The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  The room is taken over by the pre-storm dusk and, when seen from the lofty height of Hound Daddy, looks surprisingly small. Sphinx, Blind, and Mermaid sit in a neat row, backs against the wardrobe. The dusty whirlwind rattles the windows and throws flying debris at them.

  Black lowers me to the floor. I crawl over to our guys, trying and discarding on the way successive faces that may be relevant to the situation. The problem is, I don’t quite understand the situation. Was today the day we’ve been orphaned forevermore? Have we just lost the last of the dragons that don’t exist in nature? Does the glum expression on the faces of those assembled here imply silent mourning, and if so, should I kick the boisterousness up a bit to shake them out of that?

  Blind shuffles aside, freeing some space between Sphinx and himself. Big enough to fit a rabbit. Miraculously, I manage to squeeze in, and immediately decide to abandon the boisterousness. I’ve already been plenty boisterous today. Let it be calm here now, and let the wind howl and tear up the Outsides. I’m tired, and my head hurts.

  Black crouches down by the door. There’s something long, wrapped in a towel, on Sphinx’s knees, and it stinks of burned plastic. I peek under the towel, but even before I do I already know that it must be the rakes in there. And it is indeed them. Unattached, with fingers melted off, flashing the nakedness of the steel frame. Ugly. Very ugly.

  “Leave it,” Sphinx says. “It’s trash now, nothing more.”

  I lower the corner of the towel back. It’s an unpleasant feeling—touching something that’s died so recently.

  “Did it hurt?” I ask, feeling stupid.

  “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “What about Alexander?”

  “Alexander is upstairs. Sleeping.”

  The words come fast and clipped, and I understand that I shouldn’t be asking for clarification. Upstairs means on Humpback’s bunk, and why exactly he’s there and in what condition—insignificant details I’m not going to delve into. The important thing is he hasn’t flown away completely. I close my eyes and go limp, squeezed between the rib cages of Sphinx and Blind, trying to convince myself that sleeping in this fashion, like a piece of cheese between two graters, is exactly what I’ve always wanted. I don’t exactly fall asleep, of course, but crash into some kind of slumber. I have enough thoughts that need thinking, and the thinking of them is best done in this semiconscious state. So I think them.

  With gold-braided rope, I have encircled the space that’s taken up by the collection. It looks like a small stage. The photographs of the Crossroads in the ancient times serve as a backdrop. In the gap between them I have this large white-and-blue plate, shining like the Moon. I’m not sure it was the right place to put it, but the arrangement holds a special attraction for me, combining as it were the Moon and the House, two of my favoritest natural phenomena.

  In front of the boards with Crossroads landscapes I put stools of varying heights. The tallest of them supports the birdcage. It is also tall and very narrow, and frankly would feel cramped even for a budgie. A shorter stool holds some kind of crooked thing that no one could guess what it is. What it most resembles is a malignant tree growth that got cut off the tree, squashed flat, and fashioned into a tray. Who knows what for? It would be hard to call this dried knobbiness beautiful. If anything, it’s unsightly. When I was a kid it used to lie around the room the seniors called “bar.” I don’t know where this story came from, but among the squirts there was a persistent rumor that if it were ever pierced, the resulting hole would spew forth a torrent of foul, squelching slime that would engulf everything around it. The world would turn into a swamp. So even though we were mortally curious to find out what was inside the knobbiness, no one had dared to be the one to check. We just caressed the rough skin, listening to the swamp within, trying to determine if it threatened to gush out, excited by our touch. We did it when the seniors weren’t around, and even though we never dreamed of piercing it, just touching the swamp was terrifying enough. It could have been only pretending to be solid to throw us off guard while waiting for an opportune moment, for that one incautious poke of the clumsy finger.

  The swamp is now part of my collection. It looks smaller and somehow darker than it did once, but it’s still waiting. In case any careless visitors get any bright ideas, I’ve stapled a piece of paper above it, saying Do not touch!

