The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  Humpback said he was going to perform an Irish jig for us.

  “Just you wait. I’ll do it,” he said in a kind of voice people use to threaten suicide.

  Then he tore apart the notebook with his poems, fashioned paper airplanes out of the pages, and tossed them out the window. Dropping one on the way. I picked it up, turned this way and that attempting to figure out what was written on it, and then rushed down to the yard to try and salvage the rest, but in the time it took me to drive down, half of them had been snatched up, and the other half landed in the muck and got dirty and soggy, rendering the letters completely illegible.

  Tabaqui was singing nonstop. He must have done four dozen songs in a row, each one more depressing than the one before it. All funerals and broken hearts, all the time. Noble, the only one of us who had at least some success in the past in getting him to shut up, inexplicably decided to practice patience and just smiled.

  Blind appeared about an hour and a half after our return from the canteen. He had one of his hands swaddled in a towel, and his complexion was so gray that Tabaqui took one look at him and fell silent. Blind looked like all the protagonists of his songs at once. Those about the funerals, and broken hearts, and abandoned wreaths. He said that he wasn’t feeling too good, climbed up to Lary’s bed, and lay there without a sound.

  Tabaqui darkened. Wheeled around the room a couple of times and then also clambered up to join Blind. A little while later he peeked out, called to Alexander, requested to be taken down, examined one of his top-secret hiding places, and disappeared back into Lary’s bed with a bottle of brandy at the ready. Tabaqui had exactly one way of treating any ailments. The only variation came in the brand and alcohol content.

  I don’t remember when exactly it was that I started to suspect that the graduation was happening earlier than the next week, and quite probably even tomorrow. I guess it was shortly before Blind’s arrival. It was definitely clear as soon as he appeared. When Ginger came in wearing the same cheerful expression as Blind and began hugging people left and right, my suspicion grew into certainty. She even hugged me. Like it wasn’t even a thing, like we hugged each other anytime we felt like it. That was the moment when I understood everything about tomorrow. And about today. Why the search, why Noble was willing to sit through the interminable funeral laments, why Blind looked like a corpse, and why Humpback was threatening to dance. And about the smiles, I understood them too. I mean, why everyone around was smiling like an idiot. I had this lump in my throat that stood in the way of words, so I too could only smile now, just smile and nothing else.

  “Please look after my bear for a while,” Ginger said. “I’ll be right back.”

  I took the bear from her.

  “Oh, look, one more paranoid grin,” Sphinx said, entering the dorm. “Another one joins the fun.”

  He looked at me intently, then at Ginger’s bear, which I was clutching tightly, because I did promise to take care of it even if I hadn’t quite put it in words, and then turned away.

  “There’s all this bread in the Coffeepot,” he said. “From the canteen. No one’s turned up for dinner at all. Shark ordered everything to be brought into the Coffeepot. If we want to claim our share we should hurry. Hounds already started sneaking it away.”

  Tabaqui got ready in a flash and wheeled away to get the bread, taking Lary with him. Before he left, he felt it his duty to smack me on the back. Cheering me up, I guess.

  “Did you figure it out yourself?” Sphinx said.

  I nodded. Then wheezed that it wasn’t that hard. We both looked up at Lary’s bunk. I noticed there was a paper airplane peeking out of Sphinx’s shirt pocket. The burns on his cheeks were still fairly bright, making him seem ruddily healthy.

  Then came Black, who asked if we were in need of brute force. He was dressed like he was going out into the wilderness. Heavy boots coming up almost to the knee, cargo pants with a dozen pockets, a shirt on top of another shirt. All of it on the greenish-brown side of the spectrum. And a hat on a string behind the shoulders.

  Sphinx said that the brute force would be needed in about half an hour. Black said in that case, he would return in about half an hour, and walked out, leaving behind a jar of olives.

  Alexander hauled out the box of cups, all of them different sizes, and started arranging them on the table. Tabaqui and Lary came back laden with packages. In addition to bread, they turned out to contain two jars of sandwich spread, a wheel of cheese, a stick of salami, and a bunch of scallions.

