The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  “And that’s why I find you easy to talk to,” Black said.

  I nodded again. We were silent for a while. This mute understanding was growing between us, and we were afraid words might spook it. It’s not that I considered Black to be right about everything. But I had to admit that talking to him was indeed much easier than talking to Sphinx or Humpback.

  “Noble is not well,” Black said suddenly, apparently trying to get everything that was bothering him out in the open. “Tried to kill himself a couple years ago. Once, twice . . . Sphinx got to him. With his drills, like a sergeant. Amazing how he’s crawling around now, right? Well, you should have seen the way Sphinx was driving him. Followed him one step behind, and as soon as Noble stopped he’d step on his legs. So Noble was in turns crawling and yelping. Crying and still crawling. A sickening sight. And Sphinx kept following and stepping on him.”

  I had to close my eyes when I imagined what he was talking about.

  “Black, stop it,” I said. “This is too much.”

  “Sure,” Black said. “It’s better not to know. To continue thinking that Sphinx is this sweet guy. Very helpful, if you want to blend in.”

  I let that pass. I was still trying to come to terms with the image of sadistic Sphinx trampling someone’s legs with a beatific smile on his face. I had a hard time even imagining this. But at the same time I realized that Black wasn’t lying, and this contradiction was driving me crazy.

  “Black, I’m sorry,” I said finally. “I didn’t want to interrupt. I guess I am better off knowing things like that, at least to . . . to better understand what’s what. But I need some time to adjust. To absorb the information.”

  “I’m fine with that,” Black replied. “I didn’t tell you all this so that you start avoiding Sphinx from now on. That’s not the point. The point is that Noble is nuts. He’s sick. Always has been. Even before Sphinx added to it. He needs treatment. So when Sphinx goes all righteous on me, telling me that I, wouldn’t you know, behaved despicably, I want to just laugh it off. But when six other people, who, by the way, all witnessed everything I’ve told you about, when those six all agree with him, that’s no longer funny. Make sense?”

  “Yeah.”

  Black took out another cigarette.

  “Just wanted, you know, for at least one person in this damned zoo to understand. Just one.”

  He lit up. I saw that his knuckles were scraped, and his hands trembled so much that he couldn’t quite connect the end of the cigarette with the lighter’s flame.

  I was sitting there, stunned, torn between anger and pity. I understood him. I understood him all too well. But I didn’t want to. Because it meant becoming a black sheep again. Only this time there’d be two of us. And I so wished to become a full-fledged member of the pack. To be with them, to be one of them.

  “I understand you. I do. I’m sorry if it doesn’t look that way from the outside.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I guess I shouldn’t have dumped all of this on you.”

  But he was obviously glad I’d said that. And I realized that this was it. There was no going back. I chose Black.

  I was trying to convince myself that maybe this wasn’t quite the end of the world when Black finished his cigarette, tossed the butt over the back of the sofa, and got up, favoring his aching leg.

  “Let’s roll,” he said. “Now we’re definitely not going to make it before it’s dark.”

  He stuffed the pink bunny into his pocket.

  We didn’t make it even as far as the Second when the lights went out. They blinked twice, and then it was dark. I’d been forewarned and prepared, but still I startled. Black was right: if I were to find myself alone in this inky blackness, I’d just be stuck wherever I was when it came. But Black did have a flashlight. Now I was holding it, and he was pushing the wheelchair.

  I was still digesting our conversation and must have been doing a lousy job of lighting our way, because at some point Black stopped and told me to point the flashlight straight ahead. I apologized and raised it higher.

  The murals on the walls looked different. They loomed out of the darkness in fragments, most of them unfamiliar, even those that I passed several times each day. And when faced with the White Bull I simply gasped in astonishment. Black understood and stopped, giving me the opportunity to fully illuminate the drawing.

  The Bull was swaying forlornly on its slender stick legs, watching us with its human eyes and thinking about something sad. It was the most amazing bull in the whole world. It was drawn in an affectedly primitive, childish manner, and its expressiveness went straight for the heart.

  “Look at it,” I whispered.

