The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  “What for?” said Lary distractedly. “We know already. All the really important news. You don’t have to be a Log to keep up with it.”

  They passed the First, slowing down as usual, but suddenly Lary felt riled up again and went into a gallop. Horse jumped and raced alongside him.

  “Hey, cool it down! What’s the matter?”

  Lary put on the brakes so suddenly that Horse crashed into him, almost sending both of them tumbling.

  “I’ve got my very own personal Pheasant now,” Lary explained with visible disgust. “Why would I want to look at more of them? Anytime you come into the room—he’s there. Wheeling around like he owns the place. Enough to drive a man bonkers.”

  Horse assumed a somber expression.

  “Yeah, I can see that.”

  At the Crossroads, Lary flopped on the sofa and finally pried the gum off his heel. Horse positioned himself next to him and spread out his spindly, spidery legs. Lary shot him a sideways glance. Am I also that skinny? Like a rake? he thought, appalled.

  Not privy to the dark musings of his friend, Horse made himself comfortable.

  “He crawls like a piece of shit,” Lary complained. “Like he can’t do it at all. Makes me sick. Here’s the question: Why do I have to look at it and suffer?”

  “You had it easy,” Horse sighed. “Your wheelers have always been these demons, you know. Try living in the Nesting for a while.”

  Lary couldn’t care less about the Nesting problems. What bothered him was Horse’s unwillingness to understand simple concepts and to commiserate.

  “Horse,” he said. “This is really easy to understand. Make an effort. See, Lary’s prey can’t wheel around Lary’s lair.”

  But having said that, he started to doubt himself. Lary’s lair? Logs were not supposed to have lairs. Because when a Log was in his lair he was no longer a Log.

  “Even my zits are something special lately,” Lary said, shaking his head. “Vicious buggers. All because of him. It’s all nerves.”

  Horse grunted reverently. Lary’s zits had always been special. Explosions and craters. Erupting volcanoes and smoldering calderas. Anything but regular zits. Horse was a connoisseur, he had some of his own. Alcohol pads helped a bit, lotions helped not at all, and nothing ever helped Lary because there was no remedy against direct blasts to the face. Horse eyed the calderas closest to him, did not notice any change for the worse, and decided to keep it to himself.

  “Broke his face today,” Lary said gloomily. “This morning.”

  Horse shifted expectantly.

  “And?”

  “And nothing.” Lary shuddered with disgust. “He just took it.”

  “And the others?”

  “Also nothing,” Lary said in a markedly different tone of voice.

  “And the reason?”

  “He is the reason all by himself.”

  They fell silent. Two tall stick figures in black leather, legs crossed. The sharp toes of the boots rocking in the air. It would be difficult to tell them apart from behind if not for Horse’s blond mane done in a ponytail.

  “Pompey said . . . ,” Horse began cautiously.

  “Please don’t.” Lary grimaced. “Whatever it is he said, I don’t want to know. We have plenty of time ahead of us to listen to it, anyway.”

  “What do you mean? You think he’s going to pull it off? That’s not certain.”

  Lary sighed.

  “Don’t try to console me. I’m already resigned to everything.”

  Horse pulled at his lip a couple of times.

  “Damn it, Lary,” he said angrily, “you have no right to think that way! How can you be so . . . unpatriotic? If I were you I would never allow myself to do that.”

  Lary stared at Horse.

  “Are you serious? What’s patriotism got to do with it? There’re ten of us and more than twenty of them. Can you, like, count?”

  “Sometimes one warrior is worth ten,” Horse said loftily.

  Lary looked at him pityingly.

  “Can you count?” he asked again.

  Horse didn’t answer. He dug in his pockets, produced a piece of candy, and handed it to Lary. A gust of wind threw a handful of dry leaves through the open window. Horse picked up one and examined it, scratching his nose.

  “Autumn,” he declared, scrunching the leaf. “It’s a long way until next summer. Pompey may not be one of the old ones, but you and I both know—”

  “That nothing really scary can happen before the last summer,” finished Lary with a faint smile. “Well, Horse, that’s about the only thing keeping me afloat. Or I would’ve gone crazy by now.”

