"Matt Ruff - Set This House in Order" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ruff Matt)

finish the job that my father had begun: a job that he had chosen, but that I was made for.



I
EQUILIBRIUM
 FIRST BOOK:
ANDREW



1

I met Penny Driver two months after my twenty-eighth birthday -- or two months after my
second birthday, depending on how you want to count it.
Jake was up first that morning, as he is most mornings, barreling out of his room around sunrise,
thundering down the stairs to the common room, the clamor of his progress setting off a chain reaction of
wakings among the other souls in the house. Jake is five years old, and has been since 1973, when he
was born from the wreckage of a dead soul named Jacob; he is a mature five, but still basically a little
kid, and not very good about respecting other people's need for quiet.
Jake's stomping roused Aunt Sam, who started up cursing; and Aunt Sam's cursing woke Adam,
who has the room next to hers; and Adam, who is old enough to respect other people's need for quiet,
but often chooses not to, let out a series of war whoops until my father banged on the wall and told him
to knock it off. By then, everyone was awake.
I might have tried to ignore it. Unlike the others, I don't sleep in the house, I sleep in the body,
and when you're in the body, even the loudest house-noises are just echoes in Andy Gage's head that can
be tuned out at will -- unless they come from the pulpit. But Adam knows this, of course, and whenever I
do try to oversleep, he's out on the pulpit in no time, crowing like a rooster until I take the hint. Some
days I make him crow himself hoarse, just to remind him who's boss; but on this particular morning, my
eyes were open as soon as Jake hit the stairs.
The room where I slept -- where the body slept -- was in a renovated Victorian in Autumn
Creek, Washington, twenty-five miles east of Seattle. The Victorian belonged to Mrs. Alice Winslow,
who had first taken my father on as a boarder back in 1992, before I even existed.
We rented part of the first floor. The space was large but cluttered, clutter being an inevitable
side effect of multiplicity, even if you make an effort to keep real-world possessions to a minimum. Just
lying there in bed, and without even turning my head, I could see: Aunt Sam's easel, brushes, and paints,
and two blank canvases; Adam's skateboard; Jake's stuffed panda; Seferis's kendo sword; my books;
my father's books; Jake's little shelf of books; Adam's Playboy collection; Aunt Sam's stack of art prints;
a color television with remote that used to be my father's but now belonged to me; a VCR that was
three-fifths mine, three-tenths Adam's, and one-tenth Jake's (long story); a CD player that was one-half
mine, one-quarter my father's, one-eighth Aunt Sam's, and one-sixteenth apiece Adam's and Jake's
(longer story); a rack of CDs and videotapes of various ownerships; and a wheeled hamper of dirty
clothes that no one wanted to lay claim to, but was mostly mine.
That's what I could see without even looking around; and besides the bedroom, there was a
sitting room, a big walk-in closet, a full bathroom that was full in more ways than one, and the kitchen
that we shared with Mrs. Winslow. The kitchen wasn't so cluttered, though; Mrs. Winslow cooked most
of our meals for us, and strictly limited our personal food storage to one shelf in the refrigerator and two
shelves in the pantry.
I got us out of bed and into the bathroom to start the morning ritual. Teeth came first. Jake really
enjoys brushing for some reason, so I let him do it, stepping back into the pulpit and giving him the body.