The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  I told Guppy about this. I didn’t want to bother Sphinx.

  “Tabaqui?” Guppy asked, frowning.

  I swear, it took him two full minutes of racking his brain to figure out who I was talking about. So I was a little surprised when I found that my diary still contained Jackal’s musings, and the little figurine he made from a walnut and gave to me was still in my bag.

  “A present stays back,” Sphinx said. “And if he considered what he wrote in the diary to be a present, it would also stay.”

  I went through the diary and saw that only Vulture’s cactus notes had disappeared. In their place there was nothing. Clean paper. It became a little clearer what had reduced Dearest to the state he was in, and why Guppy would periodically call Lizard “Leader.”

  My insights, doubts, and fears were spread over the four days of our vigil, dulled by the discussions and the waiting. I felt like a fish in a tank that hadn’t been cleaned for a while. Everything was murky, uncertain, and unexplained, and it seemed that the ability to be shocked had been lost somehow.

  The weather was beautiful. Not hot, not cold, no rain, no wind, no withering heat. The air remained clean and clear. Lizard whiled away the hours playing solitaire, mumbling under his breath, or else incessantly pumping the weights he’d hauled in. Guppy and Dodo played cards. Dearest, before he was taken away, just sat in the corner scowling angrily.

  When I said that we who remained in the House became closer, I didn’t include Sphinx. With him it was the other way around, like he was fading in the distance with each passing day, becoming even more withdrawn and emaciated. I was afraid that if this kept on he too would simply disappear. He slept in his clothes, and I never noticed him eating, drinking, or going to the bathroom. It was better when Mermaid was around, but in her absence I tried not to look in his direction. Because when I did I always ended up trying to help somehow, and then he would tense up, thank me, and leave. He behaved the same way with Guppy and Dodo, to say nothing of Lizard, but they unexpectedly hit it off with my father. Held long discussions through the night. My dad, whom I’d always known to have a single mode of behavior with anyone younger than twenty, and that is hooting and slapping them on the back, suddenly opened up as a great listener, a philosopher even, demonstrated a sharp sense of humor and generally amazed me to no end. He also managed to force Sphinx to take a shower, and afterward put clean clothes on him, so neatly you’d think he’d spent all of his life practicing. Pity that he could only come in the evenings, after work.

  Then they announced the new graduation date, and our life in suspended animation came to an end.

  It was Sunday, so my father didn’t have to go anywhere. We had a peaceful breakfast in the canteen, freshened up, and went down to the first with our bags. The lecture hall was packed with the departing students and their parents, the parents being somber and businesslike, in a rush to leave, and compared to them, those who had stayed with us for the four-day vigil looked almost like slackers and layabouts, I didn’t know why. Viking’s mother kept pushing hair out of his eyes, giggling moronically; the glasses on Rabbit’s mother appeared absurdly large, making her nose stick out from under them like a button in an elevator: Guppy’s father was wearing a suit that didn’t fit, like he took it off someone; and my dad inexplicably turned into an aging hippie, and even started talking in an absurd drawl. Women threw him sideways glances, like he was a bum who had sneaked in somehow. I wanted to sink through the floor, I was so ashamed—for him, and for myself for being ashamed.

  I don’t know who came for Sphinx, except that it wasn’t one of his parents. Could be his personal driver. Or maybe a distant relative. Sphinx regarded him as no more than a porter for his suitcase. He himself wasn’t letting Mermaid out of sight even for a second. Her parents turned out to be quite elderly. Small, dressed all in black, as if plucked out of some remote village and brought to the House by a magical twister. I noticed them writing diligently on the sheets of paper they tore out of a notebook, or rather the father was writing what the mother dictated. They passed the sheets over to Mermaid, and she folded them and stuffed them in Sphinx’s breast pocket. I knew then that he wouldn’t have any trouble finding Mermaid in the Outsides. He hadn’t asked for my address, but my father stalked the driver (or the relative who looked like one) until he managed to obtain some kind of information from him, and only then said we could go.

  And we went. With no farewell hugs or kisses, because we had already said our good-byes more than once.

