The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  “Yes, I’m a Jumper. Why?”

  Ralph is stunned. He looks at me with his mouth hanging open, searching for words.

  “You sound very calm about it.”

  “I am not calm,” I say. “I’m nervous. I’m just not showing it.”

  “But other . . . ,” he stumbles and continues, “people like you never talk about it.”

  “Because I’m a bad Jumper. Defective.”

  Ralph freezes, his eyes glinting hungrily. He thinks he’s found something incredibly valuable while rummaging in a dumpster, and can’t quite believe his luck.

  “Bad, what’s that mean?”

  That’s when I realize that I probably need this conversation even more than he does. Because no one ever asks you about obvious things. Or things that seem obvious.

  I lean back and close my eyes. The sun is directly in my face. A good excuse for not looking at the person you’re talking to.

  “I don’t like it.”

  I don’t need to look at him to see how surprised he is, and I answer his next question before he gets it out.

  “I don’t Jump. You don’t have to do something only because you can. And you don’t have to like doing it either.”

  I open my eyes and see him not even breathing, as if his breath might somehow spook me.

  “It happened to me on that very morning,” I say. “For the first time, and for six years. When I woke up and they brought me a mirror, it wasn’t that I got scared of my bald head, as everyone assumed. I was scared to see a little boy there. Because I was no longer him. If you can imagine that, you’ll understand why I haven’t Jumped since then.”

  “Are you saying that ever since that time . . .”

  “Yes, ever since that time. I haven’t and I’m not planning to. Unless it happens by itself. A nervous shock, a sudden fright. That kind of thing leads to Jumping sometimes. Isn’t it the same with you?”

  “I’ve never . . . ,” he begins.

  “Of course you have. You just forgot. People forget it very quickly.”

  There we go. Now he’s choking. And I’m not handy with the taps on the back. It’s very hard to gauge the strength of a slap with prosthetics. This ruins many friendly gestures for me. I pull my legs up on the bench, put my chin on my knee, and watch him coughing spasmodically. A child playing with matches. Makes a fire, imitating his daddy lighting them, and then is honestly surprised when real firemen show up in a real fire truck. You’d think he had those books when he was a kid where this causal relationship was featured in big letters, short words, and colorful pictures.

  “And now you’d like to go away,” I say to him. “Or at least for me to stop talking. Everyone gets that, so don’t worry.”

  Ralph is hunched over, fingers buried deep in his hair. I can’t see his face, but the posture tells me that he’s not feeling too good.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he says. “And I would like you to continue.”

  Resilient, isn’t he?

  “Too bad,” I say. “I like this conversation less and less the longer it goes on. Besides, I’m waiting for my date.”

  He doesn’t believe me. I lean back again and close my eyes.

  We banged the hell out of that door. We almost smashed it to splinters. If they hadn’t let us out I’m sure we would have. Because by morning nothing was holding us back anymore. We had sat there through the night, docile and patient, respecting the will of the seniors and their big reasons. We knew we were too little to be taking part in the proceedings. The snub made us want to cry, but we held on. That night wasn’t the last for us, but it was for the seniors. It belonged to them. We spent it on two mattresses on the floor of the biology classroom. They had remembered to bring in the mattresses. And a bucket.

  “There were fourteen, fifteen of us,” I say to Ralph. “They hadn’t given us time to dress or put on shoes. Siamese, Stinker, and Wolf they took away separately. Must have figured that a mere locked door never would have stopped those guys. And no one had been able to locate Blind. He’d disappeared before they came. The only one of us who hadn’t been locked up that night. The pajamas we were in, Magician’s crutch, and a pack of candies were all we had. We’d gone through the entire pack in the first half hour, and the crutch we used in the morning to bash the door. We threw everything at that door trying to break it, because by then it was obvious that they’d forgotten about us being there, and that we could only rely on ourselves if we ever wanted to get out.”