  Black stepped forward and scraped the wall where it had started peeling, costing the bull half a horn.

  “It’s coming off. Vulture tried putting clear varnish on top, that’s why it looks dull now.”

  The image of Vulture as a custodian of wall art was such an incongruous one that I could only mutter something indistinct. The House was a strange place indeed, and every day brought me new evidence of this.

  “Who painted this?”

  Black looked at me funny.

  “Leopard, who else? Oh yeah, I keep forgetting you haven’t been here that long. You can’t mistake his drawings for anyone else’s.” He thought for a while, then added, “Leopard was Leader of the Second. Some three years ago. Red’s third after him.”

  He seemed to force that last bit out of himself, but I got the impression that the details would have been forthcoming if I started asking questions. It was strange but refreshing knowledge: that my every question would be answered concisely and exhaustively. With no equivocating, clowning around, references to Pheasants, or long discourses about the Ways of the House. I immediately decided not to abuse this, and to begin by not digging further into the topic of Leopard’s disappearance. Especially since Black’s tone of voice very strongly hinted at the answer.

  “There are others,” Black continued as we went along. “Other drawings. They’re almost all around the Third now. There were even more near the Second, but those were all painted over. Still, Bull is the best. I took a couple of shots using a flash, but they didn’t work out that well. I should try again. There’s been this talk about repainting the walls for some time now. Then it’d be gone forever.”

  At the door, Black fumbled in his pockets and produced a key. This was the first time I saw our dorm locked, and it sharply drove home the fact that Black and I were indeed alone. Black was fiddling with the balky lock and I was illuminating the door. All along the door’s edge the wall was covered with the repetition of the letter R. The pattern almost dissolved into a meaningless ornament, but it was still composed of that letter. I remembered that I’d seen it on the walls quite often.

  “What does the letter R mean?” I asked.

  “That’s our counselor,” Black said. “Ralph. He had both us and the Third.”

  I’d never heard of a counselor named Ralph, so I assumed that he was no longer alive either. Like Leopard the wall painter. The House was filling up with corpses at an alarming rate in response to my every question. Even if it concerned something that might initially appear entirely innocent.

  “Is he dead?” I said, expecting confirmation.

  “No.”

  Black pushed me in the door and clicked the wall switch, but the light in the anteroom did not come on. He swore, went a bit farther, and switched on the light inside the dorm. Coming back, he tripped over something and swore again.

  “Filthy thing!” he was saying when I wheeled in, shielding my eyes from the bright light. “Slipped in, the dirty bitch!”

  “What?”

  “A rat, that’s what! Another one!” Black was peering under the common bed, in a demonstrably hopeless attempt to discern something there. “What do you think I tripped over just now?”

  “Could be anything . . .”

  “There are no anythings when your Leader’s blind.” Black straightened up, m
oaned, and rubbed his leg. “When was the last time you saw something thrown on the floor here? I can tell you that the last thing Blind ever tripped over was Lary’s boots. Ever since that time the boots spend each night with Lary, on his bunk.”

  I giggled. Black shot me a disapproving look.

  “You’re one weird guy,” he said. “This isn’t funny at all.”

  He helped me climb on the bed and put the kettle on. I cleared up the strata left by Tabaqui—he seemed to regard the trip to the Sepulcher as kind of a night out, and the garments he had tried on and discarded were left covering the bed in an untidy mound. I then made myself more comfortable and asked Black where did Ralph the counselor go and why were his initials such a popular motif among the wall artists. In all honesty, I didn’t care much about all this, and was asking only to rinse out the unpleasant sediment that was brought up by the conversation concerning Sphinx. I was afraid Black might return back to that. But Black wasn’t in the mood to discuss counselors.

  “He left,” he said tersely. “About six months ago. Packed his stuff one day and hightailed it out of here. I have no idea why they still write and paint his nick. Could be someone misses him.”

  Black’s face showed quite clearly that if anyone did miss this mysterious R, it definitely wasn’t him.

  “I see,” I mumbled thoughtfully.