  EPILOGUE

  TALES FROM THE OTHER SIDE

  The Man with the Crow

  No one could say he had it easy. In the bed of his pickup truck there were twelve little mattresses, a box with clean baby clothes, a bag with the dirty ones, another bag, this one with disposable utensils, a boombox lashed to the side with wire, and eleven kids, aged one to three. At least he got lucky with Rat Fairy. She drove while he busied himself in the back with the children, and sometimes spelled him for a short time in this capacity, so he could get some sleep. Not too often, because it meant that the truck wasn’t moving. She looked more like an evil enchantress than a good fairy, but she was neither evil nor good, she was just fulfilling the task she had been charged with.

  With the children he was also lucky. They were all smarter than their age, and almost all of them endured the trip quietly and patiently. But they still would get carsick from time to time, they needed to eat and drink, many were not toilet-trained yet, those who were still couldn’t do it sometimes in the shaking truck bed, and no matter how he tried, each day it became harder and harder for him.

  People who saw this strange family were surprised that many of the children were of the same age while not being twins, and that none of them looked like their father. Also suspicious was the father’s relative youthfulness, the crow ensconced on his shoulder, and the wide-brimmed black hat adorned with a ring of the yellowed skulls of some small animal.

  “Gypsies, I’ll bet,” they said, glowering. “And the kids are stolen.”

  “They are not all mine,” he would explain self-consciously, when the questions became particularly probing. “Half of them are my sister’s.”

  And he pointed at the raven-haired girl behind the wheel. She chain-smoked, resting her sharp elbow on the edge of the window, and her shoulder featured an unusual tattoo: a scowling rat. As soon as people had a good look at it, even the most inquisitive of them thought it best to walk away, and the questions tended to end abruptly.

  The truck rolled around seemingly without purpose, but Rat Fairy did, in fact, constantly check the map. Some houses were marked on it with a red cross. They tried to reach them at dawn and without disturbing the neighbors. Each time they were met there, usually by a man and a woman, but sometimes only by women and once by a single man. A brief hushed conversation ensued, one of the children would be transferred from the truck to the house, and they left as quietly as they came. Other houses were marked with green crosses. These they visited openly, at any time of day or night, and picked up boxes of baby food.

  And even though there were fewer and fewer children, they grew more and more tired, and their journey became more arduous. They started forgetting days and dates, talked less and less, confused the kids they’d already fed with the ones who were still hungry. Twice Rat Fairy lost her way, making the quest longer by many hours.

  Still, when it came the time to part with the last child, he started crying. Rat Fairy slapped him on the back.

  “Oh, come on. You’ll have your own someday.”

  She wasn’t really evil, it was just that there were things she had no way of understanding.

  The Waitress

  Every night when her shift ended, about half past eight, she would go out into the backyard of the café carrying the scraps for the cats. She distributed them between two paper plates, leaned with her back against the deck railing and simply stood there, resting or maybe dreaming, until it became dark. The cats strolled around. Gray
cats did it invisibly, of course, black-and-whites were half-visible. She stood there, also almost invisible except for the apron and the lace cap, hands tucked under her armpits, and waited. “The twilight is the crack between the worlds.” She’d picked up this phrase in some book, back when she still had time to read. She no longer remembered what happened in that book or who wrote it, but this phrase alone stuck in her mind. The crack between the worlds, she kept thinking, staring into the deepening blue dusk. Here. Now. When it became too dark to distinguish the shape of the lilac bush near the fence, five feet from the deck, she went back. Feeling rested and full of energy, as if the half hour she spent doing nothing cleansed her of the tiredness, the kitchen reek, and the kitchen gossip.

  Because of that strange habit, the other kitchen girls started calling her Princess. Some days, when she returned to the kitchen for her bag before leaving, she heard them talking about her.

  “You’d think she would run back to the child, right? But no, first she needs to nip out back for an hour, day in and day out. Some mother, is what I’m saying. If you ask me, I wouldn’t let people like her within a mile of children.”

  “She must be doing this because she doesn’t like taking care of the baby. I have no idea who she dumps the poor thing on while she’s here.”

  Sometimes the woman who was relieving her shift would chime in.

  “Ah, but have you looked at that baby? I’d like to see you rushing back to something like that. He’s got this huge head, and a mouth full of teeth. Eight months, my eye! He gives me the willies, he does. And she wouldn’t even call him by name. Tubby this and Tubby that. And he’s not that fat, really.”

  “Maybe his daddy was tubby.”

  “Whatever he was, must’ve been a scary sight if the kid’s taking after him.”

  “Not after her, surely. She might be all speckled like a quail’s egg, but she is kinda cute for that.”

