The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  Lary stared at the nail file and did not like the sight of it for some reason. He seemed to have second thoughts about the fight.

  “I’m not overreacting,” he said. “Walk the corridors like I do, you’d react the same. You have any idea what kind of atmosphere is out there right now?”

  “Lary, enough,” Sphinx said. “We’ve had it up to here with your atmosphere. Stuff it.”

  Lary was shaking all over, and the bed was shaking with him. I could not understand why they wouldn’t just let him speak. I would’ve thought that could calm him down a little. It’s not a pleasant experience to be sitting next to someone who’s shaking from some unexplained emotion. Especially if that someone happens to be a Bandar-Log.

  Alexander appeared next to the bed, an obsequious shadow in a gray sweater. He distributed cups of coffee from the tray and disappeared again. Either crouched down on the other side of the headboard or flattened against the wall. The cup was boiling hot and I turned my attention from Lary to the coffee, so it was a complete shock when he turned his to me.

  The long nail of his trembling finger was pointing right at the middle of my forehead. “There! This entity here is the reason we’re all knee deep in shit! And he’s having coffee in bed instead of wearing a concrete suit!”

  Tabaqui gasped in delight.

  “Lary! Lary, what are you prattling about?” he squeaked. “What is this nonsense, my dear boy? How would you go about it? Where would you get your hands on that much concrete? Where would you mix it? And then how do you propose dunking Smoker in it? And what were you planning to do next? Flush the block down the toilet?”

  “Shut up, you pipsqueak!” Lary howled. “Keep your mouth shut, just for once!”

  “Or what?” Jackal wondered. “You’ll call upon your Log brothers to deliver a barrel of mixed concrete and a convenient footbath? Answer me this, buddy: if you’re so handy with all this stuff, how come you still can’t even cook a plate of spaghetti?”

  “Because . . . shove it up your ass, you freaking idiot!”

  Lary’s screeching swept Nanette off the locker. She landed on the table. And other things did too. Our crow liked to butcher old newspapers in her spare time, and the pieces of the newsprint puzzle flew into the air and settled down like a short, dirty blizzard. Two scraps ended up in my coffee.

  Then Lary’s face, with the viciously squinting left eye, was right next to mine, and then a lot of things happened at once.

  The coffee scalded my hand. My shirt collar twisted and squeezed my neck. The ceiling started spinning. With it spun the yellow kite, the empty birdcage, the wooden wheel, and the last pieces of the newspaper snow. This spectacle was so sickening that I closed my eyes to avoid seeing it. Miraculously, I managed not to throw up. Then I was lying faceup on the bed, gulping saliva mixed with blood and desperately trying to hold on.

  Tabaqui helped me sit up and earnestly inquired how I was feeling.

  I did not answer. I brought the faces around me into focus as best I could. Lary’s wasn’t among them. I had no doubt that this time he did break my jaw. I couldn’t hold back tears, but the pain was nothing compared to the sweet concern everyone was showing. They behaved as if something heavy had just happened to fall on me.

  Tabaqui proffered another one of his miracle pills. Sphinx told Alexander to get a wet cloth. Blind appeared from behind the bed and asked if my head was still spinning. Not one of them had intervened when all of that was happening. Or even told Lary what a bastard he was. This kind of treatment made me lose all desire to talk to them or answer their questions. I tried not to meet their eyes. I crawled to the edge of the bed somehow and asked for my wheelchair. I don’t think the words came out right, but Alexander immediately brought it around. Then he helped me into it.

  Once in the bathroom I washed my face, trying not to press on the tender spots, and then just sat in front of the sink. I didn’t want to go back. A familiar feeling. I used to have it a lot in the First, except there, no one was allowed to be by himself for long. Here nobody cared about stuff like that. Anyone was free to wander anywhere he wanted, deep into the night.

