The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  “Take the other one, then,” Noble said. He took the jar himself, sniffed, and put it aside. “This is last year’s vintage. And quit jolting it, you are disturbing the sediment.”

  Blind licked the drops he’d shaken onto his hand from another bottle, scowled, and said, “What’s oil doing here? Is this salad dressing or something?”

  “Hey!” Tabaqui yelped. “Where did you get that from? That’s a scorpion drowned in sunflower oil! It’s medicine! I always store it separately!”

  Noble brought the bottle closer and peered at it.

  “Could be. Yep, there it is, floating there. You dummy, why did you have to do it in an opaque bottle? You can hardly see the bugger.”

  “I used what was available at close proximity,” Tabaqui said sulkily. “Your choices are somewhat limited when you are holding a live scorpion in your hand, you know. And I distinctly remember putting a warning label on it. Must have dropped off at some point.”

  “What use would your label be to Blind? What if he drops off right here? We’d be leaderless on the eve of a military coup.”

  At this, Noble broke into a smile. It was tender and wistful.

  It immediately brought to mind Tabaqui’s saying: “Noble only smiles once a year, and that when someone breaks a leg.”

  Or when someone takes a swig from the bottle with a scorpion in it, I added silently.

  “Blind, tell me, do you know any spells against poisons?” Tabaqui inquired anxiously. “Or how about a guarding amulet?”

  Blind was already busy with the next bottle. He threw the cork from it into Tubby’s playpen and coaxed a drop onto his finger. He definitely didn’t look like someone in deathly peril.

  “On second thought, what’s a mere scorpion to him?” Tabaqui said, mostly to himself. “He’s eaten much worse stuff than that. Just the other day, and other days besides the other day.”

  Tubby, happy as a lark, was playing with the cork. He tossed it into the air with his two-fingered pincers and then tried to catch it. The cork kept falling through his grasp, but that didn’t faze him. Then he stuffed it into his mouth and started gumming it like a pacifier.

  I watched them for a bit more and then turned over on my back. Humpback’s whittling was spraying the shavings in all directions.

  “Sorry,” he’d say every time some of it fell on me.

  “It’s all right,” I’d answer.

  Humpback’s eyes were like moist prunes, and his eyelashes were so long they looked glued on.

  “By the way,” he said, interrupting our monotonous exchanges of pleasantries, “Shuffle says that Pompey is practicing knife throwing, imagine that. He’s rumored to hit the mark from ten paces three times out of five now.”

  “Who were you talking to just now?” Tabaqui said from down on the floor.

  “Everybody,” Humpback said.

  I turned over on my stomach again and pushed apart the bags hanging on the headboard.

  “Then stop doing it. Basically, everybody already had enough of that talk from Lary.”

  Tabaqui extracted a half-decomposed chili pepper from the jar he was holding, shook off the liquid, and chomped on it.

  “Now this one is pretty good,” he said and closed his eyes. “There’s only one thing that’s currently perturbing me. By the time Pompey achieves perfection in his quest for accurate knife throws, Lary will have eaten all of our brains out with a spoon. He’s already on edge. Attacking people left and right. Well, he won’t be attacking anyone anytime soon now, but still. He’s clearly not himself. I think we all need to do something about it.”

  “Why isn’t he going to do it anytime soon?” I said.

  Noble sent another one of his radiant smiles my way.

  “Yesterday we convinced Lary that he had killed you.”

  My next question got stuck in my throat.

  “He was bawling his head off somewhere in the bowels of the House,” Noble continued, “bidding good-bye to his faithful Bandar-Logs. It’ll be some time before he lives that down.”

  “And you’re just reveling in the agony of your fellow human being!” Tabaqui said indignantly. “Happy that he almost hanged himself! Gleefully recounting this whole disgusting matter!”

  “I’m sure Sphinx would’ve taken him out of the noose before anything bad happened,” Noble said airily. “He’s very considerate like that . . . sometimes. And besides, I get this feeling that you already forgot it was your idea all along.”

