The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  “When I came here I was five,” he begins. “Everything was simple then. The House was Elk’s House, and the miracles were of his making. As soon as I entered I realized that I knew more about this place than should have been possible, and that I was different here. The House opened itself before me, opened all of its dreams, its doors, its endless paths, all but the tiniest objects in it sang loudly to me when I approached. It was Elk’s House, so how could it be otherwise? At night I ate pieces of its walls, believing that this brought me closer to Elk. He was the god of this place, the god of its forests, swamps, and mysterious ways. He used to tell me, ‘The world is boundless, it opens up outside the door, and there will come a time when you’ll understand it, my boy.’ What could I have thought of those words except that we were not allowed to talk, other than in riddles, of what only the two of us knew about?”

  Humpback is silent. Only his breathing betrays his presence.

  “Years passed,” Blind continues, “and I realized that all that had nothing to do with him. That he was not the creator of this place, or its god, that it existed separately from him, that the secret I thought we shared belonged to me alone. Then it turned out that there were others, but it made no difference anymore. Because for me it was always about him. And he simply didn’t know. He lived his life on the Day Side, lived there and died there, and the House did not protect him. It would have protected me, because I was a part of it, but Elk wasn’t. The House is not responsible for those it didn’t let in. It isn’t responsible even for those it did, if they get lost, or get scared at the wrong moment, or don’t get scared at the right moment, and especially if they think that what they see are just dreams. Dreams where you can die and then wake up. Those like you. Thinking that the Night Side is a fairy tale. The Night Side is strewn with their skulls and bones, with the tattered remains of their clothes. Every dreamer thinks this place is his. That since he created it, nothing bad could happen to him while he’s there. Sooner or later it does happen. And one morning he doesn’t wake up.”

  Humpback swallows.

  “What about you?” he says. “Did you know right away that it wasn’t a dream?”

  “I never had dreams before I came here,” Blind says drily. “I am not sighted, if you recall.”

  Humpback shifts on his branch, sits differently. Clicks the lighter. He clicks and clicks, again and again, until there appears a cloyingly sweet, vanilla-scented cloud.

  “So I’m a Jumper?” Humpback says indistinctly. The pipe gets in the way of words. He takes it out and adds, “That word always sounded funny to me.”

  Blind shrugs.

  “You can call yourself something else if you wish. The word is irrelevant.”

  “And that little monster . . .”

  “Is Godmother,” Blind says. “I had no choice but to drag her over, and it’s not my fault she turned into what she did. I’ve left her with you to wake you up.”

  Humpback’s silence is so long and deep that Blind begins to suspect he’ll never talk again. There’s no more smoke, the pipe must have gone out.

  “Damn,” Humpback says finally. “I know you’re not lying, but I still can’t believe it. Is it true, what they say about her and Vulture?”

  “For the most part,” Blind says, getting up.

  “She bites really hard.”

  “I know.”

  Humpback gets up too.

  “You climbed up here only to tell me all this?” he says suspiciously.

  “No. I climbed up here to ask you to play for me. I need a piper on the graduation night. Someone who is a Jumper and can play the flute.”

  “What for?”

  Judging by the tone of his voice, Humpback can guess at the answer and doesn’t like it at all.

  “To lead away the Insensible.”

  Blind feels the horror in Humpback’s gaze directed at him.

  “A dozen of them,” he says. “I need someone they would follow. Run and drive after. Someone who is capable of walking them over. The Pied Piper. He must love children and animals. He must be one of those who always have homeless puppies and hungry kittens tagging after them. His playing needs to assure them that a warm home and tasty food await where he’s taking them.”

  Humpback sits back down.

  “This is crazy,” he mumbles. “Complete nonsense! Do you even understand what it is you’re babbling, Blind? I’m not the Pied Piper. He only exists in fairy tales! And I am not him! I don’t believe in all this, anyway!”

  “Believing is not a requirement.”

  Nanette drops some debris on Humpback’s head and caws coyly. Humpback shakes the adornments out of his hair.

