The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  He knew he was right, at least somewhat. One couldn’t just walk out of here and then walk back in again. The House might not accept him. This had happened to others, he himself saw it not once and not twice, so he knew what he was talking about. Something might not accept him. It could not be put in words, it could not be subjected to logical analysis, this Something that was the House itself, or maybe its spirit, its essence. He wasn’t looking for the right word, or for any word at all. It was just that, coming back, he knew that the final decision was not up to him. Not to him, not to them, and to Shark least of all. The House would either let him in or it wouldn’t. So maybe it was the House they tried to placate, marking its walls with his initials. To accustom it to the idea of him returning.

  “All right,” Ralph said resignedly. “You can consider yourselves thanked.” I wonder what it is they need from me. Or is it just that tradition now demands the sacrifice of a counselor before graduation?

  He got up and tried to chase the silly thoughts out of his head. If all they needed was a counselor, they’ve got plenty already, I’m just one more . . . And by the way, no one needs a crazy counselor, not them and not me. He went to the window, tugged at the latch, and opened one of the panes. The cold gust burst into the room, banishing the staleness of the unlived-in space.

  The crumpled clouds were hanging level with the top of the window, filling midday with the shadows of an evening-like dusk. He wiped the dust off the windowsill, sat down, and lit a cigarette, relaxing. Then threw away the end and listened. The hallway was alive with voices.

  The House songs and whispers . . .

  He heard feet thundering past his door, then the wheelchairs squeaking. Ralph moved to the sofa and switched on the radio. Music. He increased the volume.

  Someone stopped in front of the door. Two of them. Then more. He heard the muffled conversation but couldn’t make out the words. The meeting ended. The heavily shod boots of the Log messengers disappeared with the reports, and Ralph switched off the radio. He went to the door, one of those delivering a smack to the face when opened. But they were in time to jump away.

  “Oooh . . . Oooh . . .”

  At the opposite wall, two awkward, big-eared Logs were bowing to him respectfully.

  “You are back! You are listening to the radio . . .”

  “Yes,” he said. “As you can see.”

  They proceeded to simultaneously bow and shift imperceptibly to the right. Quick, run, tell, be the first to inform everyone! The biggest story of the day was standing right there, in the flesh, but the rules of etiquette prevented them from storming off, racing each other and yelling at the top of their lungs, announcing the news to the entire House. They suffered in silence, flaming ears, bitten lips, and all, while their eyes continued the feverish examination of Ralph. Whoever noticed something extraordinary would be king for the day. Those who already left were the first to know and were now going to be the first to tell, but those who stayed were the first to see, and they were trying to squeeze out every last drop of this feeble advantage now that the option of surprise was taken from them. The eyewitness accounts were supposed to be elaborate and deeply moving, and Ralph felt himself being mined for the moving and elaborate details, the greedy tentacles of their probing eyes burrowing under his skin.

  “Dismissed,” he said.

  Bandar-Logs didn’t move an inch, only upped the degree of passion in their stares. He decided to take mercy on them.

  “I am going to the Third.”

  Logs gasped and galloped away, treading on each other’s feet, all glistening black-leather vests and clanking rivets.

  Ralph walked slowly, giving the couriers time to fulfill their purpose. Walked and looked at the walls.

  The domain of the Second. Headless female forms, impossibly ample hips, spherical buttocks, bountiful breasts . . . The spaces between those were given to public criticism of the artists’ abilities, verses discussing the same basic concepts, and, of course, swearing.

  BY HIS OWN TAIL, SOLOMON RAT

  LOOK OUT! YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!

  Swim canceled due non-stndrd clthng

  DID IT AGAIN. WILL DO AGAIN.

  Rats were standing in the open doorway of their classroom, giggling, bowing and scraping in unison, as if their strings were being pulled simultaneously by one invisible inebriated hand.

  “Good afternoon . . .”

  Fresh from a dive in the dumpster. Scalded gray fur, glassily vibrating whiskers, the stench of garbage and naked tails covered in slime.

  “Welcome back. How are you?”

  Ralph walked past.

