The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  “I remember. It was just silly talk.”

  “That’s as it may be. But do you hear the squeaking now?”

  “No. It is not turning in my direction, if it’s turning at all.”

  Vulture coughed. Or laughed.

  “Just as I thought. An odd fellow. I wonder what it was that he wanted.”

  “Past tense already?”

  “So it would appear. He is not one of the old ones, and that’s all there’s to it. Take us, for example. We know things, even if we don’t exactly know what it is we know. He doesn’t.”

  “I think the words are getting the better of you.”

  “As does everything lately. It’s a weird old thing, the world. And you are saying that it was Elephant rambling past just then, like a rhino with a screw loose. What am I supposed to make of it? You know I’m scared of things like that. Harmless little Elephant goes out at night sniffing, for some reason . . . Now what do I do? I’m upset, you see. I guess I’d better check on him.”

  “Of course. Go.”

  The door squeaked. Blind traced Vulture’s progress, turning his head as if he really could see, then closed his eyes and sank into a cozy slumber. And the Forest returned. It overtook him, breathing into his ears, tucking him into its moss and dried leaves, hiding him and rocking him to sleep with the soft lullabies of the whistlers. It liked Blind. It smiled at him. Blind knew that. He could sense a smile from a distance. The burning ones, the sticky and sharp-toothed ones, the soft and cuddly ones. Their fleeting nature tormented him, that and his inability to subject them to the probing of his fingers and ears. A smile couldn’t be caught, grasped, examined in minute detail, it couldn’t be replicated. Smiles fled, they could only be guessed at. Once, when he was still little, he heard Elk asking him to smile. He could not understand what was required of him then.

  “A smile, my boy, a smile,” Elk said. “The best of the human features. Until you learn to smile you’re not quite human yet.”

  “Show me,” Blind requested.

  Elk bent down to him and let Blind’s fingers probe his face. Blind encountered the wet teeth and jerked his hand.

  “It’s scary,” he said. “Can I please not do that?”

  Elk sighed resignedly.

  A lot of time had passed since then, and Blind had learned to smile, but he knew that a smile did not make him more appealing, like it did others. He stumbled upon the wide-mouthed faces on the tactile pictures in his books, found them on toys, but none of those were something that made itself visible in the voice. Only listening to the smiling voices did he finally understand. A smile meant a light switching on inside. Not for everyone, but for many it did. He knew now what Alice must have felt when the Cheshire Cat’s toothy, sarcastic smile was floating in the air in front of her. That was how the Forest smiled. From above, in a boundless mocking grin.

  Blind rose and staggered forward, stumbling against tree roots. His foot dropped into someone’s burrow. A whistler startled and went silent. Blind bent forward, felt in the grass and grasped it—a tiny one, covered in peach fuzz and smelling of a young cub. He cradled it against his cheek. The whistler was breathing softly, its heart ticking in his fingers. A worried whistle issued from about ten paces ahead. The baby in his hand squeaked in response. Blind laughed and placed it on the ground. The grass rustled. The baby rushed to its mother, squeaking along the way, and soon their joined whistling faded in the distance. Before continuing on, Blind sniffed at his hand to better remember the baby’s scent. An adult whistler smelled different.

  He couldn’t feel his legs. They became alien and bent in all the wrong directions, as if made of rubber. That irked him. He soon grew tired of snatching them out of holes and avoiding mud and puddles and decided to sit down. His legs folded the wrong way again. It also seemed that there were more than two of them now. He was probably turning into something, but the transformation wasn’t complete yet. He heard the laughter of the dogheads. They were still far off, running, giggling, bumping against each other. Blind shot up and tottered away on all six of his legs, long and articulated. The stray leaves clung to them, but they made for an easy gait. He hid in the nearest hole and waited in silence. The dogheads thundered past. The disgusting guffaws faded. Blind peeked out cautiously. Something hooted in the canopy and dropped a cloud of rotted wood on him. He shook himself off and counted the legs again. This time there were two. The night was stifling. Blind pulled off his sweater and threw it away. Then took off the waterlogged sneakers, tied their laces together, and dropped them into the hole.