  I was looking at Noble and thinking that at the time Sphinx was wringing me out in the bathroom, he already knew what his packmates had done to Lary. And that what they had done was by far the best protection for me that could be imagined. But he never said anything. He was testing if I was capable of snitching, and then testing if I was ready to be considered a snitch in the mind of Lary, whom I did not particularly respect. And maybe a bunch of other things as well, I couldn’t even imagine what. So that’s why I felt like I was navigating through some sort of test. Because I actually was. I knew I wasn’t going to forgive him this for a long while. And I also knew that I’d never tell anyone about it.

  Tabaqui continued to expound excitedly on Lary’s mental state, and it all boiled down to his conviction that Lary would be best helped by a nice cup of herbal tea. Noble countered that Lary would be best helped by Pompey’s untimely death. Listening to this made me realize that I’d been hearing rumors of some kind of coup for a while now, and that the nick of Pompey, Leader of the Sixth, was often mentioned in relation to it. When I had still been a Pheasant, this kind of talk never really concerned me, but now I was suddenly worried that there was some piece of common knowledge I didn’t have any idea about.

  “So it’s Pompey who is behind this coup?” I said. “What does he want with it?”

  Tabaqui, Noble, and Blind all raised their heads and stared at me. Or rather, Tabaqui and Noble did. Blind just raised his head. All three holding jars and spoons, all three in colorful bandanas to keep their hair out of the way, they hilariously resembled three witches busy with their potions. Tubby in his playpen could pass for a homunculus. Even the bottled scorpion fit. I giggled at the thought.

  “What does he want with it?” The smallest weird sister, the one with the most hair, shrouded herself in cigarette smoke and went into a trance. “What-does-he—”

  “One sentence!” the second one snapped. “And that’s an order.”

  “What?” Jackal said indignantly, ruining the image. “Blind, have a heart, or Smoker shall forever remain unenlightened!”

  This threat did not appear to have any effect on Blind.

  “I see,” Tabaqui drawled menacingly. “So this is how you want to play. All right, so be it.”

  He cleared out some space around him as if preparing for takeoff, sat up, and cleared his throat.

  “Hear a tale then, O Smoker, and know that it is the true tale of Pompey, whom you might know a little about and who lately has been behaving in a not entirely satisfactory manner by taking things upon himself that he hadn’t before, even though ‘before’ is an imprecise notion in this context, seeing as there was a ‘before’ for some of us here where he did not figure at all, and so it is completely beyond our kenning what exactly his behavior was in the place where he found himself prior to the moment when he found himself with us, making it at best questionable that at that time he did behave more adequately, since this man has obviously traveled far from the spirit of true Tao by becoming thoroughly steeped in the effluvium of the Outsides and is therefore capable of earnestly imagining that he could be an adequate substitute for Blind in his demanding position, which delusion might, however, be more mundanely attributed to his being fed up with the constant overpopulation of the particular precinct entrusted in his care and thus yearning for your everyday peace and quiet, in which case the preferred course of action to alleviate this condition would have been to transport himself bodily within the confines of the Cage for a period of no less than three and no more than fi
ve days, undoubtedly resulting in deeper self-awareness and spiritual cleansing as well as development of a more public-minded level of conscience, or, not to put too fine a point on it, a more introspective state of being, but no, he needs something entirely more bombastic and earth shattering, he desires to conquer and to vanquish and to tickle his multitudinous ingrained insecurities, where the manifest insecurity of his person is easily apparent to anyone in sight of his cravats and sideburns, his manner of locomotion and body language, but especially the faces of the bats that he keeps adorning himself with, for those are the faces of creatures doomed to endless suffering, afflicted with all the infirmities, known and unknown, of their chiropterous kind at the same time, a regular Ozzy Osbourne he, except that, instead of mercifully biting off their heads, he condemns them to fester around his neck for months, take poor unfortunate Poppy, having shuffled off this mortal coil not quite last Wednesday, and lo! today Suzy is already in its place, considering that this is the best we can expect from someone completely ignorant of the science that is biology, who could not even be bothered to notice that Suzy is male, despite it flashing balls the size of walnuts, though it still isn’t going to make any significant contribution in the grand scheme of things since it, too, is not long for this world, this Suzy guy is, as Pompey buried quite half a dozen of its brothers already, making its demise a question only of time, besides it likely is a matter of indifference to a bat what name is attached to it as it breathes its last, while if I were representing the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals I’d be very interested to know the name of the scoundrel buying those wretches wholesale just to look cool, even though it’s highly debatable how much coolness can possibly be squeezed out of the bedraggled body of a bat, it’s not like it’s a coral snake, now that really would be something to write home about, whereas he who is not at home with the thought of his own death is quite unlikely to wrap said snake around his neck since that would require significant expenditure of time and effort to win its trust when instead one can so easily pave his way in this world with feeble bones of innocent leather-winged victims without even bothering to notice their gender, and it is quite likely that only the complete and utter impunity Pompey enjoys with respect to this specific question is what facilitates his mistaken belief that he is supposedly capable of trampling underfoot the bones of a considerably less innocuous creature without breaking stride, by which creature I of course mean Blind, but you must have already gathered that, my esteemed packmates, so this last clarification can be considered extraneous.”

