of my answer has been utterly transformed.

  Memory makes the difference. There are facts that everyone knows, but memories, and the feelings they evoke, are unique to individual souls. Memories can be described, but can never truly be shared; and knowledge that is bound up in especially strong memories can’t be shared either. Like Aunt Sam’s knowledge of French: it’s more than just grammar and vocabulary, it’s the memory of her high school teacher Mr. Canivet, the first adult she ever knew who didn’t betray her in some way, who always treated her kindly and never hurt her. I never met Mr. Canivet, and can’t love him the way Aunt Sam does. Any feelings I have about him are purely secondhand, and the things Aunt Sam learned from him will always be secondhand to me too.

  My father’s job experience had the same sort of proprietary quality. It couldn’t be shared; it had to be acquired personally. We tried coaching for a few weeks—my father guiding me step by step from the pulpit, answering a thousand questions about RAM chips and SCSI ports and null-modem cables—but there was just too much to learn in too short a time. Given six months we might have managed it, but by the end of the third week my father’s work-performance rating—my work-performance rating—had deteriorated to the point where we were in danger of being fired.

  Of course it didn’t help that my father hadn’t told his coworkers about me; I still think he would have done better to be open about the fact that he was training a replacement. But two involuntary commitments had left him reluctant to reveal his multiplicity to people, and while he’d risked trusting Mrs. Winslow, nobody at Bit Warehouse knew. Not knowing, they were mystified when Andy Gage started acting like a whole other person—one who was constantly distracted and had trouble with even the simplest tasks. Mr. Weeks, my supervisor, was especially concerned; after I accidentally reformatted the hard drive on the Warehouse’s main inventory computer, he wondered aloud whether I’d been using drugs.

  “We could try telling him the truth,” I suggested. “We could tell everybody the truth.”

  “Not everybody would understand,” my father replied. “It’s a complicated truth, and people don’t like complications. Especially people in authority. You’ll learn.”

  You’ll learn. That was my father’s stock response whenever I asked a question that only experience could answer. I heard it a lot in those days, and it was frustrating, for him as well as for me. He’d thought that the hard part was over once he got the house built; turning things over to me was supposed to be easy. But he was still learning from experience, too.

  One thing we’d both learned was that I couldn’t just step into my father’s old life. I had to create my own: find my own job, choose my own friends—and make my own decisions about who to trust.

  I went to Mr. Weeks’s office and told him I was quitting. He nodded, as if he’d been expecting this, and said that he hoped I’d consider getting professional substance-abuse counseling. I told him I would think about it—another stock response I’d picked up from my father—and went back out on the Warehouse floor to finish out the day. That was when I met Julie Sivik.

  When she found me I was up on a ladder in Aisle 7, rearranging boxes on the overstock shelf. Even though I’d given my notice I was still interested in learning about computers, and my father and I were having a pretty involved discussion about graphical user interfaces, so Julie had to say “Excuse me” several times to get my attention.

  “Hello,” I said, when I finally noticed her. I slid down the ladder and brushed my hands on my shirt. “Can I help you?”

  At first glance she was a little intimidating. She was a couple of inches taller than I was, with broader shoulders. She wore a brown leather jacket over a black T-shirt and dark jeans; her hair was dark too, very straight and severe, collar-length. And she had an annoyed look on her face, like she’d already decided I must be dense. I’d seen that look on other customers’ faces, but Julie was better at expressing annoyance than most people, as if something in her features allowed for clearer transmission of impatience.

  “I’m looking for some
tax-preparation software,” she said, holding up a short stack of shrink-wrapped boxes. “I was wondering which of these you’d recommend.”

  “Ask her what she wants to use it for,” my father said, and I relayed the question: “What do you want to use it for?”

  Julie looked at me as if I were very, very dense. “For preparing my taxes,” she said. “Obviously.”

  “Personal income tax or small business?” my father said.

  “Personal income tax or small business?” I asked.

  “Oh…” Julie’s expression softened. “That makes a difference?”

  “Well…” I began, and then paused while my father filled me in. “Well,” I continued, “if all you’re looking for is a program that can fill out a 1040, then I’d probably suggest that one.” I pointed to the box at the top of the stack. “Because…because it’s the least expensive, very basic but with a good tutorial, as long as you don’t need any specialized forms…On the other hand, if you’re self-employed or running a small business, you’ll probably need something more sophisticated…You’re not a farmer, are you?” Even as I asked this question, following my father’s prompting, I wondered what was so special about farmers’ taxes. But Julie wasn’t in agriculture, so I never got a chance to find out.

  “But I am starting my own business,” she said. “And I’ve also got to fill out a personal 1040 for last year, so I guess what I need is—”

  “Wait,” I interrupted her, holding up a finger. My father was saying something else now.

  “Wait?” said Julie.

  “Just a second…”

  The annoyed look resurfaced on Julie’s face. “What the hell am I waiting on?” she demanded.

  “My father,” I told her.

  “Your father?”