The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  The sun forces its way in through the glass panes. I look out the window. It would have been easier were Tabaqui alone here, but they, the cracked hunters of junk, are two, and the other one is a girl who likes stories.

  “Very interesting,” I say. “I’m not sure I understood everything, but it is all very likely just the way you described.”

  Two tiny furrows appear on Mermaid’s forehead. Very light, almost insubstantial. Tabaqui cringes.

  “You know, there’s no need to pity us,” Mermaid says. “We didn’t call you here so you could pity us.”

  I take one last look at Tabaqui’s hunting trophies and drive out of the classroom. Looks like we just had a falling-out.

  I spend the next thirty minutes looking for my diary. The notebook is nowhere to be seen. I check the desk drawers and the bookshelves, I open and close nightstands, I crawl down on the floor peeking under the beds. It’s not there. Finally I ask Alexander.

  “Is it a thick brown notebook?” he says. “I think I’ve seen it somewhere around.” He goes to Tubby’s pen, leans over it, and says, “There you go. He’s been stockpiling fuel again. Give this back, you hear? Hey! It belongs to someone else.”

  Tubby responds with indistinct cooing. Alexander turns back to me, holding the diary, wipes it off and says contritely, “Looks like he tore it up a bit. Is that all right? I should have watched him better. I’m sorry. I didn’t check what all that rustling was in there.”

  I accept the mangled diary. The cover has been chewed, and it’s missing half of the pages. Empty ones, fortunately. Tubby started from the back.

  “Thanks,” I say. “I think it’s still usable.”

  Alexander just shrugs.

  I thumb through the filled pages. There seem to be entirely too many of them. I read a random paragraph: The stems of cacti are susceptible to rot, viral infections, and infestations of the cactus moth and various aphids. The proper care for those is pruning the affected areas and spraying them with preparations containing cupric ions. Did Tabaqui unconsciously switch from Blind to cacti?

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “What’s a viral cactus doing here?”

  Alexander takes a look.

  “That’s Vulture’s handwriting,” he explains. “I guess he chanced upon your diary yesterday and decided to put in something to remember him by. Does this upset you?”

  I flip the pages, horrified. One, two, three . . .

  Summarizing the above-mentioned circumstances, it is fair to assert that the highly targeted nature of the said disorder does not lend itself to any explanation within the framework of conventional medical science, affecting as it does almost exclusively those who are the least suitable for integration within the society that for the purposes of this discussion may be, within certain limitations, broadly described by the controversial term “Outsides.”

  Dear Smoker, Tabaqui told me to write a message for you in this notebook so that you can read it and remember me. I don’t really know what to write . . .

  The glochids of the Opuntioideae easily detach from the plant and lodge in the skin, causing irritation. The tender white prickles of some Mammillaria and the silvery threads of the Cephalocereus, the Old-Man Cactus . . .

  “I think they’ve all had a hand,” I say. “It’s not a diary anymore, it’s a yearbook.”

  I flip to the empty pages and notice some strange marks, tiny holes punched through and arranged in rows.

  “And someone bit on it here,” I say. “Or maybe not. At least the back portion was definitely gnawed by Tubby.”

  Alexander looks closer and then feels the holes with his finger.

  “This is Braille,” he explains. “Blind wrote you something. He has this tool, like a thing with a nail in it . . .”

  “Oh,” I say. “A remembrance. I’m going to read it in my old age, when I lose my sight and learn to read Braille. Cool.”

  “Listen,” Alexander sighs. “Can I just give you another notebook? Almost like this one. Tubby spoiled the cover too.”

  “I don’t need another one. I’ll manage,” I say. “I’m sorry for all the grumbling. It’s not like you had anything to do with it.”

  He shrugs.

  “As you wish. We could place it under a stack of books, then. Straighten out the pages a little.”