  “Go away,” he says. “Please.”

  Blind steps down onto the next branch, but before he is able to slide down the trunk, Humpback grabs his sleeve.

  “You can’t know these things about me,” he says. “You just imagine that I am the one you need.”

  Blind takes the sleeve away.

  “I do sometimes become a changeling,” he says. “And it’s a lot like being a dog. I’m sorry, but I happen to know for sure whom I’d follow if I were a pup. That’s about the only difference between us: I’m a little bit more of a dog than you are.”

  “You’re a little bit more of a whole bunch of things,” Humpback mutters. “And a little less of a human. No space for him, with so much other stuff in there.”

  “But you like dogs.”

  “They’re better than humans.”

  “Then I am better, too.”

  “I don’t like you.”

  “That’s only because I don’t eat out of your hand or wag my tail.”

  Humpback is silent. Blind feels that he’s chewing on something. An oak leaf, too?

  “I was not going to shoot again,” Humpback says reluctantly. “I almost threw up after the first shot anyway. They said you’d eaten the rabbit. You know, the one that disappeared from the cage. The one we looked for all over the House. Rex showed me its bones and skin. They said that you’d eaten it raw. At first I just wanted to beat you up, but then I took the crossbow and made a hunt out of it. Like in the movies . . . the dark avenger . . . all because of a rabbit!” Humpback giggles nervously. “Defender of Nature . . .”

  “I didn’t eat it. Do you really think I would kill a rabbit and then keep its bones under my bed?”

  “How do you know where they were?”

  “I found them. I thought they were rat bones and threw them away.”

  “You could be telling the truth,” Humpback sighs. “I have no way of knowing. I’m sorry I said all those things. And I lied about the song. Of course I remember it. I just hate it when people listen in on my playing. I hate it when they listen in, period. Read my poems. See my dreams. I need to have something that’s mine, where no one else can sneak in.”

  He sighs again.

  “How is it, when you see other people’s dreams?”

  How is it? Sad. Agonizing. The dreams never speak of anything you need to know. Nothing is really the way it looks in someone’s dream. There everything is too shaky, the transitions are too fast, and if you try looking closer at a face it immediately disappears. Only by picking the tiny pieces, by noticing the barely noticeable similarities, by threading familiar paths through many, many dreams can you assemble the picture of someone’s world. You could even try looking for yourself in it. You will start spotting your own face, or rather your white mask, more and more often, until one day you look into your own eyes and see how limpid they are. I am beautiful! will be your rapturous thought, your smugness will bleed through and become visible to everyone, and they will all turn away from you, but you won’t care anymore. Your happiness will last for a spell, you’ll even begin brushing your hair. Until your next encounter with yourself, where you’ll have the deathly-white eyes of a boiled fish, and your face will be covered in disgusting pustules. You’ll shrink back in horror, and from that day you’ll hide your eyes behind long hair and dark glasses, beco
me an outcast, believing yourself too ugly to be close to other people. Until the next dream encounter. This time you’ll have no eyes at all. You will grow resentful of those who have been seeing you as that eyeless monster, and stop visiting their dreams. Only later will you realize that everything is deceitful in the dreams of others, including your own face, and the only thing that matters is that you understand now how the dreamers look when you’re not looking at them.

  Blind attempts to explain all this to Humpback but fails. Humpback doesn’t hear him. He still thinks that it must be fascinating—to see someone else’s dream. Blind says to himself that it doesn’t matter. That he didn’t climb up here to ask forgiveness. Or to persuade. Why is it important what you see when watching someone’s dream? Why would Humpback refuse to share pieces of his dreams?

  “All right,” Blind says. “I’m going.”

  “Wait!” There’s panic in Humpback’s voice. “I need to ask you . . . lots of things.”

  Blind sits down. But not on that comfortable, chair-like branch. This one is rather like a bifurcated threshold, a place to linger awhile for those who are already halfway out the door.