  The bathroom looked exactly the same as in the First. If anything, it was even more dilapidated. More cracks in the walls. The tiles fell away in a couple of places so that the piping showed through. And each remaining tile was covered in scribbles. The marker didn’t hold well, it smeared and faded, and the flowing script made the Fourth’s bathroom a bizarre sight, like a place that was draining away. That was urgently trying to convey a message but couldn’t because it was melting and evaporating. The writing was on the wall, but no one could read it. I tried. It was legible enough, but added up to complete nonsense. It destroyed your mood. I usually ended up reading the same one every time, the one arcing above the low sink: Without leaving his door he knows everything under heaven. Without looking out of his window . . . The rest of it was smeared, leaving only the very last word: Tzu. It drove me crazy that I found myself rereading it, and I’d even contemplated erasing it with a sponge, but something always stopped me from doing that. Besides, then I would have had to write something else in the glaringly empty space.

  I wheeled over to that sink. Its edge was crusted with toothpaste, and the drain sported a clog of scum mixed with disgusting hair clippings. The hair was black. Having absorbed a large dose of this still life, I moved to the next sink. None of the wheelers in the Fourth had black hair, which meant that one of the able-bodied was carefully bending down to one of the low-hanging sinks while shaving, just to bestow the fruits of his piggishness on us. Or rather, I suspected, on me.

  In came Alexander.

  He brought another cup of coffee and an ashtray. Placed them on the edge of the sink. Put a cigarette and a lighter into the ashtray. The sleeves of his sweater flashed his fingers for a second; the nails were brutally gnawed off, bleeding. Then they went into hiding again. The sleeves were stretched and hung low, but he also grabbed them with the fingers from the inside to make sure no one saw his hands.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Not at all,” he answered from the door. And vanished.

  So here were two things that I learned about him in one go. That he could talk and that he was eating himself alive.

  Alexander’s servility was more scary than pleasant. It brought to mind those nasty Pheasant tales of how other groups treated new arrivals. How they made them into slaves. I’d never believed them, but then I met Alexander, who seemed to have come straight out of those stories. A real person and at the same time a horror story made flesh. The way he carried himself was seriously shaking my resolve not to believe.

  What did I know about the Fourth, when it came down to it? That, except for Lary, they behaved more or less normally toward me. They seemed nice, almost too nice for all those horrors attributed to them. But maybe I was exactly the reason? Who would need a slave in a wheelchair? Useless. He can barely serve himself. One who could move, now that’s different. One like Alexander. Having arrived at this thought, I realized that the Pheasant poison was inside me and that I was going to die from it. But not before carrying it through the rest of my life.

  That was the last straw. I looked in the mirror. At the swollen nose and the swelling jaw. Touched the bruise. Pressed it harder, locked eyes with my reflection, and suddenly burst into tears.

  They came so easily that I was astonished. As if I was always on the verge of them, ready to go. I was ogling myself in the mirror, cup in hand, and crying away. To mop up the fluids that sprung out of me, it took at least a couple of feet of paper towels. I blew my nose one final time and in the mirror saw Sphinx.

  Not his face, he was too tall to fit in the mirror designed for the wheelchair-bound. But even without looking at his face, it was clear that he’d been there in time for the deluge.

  I didn’t want to turn around, so I decided to behave like I hadn’t seen him. I put down the cup and busied myself with washing. A very long and thorough washing. Finally, I
wiped my face and saw that he was still standing in exactly the same place as before. Apparently he wasn’t here to demonstrate discretion, so I had to pretend as if I’d just noticed he was there.

  Sphinx had the same semi-assembled look, except he’d wrapped a shirt over his shoulders. The shirt clearly had been through a contentious encounter with liquid bleach at some point, and the jeans weren’t much better, but taken together, the appearance was stunning. Sphinx was one of those types on whom any old rags looked presentable and expensive. I had no idea how he pulled it off.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked.

  “A bit.”

  To avoid looking him in the face, I stared at his sneakers. They were worn out, and he’d wrapped the laces around the ankles. Mine were much cooler.

  “Bad enough to cry?” he continued.

  Yeah. Discretion was not his strong suit.

  “Of course not,” I managed.