  Alexander brings some glue and we mend the bedraggled cover the best we can. Then we put all the books we could find in the room on top of the notebook. Then Alexander makes some tea. Tea is not the best thing to be drinking when it’s so hot out. In the Sepulcher I was getting it cold-brewed and with ice, but it’s time I forgot about life in the Sepulcher.

  Alexander shows me Tubby’s bag. It’s a toddler backpack, and it overflows with little balls of chewed paper.

  “Food for the fire,” Alexander says. “He’s been saving them for a while.”

  Then he says that I should tear out the page with Blind’s message.

  “Why?” I say. “How is it better or worse than Tabaqui’s?”

  “But you have no idea what he’s written there,” Alexander persists. “And for whom.”

  “What do you mean, for whom?”

  Alexander’s gaze goes right through me. It’s directed somewhere above the bridge of my nose. He shrugs.

  “You know . . .”

  I break into a cold sweat from the hints he seems to be dropping.

  “Nobody reads Braille here in the House, do they?”

  He shrugs again.

  “Some people do. Ralph, for one.”

  He looks away tactfully.

  I’m silent. It’s stifling in the room. The sun is melting the glass in the windows. Alexander is not looking at me and I am not looking at him. I know what I am ashamed of, but I don’t understand why he should be ashamed as well. Why he should look guilty.

  “Thanks,” I say. “You’re right. That’s what I’ll do. Tear it out.”

  He nods.

  Smoker’s diary (excerpts)

  It might seem that nothing much changed in the House. The lights-out and morning bells keep getting ignored just as before. The pack spent half the night feverishly discussing the subject of “Jerichonies,” whatever they are, that are supposed to “presage the end,” and then shortly before dawn Tabaqui woke up everyone with a scream: “Here he is, I’ve got him!” When they switched on the lamp he was sitting under the table, flashlight in hand, surrounded by the shards of a smashed flowerpot.

  Mermaid is knitting a rug, or something similar. It looks like a chessboard. Every night before going to bed she puts it up on the wall and then sleeps under it. According to her, this kind of netting protects from bad dreams. According to Sphinx, it steals the dreams and makes intractable tangles out of them.

  Humpback is still living up in the oak. Lary spends his nights on the first floor. Logs created something like a tent city down there and are “keeping watch.” That is, they discuss their pocketknives all day and paint on the nearby walls all night.

  No one talks about graduation, except to mention some kind of bus. “When we are on the bus,” “When the bus comes for us,” or something about life on four wheels. I could never get out of them any details about this bus, or whether it even exists. Could be just a figure of speech, to avoid saying the word “Outsides.”

  Since the day I failed to give Tabaqui’s collection its due he only refers to me as “child” or “that youth.”

  Jerichonies are these tiny creatures that are invisible under artificial light and at the same time afraid of the sun, so spotting them is an almost impossible task. There are more and more of them in the House every day, and right before graduation they will assemble in multitudes and start shouting with a great shout. And that’s going to be the end of us, since the walls of the House, naturally, will fall down flat.

  —Tabaqui, “Common Wisdom for the Inquisitive Youth.”

  Today in the Coffeepot I asked Red, draped over the counter, what his tattoo meant. He didn’t have a shirt on, and
I saw this man with a dog’s head on his chest. I was only looking for what Tabaqui terms “a friendly chat,” but got way more than I bargained for. He said it was Anubis, the god of the dead. “In short, the protector of all stiffs.”

  Then Red lowered his head into the crook of his elbow and went all gloomy for some reason. I suspect that he wasn’t quite sober. On the other hand, he only had a cup of coffee in front of him. Everyone turned to look at us. That was unpleasant, and I tried to wheel away. But Red suddenly perked up, peeled himself off the counter, and grabbed my sleeve.

  “And I am his angel in the Upper World! His freaking emissary, get it?” he screamed, tugging at my clothes. Gawkers started gathering around, and then he let go of me and ran out. I think he’s depressed from the overdose of green. From not taking his green glasses off.

  Found on the walls:

  “Brothers and Sisters, stop fooling around. IT is near.” Know-it-all.

