The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  Smoker nods again, then mumbles through the layers of the sandwich, “Hate those yellow flowers!”

  Which precipitates another explosion of reminiscences from Humpback and Jackal about the hours they spent in quarantine.

  “So the last time I was there, I . . .”

  “One night is nothing, I was in for four in a row once . . .”

  “Yellow is child’s play! Now blue, on the other hand . . .”

  While they are all comparing notes, I suddenly discover Blind’s hand on my shoulder.

  “I think,” the Great-and-Powerful pronounces thoughtfully, “that it might be a good idea for you to walk down to the Sepulcher. Have a talk with Janus. You two are friends, after all.”

  Another one. The destination is the same, the quest just got harder, and Blind, unlike Alexander, I cannot just brush off. I mean, I could, but that would be unwise.

  “Is that an order?”

  Sightless One is surprised.

  “Of course not. Just a suggestion.”

  He lets go of my shoulder and walks off, not giving me even a moment to grumble. Time to run to the Sepulcher. And I mean run right now, before Tabaqui joins the well-meaning advisers, before Humpback tells me all he thinks about it, and before Lary volunteers to accompany me there. We’ve been living side by side for far too long. Our sides have merged, and we all share common habits now. Soon we won’t even need to open our mouths anymore to express an opinion, everyone will already know everything.

  The classes drift by silently, not involving me in any way. Rain is drumming on the windowpanes. The gray ribbons of the raindrops snake down the glass. So sleepy. I catch myself dozing off with my eyes open, and I even see something like a dream.

  A dimly lit passage through subterranean corridors. There’s a window ahead of me. A dull, flyspecked rectangle of whitewashed glass. Wolf is sitting on the sill. With his back to me. He has on his old patterned sweater with holes in the elbows.

  “Wolf!” I call to him.

  He turns around and looks at me. The familiar white scar over the lip. His lips don’t move, but I hear his voice.

  “This mouse hanged itself under the pillow in my hole,” he whispers.

  I’m shaken awake by Skank’s yelp and see her round, piggy eyes right in front of my face. She looks frantic.

  “Where is the mouse?” she demands in a shaky voice, directing the end of the pointer at my nose. “Where is it?”

  Then I’m thrown out and therefore free to do as I please. Or, rather, as I do not please. I have to go to the Sepulcher. I swing by the dorm in hopes of finding the remains of Smoker’s feast, but there is nothing but crumbs left, so I slink away, defeated. The corridor rolls by, refusing to tell me anything new. Well, maybe it does, but I float through it like in a vacuum, deaf and blind to its pronouncements. I am pleasantly surprised that this turned out to be possible after all. This goes on until I reach the Sepulcher. Here I shake off the fog. Beyond this threshold is a domain that does not suffer being trod upon in this state of almost terminal exhaustion. The Sepulcher demands an appearance of vim and vigor. Even if you’re already a corpse.

  The hallway is immaculately clean and blindingly white. And soaked in this horrible mediciney smell. I am intercepted by two female Spiders rolling out on the glistening floor.

  “What’s this? On whose authority? Get out!”

  And my unrecognizably plaintive voice pleads, “Just for a moment. A teacher sent me. It’s very important.”

  “To the head of the department!”

  A plump index finger directing me farther down the corridor.

  My tail is sweeping the floor, my lips are stretched in an obsequious grin. I take off again.

  The Spider queens stare suspiciously. A person like me is only to their liking when he’s bound, suspended from the ceiling, and stuck all over with wires and tubes. To better suck out his blood. An armless creature running free is a disgrace, verging on a crime. In my mind I give them the finger. My rakes are not capable of that feat, of course. The rest of the way I take at a trot.

  Janus’s office. Jan is the nicest, most conscientious Spider there is. I love him dearly, but our relationship has soured a bit lately, so I’m worried. I rap the rake against the frosted-glass door and push it open a bit.

  “May I?”

  “Oh, it’s you.” He swivels around in his chair. A long-faced, big-eared graying ginger with an amazing smile that he rarely lets out. That’s why he’s called Janus. He’s two different people depending on whether he’s smiling. “Come in, don’t stand there.”