  Humpback’s breath is labored. He’s chasing the questions that refuse to be caught. He already knows those lots of things, all that’s been embedded in the songs, poems, sayings, and nursery rhymes. All the miracles of the House have been distilled into them, and he swallowed them whole at the age when miracles mundanely coexist with the rest of reality, so he already has the answers to most of the questions he could ask now. The longer he searches for them, the better he understands that this is so. Blind waits, stepping over the unasked questions together with Humpback. A step . . . and another . . . and another.

  “What’s going to happen to her now?” Humpback asks finally. “This . . . Godmother. Will she stay there forever?”

  Blind nods.

  “She will. And what becomes of her there is not our concern. Not mine and not yours.”

  “She’s so little!”

  Blind searches his pockets for cigarettes but doesn’t find any.

  “She’s tenacious,” he says.

  Humpback is silent for a few seconds, evaluating this argument.

  “Where is she hidden?” he asks, revulsion dripping from his words. “You know . . . The grown-up her.”

  Blind sees what Humpback has just imagined. How Godmother’s chrysalis is extracted from a gym locker, and how much commotion that causes among the rest of the counselors.

  “She isn’t anywhere except the Forest,” he says. “I’ve dragged her over completely.”

  He cringes, already anticipating the next question. Because this is never talked about. It’s not mentioned in any poems, songs, or nursery rhymes.

  “Is that possible?” comes the question.

  “Yes,” Blind admits. “But it’s very hard. You can’t really do that. The House doesn’t like it and makes you pay.”

  With fear, he adds silently. With the possibility of losing everything. With helplessness, banishment, and sometimes even death.

  “When Ralph took me away,” he says with a shudder, “I thought that was the end of me. He said that he wasn’t returning me to the House until I told him where she’d disappeared to. Where we have hidden her. And you know . . . If I hadn’t dragged her over completely, I would have told him anything he demanded. Never in my life have I been more scared than at that moment. I ceased to exist. Turned into a nonentity.”

  Blind is shaking and not noticing it. He brings the lapels of his buttonless jacket closer together over his chest. He doesn’t realize how pitiful a figure he’s cutting, and is surprised by Humpback’s hand outstretched to him.

  “Don’t say it.” Humpback grips his shoulder. “I understand. I am not going to ask you to bring me over completely.”

  “No,” Blind says. “There’s only one person for whom I will do that. For him I am prepared to pay the price. But no one else.”

  “Try not to think about it, all right?” Humpback says.

  Blind nods.

  “I will find you there. And then I will bring you over. I’m allowed to do that to those who are already halfway gone. I think. I hope. But it might take time.”

  “You don’t have to,” Humpback says firmly. “Not for me.”

  Blind nods again and slides down the trunk. The closer he is to the ground, the cooler the air around him, as if it’s not the asphalt exhaling the heat of the day that’s waiting for him there but a sea of tall grass. When he reaches the last branch he jumps off. His fingers touch the ground and encounter small squares of cardboard. A lot of them, like someone has spilled pieces of a child’s jigsaw puzzle. It’s the questions for the Oracle. Blind picks one up and puts it in his pocket.

  “Hey,” he hears a dejected voice say from above. “What do you think the Pied Piper would be playing?”

  “Madrigal of Henry the VIII,” Blind answers immediately.

  TABAQUI

  The days are wound tightly, like strings. Each tighter and higher than the one before it. I feel like I’m sitting on a string waiting for it to snap. When it finally happens I’ll be thrown far, far away, farther than can be imagined, while at the same time staying exactly where I am.

  Waiting is unpleasant business, especially when compounded by this heat.

  The sky is piercingly blue, and all day I suffer from its presence, longing for the night to come and deliver me from it. Sometimes I imagine dead birds tumbling down from this sky. Broken and drained of color. I even seem to smell them. I bet if we looked hard enough we’d find a pile of rotting sparrows.

  I fight the heat by collecting no one’s things and sending out letters.

