The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  “Who was that man? Does he exist?”

  The tiles reflect our voices in a barely perceptible echo.

  “Could be. On the Underside. Unless someone snuffed him. Let’s not talk about it.”

  “Let’s.” Noble pushes the hair from his face and finally looks at me full on. Like this is the first time he sees me. “It’s late. I guess you must be going. Provided they did not lock the front door.”

  I really must be going, but I am loath to leave him here, in the place where Steel-Toothed just came for a visit, albeit in a dream. Noble is scared, which means he’s more susceptible to demons of all kinds, should they like to drop in. On the other hand, I need to replenish the stocks of food, cigarettes, and other useful items, and also tell people I was going to be spending the night in the Sepulcher.

  “Right. I’ll go check the door. If it’s locked, I’ll come straight back. If it isn’t, I’ll go see the guys. And bring some chow.”

  Noble nods.

  “OK. It’s really bright out there, be careful.”

  I make a wave with my rake and open the door into the shining snow-bound corridor.

  The Sepulcher at night is a haunted castle. I hate its bluish lights. They turn faces into death masks. I reach the end of the side corridor and turn the corner. Now my sliding reflection is caught between the glass doors of the cabinets on both sides. I walk briskly. There’s nowhere for me to hide, but I am somehow sure that it won’t be necessary. And that’s how it turns out. The night nurse’s area is illuminated like a giant aquarium, and in its center floats the gorgon’s cold face. If she were to open her eyes I’d have to turn into stone, rely on the inability of certain predators to notice stationary objects. But the Spider queen is asleep. Her eyes are closed, only the round-rimmed glasses glint menacingly.

  Not only is the front door not locked, it’s even open a crack. It catches me by surprise, but once I’m out on the landing I see the orange points of light glowing rhythmically and stop worrying. They’re here. And they’ve been here for a long time already. Their bags are full of food. They brought bottles of water, blankets, the coffeemaker, and probably even utensils. Someone rises to meet me. They are all accustomed to the dark by now, so I am the only one here who can’t see anything, but judging by the sureness of his movement, this someone must be Blind.

  “Janus says it doesn’t look good?”

  Could be either a question or a statement. You can never tell with Pale One.

  “More or less.”

  “Let’s go.” He addresses those left sitting against the wall. “Get up. Sphinx will show the way.”

  Which I do. Our grotesque cavalcade floats past the aquarium with the illuminated gorgon, past the glass cabinets and opaque doors. We are nothing but long, transient shadows. The most extravagant of them is the one consisting of two, Tabaqui atop Lary’s shoulders. It’s the tallest and the most disheveled. Neither Black nor Smoker is here, but Alexander is lugging sleeping Tubby, whose reflection in the cabinet doors resembles nothing so much as a massive backpack. I let them go ahead and bring up the rear, looking at them with love and admiration. This is my pack. It can read minds and grab meanings out of thin air. It is both awkward and awesome. Thrifty and quarrelsome. I allow myself to dissolve in the tenderness toward them—Black isn’t here, so there’s no one to knock the sentimentality off me. But Lord Almighty, how few we are. I catch myself falling behind instead of blazing the trail and quicken my steps. Out of the corner of my eye I catch the last reflections in the last cabinet—Alexander under his softly snuffling burden, Sphinx right behind him, and then one more silhouette, flashing the white sneakers as it steps in sync with us until I turn around and it vanishes. I feel much better. And then, solely for that last invisible one, I start composing a poem out loud. It comes out incredibly silly, just the way Wolf liked them.

  Green locusts falling from the sky today,

  The gray suburban hills are full of voices.

  It takes two sacks to walk from fields back home,

  Just two, filled to the brim with chirping noises . . .

  THE HOUSE

  INTERLUDE

  Stuffage welcomed them with jeers and giggles.

  “Blind’s Tail is back!” Muffin shouted.

  Whiner and Crybaby played a drumroll on the bottoms of leaky pails.

  “Blind’s Tail! Blind’s Tail!” they sang mockingly.

  Their voices did not express hostility. It was more surprise. As if the month Grasshopper spent in the hospital wing had erased him from their lives.

  Wolf was greedily lapping up the scene.

  “And . . . And Grayhead is with him,” Muffin added hesitantly.

