The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  We shuffle back to the House, pushing our shadows in front of us, headless and almost round at this hour.

  “At least now I know why you dislike the Longest so much,” Mermaid says.

  The porch meets us with the suffocating scent of geraniums. Pots with those flowers, which I can’t stand, have been placed all along the length of the railing.

  “Curious. Not a single face in the windows. Something must have distracted all those people from spying on us. I wonder what,” I say. “By the way, your Hate until the grave is of the exact same color as this geranium.”

  “I’m going to throw away that shirt,” Mermaid says thoughtfully, mounting the stairs. “You are obviously against it.”

  “Could you bleach it out or paint over it or something?”

  The stairs are completely empty, not a soul, neither on the landing above nor below. I have no idea where everyone is, but it explains why they weren’t ogling us from the windows. There’s an all-hands going on somewhere in the bowels of the House. Mermaid listens intently and comes to a decision.

  “Kiss me while no one’s around.”

  We get comfortable on the landing, leaning against the railing, and seize our moment amid the lull of the House. Quite short, or maybe it only seems that way. When we resume walking, my head is spinning slightly, and my stride is less self-assured than usual.

  The hallway is empty. If they all did gather somewhere, it’s not on this floor. Then at the other end we see two lonely, straggling silhouettes and make our way toward them. Blind and Rat. Such a beautiful couple, it makes your heart skip a bit. Both pale like corpses, shading to bluish under the eyes, identically emaciated, bordering on dystrophy. Blind also seems to be split open from the neck down to his navel. His shirt hangs in strips, exposing skin covered in long scratches. A sinister sight, especially considering that Rat’s fingernails have traces of blood on them.

  “There you go,” I say to Mermaid. “Something like your Kama Sutra, only with selected chapters from Marquis de Sade thrown in. Doesn’t look too nice, does it?”

  Mermaid looks at me reproachfully (translation: “You didn’t have to do that”) but I’m already wound up, so on the way to the dorm I expound on sexual deviations, with Rat and Pale One listening politely and in silence. That makes me a dozen times madder than if one of them just told me to shut up.

  The four of us barge into the dorm, finding no one there except Jackal, totally absorbed in purring into a tangle of colored wires. The wires grow out of the wall and disappear back in it, most of them dangle idly, not going anywhere and not connecting anything, but about a dozen or so form the trunk snaking all the way to the walls of the girls’ dorms, and some of them even as far as rather specific sets of ears. This is Jackal’s generous gift to all the lovers out there who are “separated by the circumstances,” to quote Jackal himself, except the gift is absolutely useless without his active participation, he being the only one who can make heads or tails of the jumbled mess.

  We walk in on him in the middle of a direct contact with someone from “over there,” and he’s just communicated that “Well then, I guess you’re even dumber than you look!” Upon seeing us he nods excitedly, shielding the mic, and rolls his eyes, miming terminal exhaustion.

  “Where’s everybody?” I ask.

  He doesn’t hear me, of course, and continues to bow and smile.

  Mermaid goes through the contents of the nightstand to find a first-aid kit for Blind. Rat sits down on the floor and freezes, head in hands, bloodied nails buried in her hair. She has on a leather vest, leaving arms and shoulders bare, and badges hang around her neck. An outrageously skinny girl, the kind you don’t often meet, thankfully. It could be that she really can get satisfaction only when kissing is accompanied by disemboweling, that she needs strong emotions that are not accessible to her except through refined methods. Who the hell knows, but the thought that Blind is encouraging her in this gives me the creeps.

  Pale One slowly divests himself of the remains of the shirt. Mermaid passes the vial of something mediciney to him and looks compassionately at the process of anointing the wounds.

  “Why don’t you go there yourself, darling, and don’t stop until you’ve reached the Outsides,” Jackal recommends to someone and pulls out the earbud. “Is it ever hard to hold a conversation with certain personalities! Labors of Hercules! And where have you all been hiding, if I may be allowed to ask?”

  Tabaqui then takes a look at our appearance, nods to himself, apparently having come to some sort of conclusion, and says, “They’re all downstairs, by the way. Shark’s preaching again, aren’t you interested to find out what that’s about?”