  Sixty-four letters have now been sent to various celebrities, letters offering them the opportunity to take over the maintenance of the House, together with all of us in it. The first one to take the plunge will be provided with unlimited advice from me, in any field and at any time. I am also offering myself in a role of fortune-teller, astrologer, secretary, tamer of domestic animals, jack and master of all trades, shaman, talisman, and novelty desk ornament. So far no takers. I wasn’t expecting any, of course. It’s only sixty-four letters, after all. Not that many. But the fact that no one has responded at all, not even in jest, is troubling. It could be I haven’t been persuasive enough. My advanced age must be showing.

  Before exiting the room I let everyone in front go ahead and drive into the hallway after them, looking down unassumingly. Even though I’m dying to see how what we’ve worked on through the night looks in the light of day.

  The appreciative hollering of the pack makes me blush.

  “Wow!” they yelp. “Oh wow! Look at that!”

  I so like giving surprise gifts. It is deeply gratifying, and it’s a great pity that I only very rarely get the opportunity.

  The blank walls the color of malted milk are no more.

  We labored at the very boundaries of human endurance to remake them the way they’re supposed to be. Everything—yes, we did tend more toward monumental than detailed, but none of it was done haphazardly—every letter is decorated with great care. It probably could do with more drawings, but that would mean sacrificing quality in pursuit of quantity. Everyone has limits.

  “Yay!” Mermaid shouts and runs ahead, swinging her tiny backpack.

  Smoker is busy copying some deep thought or other off the walls into his diary. The bloated three-foot-high letters glisten like wet lozenges. Even I am struck by how imposing all of it looks. It’s not entirely clear what everything means, but that’s unimportant. Others will come to work on the empty spaces between the drawings and the letters, and in a couple of days—no, scratch that, in a couple of hours—we’re going to have important announcements, news, negotiations, poems, basically everything without which neither we nor our walls can function properly. We just gave it the first nudge.

  Mermaid runs back and reports breathlessly that it gets even better.

  “There are
these six elephants trampling across, one after the other . . . and one of them is checkered. What’s that mean, do you think?”

  Smoker doesn’t think it means anything. Sphinx suggests that it had been done simply to fill the space.

  “Someone must have cut out a stencil.”

  “Wait, is there by any chance this teeny-tiny aphid next to them?” Smoker says. “Next to the elephants, I mean. It should be green.”

  Of course there isn’t. There is, however, a cute slumbering Lanthanosuchus with its little legs up in the air, but I don’t want to spoil it.

  Mermaid dutifully sets off looking for the aphid. We’re moving along, already past the elephants, and everyone’s still searching for that aphid.

  “Aw. A dead crocodile,” Mermaid says sadly.

  And they all agree. It appears that no one among them is capable of telling a sleeping Lanthanosuchus from a dead crocodile.

  “Now I understand why we couldn’t wake up Noble,” Ginger says. “And why he stinks of paint thinner.”

  She adjusts Tubby’s panama hat and wheels him ahead.

  We catch up with them near the Third, where there’s a significant crowd assembled. They’re all silent, staring at the wall. I push myself through—and get the same knock to my senses that all of them have just received. This area was too far away from mine, and I didn’t visit it last night.

  They have left only rectangles outlined in black, with notes in the middle: Here was Antelope, by Leopard. Chalk, ochre, bronze paint. Surviving fragment of the diptych The Hunt.

  Big letters snaking along the lower border of the empty frames say: STRANGER, BARE YOUR HEAD.

  Ginger slowly pulls off Tubby’s panama.

  I put on dark glasses and drive away. Mustang clangs, sending the passersby scattering, both those in a hurry to get to the canteen and those not in a hurry to get anywhere: they all readily jump away, because as Mustang is becoming heavier and less maneuverable every day I’m having a harder and harder time steering it, while the dark glasses interfere with my ability to recognize obstacles. I can’t take them off, the sunny weather ruins my mood, and they help mask all this sunniness. With them I can even pretend that the sky is overcast instead of bright blue, so I have been wearing them continuously for the last week, eager to deceive myself, and getting into accidents, but better a couple of accidents than the depression that will inevitably follow if I’m forced to live under the cloudless sky.