  Horse brushed the remains of the leaf off his palm.

  “So hold on to that,” he said plaintively.

  SMOKER

  OF CONCRETE AND THE INEFFABLE PROPERTIES OF MIRRORS

  The Fourth does not have a TV, starched doilies, white towels, numbered cups, watches, wall calendars, painted slogans, or any space on the walls. The walls are decorated from top to bottom with murals, shelves, and cubbyholes, and hung with bags and backpacks, pictures and posters, clothes, pans, light fixtures, and strings of garlic, chili peppers, and dried mushrooms and berries. It resembles a landfill that is trying to climb up to the ceiling. Some of its tendrils already have gained purchase there and now flutter in the drafts, rustling and clanking softly, or just hang out.

  The dump is mirrored on the bottom by the giant bed, assembled from four regular ones. It is, at the same time, sleeping area, common room, and continuation of the floor for anyone who would like to cut through. I am assigned a personal zone on its surface. The other occupants are Noble, Tabaqui, Sphinx, and sometimes Blind, so my spot is tiny. To actually sleep on it requires special skills that I have not yet acquired. Those sleeping in the Fourth are routinely stepped or crawled over, or used as flat surfaces for cups and ashtrays or as convenient props for reading materials. The boombox and three lightbulbs out of a dozen are on continuously, and at any time of night someone is smoking, reading, drinking tea or coffee, taking a shower, looking for clean underwear, listening to music, or just prowling around the room. After the Pheasant “lights out” at twenty-two hundred exactly, this kind of daily routine is quite an adjustment, but I am trying to fit in. Life in the Fourth is worth any discomfort. Here everyone does whatever he wants whenever he wants, and for exactly however long he needs. There is, in fact, no counselor here. The inhabitants of the Fourth are living in a fairy tale. But it takes coming in from the First to appreciate that.

  In the last three days I learned to:

  —play poker

  —play checkers

  —sleep sitting up

  —eat in the middle of the night

  —bake potatoes on a hotplate

  —smoke someone else’s cigarettes

  —never ask what time it is.

  I was still unable to:

  —make coffee without it boiling over

  —play the harmonica

  —crawl in a way that does not make everyone else cringe

  —stop asking stupid questions.

  The fairy tale was somewhat spoiled by Lary the Bandar-Log. He could not get over my arrival in the Fourth. He was annoyed by everything. By me sitting, lying down, speaking, not speaking, eating, and especially moving around. Just one look at me made him wince in disgust.

  For a couple of days he confined himself to calling me a moron and a chickenshit, then decided to break my nose for allegedly sitting on his socks. There were no socks under me, of course, but the morning was spent in explaining to various teachers the circumstances of my unfortunate fall while transferring to my wheelchair. Not one of them believed a single word of it.

  The First had a ball at breakfast examining my appearance. The suspicious pill given to me by Jackal did nothing for the pain but made me so horribly drowsy that I had to skip the last class. I thought that a shower would perk me up but got only as far as the bathroom before falling asleep. Someone ap
parently dragged me back to the dorm.

  I dreamed of Homer. With an expression of utter disgust on his face, he was whacking me with a slipper. Then I dreamed that I was a fox being smoked out of its hole by evil hunters. Just as they grabbed a hold of my tail, I woke up.

  I opened my eyes and saw the corners of several pillows forming a tent over my head. There was a small hole left between them, and in it I could see a yellow kite on the ceiling looking down at me. It was capable of doing that because it had a face painted on it. Clouds of vanilla-scented smoke wafted about. I figured that those fox-themed nightmares had a foundation in reality.

  I flattened the nearest pillow that was obscuring my view and saw Sphinx. He was sitting next to me, moodily studying the chessboard. There were very few pieces left on it. Most of them were now strewn around, and some were definitely under me, since I felt something small and hard poking me in several places.

  “Give it up, Sphinx,” said the voice of Jackal. “It’s a draw if I ever saw one. You have to learn to accept the facts as they are. To maintain dignity while at the same time bowing to the inevitable.”