  “Cleansing campaign tonight. Presence mandatory, except for those on the third loop and above.” The Inside Man.

  Alexander stashed a pile of cups and pans under his bed. But not before spending a whole hour scrubbing and washing them.

  “Might be useful,” he said when I peeked under the bed for the third time.

  “Useful where?” I said.

  “Anywhere, I think,” Alexander said and pulled the cover lower to hide his treasure.

  Even though graduation is never discussed (apart from the bus and those Jerichonies), the inevitability of it is in the air. Girls, for example, cry often. Their eyes are red and swollen, at least from what I notice on the three girls I see every day. Mermaid lives in our room and Ginger sometimes spends the night. Needle comes in the evenings to borrow the coffeemaker for Logs. And they’re all really touchy, so that I’m afraid to say even one word to them. Ginger especially. Everywhere she goes she drags this ancient teddy bear with her, with one glass eye and a shirt button in place of the other. If you jostle it you’ll get a cloud of brownish dust, and it smells so old that it is immediately clear that this must have been her great-grandmother’s favorite toy, and even back then it was already the way it is now. This nightmarish teddy always ends up lying next to me, and if I ask her to put it somewhere else she gets this miserable look, like I’ve just deeply offended her.

  The House is in mourning, on the occasion of the repairs that they were threatening us with for as long as I can remember. Stepladders everywhere, and the plasterers are hard at work scraping the drawings and the messages off the walls. People apparently can’t stand such a blatant violation of their living space and have retreated to the rooms. The wave started from the hospital wing and is slowly rolling toward the Crossroads. I ventured out to have a look. Don’t know what it looks like, but definitely not like our corridor. The walls are all dirty and feel somehow injured, covered in great gouges. If they thought this would make the atmosphere brighter, it didn’t. It’s even more depressing than before.

  “Blood! Revenge and blood!” Tabaqui screams at regular intervals. Just as I finally calm down and start thinking about something.

  Everyone’s busy packing. They drag the backpacks out into the hallways and back to the rooms, take everything out and put it back in. Whoever it is, you can be sure that they’re packing. The weather is hotter and hotter.

  “The War with the Girls” means Jackal wheeling in shouting “It’s them! Again!” Everyone jumps up and then sits down and returns to whatever they’ve been doing. In the meantime a group of surly maidens storms the Coffeepot and occupies it for the next two hours, only to vacate it afterward in the same belligerent fashion. It’s not entirely clear why they call it “war,” and why the guys insist on hiding in the dorms and ceding the hallways to the girls, and then sulk that the hallways have been forcibly taken from them. I have a strong suspicion that this is yet another invention of those who don’t know how to amuse themselves. Like Lary and Jackal, who seem to require nonstop excitement of the scary variety.

  The plasterers have scrubbed and smoothed the walls and moved to the first floor. The stepladders and the protective plastic remain, though. They say that the painters arrive tomorrow.

  Logs struck their camp temporarily. Lary’s back in the dorm. Logs spend their days out in the yard now, because the new hallways creep them out, and they’re already out of habit of being inside a room.

  “I’m out to hunt,” Tabaqui says, maneuvering his way out of the room in the morning. Every day the footboard of Mustang acquires one more weight, but the backpack is gaining bulk faster. Tabaqui clanks and rattles as he drives, like a hardware shop on wheels.

  “He’s like the White Knight,” Noble says. “Tumbling down every couple of feet. It’s only a question of time before he hurts himself.”

  “His luck seems to be holding so far,” Sphinx counters. “You’re not suggesting we take that backpack off him? That would be equal to at least two invasions of Jerichonies.”

  “Of course not,” Noble says in a frightened voice. “Better to go on the bus than that.”

  “What is that bus?” I ask Lary after breakfast. “You know, the one they keep talking about.”

  He yawns widely, like a crocodile, and stares at me dumbly.

  “What bus? There is no bus, what’s gotten into you? Where would they find it? It’s just people talking stuff. Someone’s joke. And now here you are spreading it around.”

