The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  “So you’re back.”

  Ralph sat down and immediately sank in up to his chest as well. Shark’s countenance provided irrefutable evidence of the approaching end of the working day.

  “I’m leaving soon,” Shark confirmed, as he sucked in the clear liquid sloshing in his glass without the help of the straw and stared at Ralph. “I don’t see any reason to be waiting here for the classes to end. No reason at all. Do you see any reason? Because I don’t. Nobody does. But that’s the deal, apparently. I’m supposed to sit here until I’m blue in the face, even though no one cares if I do or not. No one comes, no one knocks, no one asks anything. Ever. But here I sit. Performing what’s left of the principal’s duties. Chained here like a dog, from eight till four, and don’t even think of taking off the tie, because who knows what might happen! I have to be ready for whatever it is. If this looks like I have it easy, trust me, I don’t. It is far from easy. Welcome back, dear fellow. These past years have been kind to you. Still spry.”

  “Six months is years now?” Ralph said, surprised.

  “It is.” Shark nodded. “In combat situations each month counts as a year. So, all in all, you’ve been AWOL for six years, which means that you should’ve been terminated long ago. This is not to reprimand you in any way, mind. I’m just keeping score.”

  “Thanks.”

  Ralph looked at the screen.

  Shark didn’t appreciate being ignored. He reached for the remote. The screen blinked off and Ralph turned the chair to face the principal. Shark’s finger was waving at the bridge of his nose.

  “What was the duration of your leave supposed to be? Two months. Two. Not six. You realize, of course, that you’re through here. And have been for a while. But”—the finger made a circular motion—“I forgive you. Do you know why? Because I like you. And I understand why you decided to scram. Why is it that I understand? Because that’s the kind of person I am. Caring and understanding.”

  Ralph relaxed and stretched his legs. Listening to Shark’s crazy talk was a part of every counselor’s job description, and had long become a matter of routine. He was thinking about Wolf. And Pompey. And the hole. What exactly was the “hole” that Pompey, according to Vulture, had dug for himself? What did Great Bird mean by that? Still, thinking about Pompey was easier than thinking about Wolf. He didn’t want to think about Wolf at all.

  “But who’s going to understand me? Nobody, that’s who. I stand alone, abandoned by everyone. Now one of my subordinates returns after a six-month absence and he doesn’t even consider stopping by to say hello. I have to write notes to him! And only then does he come. What’s the best word to describe this? I’ll tell you. That word is ‘shit.’ Everything that surrounds me is shit.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ralph said. “I would’ve come even without the note.”

  “When?” Shark’s mottled eyes lit up angrily. “Tomorrow? Or maybe the day after? I demand respect. Or you can all go to hell. I’m the boss here! Am I right?”

  The principal fell silent, sighing heavily into his glass.

  Ralph stole a look at his watch. There were less than twenty minutes left until the end of the last class, and he wanted to drop by the Sixth before Hounds scattered throughout the House. That meant arriving there directly after the teacher left.

  “You,” Shark said, placing the glass on the floor and slumping dejectedly in his chair. “You’re the only counselor worthy of the name in this entire hellhole. And you just up and left, ran away to the coast. Abandoning us here to be carved up.”

  “No one’s carving up anyone.”

  “That’s what you say.” Shark’s scratchy voice was pouring soft sand into his ears. “And you’re the only one to say that.” He sniffed at the palm of his hand and frowned.

  Ralph waited patiently. The principal wasn’t drunk. He was in the state that the less politically correct counselors dubbed his “period.” There was no sense in trying to debate him now.

  “I am very sick,” Shark volunteered suddenly, staring directly into Ralph’s eyes. “They don’t believe me, but it’s just a question of time.”

  Ralph affected concern. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s cancer,” Shark said darkly. “That’s what I suspect.”

  “You’ve got to go and have it checked. Might be serious.”

  “No use. I prefer to remain in the dark. So that when I’m killed, at least that will save me from a more drawn-out and miserable death. Which is a comfort. A rather cold one.”

  “There are different ways of being killed.”