  In fact the entire collection is bristling with exhortations, directional arrows, and road signs. Crossroads boards in particular. In the middle of the left board I’ve also hung a magnifying glass on a toilet chain. It can be used to study the photographs more closely. Next to it is the mailbox on a wooden leg. Painted pink, green, and red. The leg bears traces of rat teeth, but the top part is still quite presentable.

  The boards, the mailbox, the cage, the swamp, the moon plate, the blue lantern with a hinged flap, also on a wooden leg like the mailbox, the chair with the stuffed crow glued to its back and nails pounded into the seat (and there’s a note hanging on the crow saying Hitchcock says hello!), the dog collar with bells (what’s that supposed to do, drive the dog crazy?), the box of assorted dried beetles, the bottle with a mysterious letter inside and sealed with red wax, the leaky boot of a gargantuan size, the sack of divining beans, the stop sign, mangled as if it’s been run over by a truck, the wide-brimmed black hat, three horseshoes, the twisted root that has common mandrake, male scratched into it, and the straw parasol, shedding profusely at any attempt to open it.

  The objects can be broadly classified into ephemeral, magical, and natural. In the ephemeral I include the plate, the parasol, and the birdcage. In the magical, the chair with the crow, the beetles, the “common mandrake,” and the sack of beans. Everything else is natural, except maybe the swamp. Once I was driving around the collection playing the harmonica and discovered that near the stop sign the tune tended to become plaintive, while near the mailbox, jaunty and chirpy. Which obviously means that the mailbox had once been used as a birdhouse, and that the sign had encountered some rather sad circumstances.

  It all started with the plate, the one playing the Moon. That was the day when an embassy of girls arrived and cut the cable, thus severing the communication channels between our side and theirs. When they left there were bundles of colored wires strewn on the floor. Everyone kept stumbling over them, so I was forced to hang them on the wall, because there was no other way to use them and I couldn’t very well throw them away.

  While hanging the wires I climbed up on the wardrobe and found this cracked serving plate on top of it. Also a rusty sponge and a mummified cockroach. This upset me. I got to thinking about all the old junk that nobody needs, the completely useless stuff that doesn’t get tossed only because at first no one could be bothered to and then it kind of fades away, about all the things that people attract to themselves at a frightening rate wherever they appear. The longer you spend somewhere, the more there are things around you that need to be thrown out, but when you move to a new place you never take all that trash with you, which means that it belongs more to the place than to the people, because it never moves, and in each new place a person finds scraps of someone else, while transferring the possession of his own scraps to whoever moves into his previous place, and this goes on everywhere and all the time.

  The longer I thought, the more it scared me, so in the end I lost my will to move and stayed there on the top of the wardrobe, in the company of the deceased cockroach and the dirty sponge, infinitely dear to my heart precisely because of their utter uselessness.

  When Sphinx asked me what was the matter and I explained to him the horror of the situation, he called me a material fetishist.

  “Sphinx, think about it,” I said. “They are more of this place than you and I could ever hope to be. No one will take them away from here. They have this huge advantage.”

  “Would you like to become an old sponge, little human?”

  Sphinx leaned against the wardrobe, offering his shoulders as a climbing-down aid, an
d I scrambled over them, bringing the cracked plate with me.

  Noble asked me, in an evenly malicious voice, whatever it was I thought I needed with that busted dish.

  “I’m going to share my bed with it,” I said. “Or put my earring in it every night.”

  Noble said that my fetishism had long morphed into breathtaking egotism, and that it needed to be brought under control, even though he personally had no idea how that could be accomplished. That I preferred things to people and spent my days plotting to shovel crap on top of him and all the rest of them until they surrendered and stopped moving.

  While he was speaking I wiped the dust off the plate, shined it, and placed it on the nightstand. It was even more beautiful than I’d thought. White with light-blue flowers and berries.

  All the time I was busying myself with it, Sphinx was staring at it and frowning, as if he was also dead set against the unfortunate thing.

  “What?” I snapped. “Yes, so it’s symbolic to me. Is that so hard to understand?”