  Almost the entire group was wearing sweatshirts with loud, garish messages. Grasshopper figured that those had become fashionable while he was away. The sweatshirts were declaring:

  I’m on Fire!

  Life Is One Big Disappointment

  Keep Off!

  The colorful slogans made the faces above them seem more grown up.

  Sportsman was lounging on his bunk, legs dangling, and flipping through a magazine. He didn’t even glance in the direction of Grasshopper and Wolf. Not a Slave to Circumstances, Grasshopper observed the slogan on Sportsman’s sweatshirt. Wolf put down their bags.

  “Hi, Blond!” he said to Sportsman.

  Whiner and Crybaby immediately ceased the racket. Sportsman paid them a brief look over the magazine.

  “Muffin, tell those two that I’ve been Sportsman for ages now.”

  “He’s been Sportsman for ages, he’s not Blond,” Muffin repeated dutifully.

  Wolf made an incredulous face.

  “He’s not? And somehow his hair isn’t any darker.”

  Muffin turned around in search of a clue, but was ignored by Sportsman, who was engrossed in the magazine.

  “Sport’s hair is none of your business,” Muffin said significantly. “Or yours!” he snapped at Grasshopper, even though Grasshopper hadn’t mentioned hair at all. With him, Muffin felt himself on firmer ground.

  Plump and rosy cheeked, he was pacing back and forth, preventing them from coming in. They waited at the door for him to get tired of it.

  “So.” Muffin stopped and adjusted his pants. “You, mama’s darling. Your bed belongs to the newbie now. To Magician. So you’re going to sleep in that room. And be grateful that at least we’re not sending you to the wheelers.”

  Grasshopper had already noticed someone else’s stuff on his bed but didn’t say anything.

  “We don’t need sissies like you here,” Muffin said. “Or like him!” Muffin’s finger pointed at Wolf now. “Especially his kind we don’t need at all.”

  “Was that Sportsman’s idea?” Wolf asked.

  Sportsman didn’t deign to respond. He just stretched out on his bed, yawned, and flipped another page.

  “Tail’s got arms now,” he said, still not looking up from the magazine. “I wonder . . .”

  Grasshopper looked at his prosthetics and blushed. Wolf’s eyes narrowed.

  Muffin bustled about, completely oblivious.

  “Now beat it. This is the Pack’s room. Not for the sissies crawling around the Sepulcher.”

  Wolf shoved him away.

  “All right, I’m a sissy,” he said with disgust. “And you’re all tough guys here. Especially you and Champion. Or whatever he calls himself today. Blond. So. Since you’ve thrown us out of here, we’re going to live in that room now, and we’re going to have our own sissy rules, so the tough guys like you better keep out. Got that?”

  Grasshopper couldn’t wait to leave. He furtively stepped on Wolf’s foot.

  “Wolf. That’s enough. Let’s go.”

  Wolf picked up the bags.

  “We’re going,” he said. “To our room. And whoever doesn’t feel like a tough guy can come with us. There’s plenty of space.”

  Whiner and Crybaby banged on their drums, a bit uncertainly.

  “Hey!” Bubble protes
ted, wheeling up to them on his skates. “What do you mean, your room? I sleep there too!”

  “Not anymore,” Wolf declared. “You’re a tough guy, aren’t you?”

  Bubble looked himself over.

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

  “Enough of this,” Sportsman said, putting away the magazine and raising himself off the bed. “You heard. Beat it, before it gets beat for you. Bubble is going to sleep wherever he wants, and you just shut up!”

  The pack was silent. The newbie, the one on crutches who could do magic tricks, was looking at Grasshopper sadly. He’d like to come with us, Grasshopper realized. But he’s got my bed now, they’ll never let him go.

  They went out into the hallway. Someone belatedly whistled behind their backs.

  Grasshopper laughed.

  “That’s exactly what I wished for.”

  “I know,” Wolf said.

  They entered the room next door. Wolf turned on the lights. The room was bare and ugly. Steel cots in two rows, with rolled-up mattresses on them. Only three had linens. Blind was sitting by the wall and raised his head as they entered. He hadn’t grown at all—or he just didn’t look like he had. His hair had gotten longer. The fashion for sweatshirts with messages apparently hadn’t reached him. He was wearing a checkered flannel shirt, an adult one. Elk’s shirt, much too long for him.

  “Hey, Blind!” Grasshopper said happily. “It’s me. And Wolf. They threw us out. And here you are!”