  Shark flinched. “No kidding. Are there also different ways of saying nasty things to a terminally ill man, instead of, oh, I don’t know, maybe trying to cheer him up?”

  He sat there for a while, looking like he was ready to breathe his last right that moment, then looked at his watch and stirred nervously.

  “Oh . . . There’s a game on today. Damn! Forgot all about it!” He jumped up and looked around the office. “Right. Switched off everything. Now only the lights. And the door.”

  He searched his pockets.

  “Want to go grab a bite?”

  “No. The trip took it out of me. I think I’ll turn in early.”

  Ralph took the keys proffered to him and turned off the lights. Shark was looking at him proudly.

  “It’s good to have you back. We’ll fill you in tomorrow morning. Don’t think your vacation is not going to really cost you in the end.”

  “I have no doubt it will.”

  Ralph locked the door and returned the key ring to the principal. He jangled it, hunting for the key to his bedroom.

  “Why did Noble’s mother take him away?”

  “You know already,” Shark said with admiration. “As usual. One foot in the door and already knows everything. I’ve always said you weren’t quite normal. In the best possible sense, of course.”

  “So why did she?”

  Shark finally located the key and painstakingly separated it from the others.

  “Lost confidence in us. We weren’t watching the guy closely enough. That’s how she put it. And something about the climate here being unhealthy. A stunning woman. Hard to argue with her. I didn’t even try.”

  “Did she take him home?”

  “I don’t know. None of my business. I never asked.”

  “She could have switched schools . . . If this one wasn’t good enough for her.”

  Near the canteen they were greeted by a piercing bell. Ralph couldn’t help wincing. Shark looked at him disdainfully, like a crusty captain might look at a former sailor long out of practice.

  “You’ve gone weak,” he observed. “Weak and lazy. And here’s me holding you up as an example to the youth.”

  Still grumbling, he mounted the stairs. Ralph stood there on the landing for a while, watching him go, and then returned to the hallway.

  The Sixth was never quiet. Even when all of them were silent, a trained ear could still catch a kind of buzzing, the hum of a spinning engine hidden in the walls. That invisible swarm.

  The voices died down as he entered. Hounds spit on the cigarettes, extinguishing them, cascaded down from the windowsills, rolled back toward the chairs, and attempted to switch on the silence. This enabled him to hear the droning: the susurration of their thoughts that never quieted down, since there were always too many of them in this place. The song of the Sixth. They wore bright colors—not quite at the Rat level, but close—assaulting the eye with the splashes of scarlet shirts and emerald-green sweaters. But the walls of the classroom exuded a dull grayish sheen, trapping them in an impenetrable airtight rectangle, so that the windows started to seem like crude drawings stuck on the gray substance.

  As soon as he closed the door behind him, he felt how stifling this vacuum was, robbing him of breath and movement. The ceiling hung too low over his head, while the walls moved slowly inward, flowing into the floor and pressing on him with a rubbery colorlessness. They can engulf you completely, trap
you like an insect, and then when the next visitor comes you’ll already just be a part of the decoration, a mural indistinguishable from the rest of them, a stuffed specimen of the Sixth.

  “I want to speak with the new Leader,” he said. Waited until the bout of coughing from those who choked on the smoke subsided and added, “Or with whoever considers himself to be one.”

  They shifted and looked down. All of them in leather dog collars—store bought and handmade, with studs and rivets or decorated with beads. He knew the answer even before anyone spoke. There was no Leader. The Leader of the Sixth was the only one of them not obligated to wear this token of belonging to the pack. Only he could walk around with his neck open. Of course, a collar could have been serving as a kind of disguise, hiding a Leader who didn’t wish to be exposed to outsiders. But not a single Hound even glanced at another, no one became a momentary center of attention. There was no one among them who had taken the place of the late Pompey.

  They cringed and studied their hands, as if ashamed of something. What of? That they can’t find anyone to rise above the others? Their headlessness? Their loss?

  “There is no Leader,” someone in the back offered. “Haven’t elected him yet.”

  “When did Pompey die?” Ralph asked.

