The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  We exchange looks again, smug ones this time.

  Lary scratches his chin and says, “There’s only one thing I don’t understand . . .”

  But what that thing is remains shrouded in mystery. We dutifully wait for about three minutes, but Lary only scratches himself and sighs, so we finally lose interest and return to the daily grind.

  For some completely unknown reason, or for no reason at all, Black chooses this particular day to get drunk. When he appears in the room he’s already made good on this decision, that is, he’s totally plastered, so any objections are completely useless. Different people behave differently when drunk. Black becomes unpleasant. It’s not that he’s a picture of friendliness even when sober, but when he drinks he gets aggressive. So he shuffles around the room in circles, like a Terminator that’s blown a fuse, and tries to pick a fight. He tries and he tries, never quite losing hope, right until the dinner bell. He even continues his pointless efforts at the table, so clumsily it pains me to look at him. His disgusting behavior finds any sympathy only from Smoker. Why—beats me.

  SMOKER

  ON APHIDS AND UNTAMED BULL TERRIERS

  Daily Survival for a Wheeler: A Manual

  Chapter 1

  It is recommended that any mention of the Outsides be completely avoided as a conversation topic, with the exception of situations in which it is being mentioned:

  a. absent any connection to the speaker;

  b. absent any connection to his interlocutor;

  c. absent any connection to their mutual acquaintances.

  Including the Outsides in sentences constructed in present or future tense is discouraged. Past tense is permissible, but not advisable either. Mentioning the Outsides in future tense with respect to the interlocutor constitutes a grave insult to the latter. Two people speaking to each other in those terms are engaging in a kind of perversion, acceptable only between very close packmates.

  —JACKAL’S ADVICE COLUMN, Blume, vol. 7

  “Because you live cooped up here. In an enclosed space. Don’t you see? Completely engrossed in yourselves and in this place, like . . . like chicks still in the shell. I think that’s the source of all your perversions.”

  “Perversions?” Sphinx coughs, and smoke streams from his nostrils and between the teeth. “How’s that?”

  Smoker hesitates.

  “You know . . . that stuff . . .”

  “Elaborate,” Sphinx suggests. “That’s a strong word, perversion. I’d like to understand what you mean by it.”

  Smoker glumly picks at a bead on his sweater. This sweater, in gray and green wool, was knitted for him by Humpback. Around the collar and the sleeves he attached glass balls with black pupils, the kind people use to ward off evil eye.

  “You know,” Smoker says, looking up at Sphinx. “You know perfectly well.”

  “Let’s say I do. Let’s say I just need you to spell it out.”

  Smoker looks away.

  “I meant your games. The Nights, the fairy tales, the fights, the wars . . . I’m sorry, I just can’t see that as something real. So I call it games. Even . . . even when they end badly.”

  “Is this about Pompey again?” Sphinx scowls.

  “Him too. But not only him,” Smoker adds quickly. “It could have been someone else. Well, all right, it is about him. Doesn’t it strike you as over the top—to cut someone down only because he wanted to be the coolest guy here? Here, in this tiny, moldy figment of a world . . . Sphinx, could you please not look at me that way? You know I’m right! No Leadership can possibly be worth this.”

  They are alone in the canteen emptied of people. Chairs pushed away from the tables piled with dirty dishes, tablecloths spattered with sauce and sprinkled with bread crumbs. The door out into the hallway is cracked open.

  Sphinx leans back in his chair.

  “Smoker. Try to understand,” he says, avoiding looking directly into the flushed face of his vis-à-vis. “What for you means nothing can be everything for someone else. Why is that so hard to believe?”

  “Because it’s wrong! You’re too smart to live like this, with your eyes always closed. To believe that the world begins and ends with this particular building.”

  An elderly woman appears in the doors to the kitchen and stares at them, lips pursed. Sphinx stops rocking his chair, brings it closer to the table, and carefully places the cigarette end he was holding between his teeth on the edge of the plate.