  I enter. His office is not as white as the rest of the Sepulcher. You could almost imagine you were somewhere else. Leopard’s drawings in thin wooden frames on the walls. Janus’s office is the only place in the House where you can still see them in a civilized environment. Yes, whatever remains on the walls is closer, more accessible, and all around more fun, but a wall is a wall, it’s hard to preserve things on it in exactly the state they were meant to be when created. Especially if they do go ahead with that renovation, painting over everything everywhere—then the drawings will be lost forever. Only these will be left. These, and the ones I have stashed away. Here, all we have are the spiderwebs and the trees. The largest sheet shows a gloomy white spider, its face unmistakably that of Janus. It’s hanging forlornly from a thread in the middle of a tattered web. There aren’t many people who’d hang a portrait like that in their office. But Janus did. He hung it, and the others, even though they all reek of the hatred Leopard had for the Sepulcher. I approach the glass-covered white desk.

  “Can I see Noble?”

  Janus doesn’t answer. I can see he’s set against it. But he’s never going to say “Get out” straight off. That’s not his way.

  “Who was it you had a scrap with? Come here, let’s have a look at you.” Jan pulls out a desk drawer and starts rummaging in it. “I said come here. Do you enjoy this?”

  “Enjoy what?”

  “Fighting. Hitting someone in the face with your feet.”

  He finally fishes out something and dumps it on the table. A white-and-cyan package of surgical tape.

  “That grimy thing over your eye, it needs to be changed.”

  Jan gets up, puts me in the swiveling chair, and peels off the strip of Band-Aid on my forehead. I see that it really is on the grimy side. It’s not the end of the world, of course, but I need to be nice to Janus, so I sit quietly and allow him to do whatever he thinks has to be done.

  “Now you see,” he mutters, picking over my wounds, “he needs to be by himself for a while. People do need that sometimes. You understand that, don’t you?”

  I do. And he’s right. But let him explain this to Alexander. To Blind. To all of them.

  “I understand.”

  “Good. Go back to your group and tell the guys not to send anybody else. Later, maybe. But not now. Principal’s orders.”

  I shudder. “Why? He usually doesn’t interfere with your business.”

  Janus is purposefully looking at the landscape beyond his window.

  “He doesn’t, and then again he does. In extreme cases.”

  I feel sick. That’s a death sentence. I look at Janus and see him suddenly pull away from me, himself, his desk, and then the whole room, growing smaller, more and more indistinct. The walls glide past, carrying him farther and farther from me, while the pictures seem to grow and crowd me, the webs on them hanging from the ceiling to the floor in nightmarish distorted polygons. I close my eyes, but this only compounds the horror, because I start hearing voices. The barely perceptible whispers of those who got tangled in the web and perished here. Leopard. Shadow. This is a terrifying place. The worst in the whole House. It stinks of death, regardless of how well scrubbed and polished they keep it.

  Someone is shaking me so hard my teeth are clattering. I see Janus’s face right in front of me. The web is gone.

  “What’s going on?” he asks. “Are you all right?”

/>   “Don’t do this,” I say.

  He lets me go and straightens up.

  “You can’t do this.”

  Janus shakes his head.

  “It’s not my decision anymore. I am really sorry. What’s happening to you?”

  What’s happening to me? The Sepulcher is happening to me, which is peanuts compared to what lies in store for Noble.

  “My apologies. This place gets to me very badly.”

  He pours water into a glass and gives it to me. I drink it out of his hands, completely forgetting about the rakes.

  “This place?” he asks. “This particular place?”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “Yes, I think so. It’s those weird superstitions of yours. Are you completely sure you’re not sick?”

  I don’t answer. There is no one here who can be completely sure about it. If anybody, a Spider should know this. Janus looks down and bites his lip. He is terminally curious. I don’t have to wait long for the questions to start. He takes cigarettes out of the drawer and I realize that there might be more questions than I thought. Jan sits down on the edge of the desk.