  Tabaqui paused and then nodded proudly at Blind.

  “I trust that was within the rules. Even though limiting me in this fashion was really rotten of you.”

  The room was totally quiet. Even the boombox had gone silent. Even Nanette stopped stirring. It was as though, all this time, Jackal had been chanting a monumental spell putting the whole world to sleep. Noble was cradling an open jar and swaying from side to side with his eyes closed. Blind had slumped against Tubby’s playpen. Humpback stared at the twisted root in his hands, evidently having no idea anymore about what he was doing with it. Their faces seemed drowsy and somehow unwell, bordering on sickly. Tubby was the only one immune to the spell. He was peacefully pulling on Blind’s hair and droning softly.

  Once it became crystal clear that everyone else was completely bewitched, Humpback startled and translated, blinking sleepily.

  “What Tabaqui is saying is that Pompey hankers after Blind’s job. I’m not sure this really came through, what with all those bats and other crap.”

  “Objection!” Tabaqui said hotly. “I was acquitting myself quite eloquently, and, what’s more important, very vividly. To try and reduce this oration to a digest is criminal.”

  “True,” Humpback said. “Except that Smoker might be a bit stunned, since it’s his first time, and so not really in a position to give it its due.”

  Noble opened his eyes and peeked in astonishment into the jar he was hugging through all of this.

  “Would it be possible,” he said, “to limit this monster next time to a certain number of words instead of sentences?”

  “Of course not!” Blind said. He straightened up and snatched his hair out of Tubby’s grasp. “Just think of the many different ways one single word can be repeated.”

  We all thought of it and groaned. Tabaqui inclined his head like a great actor acknowledging the applause of his audience.

  At dinner I couldn’t eat properly. I was shaken up by the information about Pompey. The well-being of his bats was the last thing on my mind. I didn’t like the word coup, not one bit. I felt myself in the middle of events about which I had only a very hazy notion, or rather no notion at all, and I liked that even less.

  How does the House change Leaders? Do they fight each other? Or is it pack against pack? And if so, why is the Fourth so unruffled in the face of the coming massacre? Because there was no other way that a fight between them and the Sixth could be described.

  I guess that’s the end of the peaceful life, I thought. As if my life in the Fourth was ever peaceful.

  The green peas were drying out on the plate, and the meat loaf was already caked with congealed fat. I was hungry, but I still couldn’t eat. The ceiling speakers were drenching us in marching music, so anyone in the canteen wanting to have a conversation had to shout in order to be heard.

  The black-and-white Pheasant table. The quiet horror of the glances examining neighbors’ plates. Half of the Pheasants were on individual meal plans, each one different, so everyone’s plate contents were always a concern. There were calories to be counted.