  “No, it’s not that. The thing I don’t understand,” Sphinx drawled thoughtfully, “is where did it come from. Has anyone seen this dish before? I haven’t. I can’t imagine how it ended up on top of our wardrobe. Now you, Tabaqui, do you remember it?”

  I didn’t. Neither did Noble, Humpback, Lary, nor Blind. I spent the next two days driving around the House pushing the cracked white-and-blue plate into people’s faces, and not a single one of them recognized it. And then it turned out that the House was full of unexpectedly unrecognizable objects. That was the start of my personal quest and of the Hunt that the pack happily dismissed as insanity. After three days of the Hunt, I was chased off the common bed with all my loot. On the sixth day the collection was transferred to the empty classroom.

  I wake up in a dark and stuffy place, racked by the Howls that have taken me over and shaking from oxygen deprivation. Someone not very bright has fashioned a sleep nest and shoved me inside. I’m sure they had only the best intentions in mind. You have to have a knack for building nests, it is even a science of sorts, because if you get it wrong it’s liable to collapse or smother you accidentally. But whoever’s built this poor imitation wasn’t bothered about details like that. So I emerge out of it sweaty and half-asphyxiated, and it folds in on itself even before I’m fully out, sending a couple of pillows tumbling on top of me.

  Smoker is studying the ceiling. If it were him imprisoned in the nest instead of me, he’d have expired right there, quietly and peacefully.

  Lary is making tea. Ginger is scraping off some stuff that got stuck to her bear. I ask where Alexander is.

  “He went out,” Ginger says, turning her button-eyed beast to face me. “Feeling embarrassed, I guess.”

  I see. A bashful type, our Alexander. Except when he isn’t. Then it’s advisable to be as far away from him as possible. Actually, I don’t think that way. I wouldn’t have missed my own role as an active participant in what has happened for anything. I climb back over the ruins of the nest. This way I can see Noble, sitting on the floor. A proud owner of a beautiful new shiner, he’s cradling Ginger’s flask and quietly getting piss drunk.

  “They say you threw a homemade bomb that blew away half the Coffeepot,” Lary informs me. “Like, said a farewell speech and tossed it. I told them you never had any bombs, but they don’t believe me. They say I’m covering up for my own kind.”

  “That’s nice, Lary. You should always cover up for your own kind. We’re one pack, after all. That’s serious business.”

  He blinks.

  “But there wasn’t any bomb, right?”

  I feel the lump on my head. “Are you sure?”

  Of course he’s not sure. He sniffles and scratches his chin. Or rather the place where chins are supposed to be located on people. His meditative state does not bode well for the prospects of us having tea in the foreseeable future, but it certainly improves his overall appearance.

  “And Alexander got spooked and had a fit,” Lary says, visibly downcast.

  “Was that a question or a statement?” I say.

  He just sulks silently.

  I lie on my belly and squint. The squares of the comforter stretch before me like a wavy chessboard. Like a runway for the stuff strewn on top. The glasses case is an armored car without doors or windows, the comb is a peeling, listing fence, my cap is a flying saucer with pins for portholes. A hauntingly beautiful and uninhabited little world. Well, not completely, as I set my fingers running across to liven it up. As they do, a primitive white contraption lowers itself to the surface, belching steam.

  Ginger’s voice inquires if I’m all right.

  “You seem to be unusually prostrate.”

  I sit up and pull the cup closer.

  “I just came back from the Blanket Country. A very peaceful place. It’s inhabited by a race of snakelike sentient beings. They’re pink, blind, and rather nimble. And there’s one collective conscience for every ten of them. The Snakers have this myth that their world has a lower counterpart, and on that lower level each Snaker has a double, only shorter and less mobile. Naturally, not everyone believes this nonsense. But there’s an even more extreme sect. Its members are convinced that a common conscience unifies not ten Snakers, but twenty, of which ten are from the netherworld. That’s widely considered heretical. The sect members also like to use forbidden stimulants in order to expand the boundaries of their universe, and have been mostly hunted down and eradicated by now, one way or another.”

  Noble’s head emerges from the other side of the bed and positions its chin on the edge.