  “Where does this angst come from?” he asks. “Why? I see it too often to just dismiss it out of hand. When people start breaking out in a cold sweat in this very office . . .” He looks around, as if making sure that this is indeed still his office. “I’d like to know the reasons for it. I could understand if this were only happening to you. I‘d just refer you to a specialist and that would be the end of the problem.” He puffs on his cigarette, observing me closely. “You can answer or not, it’s your choice.”

  “I’ll answer. But I don’t think my answer, such as it is, will satisfy you. This is a bad place. For every one of us. There are good places and bad places here. This one is bad. How it became this way is a long story.”

  Janus patiently waits for me to continue.

  “And since you’re not going to let me see Noble anyway . . .”

  His forehead breaks out into a concertina of ripples.

  “Are you trying to bargain?” he asks incredulously. “With me?”

  “Yes, I am. Just so you know, I wrote a scholarly article once exactly on the topic that interests you, so I’m quite competent to discuss it. A long article complete with references to the classics and an inventive title, ‘Sepulcher: Outside or Inside Us.’ This, as you might have guessed, is me talking up my side. I understand it is common when bargaining.”

  Janus looks at me with such sincere amazement that I almost laugh out loud.

  “You’ve lost me,” he says. “What article? Where?”

  “Just an article. In a magazine with a circulation of ten copies.”

  He exhales, relieved.

  “Oh. I get it. It’s your own magazine. What’s it about?”

  “Everything. It comes out twice a year, so we’re never short of topics. The authors hide behind unrecognizable pen names, and everyone writes about whatever is of interest to him. I wrote about the Sepulcher, and the next issue featured a very lively discussion in the letters to the editor. Those might be even more useful to you than the article itself.”

  Janus nods. “We’re haggling over two issues. A yearly subscription. It’s a pig in a poke. Two pigs.”

  “In exchange for one visit to one dragon. I think that’s fair.”

  “Nothing doing,” Janus says, clearly disappointed. “That would mean me abandoning my principles. Indulging my own petty curiosity. I’d be ashamed of myself afterward.”

  “Your call.”

  I sigh with relief, even though he did refuse. It’s good that he did. I didn’t really want him reading my creation. It revealed too much. Almost as much as Leopard’s drawings. I steal a glance at them and look away. It wouldn’t do to go down for the count again. I transfer my attention to Janus, do my best to keep my eyes on him. He looks around in an exaggerated manner, trying to see something that he wouldn’t be able to, no matter what. Then stubs out the cigarette in the ashtray.

  “You look terrible,” he says. “Go get some sleep, grab something to eat, calm down, and then come back.”

  He sounds irritated. My nightmares are getting on his nerves. They must be visible to the naked eye by now.

  “Go,” Janus repeats. “We’re all tired. There are no classes tomorrow. I might let you see him then.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” I say patiently. “I’d be happy to do exactly that, except I can’t. Until I see Noble I can neither sleep nor eat nor look my people in the eye. I can’t just go back empty-handed and crash into my bed. I will have failed to do that which I was sent to do. How can you not see that?”

  “You mean I have to cater to your whims now?”

  “It’s not a whim. You know it isn’t.”

  “He needs to rest. To be away from your people. You would only exacerbate his condition if you showed up in this panicked state.”

  “He’ll have plenty of rest where you’re sending him. And it will exacerbate everything much more than I ever could. Do you know how we speak of those who leave the House? The same way we speak of the dead. You’re not letting me talk to someone who is going to be dead soon.”

  Janus climbs down from the desk. Rubs his face. A gaunt, hunched figure, looking more now like Leopard’s drawing of him than I’ve ever seen.

  “You know what?” he says. “If you spend one more minute in my office I’m going to start dreading to stay here alone. Imagining heaven knows what until I become convinced that this is indeed an evil place. I have no idea how you manage to force this on me, but I’m having a hard time fighting it.”

  “I’m not forcing anything,” I say. “It’s the way I feel.”