  The unpleasant memories make Ralph cringe. He was there too. Most likely he was among those who did come to let us out. They tried to corral us, but it would have been easier to hold on to fourteen streaking meteors. We swept away our saviors and tore down the hallway, screaming hoarsely. Some of us were already bawling, even as we ran. Simply because we were scared. We did not yet know what had happened. Where it was we were in such a hurry to get to, I still cannot understand. But I remember well what did manage to stop us. The puddle. A small pool, richly crimson, right at the Crossroads. And in the middle of it, a half-submerged white sail. A handkerchief. It still comes to me in my dreams. Was that puddle really as boundless as it seemed to us then? Anyway, it made one thing absolutely clear: no one could lose that much blood and live. I looked at it, transfixed, and all the time I was being jostled from behind by those who kept arriving. They shoved me in the back, forcing me to take tiny steps in its direction. A step, then another, and another. Until I realized that my socks were soaked through. I don’t remember anything after that.

  After six long years I returned and finally learned what had come to pass that night. But it forever remained for me something remote, out of the distant past. I hadn’t lived through it with the others. One of the most horrible nights of the House begins and ends for me with the crimson puddle, the half-submerged sail of the handkerchief, and my own cold and sticky socks.

  When I awoke, after six years by my time and a month for everyone else, I saw a strange creature in the mirror. Bald, scrawny, much too young, staring wildly . . . I realized that I was going to have to start my life all over again. And cried. Because I was tired, not because I had no hair. “An unknown virus,” they explained. “You are most likely no longer contagious, but we’d like to keep you quarantined for just a while.” The days spent in the quarantine saved me. Gave me time to adapt. To get rid of some of my grown-up habits, to get used to the new skin. The Sepulcher staff dubbed me Prince Tut. The transformation from Prince Tut to Sphinx took me another six months.

  Ralph is silent. An eternity passes.

  “Curious,” he says. “There was blood everywhere. The floor, the walls. Even the ceiling, I think. But your memory only managed to hold one single puddle.”

  “Oh, it was enough,” I assure him. “More than enough. My puddle contains the whole of that Night, and all of the days that followed.”

  “And then . . .”

  “And then nothing. I’m not telling. It’s irrelevant.”

  He sighs and pulls out the cigarettes again.

  “All right. Anyway, thank you. You are the first to talk to me about these things at all. The first in thirteen years. I probably shouldn’t be asking you any further?”

  “You shouldn’t. The less talking about . . . these things, the better.”

  “Are you trying to scare me?”

  “I am,” I say. “Trying, that is. But you are too headstrong to get properly scared. That’s not good. The House demands a reverent attitude. A sense of mystery. Respect and awe. It can accept you or not, shower you with gifts or rob you of everything you have, immerse you in a fairy tale or a nightmare. Kill you, make you old, give you wings . . . It’s a powerful and fickle deity, and if there’s one thing it can’t stand, it’s being reduced to mere words. For that it exacts payment. Now, with you duly cautioned, we can continue.”

  “Risking . . . what?” he asks carefully.

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better than mine. You know much more than you think.
”

  That seems to annoy him.

  “Would you stop playing with words!”

  Silly man.

  “Oh, I don’t think you’ve ever heard real wordplay,” I say. “There are grand masters in the House. I am not worthy of being in the same room with them.”

  That’s when Mermaid finally appears. Comes down from the girls’ porch and shuffles across the yard toward us. Flared jeans, crocheted vest, and impossible hair, almost down to her knees.

  Ralph squints. Looks at her. Then at me. It’s an odd look. One I’m very familiar with. Mermaid is sixteen, but she looks all of twelve. With her looks you’d expect her to still play with dolls and believe in Santa Claus. Which is why any adult who sees me and her together looks at me as if I’m a pervert. It rubs Mermaid the wrong way. It doesn’t bother me.

  She stops a fair distance from us, not wanting to interrupt. Just stands there looking at us. Those aren’t the eyes of a child at all. They’re too big for her small triangular face.