  “This is a question of freedom,” he says. “Which can be discussed until forever, breaking only for sleep, tea, and movable feasts. Would you like to do that? Tell me, if you please, who is more free: an elephant stomping across the savanna or an aphid sitting on the leaf of whatever plant they sit on?”

  Smoker is mesmerized by the cigarette expiring sadly on the plate.

  “That’s a silly example. Neither possesses consciousness. I’m talking about people.”

  “An elephant doesn’t? Really?” Sphinx is surprised. “All right. Let’s leave the animal world alone, if you wish. You can put out my cigarette, by the way, if it’s annoying to you. Take a prisoner and a king . . .”

  Smoker winces. “Please! Spare me. You’re not going to try and convince me that the inmate is the one who’s more free? Empty words. Do you really want to identify with a prisoner? Or an aphid?”

  “I am simply trying to explain . . .” Sphinx looks past Smoker at the kitchen door. The washing lady just came out, resolutely pushing a wheeled cart in front of her. “But I see that I’m talking in a vacuum. You’re not listening. Everyone chooses his own House. It is we who make it interesting or dull, and only then does it start working trying to change us. You can choose to agree with me or disagree. It really is your choice.”

  “I can choose nothing,” Smoker fumes. “It was all chosen for me. Even before I took the first step inside. They chose the group, and that automatically made me a Pheasant. No one had asked my opinion. And if I were to go to the Second, I’d have no choice but to conform to the Rats’ ways. To the idiotic image that they chose for themselves without me and long before me. Is that your idea of freedom?”

  “But you didn’t make a good Pheasant, did you?”

  “I sure tried!”

  “Not hard enough, or you would’ve been one by now. You decided not to. Made your choice.”

  “While we’re at it, it’s as much your fault that I didn’t as it’s mine,” Smoker says hotly. “You ruined my reputation!”

  Sphinx laughs. “Is that regret I hear?”

  “Well, no . . .” Smoker accidentally dunks his sleeve into the plate still holding the remains of dinner and pushes it away gingerly. “I don’t regret that. But after all that happened, you should be the last to lecture me about freedom of choice,” he concludes feebly, rubbing the napkin over the sleeve.

  Sphinx watches him with interest. “Look. You’re not in the First now, and not in the Second. What’s eating you? What kind of role do you think you’re being forced to play?”

  “Of someone exactly like all the rest of you.”

  “You don’t mean we’re all exactly alike?”

  Smoker throws away the crumpled napkin.

  “You don’t even see it. You don’t realize how similar you are. You’re so alike it’s scary!”

  Sphinx looks at him in mock surprise.

  “We are? You don’t say. Silly me, thinking that there’s very little in common between me and Black. So little that it’s making communication between us almost impossible. And I also notice that for some reason you decided to adopt his views regarding everything that’s around us. So it’s becoming more and more difficult for me to communicate with you as well.”

  Smoker smiles.

  “I see. A dressing-down for consorting with the black sheep.”

  “Who’s black sheep?” Sphinx says, amazed. “You can’t mean Black, surely?”

  “Exactly. The only one not sharing your own view. An undesirable.”

  Sphinx laugh
s merrily. “Black? Very funny. There’s only one question where he deviates from the majority, and that’s the question of his own stature.”

  “I can always talk to him about the Outsides,” Smoker counters. “To him, but to no one else.”

  “True,” Sphinx says. “Of course he needs his own shtick. And if it happens to get on everyone’s nerves, so much the better. But don’t get suckered in. He’s been here since age six. The Outsides for him is just as much of a fiction as it is for Blind. He’s only ever read about it in books. Or seen it in the movies.”

  “But at least he’s not afraid of it.”

  “Is that what he told you?” Sphinx gets up. “All right. Let’s stop it here. If you could, for a moment, get unstuck from feeling tragically misunderstood, you might have some time left to understand others. If you could limit your exposure to Black it would do you a world of good. If this stern woman weren’t approaching our table right now with such grim determination I could have enlightened you some more. If this door did not lead out into the corridor it would lead somewhere else . . .”

  He goes to the door, pushes it with his shoulder, and goes out without looking back.

  Smoker, distraught, wheels after him.