  Tabaqui has been in his Button Period ever since the last masked ball. He’s covered in them, as iridescent and multicolored as an acid trip. The permanent collection of the button museum has as its backdrop a scarlet tailcoat with wide lapels (that way there’s more space for them), but the jeans are relatively undecorated (or it would interfere with crawling), which vexes Tabaqui so much that, once ensconced in place, he flips the coattails to the front and starts fidgeting, trying to catch the reflection of the electric lamps in the countless pieces of shiny metal, and he’s not content until he resembles an eye-watering imitation of an oversized Christmas-tree decoration.

  “Who was that you were just squabbling with? Not Catwoman, by any chance?” Mermaid asks Tabaqui as she pulls the wet, mud-encrusted sweater off me.

  “Of course not. With Catwoman it’s never that trivial. And who said I was squabbling? I am simply keeping up the fighting spirit in some people. Providing both human contact and an occasional shake-up to those in need of it. It wouldn’t do to sink into benign complacency and lose the edge only because you couldn’t find anyone to tick you off at the right moment.”

  “So who were you ticking off?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Tabaqui sticks the earpiece back in and chooses a wire from the bundle. “You do agree with the principle, though, don’t you? Calling the party, over.” He scowls into the mic. “Feral Wolfdog here. Talk to me, my mysterious and lonely friend!”

  The buttons shine next to the rainbow tangle of the wires. I glance past them to the open doors of the cabinet, to the carefully folded sweaters, shirts, and vests. I can’t complain of a particular paucity with regards to my wardrobe, but to find something in there that would be uncommon enough to be inaccessible to someone with a desire to imitate it suddenly seems a challenge. Almost enough to consider becoming a human display case, in the manner of Lary or Jackal. Then at least I can be sure of being unique in my ugliness.

  Mermaid reads my thought again.

  “I can make you a vest out of colored rope. I have this huge skein, grass-green. Unless Catwoman’s kids got to it.”

  Tabaqui seems to be listening in, even through the earbuds. He turns sharply around and stares.

  “Keep it down,” I say to Mermaid. “Or you’ll end up doing ten of them, and then sewing a hundred buttons on each. And that would be child labor.”

  Tabaqui leans precariously in our direction and cocks one ear. Mermaid grabs the closest shirt and drapes it over my shoulders.

  “I think I better go to our side and see if there’s anyone lying there prostrate with a heart attack,” she says with concern. “Some people have really peculiar notions of charity.”

  “Sure, go ahead. I’ll go down to the first, find out what’s the buzz. I’ve been separated from society ever since this morning. Also from food and cigarettes.”

  Blind, already in a fresh tee, stuffs a pack of Camels into my breast pocket.

  “What was all that long talk with Ralph about?” he asks. “Inquiring minds want to know.”

  “Potential runaways. People being slowly squeezed out of the House. He’s got them all on a list, those who’d like to bolt as soon as they can.”

  “Those counselors sure like their pieces of paper,” Sightless One says, astonished. “Could it be that they all suffer from me
mory problems?”

  He picks up his backpack, also emaciated.

  “Let’s go listen to Shark. He’s been at it for half an hour already, must be just about getting to the point by now. And he’s got a whole mound of paper.”

  “Could you take that thing off my head, please,” I say. “It’s starting to get on my nerves.”

  Blind sweeps the bandana off me. Mermaid is waiting for us outside the door, peeking in when she thinks we’re not looking. Rat is still on the floor, face buried in her hands. She doesn’t seem in any hurry to leave.

  “Oh, hello,” Jackal breathes beguilingly, hugging the mic. “Could this be number fourteen oh-one? It has been a while. How are you doing, oh-one? I’ve missed you. Hope the feeling is mutual?”

  Blind and I appear in the lecture hall and immediately find ourselves in the thick of action. Shark, sweating from heat and indignation, shouts into the mic that periodically cuts out, the audience is partly listening, partly dozing off, and the aisles between the rows closest to the lectern are strewn with paper, as if someone clumsy was trying to film a snowstorm.

