The door of the Third opens and lets out Guppy.
“Hey,” he says. “Where do I put the stepladder?”
I show him. They bring the ladder. Guppy huffs and puffs and clanks its metallic parts, while Beauty mostly bumps into its legs. He’s not much help, in short. Bubble, in pajamas and yawning, drags himself out as well.
“Damn Logs all bolted. Celebrating some crap or other,” he whines. “Now we’re supposed to lug this. It’s heavy, and here we are with our health condition.”
“Daddy’s orders are Daddy’s orders,” Dearest says. He also has on pajamas, but is holding a suspicious-looking bottle under his arm.
“How about a swig in honor of the new Law?” he offers as he wheels closer. “Everyone’s so happy, wouldn’t do for us not to join in.”
So while they install the stepladder, we drink some homebrew junk, made by him personally.
“Now give me a hand up,” I say.
Two more stumble out to look at them lifting me up. Bubble worries that I’m going to fall. Angel worries that I’m going to throw up right on Vulture’s stepladder. At the top I can see much more clearly how dirty and spider-infested the ceiling is. The wall is dark and dirty as well. I take care of insulation—spreading Guppy’s blanket under me. The top step is tiny, I have to keep the paint can balanced on my knees. To go tumbling from here, hitting all the steps on the way down, is a scary thought.
I sigh quietly, wave to the Bird throng below, and start drawing. Just as I expected, they soon grow tired of craning their necks trying to decipher my scribbles and freezing their tails off in the process, and slowly drift away. My head is spinning from the vile hooch Dearest calls tequila. What I’m drawing is the outline of a dragon standing on its hind legs. It is coming out strange: a bit like a horse and a bit like a dog. I would have done better in a more convenient spot, but this’ll have to do. I give it teeth and sharp talons on the front paws. Talons are important. Once it becomes obvious that it’s a dragon I’m looking at, I crack open the can and fill it in.
Gunk, hair, and assorted debris that drowned in the can long ago—my poor dragon is now covered in all of this. When the white brush follows its jagged spine, my hand starts shaking. Time and I, we’re not exactly on the best terms, but it appears I may pull it off, even though it’s too early to tell for sure. I can’t sit here and wait until the dragon dries completely. With the pocket knife I start gouging out a hole for the eye.
This is hellishly difficult. The hole is almost ready, and then the can suddenly jumps off my knees and disappears below. Awful racket. It rolls around down there for a while, then finally gets stuck, and I’m still busy with the eye. The hole is already quite deep. I probe it with my finger. Now for the lilies. I scratch them into the wet surface of my dragon with the tip of the knife, the crude fleurs-de-lis, all over. Once I’m done, the dragon is no longer just any dragon, it’s Noble, because lily equals Noble if you want to draw him quickly and recognizably. I sign my work.
By the time the lights go out I’m almost finished. I rummage in my pocket for the magical stone the color of Noble’s eyes. The dragon, the ceiling, me—we all disappear in the darkness. I’m not scared. I take out the flashlight, point it at the eye socket, and insert the stone. It’s holding. It fits, or maybe just sticks to the wet paint.
I fulfill my dream. Here it is—the ghost dragon, covered in lilies and with Noble’s eye. It’s running with the talons pointing at our room. That means return. Maybe something else as well, I have no idea. My job was just to put it here. I switch off the flashlight and sit there in the dark. I’m all sticky; probably covered with paint.
I don’t know how much time passes before there’s stomping, flashlighting, and cooing from below.
“Coo-ee yourselves,” I say. “I’m up here. Could you maybe have waited until morning? My rotting carcass would have been so glad to see you.”
“Pipe down,” Sphinx says. “It’s no one else’s fault if you decided to spend the night on this idiotic contraption.”
“He-ey!” comes in Vulture’s drunken voice. “I would thank you for not dumping on my princely perch!”
They point flashlights at me and giggle. Then someone trips over the can and steps in the paint. Now I’m the one giggling.
“Damn!” Humpback yells. “There’s shit all over the floor! He was making a trap for innocent passersby. Using bird crap!”
They finally take me off the ladder and carry me away. The actual carrying falls to Alexander, and everybody else just stumbles along, waving flashlights and singing.
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s being the only sober member of a drunk crowd. But by now it’s useless for me to try and catch up with them. Not even with the help of Dearest’s tequila.