  It was silly of me to have expected that he would just turn around silently and leave me alone with my embarrassment. Now he was surely going to start an inquiry into why I seemed so unhappy.

  “Your coffee’s getting cold,” he said.

  I felt the cup. It was still warm.

  Whether it was because I didn’t see Sphinx, who was now standing behind me so I could not see him in the mirror, or because he never did ask me anything, or because I wouldn’t have known what to answer if he had, or all of it together, the dam burst again. Except now it was words gushing out of me in a flood instead of tears.

  “I’m a Pheasant,” I said to my puffy reflection. “A freaking Pheasant. I am for some reason not happy drinking my coffee right after a punch in the face. And you know what the funniest part is? That Lary doesn’t think I’m one. Oh, he calls me a Pheasant, but he doesn’t believe it himself. Or he wouldn’t be doing this. No Pheasant would ever take it, he’d snitch in an instant. So on the one hand he hates me for being a Pheasant, and on the other he counts on me not being a Pheasant. Isn’t that special? What if I were to wheel out of here right this moment and go to Shark’s office?”

  I felt my face again. The swelling was visibly spreading. By dinnertime it was going to occupy half of my face. Much to the joy of the First.

  “You can put some foundation cream on it,” Sphinx suggested. “It’s in the cabinet to your left.”

  I bristled. He was so sure that I wanted to hide that shiner. Lary was too. What if I wanted to reveal it to the world? Tell everyone of the circumstances of me acquiring it and see what happened next? This was the Pheasant talking, of course, and it was scary.

  “I am going to tell Shark,” I said out of sheer contrariness.

  Sphinx came up to the adjacent sink and sat on it. He even crossed his legs, like it was a chair. I immediately thought of the caked toothpaste and wondered if he’d still look cool with toothpaste smeared on his butt.

  “Right now?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Are you going to tell right now?”

  I didn’t answer. Of course I wasn’t going anywhere, but he at least could have pretended to believe me. And try to talk me out of it.

  “It was a joke,” I said crossly.

  “Why?”

  As I thought about it, he answered himself.

  “Well, obviously you wanted to be talked out of it. To begin with. What else? Did you want to scare me? Possibly. But why me and not Lary? Or maybe you’d like me to stand up for you next time? Something like a covenant to protect you from him in the future? Sorry, I can’t promise you that. I’m not your nanny.”

  I felt myself reddening from my ears all the way down to my heels. Sphinx’s interpretation of my behavior turned it pathetic. And it was very accurate. I just wasn’t thinking about it in those terms.

  “All right,” I said. “Enough.”

  Sphinx blinked.

  “No, wait,” he said. “I said I can’t promise you anything, but I can go find Lary and tell him how hard it was for me to talk you out of going to Shark. He’d believe me and would never lay a finger on you again. That’s all I can do. If that’s something that works for you.”

  “It does,” I said quickly. “It does work for me.”

  I was this close to telling him that all I’d wanted was to irk him, but stopped myself just in time. I snatched the cigarette left for me by Alexander, clicked the lighter, and took a drag so hard that my eyes almost bugged out. The wretched creature in the mirror imitated my greedy gesture, making me ashamed for him and for myself.

  “Listen, Smoker, why is it that you never fight back when someone’s beating you up?”

  I coughed up smoke.

  “Who? Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  The faucet behind Sphinx’s back leaked, so the bottom of his shirt was getting wet. The deepening cyan color was making his eyes even more green than normal. He sat hunched up, not straight like he always did, as if trying to draw out my soul with those water-sprite eyes of his. Pull it out and then dissect it at his leisure.

  “What good would that do?” I said.

  “More than you can imagine.”

  “Sure. Lary would have a laughing fit and forget to swing his fists.”

  “Or be so surprised that he’d stop thinking of you as a Pheasant.”

  He seemed to genuinely believe in what he was saying. I couldn’t even get angry at him for this.

  “Sphinx, stop it,” I said. “This is ridiculous. What was it I should have done? Scrape his knee?”