  “I shall call this dinner ‘The Last Flight of the Flyer,’” Tabaqui explained and added Black’s olives to the loot on the table.

  Ginger returned and took the bear off me.

  Then all was incredible hustle and bustle. They dumped the clothes out of the wardrobe and piled unfamiliar bags in the anteroom. There was a line to use the showers. I looked at this for a while and then decided to take a stroll. I didn’t have anything to change into anyway, and sitting there idly in the middle of it was quickly getting old. So I wheeled out.

  The hallway was empty. Not a soul, not even at the Crossroads. Doors slammed, from time to time someone would sprint from one room to another, but mostly the commotion was confined to the dorms. I went to sit by the Crossroads window. The rain had stopped a while back. Sun even made an appearance, albeit a short one. It was setting now, and the puddles in the yard glowed gold. I decided that I had to do a painting like that. Later sometime. An evening, in the bluest of blue, and the yellow puddles, and a thin line of yellow in the sky. I didn’t have my notepad with me to sketch it, so I did a quick one right in the diary, to make sure I didn’t forget, even though I knew I wouldn’t forget anyway. I saw this painting in my mind so vividly it got me doubting that it was going to happen. Everything that I imagined in such detail before I started drawing ended up worthless, or looked nothing like what I was imagining.

  I took another couple of laps around the hallway and returned to the dorm.

  They were in the process of moving furniture, trying to free up the space for the guests. The master bed had been disassembled into regular, narrow ones. They pushed one against the wall, the other against the wardrobe, and the third got squeezed somehow between the bunk and the table. It was now impossible to reach the window or to open the wardrobe, but there was this big empty space in the middle of the room. Covered with dust and debris. Lary attacked it with a broom, Alexander went over it with a mop, and then they let Tubby, in his festive red overalls, crawl around it to his heart’s content.

  Tubby was crawling, Tabaqui was slicing bread on the table, Sphinx and Black were discussing something, sitting on Black’s bed, Noble was offloading the medicine bottles from the wobbly nightstand that invariably got knocked over anytime we had guests. I noticed that he was throwing them into a garbage bag, and then I noticed the backpacks, in neat rows under the bed, all closed and ready. And more backpacks in the anteroom. Also coats folded on top of some of them. It dawned on me that everyone had already packed. Except me. I had this creepy feeling that they were all going to vanish any moment now, and I’d be left here alone in the empty dorm to wait for the morning. It passed, but left such a bad aftertaste that I hurriedly stuffed my things into the bag. I didn’t have much. Sketchpads, notepads, paints. The sweater that Humpback knitted for me and the cup, Jackal’s present.

  Tabaqui shouted to me to climb up on the table and help him with the sandwiches.

  The next hour I was very busy. Busy putting spread on all the bread he’d sliced, and since he’d sliced a sizable mound of it, the work promised to never end. The buttered pieces Tabaqui ingeniously decorated with this and that, and as a result managed to create enough sandwiches out of the limited amount of ingredients to feed an army. Looking at them, I even started to doubt if we’d be able to eat them all in one night. The finished sandwiches we arranged in layers on serving plates, but not before sticking a toothpick in each.

  “There!” Tabaqui said. “I’m done with work
ing for today. It’s party time!”

  With this, he and Noble holed up in the corner with bottles of homemade hooch, tasting and mixing. I wasn’t going to be of any help in that.

  While I was contemplating what else useful I could be doing, two Bird-Logs came in carrying mattresses, plopped them in the middle of the room, and went away again.

  Then came Lary, in Noble’s white shirt. It was the kind of shirt the lead singer in Tosca usually wears for his big number. I keep forgetting what his name is. Anyway, it was a very operatic shirt. Lace on the collar, billowing sleeves, that sort of thing. Lary looked stunning in it. It went especially well with high boots. Actually, they had all spiffed themselves up, it’s just that on Lary it seemed especially jarring.

  I was still sitting on the table. Shooing Nanette from the sandwiches quietly going stale, and drawing anything and everything around me right in the diary. Bits and pieces of them.