  “Hey,” Wolf said, putting down the bags.

  “Hello.” Blind rustled.

  “A sad sight,” Wolf said, looking around the room. “But we’ll soon transform this into Gardens of Paradise.”

  Grasshopper perked up.

  “Can I do the transforming too?”

  He couldn’t wait to try his new prosthetics.

  “I said ‘we.’” Wolf nodded. “We, living here. Blind, is that OK with you?”

  Blind was listening intently, with his head slightly to the side.

  “Yes. Do all the transforming you want.”

  Wolf went up to the tucked-in beds.

  “Which one is Bubble’s bed?”

  “Second from the window.”

  Wolf grabbed everything from that bed and hauled it to the door. Then he returned for the linens.

  “Are we going to evict Crook as well?” Grasshopper asked hopefully.

  Wolf stopped.

  “Don’t know. I guess he can decide for himself.”

  Wolf deposited Bubble’s things in the hallway and came back.

  Behind the wall, Stuffage was alive with voices and stomping feet. Wolf ran up to the windowsill and plopped onto it, paying no attention to the dust.

  Grasshopper sat down beside him. Wolf was devouring the scene down in the yard. He had a proprietary look on his face. Grasshopper was used to seeing Blind look that way, but never Wolf. How are they going to get along? he thought apprehensively and looked back at Blind.

  Blind was still sitting at the wall and listening. He wasn’t listening to the noises of Stuffage. He was listening to Wolf. Guardedly and inconspicuously.

  Were it not for Wolf, he’d talk to me. Tell me what’s been happening while I was away. Show that he’s glad I came back. Like really show, not the way he did now—everything on the inside and nothing visible.

  Grasshopper felt sad.

  “Blind,” he said. “Do you know what it says on Whiner’s and Crybaby’s sweatshirts? Leave the Loner Alone. Both of them.”

  Blind smiled.

  Wolf snorted from the windowsill, “One loner and one loner make two loners. And ten more loners would make for an entire ocean of loneliness.”

  “They called us sissies,” Grasshopper explained. “And said that there was no place for us there.”

  “I heard,” Blind replied.

  Grasshopper went to sit next to him. Elk’s shirt covered Blind down to his knees. The rolled sleeves looked like tubes around his wrists. The corners of his lips were covered in something white. He must have been eating plaster off the walls again. Grasshopper moved closer to Blind and inhaled the familiar scent of plaster and unwashed hair. He’d missed him, but he didn’t know how to express his happiness and how to make Blind feel it too. He could only sit next to him in silence. Blind remained still, but now he was listening to Grasshopper. Without turning his head he inhaled forcefully through his nose and then licked off the white residue.

  I must have my own scent too, Grasshopper realized. Everything did. People, houses, rooms. Stuffage certainly had it. This room did not smell of anything yet. But that would soon change.

  Grasshopper stretched his legs and closed his eyes. This is my home, he thought. Right here. Where Wolf and Blind are going to wait for me and worry if I’m away for too long. This is what they call Gardens of Paradise.

  The next morning, Wolf started working on the room. He dashed off to Elk and to seniors, then went down to the yard, returning each time with heaps of this and that and laying it out along the walls. Grasshopper never went out. He and Blind were guarding the room. Wolf procured paints, both liquid and spray, an old easel, a stepladder, and some fraying brushes. He also arranged empty paint cans and stacked old, yellowing newspapers on the floor. Grasshopper was getting tired of the commotion and of Wolf running around holding all these items, but then Wolf declared everything ready for the work to begin.

  Grasshopper helped him spread out the newspapers. Wolf mounted the stepladder and started painting the wall white. The old portable radio was belting out slow blues, coughing and making unfunny jokes between the songs. Grasshopper walked over the newspapers, anticipating the multiple colors of the Gardens of Paradise and singing along softly whenever the tune turned out to be familiar. Blind was scrubbing the windowsill, grayish water flying everywhere.

  The lunch bell came unexpectedly for all of them. Wolf stayed back while Grasshopper and Blind went to the canteen. Sportsman’s eyes were shooting daggers, Muffin made faces, blue-eyed Magician looked at them plaintively and forlornly. This was the first time Grasshopper was using his prosthetics in full view of others, and the embarrassment was making him eat very slowly.

  “Sportsman is looking at us weird,” he whispered to Blind.