  He touched the gnarly trunks as he went by, his ears pricked. Slender, silent, invisible against the trees, he was a part of the Forest, its offshoot, a changeling. The Forest was walking alongside him, swaying its treetops far above, dropping its dew on the warped floorboards.

  Blind stopped at the clearing. The gigantic moon drenched him in silver. He crouched, feeling the light bathing him, feeling his fur stand on end, electrified by this light. He pinned back his ears, closed his eyes, and howled.

  A lingering, mournful sound enveloped the Forest. It was full of sorrow, but also of Blind’s joy, of the closeness of the moon, of the night’s own life. It didn’t last long, and then Blind bolted into the thickets to sniff at the mossy trunks and dance on the wet leaves and roll around on the ground. He was boisterous, scaring off the small creatures, covering his fur in debris, leaving wolflike prints in the puddles. He ran after a stupid mouse and chased it into someone else’s burrow. He peeked into a tree hollow and got hissed at. He excavated an underground lair and ate its owner, a fat, juicy one, spat out the fur, and moved on. The moon was hidden by the trees now, but he felt it as vividly as he’d feel someone standing behind the door or hiding in the bushes—it was that close, and the trees could not hinder it. He leapt over the brook without getting his paws wet, ran back and forth along the shore, found a puddle and gulped it all in, tadpoles included.

  A frog, miraculously spared, cursed him piercingly in its language and scampered off to find another hiding place. He stretched on the wet sand, his sharp-eared head on top of the folded paws, listening to the Forest noises and to the grumbling in his stomach, then leapt up and bounded farther along the path, since he didn’t like to spend too much time near the water.

  He soon was within earshot of the dogheads’ howls again, but decided not to hide this time. Instead he howled back in defiance, but they did not accept his challenge and were soon gone, quarreling among themselves. He followed their trail for a while. He would have caught them had he wanted to, but it was a game, not a real hunt, and he liked running games more than chasing games. He suddenly switched direction, as if he’d thought of something he had to go and see about, and from then on ran purposefully, with his nose to the ground, paws moving fast. His tail, up in the air and full of thorns, broadcast his concentration to the world.

  Then the Forest ended. Vanished just as instantly as it had appeared. Blind wasn’t upset, and he didn’t think of going to search for it again. He stopped. Exactly on the edge dividing the darkness and the light rectangle on the floorboards, the yellow glow cast by the opened door. Behind the door, shaggy shadows darted over the tiles and talked in muffled voices. On Saturdays and Sundays the teachers’ bathroom was poker territory. The only player in his pack was Noble.

  Blind was motionless, and the flame of the candles played in his wide-open eyes. He stood there for a long time. Then he lit a cigarette and moved on. He crossed the strip of light, not hiding anymore, went past the moonlit clearing of the Crossroads, the open door to the bathroom, the door to the staff room, the canteen. The stairs smelled of cigarette butts; he stepped on one of them, still warm, and slowed down.

  Down the stairs. Another long, empty corridor, and at the very end of it—more stairs and the door to the basement. He swayed, and his feet slid on the steps. He steadied himself against the wall. Picked the lock with a piece of wire and entered.

  The basement was dusty and stuffy. Bli
nd sat on the concrete floor facing the door, buried his chin in his knees, and froze. His armpits flowed down into his jeans. The cigarette clung to his lips. A ringing in his ears. Three little bells and one cricket. He rolled over to the wall, rose up to his knees, and ran his fingers along the scratchy brick surface. Feeling for the emptiness behind one of them. At first he had needed to count steps from the corner to find the right one, but now he knew instantly. Blind carefully removed the brick. In the opening there was a bundle wrapped in newspapers. He shook the dust off his fingers and inserted both of his hands into the hiding place. The old paper rustled. He extracted the parcel, put it on the floor, and unwrapped it.