They carry me inside and file in. Humpback is bringing up the rear, whistling into a flute. The dorm is so trashed it’s scary. The nightlights leave a trail on the ceiling. Alexander puts me on the bed, and the rest keep circling the room in a conga line. Must be looking for dungeons and caverns.
Nanette is sleeping splayed out on the sandwich plate. I take her off, grab the last remaining sandwich, and eat it. The rest of the plates are empty. My favorite place is occupied by Elephant, fast asleep, clutching some kind of red ball. On closer inspection it proves to be our Chinese lantern.
Red and Blind are waltzing, but mostly walking into furniture. Humpback is trying to tootle on the flute in time with them. Blind is counting off loudly: “A-one-two-three . . . One-two-three . . . One . . .” Each standalone “one” makes them freeze in place. Humpback then bumps into them and freezes too.
“To the girls,” Vulture proclaims, sniffing at his glass thoughtfully.
Who knows what he can be sniffing there. Anything liquid within reach has already been gobbled up. I set to gnawing on the remains of the sandwich. In this crotchety state I disgust even myself.
Sphinx plops down next to me, winks, and imparts, “A dragon be a mythical beast . . . While a white dragon, doubly so, because in addition to all of its other qualities it is also an albino, that is, an anomaly even among its own kind.”
“You noticed,” I marvel at him. “Managed to see! In total darkness!”
“I notice everything. Besides, it’s not like you climbed all the way up there just to give the ceiling a fresh coat of paint.”
Then we sit and watch the others gradually switch off. Someone’s singing from the direction of the window. Loudly and out of tune.
“Whose is this?” I ask, lifting an unfamiliar prosthetic by the strap. “I didn’t know we had anyone else of that sort here.”
“It’s a joke,” Sphinx says darkly. “A funny, merry joke. Humor among thieves, you might say.”
I decide not to pursue this and instead busy myself with going to sleep. Feeling worn out, grimy, and elderly, but also like someone who has responsibly carried out his duty. Also cold. As soon as I manage to get warm and cozy and finally drift off, I’m immediately woken up by Black. He’s rattling the coffeepot against the bars of the bed and reading Kipling aloud. Some of those not yet asleep try to get him to pipe down, while the rest are having some kind of scholarly argument. I don’t want to sort through the details, and I fall back asleep.
The second time it’s a hyena’s laugh that wakes me up. It trails off into sobs. Everyone except the hyena is fast asleep, and even the lights are out.
The third time I startle at dawn, who knows why. The party’s over. The gray morning slithers in through the windowpanes. Insensate bodies stacked haphazardly, snoring. All is still and quiet, except for the barely audible ticking. That’s the bitch that woke me up. I seek it by ear, by smell, I home in on it. It’s a watch, lurking in the folds of the blanket. I lean over the edge of the bed, grasp for an empty bottle, place the watch on the floor, and smash it, using the bottom of the bottle as a hammer. It takes but a moment, and the ticking stops.
Black, asleep on the floor, raises his head and stares at me dazedly. Then fall
s back down. I drop someone’s sweater on him and crawl back into my paint-smelling burrow.
THE CONFESSION OF THE SCARLET DRAGON
“You sin, you pay.”
This had been pounded into me by Gramps, my crazy grandfather. I hope he burns in hell right now, because if such a place really exists he and those like him must end up in it. I cursed him with all the curses known to me, and they wore him down eventually. Very slowly, because he knew how to fight these things; besides, we were of one blood, he and I, so I received a portion of my own curses on the rebound. Let him burn, like a gas burner burns, heating up everything around him, as he never gave me even a smidgen of warmth.