  I crouch down and slip into the center row. Blind copies my movements step for step, even pinching the bottom of my shirt to steady himself. Shark notes our being late but is too busy to comment. He’s about to move to “documentary evidence of the above-mentioned,” in the form of a pile of paper delivered by obsequious Pilotfish. Blind and I position ourselves on the ugly metal chairs and join the listeners. There aren’t many of us—those who really are listening. Mainly the first rows, occupied by the teachers.

  “The results of the mandatory testing . . .”

  The pack is in a state of drowsy apathy. The perkiest around here are Tubby, gnawing on a carrot, and Needle, counting the stitches of her next knitted masterpiece. Humpback is nodding halfheartedly to the song playing through his earphones. Alexander is using a safety pin to extract a splinter out of his finger. I look a bit farther out, into the Hound rows, where Black’s pink shaved head looms. Four Hounds next to him mimic his pose exactly—arms crossed, one foot on the seat of the chair in front. In their desire to be like their Leader they put even Logs to shame, but if what Mermaid said is true, I shouldn’t be the one laughing. Especially considering that I almost shoved my own foot on the next seat in the same fashion, and now can only sit like a statue and stew silently. Because, after all, who’s supposed to be copying whom?

  “Almost no one managed to score even a fifty! Which is the bare minimum for an average numbskull!”

  Shark furiously tosses a pack of the pernicious “yes-no” sheets into the air. They flutter and settle down, forming another layer of the fake snow. So that’s how it got there.

  “Let me explain to you what this means! It means that the vast majority of you are not qualified to fill any position that requires a functioning brain! You are outside the boundaries defined by your peers!”

  The teachers’ row, second from the podium, turns around as one, to look at us reproachfully. The counselors don’t bat an eye. We have long ceased to be capable of surprising them. The mic cuts out again. Shark continues his harangue, not noticing it, then pauses and starts screaming even louder than before.

  “You’re basically imbeciles! Explain to me, will you, who do you think you’ve dealt this devastating blow by your stupid tricks? Me? You think I’m going to cry over it? Try to convince someone up there that you’re smarter than this? You maybe think I care where you end up when you get out of here? Or what you’re going to do there? It’s your own lives you flushed down the toilet, you halfwits!”

  I realize that I did sneak the foot onto the next seat. I let it stay there. I refuse to sacrifice the basic necessities of life only because I don’t want to be copied.

  Blind yawns and hides inside his palm. The lemur-like fingers easily swallow his entire face, including both his forehead and chin. A simple gesture, sure, but one that can’t be copied by anyone present. I sit there, consumed by dumb envy. All right, enough. Time to shake off the paranoia. I suddenly realize that it’s not Blind’s hands I envy, not his independently alive fingers, but merely the gesture that I can’t appropriate. Am I really as stupid as I often appear to myself to be?

  Shark’s latest “maybe you think” is unexpectedly picked up and amplified a hundredfold. The soundest sleepers wake up with a start. Tubby drops his carrot. Humpback winces and stuffs his earbuds farther in. Even Shark himself cringes up there at the lectern.

  “Therefore,” he continues more calmly, “all the exams that were to take place this month have been canceled, along with the general evaluation, even though you’re supposed to have been preparing for it since the end of last semester. Both have now lost any modicum of significance. The results of your testing are not going to allow you to enter any institution of higher learning. Not that you had any chance of that before.”

  Noble turns his face, curtained by the silver-colored dark shades, to me and stretches his lips in a wide grin. I smile back and then see, to my horror, that he’s surrounded by sloppily made copies as well. I shake my head but the ghosts refuse to disappear. A couple of Logs on both sides of Noble, the High Keepers of Noble’s crutches, one per person. Both are wearing mirrored glasses and Noble-style goatees. With no time off for chewing, gossiping, or Shark’s speeches, Zit and Termite polish the crutches with their handkerchiefs and scrape dirt off the rubber tips. A ridiculous, risible sight. I can’t help but smile. Noble lifts his eyebrows quizzically. I nod at his retinue. He shrugs—“What are you going to do?” Ginger’s colorful crest is flaming by his elbow, her translucent chin sunk into the hands is positioned a little lower, and then the slanted front teeth and devoted eyes of the crutch-bearers, proud of their assignment. I again note with surprise how much Noble grew up during his trip to the Outsides. It only took him six months to learn to accept stoically the things that still push me over the edge.