  Foreheads, cheeks, and chins covered in drawings. Dark shades of any and all shapes and sizes. Rats detested bright light and shielded their eyes from it.

  “Welcome back,” the wall sneered at him next. The greeting was accompanied by a veritable picket fence, eight exclamation points in a row. When did they have time? He left the Second behind. The scenery changed to red triangles, bulls, and antelopes. The writings here were few and compact. Leopard’s drawings were protected from encroachments. Ralph did not look too closely. A green arrow, pointing straight ahead:

  THE PATH OF THE DRUID. FEEL THE GROUND IN FRONT WITH A POLE.

  S.CE EVERY FRIDAY AT FULL MOON.

  What does “S.ce” mean? Could it really be “sacrifice”?

  The doorframe of the Third remained unoccupied. Ralph entered and immediately heard the crunch of seeds underfoot. Seeds and dead leaves. Pods bursting noisily as he stepped on them, spreading whitish dust. Birds in the shadow of verdant vegetation, smiling. Fleshy leaves and thick trunks of various plants masking the window frames. And the smell of freshly dug earth.

  Enormous, red-cheeked Elephant nodding his head, surrounded by potted violets. Purplish end of the spectrum. Beauty over the withering geranium, Butterfly under the lemon tree. Vulture perched on the stepladder, floating over the classroom all the way up to the ceiling. Two small pots with cacti kept him company there. Lizard’s desk, home only to a plate of sprouted wheat, looked austere.

  Birds smiled. Chirping in the thickets . . . There was no fear, no hostility. It could almost seem that they were glad to see him again.

  Ralph sat down at the teacher’s desk. A thick, whitish sprout plopped in front of him, like a grub that’s lost its grip somewhere above.

  Vulture dismounted from the stepladder, hobbled to the desk, muttered “My apologies,” grabbed the sprout, swallowed it, and added, “Told you time and time again: if it’s rotten, prune it back!”

  He passed his handkerchief over the desk.

  “Thank you,” Ralph said.

  Vulture smiled beatifically.

  A cup of coffee appeared from nowhere in front of Ralph. As he was regarding it in surprise, duckweed sprang up on the surface.

  “As you can see,” Vulture said, “one is hard pressed to keep track of everything at once. It pains me greatly, it really does.”

  Ralph tried to get his mind back together.

  “While I was away . . .”

  “We all missed you,” Birds announced happily.

  Vulture beamed with pride.

  “And this Pheasant flew over to the Fourth,” Elephant said, picking his nose. “Who knows why. Not us, but them. Who knows . . .”

  “The affairs of the Fourth are not our concern,” Lizard snapped. “Keep your mouth closed!”

  Angel struck a pose.

  “The House is not quite the House without you, esteemed Ralph. So I keep telling them, constantly! Just ask them, go ahead, ask . . .”

  “Happy to hear it,” Ralph said. “Anything else?”

  “A song!” Angel crowed, delighted. “Dedicated to you! Finished rehearsing it only yesterday! Permission to perform?”

  Finished rehearsing . . . yesterday? A song?

  “Denied,” Ralph said. “Songs will have to wait.”

  Birds sighed in disappointment. Angel, infuriated, sank his teeth into his own arm.

&nb
sp; “Excuse me?”

  There was a small man at the door, bald, wearing a blue suit. He was studying Ralph, squinting myopically.

  Ralph rose up.

  “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” the small man said, stepping inside.

  “I am a counselor,” Ralph explained. “Back from vacation. Just came to visit with the boys. I won’t interfere with your lesson.”

  “Not at all,” the teacher fussed, “please, talk all you want. I’ll come later.”

  “We have already talked. I don’t want to disrupt. I’m sorry.”

  Ralph went around the bald man and into the hallway.

  The teacher squeezed out after him.

  “You are their counselor, aren’t you?” The pudgy hand grabbed the sleeve of Ralph’s jacket. “Would you agree”—the teacher’s eyes opened wide and his voice went down to a whisper—“would you agree that they are rather . . . unusual? This smell . . . and this . . . prevalence of plant life. Would you agree? The sheer amount of it . . . And the smell . . .”