  “Let’s go.” He opens the door and holds it for me. “I am fond of my office and of my sanity. So the sooner you get out of here, the better for both of us.”

  I get up.

  “Are you going to let me see him?”

  “That’s where we’re headed. Do you think I should ask him first if he’d like to see you?”

  We’re walking down the Sepulchral corridor. He’s striding ahead—a slender white tower. I can barely move my feet fast enough to keep up with him. I am all wrung out like a sponge, someone could use me to wipe the floor. Sure, I’ve gotten what I wanted, but I have nothing left for the main event, the whole point of this enterprise. We turn a corner. Janus slows down by a long opaque cabinet, takes out a white lab coat, and throws it over to me.

  “Wait here. I’ll just be a moment.”

  I wait, staring at an installation of cacti in pink flowerpots hanging off a wire frame, somehow resembling a spiderweb. Another one. This blind offshoot of the main corridor, clad in the whitest linoleum, glistens under the lights, proudly presenting the essential quality of the Sepulcher—its total sterility. I could eat my dinner off it, if I wanted to. But I just lower myself down on it and lean against the wall. And try to calm my frayed nerves with a simple mantra. You are not a patient here. You’re just coming through. Running through. You can leave whenever you want. Remember it and hold on.

  In that long-ago article on the Sepulcher, I picked apart the very word “patient.” Dissected it, broke it down into elementary particles. And deduced that a patient is no longer a human being. That those are two mutually exclusive notions. When a person turns into a patient he relinquishes his identity. The individuality sloughs off, and the only thing that’s left is an animal shell over a compound of fear, hope, pain, and sleep. There is no trace of humanity in there. The human floats somewhere outside of the boundaries of the patient, waiting patiently for the possibility of a resurrection. And there is nothing worse for a spirit than to be reduced to a mere body. That’s why it is Sepulcher. A place where the spirit goes to be buried. The dread permeating these walls cannot be extinguished. When I was little I couldn’t understand how this name came to be. We inherited it from the seniors, along with the horror this place instilled in them. We needed time to grow
into it. A lot of time and many bitter losses. It’s as if we were filling a void, a space carved out by those who came before us that somehow turned out to fit us perfectly when we filled it completely. When we understood the meaning of all the names given long before our time and went through almost all the motions that had been already played out. Even our innocent little Blume was a great-great-grandchild of an earlier incarnation; our very own baby and at the same time a reappearance of an old ghost. I’m willing to bet that if someone were to discover the archives of its predecessors, he’d find plenty of screams of rage against the Sepulcher, identical to mine.

  Janus steps out and nods at the door.

  “You can come in. I’ll be back to check on you in a quarter of an hour. We’ll see how your presence reflects on him. If I find that he’s becoming upset, that will be the last time you are allowed anywhere near here.”

  “Thank you,” I say, and enter.

  The whiteness of the tiled walls is blinding. The room is tiny. Semiprivate—that is, for two. There are no windows. Noble is sitting up, blanket up to his knees, in an ugly gray gown with string ties hanging down from the collar. On the nightstand by the bed—a tray with a bowl of oatmeal and a glass of milk. The silly gown becomes him. As does everything I’ve ever seen him wear. Tabaqui has this theory that Goldenhead would remain beautiful even if he were to be dunked in shit. And the more benign tar and feathers would make him absolutely stunning. Someone who’s not used to the visage of the Dark Elf is usually overwhelmed in his presence, buried under a mountain of insecurities. But someone who is used to it, and is also very hungry, should be able to redirect his attention to, say, a bowl of oatmeal. Which is exactly what I do.

  How beautiful it is! Small pink flowers run along the border of the bowl; a golden puddle of melted butter occupies its center. The oatmeal is already starting to acquire a tender crust, but obviously is still warm. Not too hot, not too cold, just right. I am mesmerized by it, consumed by the desire to attack it, to chomp and smack my lips and lick the bowl clean, slurp in the milk, and then fall asleep right there. It’s funny, the more vividly I imagine all this, the hungrier I get. My legs are about to give under me. I am this close to fainting. Noble stares at me in surprise.