  “You should have done whatever. Even Tubby bites when he feels threatened. And you had a cup of hot coffee right in your hand. I think it scalded you when you fell.”

  “So I was supposed to pour my coffee on him?”

  Sphinx closed his eyes for a second.

  “Better that than pouring it all over yourself.”

  “I see,” I said and crushed the cigarette in the ashtray. It flipped over and I barely managed to grab it. “You guys crave entertainment. You’d like to see how I flap my arms at Lary, bite his finger, and douse the bed in coffee. I guess Tabaqui would even make a song about it afterward. Thank you so much for the advice, Sphinx! How can I ever repay you?”

  Sphinx suddenly shot off his perch and was next to me in just a couple of steps. He was looking at me in the mirror. He had to bend down, like he was peering at someone behind a low window.

  “You’re welcome,” he said, addressing that someone. “Don’t mention it. Lary himself would have given you the same advice if he happened to be here.”

  His jumping startled me so much I swallowed all the curses that were ready to come out.

  “Of course,” I said. “He’d have nothing to lose.”

  Sphinx nodded. “And he’d finally be able to leave you alone. Do you know why Logs are always picking on Pheasants? Because they never fight back. Not in principle and not in practice. Just close their eyes and go wheels up without a peep. And until you stop doing that, a Pheasant will be all Lary sees when looking at you.”

  “You said you were going to set him straight.”

  Sphinx was still trying to mesmerize my reflection. The reflection that was still looking worse and worse.

  “I did. And I will. Not a problem.”

  His tricks were making my head spin. I felt that there were three of us here.

  “Sphinx, will you stop talking to the mirror?” I blurted out. “The me that’s in there is all wrong!”

  “Yep. You’ve noticed it too, haven’t you?”

  He turned around absentmindedly, as if he really was talking to someone else and I’d interrupted him. Then he focused on me, which was even more disconcerting. I felt a headache coming on.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s forget about that you, the one living in the mirror.”

  “Are you saying he is not me?”

  “He is. But not quite. He is you seen through the lens of your image of yourself. We all look worse in the mirror than we actually are, didn’t you know that?”


  “I’ve never thought about it that way.”

  Suddenly it dawned on me how crazy it all sounded.

  “Cut out this nonsense, Sphinx. It’s not funny.”

  Sphinx laughed.

  “It is funny,” he said. “It really is. Funny how, as soon as you start to grasp something important, your first reaction is to shake it out of yourself.”

  “I’m not shaking out anything.”

  “Look over there,” Sphinx said, nodding at the mirror. “What do you see?”

  “A pathetic cripple with a shiner,” I said darkly. “What else can I possibly see?”

  “You need to keep away from mirrors for a while, Smoker. At least until you get over feeling sorry for yourself. Have a talk about this with Noble. He never looks in the mirror.”

  “How come?” I said in astonishment. “I wish I could see in the mirror what he sees when he looks in it.”

  “How do you know what he sees?”

  I tried to imagine that I was Noble. Looking at myself in the mirror. Massive attack of narcissism.

  “He sees something like young David Bowie. Only more beautiful. If I looked like Bowie, I’d—”

  “Whine that you look like elderly Marlene Dietrich and dream of looking like Mike Tyson,” Sphinx said. “That’s a direct quote, so don’t think I’m exaggerating. What Noble sees looking in the mirror is completely different from what you see looking at him, which is only one example of reflections behaving strangely.”

  “I see,” I said. “Makes sense.”

  “It does?” Sphinx sounded surprised. “It still doesn’t quite for me. Even though I spent some time researching the subject.”

  I was suddenly overwhelmed by desire to ask him something. Something that had been gnawing at me for a while.

  “Listen, Sphinx. Alexander . . . How come he’s like that? Did you just feed him to Lary? Or is that how he was when he came in?”

  “How come he’s like what?” Sphinx frowned.

  “You know. Helpful.”

  “Oh man, not another one,” Sphinx drawled. “What horrors did we inflict on him? We didn’t. But you don’t believe me, so there’s no point in my telling you this.”