  “As soon as I need your advice I’ll let you know,” Sphinx said.

  I dabbed at my nose. It wasn’t as painful as before. Apparently the pill did work after all.

  “Hey, Smoker’s awake! I saw his eyes blink!” An extremely grimy little paw patted me on the cheek. “The Pheasantkind has some pluck left in it yet. Who said he was dead?”

  “I don’t think anyone did, except you.” Sphinx leaned over me and inspected the damage. “Nobody dies over this.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” countered invisible Tabaqui. “Pheasants, even former ones, are capable of anything. What motivates their life? What causes their death? Only they themselves know the secret.”

  I sat up, tired of being a bedridden patient and a topic of discussion. I couldn’t quite sit straight, but my field of vision expanded significantly.

  Tabaqui was clad in an orange turban, fastened with a safety pin, and a green dressing gown that looked like it could cover him twice over. He was sitting on a stack of pillows and smoking a pipe. The vanilla smoke that had tormented the fox in my dream was emanating from him. Sphinx, ramrod-straight and serene, was meditating over the board. His sharp knees were poking out of the holes ripped in his jeans. He had only one prosthetic arm attached, and his tattered shirt was exposing its workings, so he resembled a half-assembled mannequin. I could also distinguish someone’s figure on the windowsill behind the drapes.

  “I dreamed I was a fox,” I said, fanning away the cloying smoke. “I was being smoked out of my den when I woke up.”

  Tabaqui transferred the pipe to the other hand and waved his index finger.

  “When dealing with a dream the most important thing is to wake up in time. You seem to have managed, and I am happy for you, baby.”

  And he launched into one of his bizarre, mournful songs with endlessly repeating choruses that made my skin crawl. They usually extolled the virtues of wind or rain, but this one was about smoke, rippling over the ashes of some burned-out building.

  The figure behind the drapes twitched and pulled the fabric tighter to try and shield itself from Jackal’s dirges. The hasty movements betrayed it as Noble.

  “Ahoy, ahoy . . . Black crows over the gray smoke . . . Ahoy, ahoy . . . Nothing left, it’s all gone . . .”

  Sphinx suddenly buried his face in the blanket, as if pecking it, then straightened up and jerked his head, and I saw a pack of cigarettes flying in my direction.

  “There,” he said. “It’s good for the nerves.”

  “Thanks,” I said, examining the pack. There were no teeth marks on it, and no traces of saliva either. I coaxed out a cigarette, caught the lighter thrown by Tabaqui, and thanked him too.

  “He’s so polite!” he exclaimed. “How nice!”

  He started fidgeting, shaking out the folds of his dressing gown. The turban kept falling over his eyes. Finally he fished out a glass ashtray from somewhere. It was already full.

  “Found it! Here you are.”

  He tossed it at me, even though I was close enough to just take it from his hands. It lost most of its contents in flight, and the blanket acquired a dappled trail of cigarette butts. I brushed the ash off myself and lit up.

  “Where’s the gratitude?” Jackal demanded.

  “Thank you,” I said. “For missing.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said, visibly delighted. “Always glad to help.”

  The ahoys resumed at double the volume.

  Sphinx said that he agreed to a draw.

  “Finally,” a soft voice from the other side of the headboard replied. Snaking through the layers of bags hanging on the bed, a very white, very long-fingered hand worked its way up, turned the board over, and began assembling the little pieces into it.

  “Ahoy, ahoy . . . The blackened cooking pans! Ahoy, ahoy, the frame of a stuffed bear . . . It used to be a coat hanger, it did . . .”

  “Someone please shut that pervert up!” Noble begged from the window.

  I couldn’t pry my eyes off Blind’s hand. In addition to the fingers being impossibly long and bending in ways that fingers weren’t supposed to bend unless they were broken, the hand also seemed unpleasantly autonomous. It traveled to and fro, slipping on the covers from time to time, extending its feelers, almost sniffing the air. I extracted the white rook that had been digging into my backside and carefully placed it in front of the hand. The hand stopped, waved the middle antenna, cogitated, and then grabbed it with lightning speed. I startled and quickly set to producing the rest of the pieces that had dropped under my body because I had a horrible suspicion that, if I didn’t, the hungry hand would just burrow in and find them. Sphinx observed me with a faint smirk on his lips.