  Black sat down across from me and arranged the cups, the teapot, and a pack of cookies on the tray. I crawled closer. He passed me the cup and turned on the player. Good thing, too. Without music our tea party would have been too gloomy. Even with music it was pretty sad.

  I had a strange dream that night. I saw myself in the second-floor hallway. It looked the same as it always did, except it was divided down the middle by this thick plate of glass, all the way from the floor to the ceiling. There were people on the other side. Indistinct figures floated there, like fish in a bowl, bumping into the glass and pressing their faces against it. I saw a pale guy wearing sunglasses, with hair as white as snow, a girl with very long braids, and an ugly, dark-faced creature flying around in a wheelchair. There were a lot of them, and all of them wanted to get in. Some had translucent wings. Their side also had light fixtures on the walls, but theirs looked somehow different: they glowed green, almost emerald, like giant fireflies. I was observing all this from the door to our dorm.

  Then Noble pushed my wheelchair aside, walked out of the room, and threw a crystal ball at the wall. The ball hit the wall and bounced off, making a long crack in it, reaching all the way down. Noble walked into it, like between the folds of a transparent curtain, and the glass sealed itself behind him, becoming whole again. He waved to us and walked down the green firefly corridor. On his own legs. He wasn’t floating or swimming, he just walked, and the strange winged shadows darted around him and returned back to the glass, to look at us and to try and say something to us, something that we couldn’t hear.

  There were whispers and commotion behind my back. Then Tabaqui and Blind hauled out this huge cauldron of boiling, bubbling liquid and splashed it at the glass. It made an ugly stain. The hissing, poisonous stain started spreading, growing in all directions, and shaped itself into a smeared letter R. The glass under it crackled, and all the creatures that were flying around on the other side crowded near it and started banging on the glass, while everyone on our side moved away from it, dragging me and my wheelchair with them, the crackling and hissing was becoming louder and louder . . .

  I opened my eyes and immediately saw the reason for my waking up. The open window was flapping in the wind, and the glass in it rattled noisily. Black, who apparently woke up at the same time as I did, climbed up, slammed it shut, and secured the handle. The wind was so strong that the glass still vibrated, only more softly. Black went back to bed, and I related my dream to him quickly before I forgot. When I finished, I realized that there had been no rush to tell it—it was still before my eyes as vividly as the moment I awoke. Black said that my dream was bullshit. He said it in a very annoyed voice, and I regretted keeping him up.

  The next time it was Sphinx who woke us. I guess it was about half past five.

  He kicked open the door and yelled, “Behold, a pale rider on a pale horse! Comes the cloud of locusts, and the dead are rattling their bones! Just look at this!” He ran to the window. “The fog is gray like the backs of gray mice! Hordes of mice are advancing! There is going to be no ground left soon, only the fog, clad in gray garments. It started stealing upon you in the night. Look now, before there is nothing to look at!”

  Is he drunk? I thought, burying my head in the pillow. Sphinx abandoned his fog quest, mounted the headboard, weaving his legs between the bars, and stared at me. With his crazy eyes in dark circles. I chirpily inquired how Noble was doing.

  “He’s doing like Saint Francis’s favorite chipmunk,” Sphinx said and giggled.

  “Sphinx. We are trying to sleep here,” Black murmured.

  “Sure, while the fog is creeping ever closer!”

  “It can do all the creeping it wants.”

  “That what you think? All right. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Tabaqui unloaded himself on the bed, crawled over me, and commenced the construction of his nighttime nest. Humpback, with Nanette in tow, climbed up to his place. Alexander started the coffeemaker. Lary deposited Tubby in his pen, knocking over another bottle and bumping into the nightstand in the process.

  “Oh god,” Black moaned, putting the pillow over his head.

  “Do not invoke His name in vain, you despicable person.”

  Sphinx stared at me for a while longer, shaking his head, then slid down on the bed and switched off, like a busted light. Tabaqui took special care to climb out of the nest and pull the blanket over him, then sniffed at him thoroughly and, apparently satisfied, crawled back into his pillows.