  There were two knives inside. Blind liked to touch them. Sometimes he would cry when doing it. At one time the parcel had also contained a monkey skull on a chain, but he had given it to Sphinx, so now there were only the knives.

  One was a gift. It had been given to him so long ago that he didn’t remember exactly when it happened, and remembered only that it had always been a secret—first so that no one would take it from him, and then just to keep it away from prying eyes. The knife was beautiful. The blade thin as a thorn and sharp on both sides. No one had told Blind it was beautiful, he just knew it. He’d never questioned the seniors of his childhood, and so one of them giving a child a toy like this did not appear strange to him at all.

  The other knife was the one they’d used to kill Elk. It was neither beautiful nor particularly handy. A regular kitchen knife marred with rust. He always shuddered when he touched it, but at the same time his pain was dulled by the strange feeling of the impossibility of what had actually happened. This pitiful piece of iron in his hand couldn’t have killed Elk. A mouse never would gnaw down a mountain, a mosquito bite never would harm a lion, a sliver of steel never would destroy his god. So he kept the knife and visited it regularly, touching it to refill himself with unbelief again and again. To imagine that Elk wasn’t dead, that he’d vanished, disappeared, cast off the House that had betrayed him.

  It was time to go back. Blind stuffed his knife in the pocket, wrapped the other one in the paper again, and lowered it into the hiding place. The brick slotted back into position. My sweater, Blind remembered. I need to pick it up. He went out, clicked the padlock shut, and mounted the stairs. The stairway to the second floor he took at a run. He was almost out of time. The night was fading away. The Forest was quickly devouring it. The hallway, the doors, the silence. The first sounds of morning were on the cusp of bursting in, and then he would be invisible no more. It was an unpleasant thought, and it made Blind hurry up.

  SMOKER

  VISITING THE CAGE

  I felt like a corpse the entire day after Fairy Tale Night, and only started showing signs of life late in the afternoon. And it came in stages. First I mustered enough strength to wheel down to the bathroom and meet a sinister red-eyed monster there, who then turned out to be myself. I had to do something with him, so I decided washing him would be a good start.

  Alexander helped me undress. I wouldn’t have managed. My hands shook as if I had been drinking for thirty years straight. I refused to believe that one single bender was capable of reducing me to such a sorry state. After parting with my pajamas—they were so saturated with pine scent and alcohol that I easily could have used them to scare away mosquitoes—I went to sit in the shower and then returned to the dorm.

  It was around six. I still wasn’t able to divine precise time without the aid of a watch. I clambered onto the bed somehow, took a pad from under the pillow, and started drawing whatever. The backpacks and bags on the bed rail, all in a row. Tabaqui’s head, peeking out of the blanket cocoon he’d wrapped himself in. Noble, yawning.

  The backpacks came out the best. Tabaqui was almost completely hidden, and Noble turned away as soon as he noticed that I was trying to draw him. So I crosshatched the backpacks, filling them with volume and increasing their hanginess, put the shadows underneath, and had started to fill in the patterns when Tabaqui crawled over and all but lay on top of the pad, clogging the line of sight from me to just about everything else.

  “Why have you stopped drawing?” he asked with surprise when I put the pad back.

  “Your head is in the way,” I said honestly. “Also I don’t like people pushing my arm.”

  Tabaqui decided to take offense. He rolled over and turned his back to me. I knew by now that he could not remain offended for long, and I ignored it. But I didn’t want to draw anymore. I wanted to eat.

  “Anything edible left?” I asked.

  Noble nodded at the nightstand.

  “Sandwiches. There must still be a couple in there. Help yourself.”

  The throw draped over the bed was never quite pulled taut. It always bulged and rippled in impassable folds. To crawl over them was excruciating. I tried. Tabaqui said that I looked like an unfaithful wife whom a sultan ordered rolled into a carpet before drowning.