The white plaque on the wall, letters of some unknown alphabet, four dozen shaved heads; whispered prayers and incantations. “. . . use the lemon juice, goddamn it, rub them until your arms fall off, because whoever saw an angel covered in freckles from head to toe? There ain’t no such thing! You must of done it just to spite me!” So—never a single ray of light, always the dusk of the curtained rooms. Maybe they really did appear in the most visible places to spite him, covering the skin that never saw the sun, the skin rubbed raw with lemon juice. White toga smelling of lemons, a withered wreath of chamomiles with white centers. And the constant “Give us a miracle, reveal it to us!” Miracles that weren’t, and painted nails, and colored lenses that made the eyes water. But “Fuck it, it ain’t no angel if he’s not blue eyed!” He swore like a sailor as soon as he was out of earshot of his beloved brethren, his “sons and daughters.” The sanctimonious piety went straight into the trash when the last of them disappeared behind the door, and the monstrous dwarf sat down to his three-course fish dinner. Wreath hanging askew, thin fish bones extracted from the depths of the munching orifice. He had no use for napkins. Never. “They are an extravagance, unbecoming of the godly, you hear me, O winged one?” Also unbecoming of him was cutlery. And unbecoming of me—a table, a chair, and even “Angels don’t eat, ha-ha, they are satiated by Holy Spirit!” Angels. Are curses becoming of them? Of course not. They discharge in your own body, pure sizzling electricity filling out every last hair instead of arcing to the one they were directed at. And then one day, a simple enchanted fish bone that’s done its job. That was the first real miracle I wrought: to pass from MY FATHER’S HOUSE, in capital letters, to a house. It could even be called my mother’s, if only I ever had the slightest inclination to call it that. Exchanging house for house and Angel for Moron, because “He can’t even read, the retard!” And “What have we done to deserve this?” They didn’t need any miracles at all. Miracles scared them. Except those they saw on the Tube. It was their god, even though they didn’t bow before it or whisper prayers to it, just stared at it through the clear lenses of their glasses, but the effect was still the same both here and there, the only difference being that there I at least had been useful for something.
The papers wrote about the old swindler who’d managed to enchant scores of people. The Tube proclaimed it, so it must have been true. It was not true: he was just a dirty old man who lost his mind. But the Tube never lies, it is beyond suspicion, so they took me to the god’s house, to rinse the traces of Gramps’s sins out of me with holy water. They washed me and christened me, but still the letters kept coming, and the crazies with shaved heads kept stalking me and falling headfirst onto the pavement, grabbing me not by the hem of the toga, as before, but by the bottom of my sweater or coat pockets, tearing them clean off, and “Oh god, I am so tired of this! The coat was brand new! It cost us a fortune! We should not let him out of the house. Disgrace for the entire family!” So—curtains drawn again, lights always on, the Tube humming constantly, the shaved heads stumbling around outside the house, sniffing the walls, scratching at them, seeking the angel that became a kind of addiction for them. Therefore, what they were seeking had to be removed. Didn’t matter where to, otherwise it was simply dangerous; after all, “they urinate down by the elevator, the neighbors are furious, and that incessant knocking in the night, and the phone calls, intolerable, simply intolerable!” And so, my mother’s house exchanged for the House. This exchange followed a prayer. The only genuine one out of thousands. The only one where I asked something for myself. I wasn’t even sure what exactly it was I asked. But it was answered, or it just might have been a coincidence, even though I happen to know that there are no coincidences, and I entered Gray House. The place that existed for me and those like me. Those not needed or, if they are, needed for all the wrong reasons.
Once I saw it, I immediately understood that this was it, the thing I’d been asking for. The writing was on the wall. Literally. It read: WELCOME, ALL YOU ABORTED, YOU PREEMIES AND POSTIES! ALL YOU DROPPED, THROWN OUT, FLIGHTLESS! WELCOME, CHILDREN OF THE WEEDS! I knew how to read, even though those in the mother’s house claimed otherwise. I entered, believing that I was given according to my prayer. Entered as Alexander, shedding both the Angel and the Moron, both of them forever, because “If you want to stay with us, there are going to be no miracles. None, you hear? Not bad ones, not good ones, and not even indifferent ones.” I said yes and, under the all-seeing gaze of those green eyes, became Alexander, as far from The Great as could be, the eternal shadow, the ever-ready pair of hands. I tried. I really tried, even though saying yes was much easier than always remembering that I had. The gray walls of the House talked to me through the graffiti: “Tired of being a slave yet, freckle-face?” No, I wasn’t, not at all, it was not slavery; besides, what do you know about being a slave? You just know the word, and you have this picture of a black man picking cotton. Uncle Tom, Uncle Sam, whatever. Have you ever seen those with shaved heads being led by the invisible rings in their noses? Have you ever heard about an angel in chains? Are you familiar with lemon-scented mornings, with chanting at dawn? Or the miracle of the exploding Prophet of the Holy Tube? Or the cat that decided to taste freedom, the least miracle in God’s quiver of miracles; I did not enchant it, however much everyone was sure that I did, it was simply a miracle, given to it not by me but through me . . .