  Black said: “Try talking to him seriously. You’ll see him start hemming and hawing. You just haven’t had a chance to observe it. I have.”

  Smoker scans the corridor for signs of Sphinx, but he’s already lost in the sea of people walking and wheeling the other way.

  Was he hemming? Hawing? The sleepless night stings his eyelids, the countless cigarettes scratch at his throat.

  Sphinx walks quickly. At the entrance to the hallway he stops and lets his eyes find the familiar whitish spot on the floorboards.

  You should have seen it, Smoker. Seen what they had wrought when their time came. If you’d have seen that, then for the rest of your life you would’ve kept your mouth shut about the Outsides, about open and closed doors, about chicks in their shells. If only you could have seen.

  “Young man!” the bitter woman in an apron calls after Smoker. “I would thank you not to smoke in the canteen ever again. And give me your name. I shall have to report you to the principal.”

  Smoker turns around.

  The hag is holding a tiny cigarette butt between her finger and thumb. Left there by Sphinx. Smoker regards it closely. Did she wait on purpose until I was out here, to have an opportunity to yell at me in front of the entire House? The headache comes on suddenly, gripping his head in a vise.

  “Your name!” the narrow, slit-like mouth demands again.

  “Raskolnikov!” Smoker shouts back.

  The woman nods, satisfied, and disappears behind the door to the canteen. Smoker continues on his way, wondering whether she would have dared to threaten Sphinx in this fashion. And why nothing had been said about this in all the time the two of them were sitting inside.

  When he passes the Coffeepot, where Logs sway amid the clouds of smoke, he sees Lary waving at him from his perch at the bar and wheels in.

  “What’s with staying back in the canteen? Secret talks?”

  Horse picks his ear with a sharply filed fingernail.

  “Lary, tell me, who’s more free, an elephant stomping across the savanna or an aphid sitting on the leaf of whatever plant?”

  Lary scratches his chest under the numerous crosses, nuts, and bolts hanging on it.

  “How should I know, Smoker? I guess that would be the eagle who’s flitting about over all of that. Why?”

  “Eagles don’t flit,” Bubble from the Third jumps in. “They soar. They plow the sky. They own it and have it in all possible respects.”

  “Idiot,” Lary spits back. “Never talk about things you don’t understand. It’s the ships that plow the oceans. And plows plow the earth.”

  Black-vested Logs sigh in unison.

  Smoker continues along the hallway. He sees a poster, bordered in black: In loving memory of Ard. Ghoul, our dearly departed brother. Memorial service for the deceased. Classroom 1. Poems, songs, dedications. Everyone who knew and loved him is invited to join the First on the 28th of this month at 18:00 hours.

  Smoker recalls the sallow face with protruding horselike teeth, and the interminable harangues on the dangers of smoking and the attending illnesses tied to this nasty habit. Who knew and loved him . . . What about those who knew and hated him?

  The piggy little visage of Pheasant Sticks peeks from behind the poster.

  “Are you coming?” it says. “You especially are invited.”

  Sticks is holding the poster up by means of two wooden handles. It’s made of heavy-gauge cardboard, too heavy for him, but he’s so proud of the task entrusted to him he’s positively glowing.

  “As someone who knew him. Even though you’re in that other group now. You should come.”

  Smoker can’t restrain himself in time.

  “Isn’t that supposed to be ‘drive,’ not ‘come’?”

  Sticks’s face contorts in a grimace.

  “You’re a mean one. Good thing they threw you out.”

  He yelps and lets go of the poster. Then leans over, grabs one of its ends, and quickly wheels off. The flapping end rattles against the floorboards.

  Smoker regards his fist thoughtfully. The knuckles are skinned in one place. He licks the raw pink spot.

  What is it to which the person in question is trying to draw attention? It would seem that it is just his footwear . . . advertising his handicap, putting it in everyone’s face. Therefore he is accentuating our common unfortunate condition . . .

  Smoker starts laughing. Very softly.

  Tiny spots everywhere, aphids spread over the leaves, the leaves are covered with multitudes of aphids, the leaves, the trees, the forests.