  Rats at the next table. The explosion of color and the tide of insanity.

  Then Birds, in their nightmarish bibs over black.

  The Sixth was all about camaraderie. Looking at them, it would seem that the group consisted exclusively of jovial practical jokers. I wouldn’t want to find myself on the receiving end of their jokes, and their bursts of loud merriment looked suspect, but so what. They were trying their best.

  The Third, Fourth, and Sixth had it tough. Rats and Pheasants were the Naughty and the Nice. Both of them overdid it to such an extent that everyone else had to squeeze in between somewhere. Birds were a bit better at it, Hounds a bit worse, and the Fourth, in addition to having no designation, was just too sparsely populated to . . . to fully participate in the game.

  Once I managed to say the word, I suddenly was free to realize that this “game” would have to include much more than just appearance. It was the right word, and, having caught it, I understood that I had been looking for it for a long time. For the word that would contain the key to everything happening in the House. All it took was the recognition of the fact that the Game encompassed everything around me.

  It was too improbable that every single one of the pathetic, whining conformists would assemble in one group, while all the unhinged anarchists would go to the other. Which meant that someone somewhere must have designed this at some point. Why? Now that was a different question.

  My own perspicacity was making me sweat. I wasn’t even hungry anymore.

  So one day, my imagination churned, they became so frightfully bored that they compiled the script of the Game and vowed to never deviate from it under any circumstances. For everyone his role and everyone in his place. And that was the way it had gone since that time. Make-believe and following the script. Willingly for some, less so for others, but everywhere and always. And especially in the canteen, where the audience was always the biggest. No wonder some of them, Pheasants for example, eventually could allow the Game to overrule even basic human nature.

  Within this structure everything started making sense, easily and beautifully. The scales had fallen from my eyes as I looked around.

  Rats. Almost all of them underage, sixteen or less. Their acid-colored mullets masked teenagers in the throes of age-appropriate angst. Probably this was why they looked so natural playing at deranged instability.<
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  Birds. Birds made me pause a little. All right. Black is just a color. Unpleasant faces, but I probably could make my own face look like that if needed. Vulture . . . the House monster. I looked at him through my newly opened eyes and tried to strip away the chaff. Mourning . . . rings . . . black polish on long manicured nails . . . long hair and eye shadow. Throw all of that out, forget even the fact that he made his bed in a coffin, erase every trace of his nasty habits—what would you have left? A gaunt, hook-nosed fellow. An unpleasant person, to be sure, but not a monster by any stretch.

  This is where I switched off temporarily, because the unpleasant person suddenly turned around and stared at me. Must have felt himself being exposed. He looked at me with those sleepy yellow eyes of his and I lost the ability to function, skewered by that stare.

  Assured that I had been neutralized and was ready to be served, Vulture smiled, showcasing the unnaturally long crooked teeth. It felt like someone forcefully dragging a blade over glass.

  It took me a couple of minutes to get my composure back, and even then something kept nagging at me. Like when you watch an old black-and-white movie and this creep in a ton of makeup is constantly polishing his fingernails and looking around unblinkingly, and it suddenly freaks you out and the next moment makes you ashamed for falling for his cheap tricks.

  All right. That meant only that he was a very good actor. He inhabited the character. If anyone was supposed to be a Game master, it was a House Leader. It must have been they who actually invented it.

  To test my theory, I decided to expose Red.

  Rat Leader proved to be not particularly amenable to exposure. If you took away the green shades occupying the whole upper half of his face and the bloodred buzz cut, supposedly his natural color, what were you left with? Nothing at all. A tailor’s dummy made up as a Rat would have done just as well.

  That fairly took away my thunder. To cheer myself up again, I turned to Pompey.

  He sort of looked a bit like Sphinx. I guess it was his height. And the bald head. Except Sphinx’s was real. And Pompey left a small lick on top. Jet black and greased to a shine. He was also fatter. That is, fleshier.