  “A month ago,” long-faced, bespectacled Laurus said. “A little less than a month.”

  “And no elections yet?”

  Hounds crouched, exposing the backs of their heads, trying to hide something disgraceful, something that pained them. The quiet hum in the walls grew in intensity. The walls advanced on Ralph, shielding the Sixth, but before the slippery curtain closed in on him . . .

  The lamps behind the wire mesh spilling yellow light. The glistening green lake of oily paint, then a scream . . . A dark silhouette writhing on the floor, spraying blood . . .

  Then the walls took over, blotting out the flying shards of the vision, discoloring and erasing them. Ralph had seen enough to understand that whatever happened to Pompey, they were all there, the entire pack, and the memory of what they saw, the bitter taste of it still in their mouths, was poisoning their existence. He was now carrying their pain and their fear—of whom, he could not yet see. They were too closed, too resistant to his attempt to understand more fully.

  Every pack was built like a ladder. On every step a living soul. If the top step broke, the next one became the top. A headless pyramid immediately grew a new head. This happened everywhere and always, excluding Pheasants, of course. Every pack had not only a first, but also a second. Even Birds, with Vulture being an enormous distance, seventeen unoccupied rungs at least, above everyone else—even Birds had Lizard, ready to take the place of the Leader should anything happen to him. The only way for this order to be broken was to have someone from way below usurp the power. But then he became the Leader himself. The fact that neither of these things had happened with Hounds pointed to a third possibility. And whatever it was, it had nothing in common with the first two. Ralph hadn’t the slightest idea what it could be. I wonder what the gym has to do with all this?

  “Curious,” he said.

  He only realized how long he’d been standing there thinking about all of this when he saw the darkness outside the windows and felt that the pack had been exhausted by his presence. The more nervous gnawed at their fingers and made faces. The wheelers fidgeted quietly, bringing their sallow faces together. The engine in the walls buzzed in fits and starts. Everything around him was completely gray. The Sixth was stuck in its protective fence, they all now looked as if they were drowning—or had long ago drowned—in a fish tank that hadn’t been cleaned in the last million years.

  Ralph went out without saying a word. The Sixth’s relieved exhalation was cut off from him by the door slamming back. It was immediately pushed open again, and the pale visage of Bandar-Log Zit appeared in the crack as he traced Ralph’s steps.

  Between the Sixth’s classroom and their bedrooms Ralph moved slowly, reading the walls. Sloughing away the fresh writings like the skin off an onion, revealing old ones, smeared and by now barely visible. Dogs’ heads with collars. The appeal to the “members of the umpire committee” to assemble in the yard on Saturday night. He squinted. There it is. A cat with a human head, crossed out with red paint. A black triangle with a hole through it. An eye inside a spiral, covered in jagged notches. All of them new. Not less than a month old. He looked again to make sure he saw what he saw. The meaning of these symbols was no harder for him to read than his own nick. The cat was Sphinx. The triangle, Black. The spiral with the eye, Blind. All three signs had been used for target practice. That was no coincidence.

  Blind was crouching in front of Ralph’s office, tracing invisible circles on the floorboards with his finger. His long black hair fell over his eyes. The knees peeked out of the ripped jeans. He raised his head when he heard the steps. An emaciated figure with colorless eyes, faceless and devoid of a discernible age, like a drifter who had long forgotten the date of his birth. At the same time as he was standing up, he was also getting younger and younger with lightning speed, and when Ralph reached him he was met by a mere boy.

  Anyone would have written this off as a trick of light in a dimly lit corridor, a mirage that disappeared when seen up close. Anyone but Ralph.

  “Hi,” Ralph said, unlocking the door.

  “Hello.”

  Ralph let him in and followed.

  Blind froze once inside. Ralph had to fight the urge to take him by the hand and lead him to the chair or the sofa. He’s blind, helpless in unfamiliar surroundings, and look at that oversized sweater, the sleeves going down to the tips of his fingers, and those holes at the knees. He closed his eyes, trying to evict the insidious image out of his head. This is the master of the House in front of you, you dummy!