  He laughs. He drives along.

  You should come. How should you come? Go on wheels, but never mention it.

  A MESSAGE, the wall cautions. Smoker stops to read it.

  BOYS, DON’T BELIEVE THE TALK ABOUT THERE BEING NO TREES OR PINECONES IN HEAVEN. DON’T BELIEVE IT’S ONLY CLOUDS UP THERE. BELIEVE WHAT I TELL YOU. FOR I AM AN ANCIENT BIRD, AND MY BABY TEETH FELL OUT SO LONG AGO I CAN NO LONGER REMEMBER THEIR TASTE.

  ALWAYS WITH YOU IN MY THOUGHTS. YOUR DADDY VULTURE.

  Trees. Pinecones. An old bird with teeth. Looks more like a pterodactyl.

  By the time he wheels into the dorm, Smoker is hooting hysterically.

  “That’s no leaf!” he shouts at Sphinx. “And no savanna either! Aphids, elephants, and toothy pterodactyls! What kind of savanna would hold all of that together, huh?”

  Sphinx stares. Smoker is extracted from the wheelchair and deposited on the bed. His laughter gradually becomes more subdued. Then he just lies there looking at the ceiling. A wet rag plops on top of his forehead. It smells of spilled coffee. I think they wiped the table with this thing before putting it on me.

  “Smoker, what’s wrong?”

  He’s silent. Sniffing at the rag.

  “That’s just the autumn blues. It’ll pass.”

  “Or it won’t.”

  “The siren call of home,” Jackal sighs. “He misses his birthingplace. Wait, that can’t be the right word.”

  “He’s just realized that he’s the dregs of society,” Humpback proclaims thoughtfully. “It was a flash of lightning illuminating his entire existence. Zap! And down he goes.”

  “Are you doing this on purpose?” Smoker says. “So that I’d have to throw up?”

  The rag slithers down to his nose.

  Blind noodles on the guitar, his hair touching the strings.

  “Boys, don’t believe the talk,” Tabaqui and Sphinx sing in unison.

  “There being no trees or pinecones,” Humpback’s voice carries upward to the ceiling, clear and precise.

  “In Heave-e-e-e-n!”

  Smoker closes his eyes.

  The bed groans under the bulk of Black, who just lowered himself on it. His face is of a more livid hue than usual
, and his breath is heavy. He’s drunk. This makes Smoker nervous.

  “Was I right or was I right?” Black says.

  Smoker sits up.

  “Don’t know,” he says. “Can’t say.”

  “Right about what?” Jackal inquires. “Who was right and about what?”

  Black turns to face Sphinx.

  “I bet you talked for a long time, but then it turned out he never said anything. He’s good at that. Flapping his gums for hours, and then you can’t remember a single word for the life of you.”

  Smoker lies down again. He’s hoping that if he manages to lie absolutely still, his head will stop aching. Humpback comes closer and shakes an enormous striped knit stocking at him.

  “Hey, Smoker. This is where the Christmas presents are going. What would you like? Make up your mind in advance, in case we need to order something from Flyers.”

  “A working pair of legs,” Black responds for Smoker. “That’s what he really needs. Is it going to fit in your festive sack?”

  Humpback blinks glumly.

  “No,” he says. “It won’t.”

  And walks away.

  Smoker feels embarrassed. Everyone is looking at him. At him and Black. Not exactly with disapproval, but with a kind of weary resignation, as if they have worn out their welcome. Both of them. And even though what Black just did was the exact same thing Smoker himself had done to Sticks, he’s still uneasy. He wants to distance himself from it somehow.

  “Black. Please don’t,” he says.

  “I don’t give a crap about all those rules and manners,” Black says, his tone of voice indicating clearly that he’s over the edge. “All those taboos. Don’t say this, don’t mention that. I’m going to talk about whatever I want to talk about, got that? This is the last year for all these ostriches with their stupid heads in the sand. They only have six more months to keep it down there, but look at them, Smoker. Just look at the way they lose their collective shit anytime anyone tries to say anything about it!”