  Ralph gets up. Gives his pockets a few slaps, checking that everything’s still in place. Has the good sense not to say “So, that’s your date, huh?” Mermaid lip-reads phrases like that from very far away.

  “I guess that’s it, then,” he says. “Thanks again. I’ll go and digest what you said.”

  “Good luck,” I say. “And be careful. We can walk in circles around those mysteries, write poems and sing songs, call ourselves Jumpers or Striders, but we’re not the ones who decide here. It’s all being decided for us, however scary that sounds.”

  Ralph is reluctant to go, aware that we are unlikely to ever return to this conversation.

  “You be careful too,” he says finally, and walks away.

  When he passes Mermaid he nods to her and says something. Then cuts straight across the grass, and the hunched crows jump away, grumbling about the violation of their personal space. Humans made the pavement, they should keep to it.

  Mermaid runs over and plops down on the bench next to me.

  “Wow. Why is it I’m so afraid of him? He’s harmless!”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t laugh.” She frowns. “Yes, I know it sounds silly, but you should have heard the stories they tell about him.”

  Mermaid dives into her thoughts, then shakes her head resolutely.

  “Yes, it is silly. He’s nice.”

  I laugh.

  “He said hello to me and didn’t call me baby, imagine that.”

  My imaginary hat is off to Ralph.

  “What were you discussing for so long? I thought he’d never leave.”

  “It’s a secret,” I say. “A sinister mystery. Go, tell that to those who were spying on us from the windows.”

  “Sure, I’m so gone,” she snorts. “They can’t wait. Already waving messages to me in code and preparing the recording equipment.”

  She shifts closer to me, completely unconcerned that she won’t be learning the details of my conversation with Ralph, and begins wrapping my leg in her hair. Wrapping and tying each strand with knots.

  “That’s new. Some kind of sorcery?” I say. “It’s not like I was going anywhere.”

  “Tabaqui gave me this book,” Mermaid explains. “Very interesting. It’s called Kama Sutra.”

  “Oh boy,” I sigh.

  “Says there that to attract your beloved you need to bind him with fragrant hair, adorn him with flower garlands, and wreathe him in clouds of incense. It’s all described very convincingly. Oh, right, and also anoint him with aromatic oils.”

  “You don’t say. What does it recommend to do with the oily bodies of the suffocated beloveds, still wrapped in hair and garlands? Put them out on the porch to serve as a warning to passersby?”

  “Nothing.” Mermaid shakes her head as she ties the knot on another loop under my knee. “It does not mention those weaklings at all.”

  Then we just sit on the bench, or rather lie on it. Quite likely in accordance with the wisdom of ancient texts regarding the appropriate behavior for lovers. The oak shuffles from root to root and shifts so that we end up in its shadow. Of course, it might just be the sun moving in the sky. But I prefer to think it’s the oak.

  I fall asleep, for real this time. Mermaid’s presence, her hugging my knee—it acts like a sleeping pill. She has this catlike ability to induce calm and drowsiness, and also to sleep herself in the most uncomfortable places. If only I had fingers I could have conjured sparks out of her hair, the kind cats give off when someone strokes their fur. I sleep and not sleep at the same time. I am on the bench here and now but everything else moves away—the writing on the bark, the conversation with Ralph. Everything except me, asleep, and my girl. The girl who wears my old shirts, sleeps curled up on my legs as if they were an easy chair, wraps herself in the sleeves of my jacket, disappears at the first rumble of a thunderstorm and reappears again once the sun is back out. It’s her most incredible feature, that limitless capacity for empathy, for picking up someone else’s mood, for dissolving into thin air when that’s what is needed.

  Someone’s voice on the wind. I startle and open my eyes. My leg is free of hair, and Mermaid’s face is looking down at me, very somber and intense. She’s only like that when she’s sure no one can see her.