  Bird-Logs came back. Dragging in Vulture’s stepladder. Mermaid and Needle came with a round tray. There was a pie on it. They put it next to me and set to cutting it up. I grabbed the knife and joined in. The aroma of the pie made me realize how beastly hungry I was. It was a meat pie, still warm. I had no idea how they’d made it and with what, but they certainly weren’t using a hotplate. We arranged the slices on the same tray.

  “I think we should try it,” Mermaid said. “If it came out all right, I mean. It’s getting cold.”

  So the three of us took a piece each, and we gave one to Tubby as well. He was slurping it with such gusto that everyone immediately gravitated to us, eager to participate in the tasting. We only managed enough willpower to get the pie away, on top of the wardrobe, when there was about half of it left. Humpback climbed on the table to place the tin pan over it, to keep it from Nanette, and when he stepped down again he was in a kind of a swoon. He said that he’d marry the one who made this pie. Mermaid and Needle exchanged glances and giggled.

  “It was a joint project,” Mermaid said. “You’d have to become a polygamist.”

  Humpback confirmed that he would gladly do that. He was absolutely serious when he said it. Deadly serious. Like this thought just hit him, that the one thing that had been missing from his life up to this point was polygamy. I couldn’t believe it was really him saying that. Always so reticent, so quiet, and suddenly—promises of dancing, paper airplanes, joking with the girls . . . It sure was strange, the effect that the upcoming graduation was having on him.

  “Oh! I have to go get changed!” Needle said and ran off.

  “What about you?” I said to Mermaid. “Are you getting changed?”

  “I did,” she said, reddening. “Changed, I mean.”

  “Ah. Of course. Right. How stupid of me not to notice! You look great.”

  I was desperately casting for something I could point out and praise, something that I didn’t see on her every day. In vain.

  Mermaid nodded. Then she teased out a long strand of hair and showed me the fish. It was tiny, whittled out of a striped seed that didn’t look like it came from any fruit I knew. She shook it, and something inside the fish rattled. Not exactly ringing and not exactly knocking, something in between.

  “There is this one single seed inside, very resonant, so it’s a fish and a bell at the same time,” Mermaid explained.

  “Cool!” I said. “What’s it made from?”

  She shrugged.

  “Blind’s present.”

  I assumed that guests meant Vulture with Beauty, Shuffle, Black, and maybe a couple more of those who usually turned up some nights. I was completely off.

  Vulture came with Lizard, Angel, Beauty, and Horse. Red brought Viking, Corpse, Zebra, and Whitebelly. Along with Black came Owl, who’d never been in our room before, and then also Shuffle and Rabbit. They were carrying musical instruments. Two guitars, two flutes, and a lute. Vulture delivered two bottles of tequila, his own creation. Red hauled in a jug of mulled wine. An unfamiliar girl with green hair, wearing a long red evening dress, brought a packet of cakes.

  It was getting crowded on the table, so I climbed down, first to the nearest bed, the one by the window, and from it to Black’s bed.

  All the wheelchairs they had lined up in the hallway, there was no place for them inside. Blind must have left Lary’s bed at some point, because I saw Zebra and Corpse climb up there along with their backpacks.

  Red was hectoring everyone to hurry up and take a seat, because the mulled wine was getting cold.

  Then Mermaid sat next to me, thankfully. Then Lary, and finally Needle, flushed and out of breath. I nearly tumbled down from the bed when I saw her. She had on a real wedding dress. The train, the veil, everything a proper bride is supposed to have. The works. She was also holding a small round bouquet bound with shiny ribbon. Mermaid struggled to help her fit the expansive white skirt on the bed between Lary and me. He squeezed into the far corner and I had to press myself to the wall to make enough space for the chiffon creation. After it had been duly positioned and straightened, Mermaid was able to sit and wrap it over herself, or rather burrow into it like it was a snowbank.