  When the morning rituals began, two hours later, we weren’t able to rouse Sphinx. He never acknowledged the gentle patting or calling him by name, and when someone tried to shake him he snarled that this someone was going to have his head bitten off, so Humpback decided to leave him alone.

  The morning turned out lousy. It was gray and wet all the way through, like a slippery cap of some mushroom in the forest. On days like this all the door handles resist harder than usual, all food scratches the mouth, the early birds are disgustingly perky and are not letting anyone lounge in bed, while the night owls are miserable and snap at every other word. Sphinx, usually the first among the disgusting early birds, was out of commission for the time being, and so his role in terrorizing the inhabitants was taken up by Humpback, who jetted around like crazy, imitated a rooster, rang a handbell, tooted on his flute, poked the sleepers with chair legs, and dumped clothes on them.

  Lary, moaning and groaning, dangled his feet in tattered socks from his bunk. Tabaqui was already chomping on something that was dripping all over the blanket. Blind, in his acid-green shirt, was smoking in the open window. I dug deeper and deeper under the blanket, fully aware that I wouldn’t be allowed to continue sleeping.

  The boombox wailed “Oh! Darling” by The Beatles. Tabaqui was singing along in a falsetto voice, right in my ear. He even lifted the blanket to make sure he aimed correctly. It was useless. I crawled out.

  While turning the wheelchair around by the window, I looked out. The wires of the fence weren’t there. The houses and streets all had disappeared. It was completely quiet. Even Nanette’s kin had scrambled somewhere. Blind turned his sharp face toward me. The mist in his gray eyes very much resembled the one outside the window.

  “Backs of mice?” he said.

  “Rather big blobs of cotton wool,” I said. “Or maybe clouds.”

  At this he nodded and turned away.

  At breakfast we were given boiled water to drink. It was supposed to ward off colds. Another one of the administration’s pet ideas. There was no music after we came back, and no card playing. Everyone was catching up on more sleep. Now even the yard itself dis
appeared, and the gray clouds (or was it really backs of mice?) came up to the windows.

  They brought Noble in after lunch.

  “He’s coming,” Lary announced, bursting in with the clatter of a wild mustang. “And those . . . Shark and the others . . .”

  The others turned out to be two livid-faced Cases and, surprisingly, Homer.

  They wheeled Noble in, installed him on the bed, and clustered around. Noble was sleepy and grumpy, dressed in the hospital gown—one of those things that rob faces and bodies of individuality, making everyone look the same. Alexander took his clothes out of the closet. Noble was changing into them while the principal’s retinue stood there and gawked.

  “You are his comrades, you could have helped,” Homer said.

  “I can handle this,” Noble said curtly, sliding into his jeans.

  “Such a nervous boy,” Homer said, aghast. “Nervous and abrupt.”

  “If only that was the worst of it,” Shark replied, his eyes darting around the room, looking for traces of criminal behavior.

  By some miracle we didn’t even have a single ashtray out, so all his efforts were wasted.

  “You have thirty minutes to pack,” he said. “And none of your tricks. Leave nothing behind, you’re not coming back here.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Noble said.

  Homer’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he seemingly stopped breathing. Tabaqui giggled. Shark swung around so fiercely that I shrunk back.

  “One more peep out of any of you and you’ll regret the day you were born,” he hissed.

  There were no more peeps out of anyone. Homer left, still unable to come to terms with the shock he’d just suffered, while Shark remained to observe Humpback and Alexander pack Noble’s stuff. It all fit in two bags. One of the Cases took them away. Noble climbed in his wheelchair and looked at us. He hadn’t uttered a single word during all of this, apart from what he’d said to Shark. And had he restrained himself, Shark might have given us the opportunity to say our good-byes in private. The other Case grabbed the handles of Noble’s wheelchair, and, for some reason, Alexander placed Humpback’s jacket on Noble’s knees. It was a heavy leather jacket, originally black but currently black and white, because it was first worn out until it became white and then blackened back with dirt and soot. This monster, bedecked in badges and touched up with paint here and there, was dubbed “dinosaur skin.” Tabaqui claimed that it was bulletproof. But Noble seemed delighted.