  “I wonder why it is that your tales are always creepy, Tabaqui?”

  “Because I’m a creep. And the sleep of my reason produces monsters. By the way, if you’re interested in serving as the Voice of God for the poor Twentiers, you can try addressing them. Bear in mind they’re deaf as well, though.”

  Noble shudders and peers closely at his own fingers, which he’s brought together under his nose.

  “How am I supposed to address them, then?”

  “Tapping in Morse code. They’ll understand.”

  “Listen to you,” Lary says indignantly. “You’re doing this to confuse me again, aren’t you?”

  Noble’s eyes widen suddenly, Doom billowing up in them.

  “You’re a bastard, Tabaqui, you know that? How can I tap anything for them unless I’m the conscience of the twenty? That would be against their religion.”

  “So you’ll be a false Voice. It’s been known to happen.”

  “You! It’s you who’s false! You just enjoy tormenting those poor . . .”

  “Oh man,” Ginger moans. “I’m so sick of you! How can you stand it, being out of your heads most of the time?”

  “It’s Tabaqui.” Noble tries to shift the blame, pointing at my fingers splayed over the blanket. “He’s a liar. He’s made himself into an idol for those . . . those . . .”

  “Twentiers,” I prompt.

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s just them trying to confuse me,” Lary insists. “Always the same story. I don’t know why they have it in for me. I haven’t been here for ages. But as soon as I show up, there it is again.”

  “Right! Let Lary address them,” Noble suggests, brightening up. “He would be quite consistent with their dogma. Lary, my friend, be a good man, tap out a message. Tell them that they have got it pretty close, if you don’t count the half-baked freaks like Tabaqui and me here, and that we fully support their thirst for knowledge.”

  “You know, I almost believe in the bomb now,” Lary complains to aloof Smoker. “Or should I say I believe in it more and more.”

  “So? You can believe in whatever you want,” Smoker says, looking at the unfortunate Log out of the corner of one annoyed eye. “Do you even know Morse code?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Then why don’t you just say so to Noble? He’d stop pestering you.”

  “Slaving fo
r them, making them tea . . . And this is what I get . . .”

  “They are ungrateful beasts,” Smoker agrees. “Ungrateful, unintelligible, and unpleasant.”

  “That would be us,” Noble translates for me. “Everything he’s just said was about us. You heard the words he said, didn’t you, Tabaqui?”

  “No, unintelligible—that was about you personally. And unpleasant too. Look at that shiner. It definitely interferes with the pleasantness of your visage. Very much. Where’d you get it?”

  “A shock wave from the blast,” Noble leers drunkenly.

  “Liars,” Smoker continues, going down his dispassionate list. “Windbags . . .”

  “And where, if I may ask, is Sphinx?” I say quickly. “Where’s he been gallivanting while I am forced to suffer this indignity and abuse?”

  “We both are, Tabaqui, we both are,” Noble points out. “Sphinx is at the funeral. I think he’ll be some time. If they are doing everything properly . . . They’ve put them in a box wrapped in black velvet . . .”

  I realize that he’s talking about the burned rakes, and feel embarrassed for my initial scare. Then I feel wronged for not having been invited.

  “Encased them in wax . . .”

  “What for?”

  “To make sure,” Noble says. “Don’t you get it? Blind didn’t want them to be scavenged for souvenirs.”

  “And also they are all absolutely mad,” Smoker says, bringing to a close the full account of our distinctive features.

  Smoker fairly reeks of watches. He’s been hiding one somewhere on his person ever since returning from the Sepulcher. I’ll get to it. Sooner or later I always do. When he’s out taking a shower, for example. That thought calms me down a little. But only a little, because at present the watch is perfectly intact and leaches the life out of me slowly by the mere fact of its existence. I can’t live in the proximity of watches, they are killing me, but just try and explain this simple fact to Smoker. He is convinced I’m faking it. Faking! Me! I look at him meaningfully and reproachfully, but he keeps sipping his tea without a care in the world. I guess the cup is in the way, shielding him from my reproach.