  I could imagine that our merry gang was pretty silly to look at. Snow-white in bridal finery and three dwarves peeking bashfully from under it. Everyone felt it their duty to approach and compliment Needle’s dress. She was sitting there beet red from embarrassment but uncommonly pretty, nodding and thanking them, and I thought how it was strange that a simple wedding dress can turn even a homely girl into a beauty.

  I had barely enough time to collect my thoughts after seeing Needle’s outfit before an even more stunning thing happened. Two people from the tent camp showed up. A man, lanky, unshaven, and undernourished, and a woman, big boned, with broad shoulders and massive arms. They came with Alexander. He invited them to sit on his bed and gave each a cup of coffee, like it was something natural and expected. Like they were in the habit of popping in nightly for a coffee.

  They themselves obviously weren’t feeling it the same way Alexander did. They looked shy and nervous, sitting close to each other, very straight, quiet and tense, keeping their eyes down. There was something strange about their bearing. I would even say weird. I wasn’t alone in wondering why they were here. But no one said anything either—guests are guests, whoever they are, and you’re supposed to be polite with guests.

  About five minutes after they appeared, Tabaqui mounted the stepladder, which I assumed had been brought for Vulture, and shouted that he was delighted to welcome all assembled, and happy to announce that he was going to emcee this Fairy Tale Night, “because there seems to be quite a lot of us here, and this requires a degree of coordination.”

  Everyone applauded.

  “We are waiting for just a couple more guests, and after that we shall begin! I would like to ask those sitting in proximity to candles to be ready to light them on my command.”

  Mermaid laughed softly, and her bells tinkled.

  “Who else is coming?” Needle asked.

  But the last guests were already there. After the tent people I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by anything, but I still was when R One showed up, and with him a bandy-legged old man in a peaked cap.

  “That’s the night guard from the third floor,” Lary whispered, leaning down from the bunk to get a better look. “I’ll be damned. Whatever does he need here?”

  R One and the old man sat on the bed by the wardrobe.

  “Please give a hand for our guests!” Tabaqui squeaked.

  Everyone applauded again.

  The old man sprang up, swept the cap off, and took a formal bow.

  Lary made a curious sound, like something was stuck in his throat, and sat up very straight. He had a look like something really shocking had just happened to him, but I didn’t have time to ask what it was, because Tabaqui declared that everyone was here now and we could start.

  They switched off the lights. Red lit the candle nearest to us. He was sitting on the floor in front of me, huggin
g Tubby.

  As soon as it became dark Tabaqui stopped screaming and said in a normal calm voice, “We have plenty of time ahead of us tonight, but still, let us begin.”

  NOBLE’S TALE

  He found himself in the middle of the road, a place where it was impossible for him to be. Strangely, this fact did not alarm him. Also, something odd happened to his memory. He remembered nothing at all, but he knew somehow that he had ended up here of his own accord, and that it was very important for him to find something.

  He was dressed all in black, and in his backpack there was a book in a language unfamiliar to him, a change of clothes, a camera, and a notepad. The notes in the notepad had been clearly made by him, but he didn’t remember when or where. Walking turned out to be very tiring, as did even standing still, so he was mostly sitting on the shoulder and only getting up when he saw a car approaching. Most of the cars weren’t in what you’d call decent shape. At least on the outside. As he sat there he was thumbing idly through the notebook, trying to decipher his own notes. They were mostly illegible, accompanied by drawings with a profusion of arrows pointing in all directions and confusing him even more.

  Finally one of the drivers took pity on him and agreed to give him a lift, “but only to the crossroads.” At the crossroads he found a bus stop and a tiny store with two tables inside, making it into a kind of roadside café. The store owner, a kind woman, called him “you poor forgetful little Jumper” and fed him potatoes fried in bacon fat. The smell of the sizzling bacon made him nauseated, but he was hungry and also didn’t want to upset her by refusing her kindness. From her he learned that the buses that stopped here went in three different directions, and one of the names rang a bell, faintly.

  “A useless place,” the café owner said. “No work there, don’t even think about it.”

  He smiled politely. Blackwood. The name of the “useless place” was calling out to him.