  Ralph went to the window and said over his shoulder, “Have a seat.”

  And immediately turned around, not sure of what he’d see: a futile search, ineffectual grasping for solid objects in the surrounding emptiness—or a sure swiftness of motion. Ralph wouldn’t have been surprised if Blind were to stay frozen in place, either. Or asked him for help, stumbling over the words. But Blind just did as he was told—sat down where he was standing, cross-legged by the door, and secreted his hands under his armpits.

  “I can’t see you this way,” Ralph said, rummaging in the stuff piled on the sofa in search of his cigarettes. “Only the top of your head. How much hair falls on your plate every time you have lunch?”

  “I never thought to count,” Blind said. “Is it important?”

  “It is slovenly.”

  Ralph found the pack, lit a cigarette, and sat on the sofa.

  He smoked in silence, allowing Blind to get comfortable. Or uncomfortable. Blind wasn’t moving. It was obvious that he could sit here like this forever. If this is the game you want to play . . . The only thing betraying Ralph was the cigarette; otherwise he had turned into stone as comprehensively as Blind. The ash growing at the end of the cigarette prevented him from disappearing completely. Blind didn’t have any ash to worry about. The bog-green sweater, exposing glimpses of body through its chunky braiding, had turned into parched lizard skin, the cyanotic eyelids folded over the eyes. Blind was no longer there. Ralph imagined that he was entertaining an ancient reptile, or a fancifully turned tree knot, or even a shadow of the knot. Whatever it was could remain motionless for a very long time. Ralph never had enough patience to find out exactly how long.

  “Tell me what happened to Wolf. And how it happened.”

  Blind immediately flowed back into the boyish persona and eagerly leaned forward.

  “He did not wake up. No one knows why.”

  Ralph looked at his cigarette, or what was left of it—a column of ash miraculously clinging to the filter.

  “Is that all you can say? Try again, please. In more detail this time.”

  Blind shook his head.

  “We were sleeping,” he said. “In the morning everyone wok
e up, and he didn’t. He behaved normally the night before, didn’t complain of anything.”

  Ralph tried to imagine this.

  Strictly speaking, Blind wasn’t lying, but the incongruousness in his words was akin to a lie. Ralph was well aware of the connection they had to each other. It cemented them into packs, it drove the Third to the doors of the hospital wing the night Shadow died. Why were they compelled to come there on that day and at that hour, all of them, even the blockheaded Logs? Was it like a bell tolling, a bell that only they could hear? He’d seen them more than once, the hunched figures by the walls of the Sepulcher. They weren’t smoking or talking, they were just there, sitting quietly. It wasn’t exactly a wake, rather a way of participating in what was unfolding in a place where they couldn’t be. Was it possible that they, who could sense death through thick walls, might not sense it in their own room? That they wouldn’t wake up when one of them was dying?

  “He was dying five feet from you and you felt nothing? Nothing was bothering you?”

  “It wasn’t even five feet,” Blind countered. “We wouldn’t have been sleeping if we’d felt anything.”

  “I see,” Ralph said, getting up. “Why do you think I wanted you to come? Anyone from your group could have told me exactly the same thing. If you’re going to insist on continuing this charade, there’s the door right behind you.”

  Blind crouched lower.

  “What should I have said so that it’s not a charade? What would you like to hear?”

  “I would like to hear what you, the Leader, have to say about a member of your pack not waking up one morning. If I am not mistaken, it is your responsibility to make sure they do wake up. Yours and no one else’s.”

  “Strong words,” Blind whispered. “I cannot be responsible for everything that might happen to them.”

  “How about knowing why it happened? Or are you not responsible for that either?”

  Blind did not answer. As soon as Ralph made a motion toward him, Blind’s posture changed, dissolved in a deceptive softness. A familiar trick. Poor little House kids. This is precisely how some of them react to a perceived threat. And this is exactly when one has to be extra vigilant. Blind relaxed, but his eyes, those clear pools stapled to fair skin, froze. Turned into ice. A chilly, snakelike stare. Blind didn’t know how to hide it.