  “Every little thing wakes you up,” she says. “The tiniest peep. I don’t like that. You should sleep calmly and soundly.”

  “Snoring and heaving my broad hairy chest,” I say. “Except I wouldn’t call those Hound howls tiny peeps. I wonder what’s gotten into them. Probably the freshly minted Leader flexing his muscles?”

  “Not freshly at all. You just can’t get used to it.”

  It’s true, I’m having a hard time accepting the fact of Black becoming the Sixth’s Leader. Even though upon reflection that’s exactly the place for him. Pompey’s throne didn’t even need adjusting for size, and Hounds received what they constantly crave—a strong, steady hand on the collar.

  “You know what’s funny?” Mermaid says. “The way your voice changes when you talk about Black. It’s not even yours anymore. I can’t understand why you hate him so much.”

  “Didn’t I explain about a dozen times already?”

  “You did. But I don’t believe your explanations. You aren’t that vindictive, to keep hating someone just because he bullied you a long time ago. It’s not like you at all.”

  She sounds so sure of what she’s saying that it makes me uneasy. I am not the flawless, ideal Sphinx she fell in love with. And that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that I would very much like to be him. That just, kind, magnanimous guy she likes so much. If I were like that I’d probably have acquired a halo by now. Shined with divine light and trailed heavenly fragrance, like a saint.

  “It is too like me. It is me. My true evil nature!”

  Mermaid doesn’t even argue, just bites on her finger and goes pensive. She detests arguments. Having to prove and defend her point of view. Which does not make her position any weaker. Not in the slightest.

  I bump her lightly with my forehead.

  “Hey. Don’t go too far. I can’t see you all the way over there.”

  “Tell me something interesting,” she says immediately. “Then I’ll stay.”

  “What about?”

  Mermaid’s face lights up. It’s amazing how she loves stories. All kinds, it doesn’t matter. Lary’s tedious laments, stumbling over each syllable, Jackal’s epics, convoluted and branching in all directions—nothing fazes her. She’s ready to spend hours listening to anyone who’d have an urge to unburden themselves in her company. This to me is her most unusual quality, one the least common in her gender.

  “So, what kind of story?” I ask, unable to resist her infectious eagerness.

  “Tell me how Black became Leader.”

  “Not Black again! What’s so special about him?”

  “You offered a story and asked what kind. I’m interested to hear about him because to me he’s interesting. As someone
you dislike.”

  “Dislike, now there’s an understatement.”

  “You see? How can that be not interesting?”

  I can only sigh in response.

  “So you don’t want to tell me a story anymore?” she asks, or rather clarifies. “Just as I thought.”

  “No, that’s not it. I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. I don’t really know how it happened. I think I can guess. He and Blind were stuck in the Cage. Nothing to do. Blind got this bright idea to send Black to the Sixth as Leader. That wouldn’t be the most bizarre thing that someone came up with while in there. So he suggested it, and miracle of miracles, Black agreed, even though it’s completely against his principles to agree when he can refuse. And that’s how it came about. It might not have been exactly this way, but I wasn’t there, and no one was, apart from the two of them, which means that only they can know for sure what really happened.”

  “How come they were stuck there together?”

  “That’s a different story altogether. One I don’t much like to recall. It started back on the Longest, and I don’t particularly . . .”

  “Wow, the Longest!”

  Mermaid tugs at my shirt imploringly.

  “Please tell me, please? The Longest—that’s so exciting! All those tales . . .”

  “That you’ve heard a thousand times already. Ask Tabaqui. He’ll read you the two-hundred-line poem he composed in honor of that night. And sing you any of the ten songs on the subject. Ginger was with us that night too. Let her tell you all about it. Why should I repeat something that you know by heart? That everybody knows?”

  “Ginger is Ginger, and you are you. I’m not asking you for a retelling of Tabaqui’s songs and poems. But if you’re so uncomfortable with this, don’t say anything at all, of course. I just don’t understand. They all like to remember that night . . .”