  “I certainly would,” Ralph said politely, unclasping the teacher’s fingers. “But it’s time for your lesson.”

  “Yes,” the teacher said, looking despondently at the door. “It is. But I am certainly experiencing a palpable discomfort. Please don’t misunderstand me. This is vexing.”

  The cloying scent of a bog wafted through the crack in the door.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Ralph promised. “Give it time.”

  The teacher slumped and disappeared inside. Vulture immediately filtered through the door in the other direction.

  “Lay it on,” Ralph said. “Everything that’s happened. And make it brief.”

  Vulture leaned against the wall.

  “Nothing has happened in my pack,” he reported. “And prying into other people’s business—that would be against my upbringing.”

  “No one’s asked you to do any prying.”

  Vulture smiled, exposing red gums.

  “The biggest news is that Pompey is no longer with us. Untimely succumbed to a stab wound. Might be considered a suicide, but then again it might not. I would call it that.”

  “Would others?”

  “The others could regard it differently.”

  Ralph thought it over.

  “So it was not, in fact, a suicide?”

  Vulture shook his head pensively. “It is a question of semantics. When a person spends a considerable amount of time and effort digging a hole in the ground, carefully installs sharpened stakes on the bottom, and then finally jumps in with a cheerful shout, I call that a suicide. But people are free to express a different opinion.”

  “All right,” Ralph sighed. “Anything else?”

  “The rest is trifling. I am having a hard time imagining what could be worthy of your attention. Maybe the one about the Pheasant transferring from the First to the Fourth. Sphinx’s godson. He is yours now. Also Noble was taken away to the Outsides. The Fourth is in mourning . . .”

  Vulture stumbled and fell silent, wincing as if his own words disgusted him for a moment.

  “Is that all?”

  “Well,” Vulture sighed. “If we are to include the happenings of an earlier time, Wolf died. Back over the summer, soon after you left.”

  “What happened?”

  “Now this, no one really knows.”

  A gangling, blondish apparition with bugged-out eyes suddenly came into view.

  “I’m sorry,” it muttered, squeezing in the door past them.

  “You’re late!” Vulture screamed testily. “You son of a Log, will I ever see the end of this?”

  Horse moaned, shaking his hair, and disappeared inside. Vulture spat a chewed-up lemon leaf after him.

  “Bastard,” he said. “Useless weed!”

  His face suddenly contorted; he clutched his knee and hissed in pain.

  Ralph watched him intently.

  “Anything else?”

  Vulture was looking up at him impassively, with unseeing eyes. He descended into the pain and locked himself in it. This conversation was over.

  “All right, you may go. You don’t seem to be feeling too well.”

  There was no one who could tell for sure if Vulture was faking it or if he really was in such bad shape. He lowered himself to the floor, hugged his leg, and bent over it as if it were a sick child, swaying gently back and forth and singing to it softly through clenched teeth. Ralph waited, not sure if he should offer help. Then shrugged and continued down the hallway.

  It was empty. Teachers’ voices droned monotonously from behind the classroom doors. A faucet was running somewhere.

  Birds . . . He probably should have listened to that song. The song that they allegedly just finished rehearsing. Now he’d never know if it really existed or if it was entirely Angel’s spontaneous invention. On the other hand, it was possible that under the inspired direction from Vulture’s ringed fingers they would have closed their eyes and opened their mouths, and the voiceless singing would go on and on, whipping them into a frenzy . . . And he’d have no idea how to react.

  Ralph stopped and studied the wall and a trail of smeared black footprints. They went up vertically, from the bottom to the ceiling, then across it and down the opposite wall. Someone had expended a lot of time and energy to make it look like Spiderman had dropped in for a visit. That, or someone figured out how to walk upside down.