  “He’d do better to look after his own.”

  “Why?”

  “Wolf has more cunning than he,” Blind replied cryptically.

  He squeezed a piece of meat loaf between two slices of bread and shoved the resulting sandwich in Grasshopper’s pocket. Another sandwich just like that one weighed down the other pocket. On the way back they bestowed two greasy stains on Grasshopper’s jacket.

  In addition to Wolf sitting on the stepladder, they also found Humpback and Beauty in the room. Humpback’s hamster was running around in the tub installed on one of the beds. Its glass bowl, spotlessly clean, was drying out on the windowsill. Beauty, his tongue hanging out from the effort, was diligently, if inexpertly, rubbing a wet rag on the lampshade. Humpback, hunched over, was drawing an unidentified animal on the wall. Its legs rose up like columns. When Grasshopper and Blind entered, he nervously straightened up and hid the pencil. All that was near the floor. Higher up, the white wall exploded in green and blue triangles, red spirals, and orange splashes. Blind can’t see this, Grasshopper thought with disappointment.

  “What do you think?” Wolf asked from up on the stepladder.

  “Yes!” Grasshopper said. “This is exactly it!”

  “And these”—Wolf pointed with the brush at Beauty and Humpback—“are fresh Poxy Sissies. Now we are five. And the hamster.”

  That’s why Sportsman was so mad, Grasshopper thought.

  “Can I finish this now?” Humpback asked no one in particular.

  He turned back to his monster and started putting stripes on it. His head was covered in orange drips too, making him seem a continuation of the wall.

  “We brought food,” Grasshopper said. “Runny meat loaf.”

  They all sk
ipped dinner. By evening they’d painted the entire wall. The upper part bristled with the flying spirals and triangles, while the bottom was taken over by bizarre animals. Humpback’s striped creation was there, as was a slender-legged wolf with teeth like a buzz saw—Wolf’s contribution. Also a smiling hamster. Beauty painted a red blob, then smeared it and started crying. They all pitched in and teased it into an owl.

  Grasshopper couldn’t hold a brush. Wolf wrapped a rag around one of the fingers on his prosthetic hand and dipped it into the can, and a giant porcupine with slightly crooked quills joined the parade of animals. Blind drew a giraffe. It was empty inside and resembled a tower crane, so Humpback colored it in. When they stopped, paint was everywhere. On the newspapers, the clothes, their hands, faces, hair, even the hamster—everything. Elk came by to ask why they didn’t show up for dinner and froze as he opened the door.

  “Oh,” he said. “This is something else.”

  “Beautiful, isn’t it,” Beauty whispered. “We did everything ourselves.”

  “I can see that,” Elk said. “But you are spending the night in my room.”

  “No,” Grasshopper said, agitated. “We can’t! If we leave here, Sportsman and all the rest of them are going to come and ruin this. We can open the windows, to air it out. There’s hardly any smell at all! Please?”

  Elk gingerly stepped inside and immediately got stuck to the newspapers.

  “A rebellion?” he asked Wolf.

  Wolf nodded. “They threw us out themselves.”

  Elk studied their stained faces, the floor and the cans of paint, then the wall.

  “I think I see a vacant space right there,” he said.

  A green dinosaur shaped like a kangaroo came to live in the vacant space, and Elk’s suit acquired beautiful emerald spots.

  “Yes, well,” Elk declared, getting up from his knees. “It is indeed contagious. And now we go and wash up.” He shoved the brush into the paint can. “Are the other walls destined for the same fate?”

  “We’ll think of something,” Wolf promised.

  “No doubt,” Elk said. “Go open the windows.”

  They opened the windows and threw away the newspapers. Elk took Grasshopper and Beauty to the bathroom. He washed them by turns. As soon as the scrubber left Grasshopper to attack Beauty, Grasshopper would fall asleep. Surrounded by the white tiles, under the thundering hot waterfall, swaying and grabbing the bars of the drain with his toes to stop himself from falling down. Beauty’s squeals, muffled by the noise of the shower, faded into the distance, then Elk’s hands came back and jostled him, the soapy brush reappearing, and Grasshopper woke up again. Then he was being carried, swaddled in a towel, and he still kept his eyes shut even though he wasn’t asleep anymore, because he didn’t feel like walking. He only peeked out of his fluffy cocoon once deposited in the room.