  “I shall now announce the names of those few who passed the tests with reasonably high scores . . .”

  Into Shark’s expectantly snapping fingers Pilot inserts another file. Shark grabs it and grumbles threateningly.

  “So . . . In the First . . .”

  The teachers’ row hums and whispers. Humpback produces an ashtray from his pocket, flicks it open, and puts it down on the floor. There isn’t anyone actually seen to be smoking, but the telltale gray cloud hangs thick overhead. Shark reads the first batch of names. I whisper them after him, recollecting vaguely that I seem to already have encountered them recently.

  “Strange,” I say. “I would have thought there’d be more Pheasants. But it’s their own business, of course.”

  “Of course,” Blind confirms right over my ear, laughing softly, his maddening insane laugh.

  His Adam’s apple performs a dance on the bare neck, his eyes are mirrors, each containing a Sphinx, just like the puddles of Noble’s glasses.

  “They were on the list that Ralph had,” I explain. “The list of students wishing to bolt as soon as possible.”

  “Now we shall see,” Blind says, overjoyed for some reason, “how well they are going to manage that. And who else besides them.”

  “You mean you knew about them?” I ask suspiciously.

  “You crazy?” Blind says, aghast. “You just told me yourself.”

  I did, didn’t I? But he wasn’t very surprised when I did. Or he hid the surprise very convincingly. At least he didn’t ask any questions, or demand clarification.

  Shark, in the meantime, has moved to the geniuses of the Second. That doesn’t take too much time, because the Second boasts just a single outcast—poor unfortunate Squib.

  “Take that! Yeah . . . that’s the way,” Rats drone two rows ahead of us, after the “interpreter,” forcibly divested of the earphones, attracts their attention by gesticulating wildly and then relates the news to them. “Keep on it, listen, you’ll tell us all later,” they encourage the interpreter before the entire pack plugs the phones back in. Well, not the e
ntire pack, rather a dozen of its imprisoned representatives, but for Rats that’s a lot when we’re talking about a function as dull as an all-hands meeting.

  Red loudly cracks a nut with his teeth and spits out the shell. Ringer, the interpreter, sighs and turns back toward the lectern. Squib, the immediate beneficiary of the whole business, does not react, doesn’t even move at all, indifferent and self-absorbed, the bill of his cap lowered all the way to his nostrils.

  Having skipped over the Third, who flunked the tests in their entirety, Shark declares, “The Fourth . . . ahem. Congratulations! It’s Zimmerman!”

  Smoker’s death sentence flies up and flutters between the rows like a small graffiti-covered kite, and in the counselors’ row R One’s sharp-beaked head turns around and stares at me.

  “One way or another,” I whisper. “Somehow we do rid ourselves of them.”

  “Were you discussing Smoker with Ralph?” Blind wonders. “Why would you do a thing like that?”

  Ten rows ahead of us, Ralph grimaces as if he heard what Blind just said, and turns away. He slightly resembles Smoker at that moment. They seem to have temporarily swapped their eyes, to better confuse me. Shark is done with the Sixth, all of three names, and is now talking about the girls.

  “Whatever gave you that idea?” I ask Blind.

  “Oh, that’s just my bright, logical mind,” Blind says proudly. “It’s come to this conclusion.”

  “Your bright mind appears to be malfunctioning lately.”

  This is my freshest and most persistent nightmare—Blind, lost forever in the ghostly forests and swamps of the Other Side of the House, a vegetable here, a person who-knows-where. Blind, who’s abandoned me to deal with all those faces and nicks alone, all their fears and hopes, the most horrendous outcome I can possibly imagine—and also the only one, as far as I know, that would satisfy Blind himself. My fear should be evident to an ear much less fine-tuned than his, but he just laughs, even though this isn’t funny at all.