  Pheasant in the Fourth. Sphinx’s godson. That by itself didn’t tell Ralph anything. He knew very little about Pheasants. Wolf. And Pompey. Mentioning Wolf made Vulture’s leg hurt. Pompey . . . Jumped into a hole of his own making . . . Made a mistake? Maybe went against the Law? A riddle wrapped in a mystery. But Ralph knew he was not in a position to demand more. Vulture never snitched. Everything he said, Ralph would have found out anyway. From talking to Shark, if no one else. But when told by Vulture, the information took on a greater importance. Unlike Shark, Vulture knew what he was talking about and always gave Ralph a chance to decipher his pronouncements.

  It became a secret game for the two of them, a game in which Vulture played on his side, his only partner in the whole House. This was the measure of Great Bird’s gratitude for the night he had spent in Ralph’s room—that night two years ago, following Vulture’s attempt to gnaw through the walls of the hospital wing and devour its inhabitants. He should have earned himself a one-way ticket to the madhouse, but had ended up instead in Ralph’s room. Ralph kept a souvenir of that night, a bloodstained towel. He had scraped Vulture’s mouth with it, trying to stifle his howls. Ralph had been too busy to think about anything except keeping his hands out of harm’s way, but when, through the opened windows, he had heard the Third respond, he realized what it was—a funeral lament. The towel, and the upholstery on the sofa ruined by Great Bird’s teeth. Once he started crying, Ralph let go of him, and for the rest of the night Vulture sobbed with his hooked nose buried in the pillow. Ralph watched and waited. In silence, not making any attempts to soothe him.

  At dawn Vulture got up, all swollen and somehow blackened, hobbled to the shower, and stood there until the morning bell rang. And then he left. Ralph spent the morning in the hospital wing with Birds, liquidating the aftermath of Vulture’s performance. The Leader of the Third was nowhere to be found for three straight days. On the fourth day he appeared in the canteen in the blackest mourning and had been wearing it ever since. He might not have had many praiseworthy qualities, but he never forgot his debts and those to whom they were owed. This was how the game started, the game of “If you’re so smart, figure out what I meant by that.” Ralph also knew that, were he to stumble, there was always going to be a clue left somewhere. It might not be obvious, more in the manner of the wall puzzles, but a clue nonetheless. And besides, Vulture was always concise and to the point, and never talked in poor verse, the way walls sometimes did.

  He called Pompey’s death a suicide. Pompey had dug a hole for himself and jumped into it, getting a stab wound. D
oesn’t really sound like a suicide. Too circumspect. Allegorical. Not exactly wall verse, but close.

  Noble is a whole other deal. Him and his mother. Who would never voluntarily take her much-too-mature son back home. So, not home, somewhere else. Where? Who knows?

  And the most unpleasant one is, of course, Wolf. After mentioning his name Vulture didn’t let slip even a vague hint. And that was exactly the moment when his leg started hurting. Coincidence? From what little Ralph knew about Vulture, nothing was ever a coincidence with him. Bird was certainly capable of enduring sudden pain without batting an eye. And Wolf had been one of those who’d changed reality around them. One of the strongest in that regard. A potential challenger. Could this be the answer?

  The dull lights cast a yellowish pall on the hallway. Sheriff was hobbling toward him—the Second’s sugar daddy and horror show. In a word—Rat, only older and bigger.

  “Wow.” Sheriff winked from under the bill of his cap and dissolved in a big smile. “Why, hello, pardner! What the hey are you looking for in this stinkin’ swamp?”

  Ralph momentarily faked surprise and joy upon meeting an esteemed colleague and effected a high-five.

  “Guess I couldn’t stand being away from you.”

  Sheriff burst out in a fit of laughter and disappeared behind the door of the Second, still giggling. The tail, thick as a rope, slithered in after him, and Rats stepped aside to make way for it . . . Rats giggled too, rubbing their hands.

  When Ralph returned to the door of his room he found a note stuck to it with a pushpin: This is insulting. You could have dropped by. It wasn’t signed, but there was no mistaking Shark’s hand. Ralph teased the pushpin out, stuffed the note in his pocket, and went to see the principal.

  Shark was waiting for him in the nonbusiness part of his office, sunk in a low armchair upholstered in cheery chintz with yellow-blue flowers. Knees above his chest, nose in the TV. He shot Ralph a sideways glance with his mottled eyes and gestured at the chair next to his.