  “Ahoy, ahoy . . . The blackened pendant! A crow would take it, bring it to its young . . . A lovely toy to bring to its young . . .”

  Noble pulled aside the curtain and flowed down. He did it a bit more noisily than usual, but still, it was all I could do not to weep from envy, looking at him.

  “Stop gawking,” came Tabaqui’s advice. “You’ll never be able to do that.”

  “I know. I’m just curious.”

  Jackal imitated a coughing fit and looked at me significantly, as if to warn me about something.

  “It would be better if you weren’t just curious.”

  I didn’t have time to ask why before Noble climbed up to the communal bed. I admired the precise movements. Where Tabaqui crawled, Noble hurled himself forward. He tossed his legs in front of him and then hopped after them on his hands. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant sight in itself, and would border on creepy if slowed down, but not from the point of view of a paraplegic. Besides, Noble was so fast that such deconstruction was often impossible. I was enthralled and I envied him bitterly, fully aware that this was way beyond me. I was no acrobat. Tabaqui moved just as fast, but he was half Noble’s weight and he had some control over his legs, so looking at him crawl did not make me depressed.

  Once on the bed, Noble stared at Jackal with a sort of vicious anticipation. It was clear that with one more ahoy things would get really hairy for Tabaqui.

  “Why are you so jumpy today, Noble?” Tabaqui said apologetically. “That was the end of the song.”

  “Thank god,” Noble snorted. “Or it would have been the end of you.”

  Tabaqui feigned shock.

  “Horrible, horrible words! And because of such a trifle! Come to your senses, dearest!”

  His turban settled down over one eye again. He hoisted it back up and puffed on the extinguished pipe.

  The coffeepot on the floor sounded like it was about to boil. I pushed apart the backpacks and bags that were hanging on the bars of the headboard.

  On the floor on the other side of the bars, Blind was sitting. His black hair fell over his white face like a curtain. The silvery eyes glowed coldly from behind it. He was smoking and looked to
tally limp. The hand searching for the chess pieces was almost done. It did not appear to have anything to do with him. While I was watching, it decided to return, and Blind appreciatively patted it with the other hand. I didn’t dream this, it really happened.

  The door slammed.

  I heard a clatter of heels.

  My mood crashed. This noise could only mean one thing—Lary had returned. I dropped the bags back in their place, obscuring Blind again, and tried to make myself inconspicuous. I didn’t hide, of course, just froze. I wasn’t exactly scared, but Lary’s presence drained all energy out of me. He invariably blew up whenever I showed any signs of life.

  Thin, cross eyed, and disheveled, he came up to the bed and stared at Jackal. He looked so miserable that Tabaqui choked on his pipe.

  “Heavens, Lary!” he squeaked anxiously. “What happened?”

  Lary’s gaze was acerbic.

  “Same old, same old. Which is quite enough for me.”

  “Oh.” Tabaqui calmed down instantly and adjusted his turban. “And here’s me thinking there was something we didn’t know yet.”

  Lary grunted. It was a very expressive grunt. Blatant, even. Noble, who detested all sudden noises, asked if Lary would mind keeping it down.

  “Down?” Lary demanded as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. “You mean even more down? If we were any more down we’d be six feet under! We’re not making waves! We are the masters of quiet! We’re so quiet we’re going to grow moss any day now.”

  “You’re overreacting.” Noble frowned. “And by down I meant you personally. At this particular moment.”

  “Oooh, I see!” Lary jumped at the opportunity. “The particular moment, that’s all we care for. Only the moment, never before or after. Nothing can ever be worth anything except for the precious moment. We can’t even wear watches, or someone might try to think more than two minutes ahead!”

  “He wants a fight,” Tabaqui explained to Noble. “A bloody massacre. He needs to fall down by the bed insensate and not have to worry about anything.”

  Noble paused in the careful filing of his nails and said, “This can be easily arranged.”