Every house has its rules that must not be broken. Every house has its three-headed dog keeping order. Gramps; Mother; Sphinx. They all hemmed me in with proscriptions, installed barriers keeping me from myself, but only one of those worked, the one put up by Sphinx. Because that’s what I wanted. Sphinx is not to blame here. He hadn’t brought me into this world or sold me to insane relatives, and he never robbed me of my childhood or starved me half to death. All he did was give me this one rule, and he never demanded anything else. And . . . After all, it was I who wished for peace and quiet, for the new life as one of many, it was I who uttered the prayer that transported me to the House. That’s why it was not slavery. Of my other houses I talked only to Sphinx. He was the only one who knew everything. He was the invisible thread tying me to the previous lives, and at the same time teaching me to live this new one. He was not afraid of me at all—I would know, I have long learned to distinguish the fear hidden in the thin shells of human faces. Why him? I have no idea. It just happened. He did remind me of the shaved heads at first. But all he had in common with them was the bare skull. I’d never ever seen that doglike expression in his eyes. “Find your own skin, Alexander, find your own mask, talk about something, do something, never stop, you must be there every moment, people must feel you. Got it? Or you’ll disappear.” Talk about what? Do what? Where to go seeking masks I’ve never worn, for words I’ve never known? He yelled at me, then calmed down. “All right, whatever. Forget it. If you can’t think about anything, don’t. After all, that’s also a kind of mask. But when your body is present in this room, you have to be as well. Be present and busy, always, unless you want to be stared at or drawn into discussions.” And . . . Day and night, cigarette butts swept into the hand, a wet rag over the clumps of dust, a sponge over the coffee stains, a spoon into the waiting mouth, and always the eyes, more piercing than Gramps’s. Don’t look into them, never look into them. Forbidden. Taboo. And “Al
, air out the room,” “Get me the pants,” “Help me into that stupid shirt,” “Bring over the wheelchair.” Splinters in the fingers, always wet, aching, bleached white by the detergent. Scrapes. Fingernails, weeping. And “Look at this guy, he’s switched off again. Hey, Alexander, what’s that you’re thinking about?” “The Conqueror’s head has left the building. Give him the mop, that’ll bring him back.” “He’s a card, that Alexander character. All he ever wants is housework.” The House walls, the House Laws, its memories, its fights, its games, its tales—that’s all well and good, calm and soothing, if it were not for the fear that’s always nearby, that only can be pushed away for a short while, very short, because sooner or later it returns, bristling with even more sharp spikes than before. It’s the fear of the inevitable end to all this, the public flaying of the new, freshly grown skin. The fear of long-legged Sphinx carrying the secret of the real me. He who has power over someone surely would wield it?
“Are you afraid of me, Alexander?”
The green eyes leave smoking holes in me. I cringe. I shout back, “Yes! Yes! I am afraid! So? Wouldn’t you be, in my place?”
“If I could be both you and myself at the same time, no, I wouldn’t. And you don’t have to either. Trust me, I want nothing from you.”
It was the truth, but I could not allow myself to believe it. He was taming me, quietly, step by step, and I didn’t realize it. He made me read and then discuss books with him. Listen to music and talk about it. Make up ridiculous stories and tell them to him. First to him only, then to others. He squeezed the fear out of me and made me trust him. I was happy, and not afraid of his eyes anymore. Not afraid of anything anymore, even though the oath was not lifted from me, I had to remember that. But I was too warm and cozy, it melted me, the warmth that he was giving me, gifting me, making up for everyone who’d withheld it from me before. The warmth I was receiving from all of them, receiving and giving back. I forgot. I never should have done that. My hands acted by themselves, quietly stealing their pain. I carried it, burning hot, and washed it off under the tap. It floated away down the drains, my legs were shaking, I was tired and empty; it was so beautiful, and it was not a miracle at all, honest, so I never broke my promise. That’s what I thought then. A new world assembled itself around me, resplendent in golden sunrises and furious sunsets, I jumped up from the bed before everyone else and ran out barefoot into the hallway, to seize the most beautiful hour, to knead the dust with my feet, to feel my body, my running legs. I turned on a lukewarm shower and sang—both ancient hymns and the songs I’d learned recently, scaring the cockroaches, splashing in puddles. That was what I was. Alexander covered in freckles, Alexander pale and thin, Alexander unknown to anyone, Alexander who gnaws at his fingernails, Alexander who needs to eat more, Alexander with his buck teeth, Alexander who’s going to be sixteen soon, who has the entire world and eight friends, who is happy.
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