  Noble helped me untangle myself—an outstretched hand—presented the packet of sandwiches—a heave to the nightstand—and returned to his corner—another heave. About two paces for someone with working legs. And he managed not to upset anything, not to bump into anyone, and naturally didn’t get snarled along the way. Since only yesterday night Noble had done the same thing in total darkness, on the bed crammed with bodies, this shouldn’t have been a surprise. But this time he never deigned to part with his magazine, which, somehow, he continued reading, which meant that one of his arms was otherwise engaged! I was astonished. It wasn’t simply that I felt inferior next to him. I was ready to burst into tears.

  It wasn’t enough for the man to be offensively beautiful and to pull off these impossible feats, no, he had to do it without even noticing! Honestly, had he been preening about, showing off his superiority, he would have been easier to tolerate.

  Noble was gnawing at his finger and flipping through the magazine, his face permanently screwed into a disgusted grimace that indicated whatever he was reading was complete trash. He was floating someplace he did not particularly want to be, but could not force himself to descend back down to the godforsaken real world. Even if it was only to look where he was crawling and ascertain whether he was taking what he wanted from the nightstand.

  “Noble,” I said, “sometimes I get this impression that you’re just faking it.”

  He glanced at me distractedly.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that you’re not really a wheeler at all.”

  He shrugged and went back to his magazine. “Everyone’s entitled to their impressions.” He didn’t say it out loud, but sometimes it wasn’t necessary to actually say something for it to be understood.

  “Could it be that you really are heir to the dragons?” I said. “That you’re actually flying all this time, and we just can’t see it?”

  “Want an explanation?” someone interjected suddenly.

  I looked around.

  It was Black. He was lying on his bed with a notepad under his chin, chewing on a pencil. Looking like a large sheep dog with a thin bone in its teeth.

  In the time I’d been living in the Fourth, I had already gotten used to two of its inhabitants always being silent. Alexander and Black. Theirs were different silences, though. Alexander was silent like a mute, while Black was silent with a message. I really should keep my mouth shut, or something along those lines. So used was I to his silence that I drew a complete blank when Black suddenly spoke. I even dropped my sandwich. Which naturally landed butter-down. And egg-down as well.

  “What?”

  “I said I could explain,” Black repeated. “If you’d like.”

  I said that I would. And tried to recall what I’d been asking about.

  Black sat up and pulled off his glasses.

  No one ever sat on Black’s bed except him. Nor lay down on, fell onto, put his feet on top of, or threw dirty socks over. Nobody put anything on it at all. That bed, always crisp, perfectly tucked and turned, seemed thoroughly o
ut of place here. As did Black himself. As if at any moment he could sail away on it headed for some distant shores. To where his species lived in its natural habitat.

  “It’s simple, really. See this bed?”

  Black pointed at Humpback’s bunk over his head. The upper section that would have stayed behind even if the lower part did set sail.

  I said that of course I did.

  “What do you think would happen if you were to be hung off of its side? So that you only held on to it with your hands, like on a high bar?”

  “I’d fall down,” I said.

  “And before you fell down?”

  I couldn’t quite catch what kind of answer he was expecting. I earnestly traced the sequence of events in my head.

  “I’d hang there. And then fall down. Hang for a while and crash.”

  “What if you were to be hung like that daily?”

  It dawned on me a little.

  “Are you saying I’d hang for a bit longer every day?”

  “Good job! Smart boy.”

  Black bit on the pencil again and went back to his notebook.

  “But I’d only need to fall down once, and then there wouldn’t be anyone to hang anymore. I’m not a cat, after all.”

  “That’s exactly what Noble thought. Once upon a time.”

  Noble threw away the magazine and stared at Black. It was a withering stare.

  “How about enough?” he said.

  I realized with a shudder that the picture Black drew for me was, like trashy movies liked to point out in the credits, based on actual events.

  “But that’s impossible,” I said. “That’s torture!”

  “And that’s what Noble used to think too. He’s still touchy about the subject, as you can see.”

  “I thought I asked you to shut the hell up.”

  Noble’s look would have been quite enough for me to shut up immediately if I’d been in Black’s place. But I wasn’t him. He was him.