  “But you’re spreading it around too. You talk about it all the time.”

  “Me?” He takes offense for some reason. “I never did. Why would I? I’ve got enough problems as it is.”

  “You mean you don’t care. Whatever happens, you’re content.”

  Lary darkens.

  “Of course I am. I mean, why not. If they tell me ‘Here’s the bus, get in,’ I will.”

  “Get in the imaginary bus?” I attempt to clarify.

  “If that’s what they tell me, yeah.”

  Lary looks around stealthily and leans over to me. The squint in his left eye is really horrible.

  “The questions you’re asking, Smoker . . . Strange questions,” he says in a low whisper. “I don’t like them, all right? Why don’t you just go on your way. I’ve got some business here. I have no time for you now, all right?”

  Found on the walls:

  “Through unrelenting meditation discovered the Law of Non-action. Inquiries welcome, the Sixth from 3:00 to 3:05.” Big Brother.

  Ratling Whitebelly comes up to me and timidly asks that I write about him “in that notebook you have.”

  “Why?” I wonder.

  “So that I’m there too.”

  A beseeching look, chocolate smears on his cheeks. He looks at least five years younger than everyone else.

  “Listen, how old are you, anyway?” I say.

  “Sixteen,” Whitebelly says, darkening. “So?”

  “Why do you need to be in my diary? The truth, please.”

  “This is my first loop,” he says in a flat voice. “I need to anchor myself everywhere I can, or I’ll get thrown out.”

  “Where?” I am almost wailing now. “Thrown out where?”

  Whitebelly looks at me in abject horror and backs away. I drive at him, but I don’t think he understands that my intention is to apologize, so he turns around and legs it away without looking back, ignoring all my shouts of “Wait!” and “Hey!”

  Sphinx says that if I continue driving around scaring the kids I’m going to get it from him personally.

  “It was he who scared me, not the other way around.”

  In the morning there’s some unusual activity by the window, and it wakes me up. I open my eyes and see them all crowding there, discussing something. Arguing loudly.

  “I’m telling you, it’s Solomon and Don! They have returned!” Jackal screams. “With a posse of like-minded avengers! You’ll see!”

  “And I think they are from the nearby houses,” Lary suggests. “Came to demand the House be demolished right now. Because th
ey’re tired of waiting.”

  “It might be someone’s parents,” Ginger frets. “Only parents can pull something like this.”

  “You think our grandmothers could be down there too?” Blind says, visibly worried. He is also there at the window, but isn’t peeking out, of course.

  “Why grandmothers?” Ginger says.

  “What is it?” I call to them. “What happened?”

  The only one to turn to me is Sphinx.

  “Tents. Right next to the House,” he says. “Four of them.”

  “It’s a camp!” Tabaqui screams, hanging onto the window bars. “A camp of revenge!”

  I start dressing. In a great hurry, for some reason. I wouldn’t be able to climb to the windowsill even if all the rest of them climb down from it, but I still behave like I’m going to get up right now, muscle my way through, and have a look for myself.

  Noble is the only one besides me who stayed back on the bed. Smoking and pretending like he doesn’t give a hoot.

  “It’s unlikely grandmothers would want to live in tents,” Ginger says. “At least that’s what I think.”

  Ginger is standing with her feet on the windowsill, in a cut-off spaghetti-strap top and briefs. The top does not even come down to her navel. The undies are bright red, the color of her hair. The moldy bear is in its usual place, under her arm. I realize that Noble must hate what he sees. That the reason for him sitting glumly on the bed is Ginger parading herself half-naked in the window. If I were him I’d be grateful she at least has something on. She could have just as easily climbed up there topless. I happen to know that for a fact.

  “Blind is just paranoid.” Tabaqui giggles. “Imagining grandmothers lurking behind every corner. They have robbed him of his peace of mind.”

  “Why not grandfathers?” Mermaid says.

  “I wonder when they’re coming out,” Lary says.