  She didn’t pay attention to any of that talk. She couldn’t afford to make a scene and lose the job. And it didn’t hurt her that much anyway. Tubby was a perfect child. Not a beauty, maybe, but very clever, and he could already say at least half a dozen words. He patiently waited for her to come back from the afternoon shift, gnawing on the biscuits she’d leave him for lunch and playing with the stuffed dinosaur. The neighbors never once complained about him crying. He didn’t need a nurse. He knew how to wait. They both knew, because that was the only thing they did. Together and separately, while playing, working, making dinner and eating it, in the crib, and around the back of the café, even in their dreams.

  Their father, also the Beautiful Prince from the Not-Here, looking at the same time like the faded dinosaur with button eyes (the way Tubby imagined him) and like the small sprig of jasmine growing in a pot on her windowsill, was going to find them sooner or later, if not today then tomorrow, they only had to wait for him. And when he did, they wouldn’t have to worry anymore about the price of diapers, or the vicious gossip, or any of the small inconveniences of life, because he would take them with him to his fairy land, where everything would be different. So they waited.

  The Three-Fingered Man in Black

  He took residence in the abandoned three-story house, the one that spawned insistent rumors of being haunted. It was some time before people noticed. The house was out of the way, and the new tenant did not turn the lights on, did not advertise his presence in any way. At first they took him for a drifter. But drifters aren’t usually clean shaven, dressed in suits, or in the habit of buying a week’s worth of groceries. When it became clear that the man was in the house to stay, they sent a committee made of residents of the nearby houses to clarify the situation. It was a small town, and foreigners here were usually met with suspicion.

  The man amiably received the committee and politely refused to answer most of their questions. Some things they did manage to find out, though.

  The owner of the house—yes, it turned out that he did exist—had hired this man to look after the property. The man showed them the papers, and the papers were all in order, even though no one could remember a time when the haunted house had been owned by anybody, and the owner’s signature looked strange indeed, resembling as it did a fat spider. One of the neighbors, a retired lawyer, assured them that there appeared to have been nothing unlawful here. The man in the black suit said that he was going to remain in the house until he received further instructions from the owner. There wasn’t anything they could say against that, and the committee departed, unsatisfied but with the general feeling of having done their duty.

  The house had always been a strange place, so it surprised no one that its owner signed papers with a spider and sent people to guard his property when there wasn’t much left of it that hadn’t crumbled to dust.

  The new occupant of the old house lay low for some time, and then one day this surly young woman in leather came to visit him astride a motorcycle, scaring the neighborhood cats half to death. She brought a small fair-haired girl, offloaded her, and roared away immediately. This event turned the people completely against the man. Even his single-father status could do nothing to endear him to the neighbors. Besides, the girl was an exceptionally unpleasant child.

  BETWEEN THE WORLDS

  Sphinx would take a room in the college dorm, tiny but private. He would spend the winter there, studying for the exams, and the winter would be the coldest in the last fifteen years. He would never find Mermaid. The address given by her parents would turn out to be nonexistent. Sphinx would visit everyone having the same last name as that strange family, then everyone with similar last names, and after two months of searching and asking would start to doubt if they hadn’t been a hallucination.

  From time to time he would receive letters from his mother. He’d read the first two. The others, unopened, would go to the bottom of his suitcase. The reams of newspapers he’d buy and scan hastily would go into a pile outside his door, growing day by day. Some of them, with articles he found interesting, would join the letters in the suitcase. The neighbors would be polite and courteous to him. At some point he’d realize that he was leading the life of a hermit and try to become more outgoing. He’d start attending student parties.

  After one of them, instead of returning to his freezing room, he’d go straight to the bus stop and board the first bus of the morning, the only passenger in it. Changing buses twice, he’d arrive at the edge of town.

  The House wouldn’t be there, or rather it wouldn’t be the House. Three walls, still standing amid mountains of bricks and rubble. Blanketed with snow. He’d walk along the fence surrounding this future building site, find a place where the boards did not come together, and sneak into the former domain of the House. One of the remaining walls would be covered in writings, from top to bottom. Names, addresses, phone numbers, short notes. He’d read all of them, and wouldn’t find that which he wasn’t hoping to find anyway.

  He’d complete the circle around the wall and sit down on the pile of rubble dusted with snow, feeling warmer each minute, against all the laws of nature that dictated he should be freezing.

  “I’m sorry,” he’d say. “You seemed to me a monster that devoured all of my friends. I was sure that you’d never let me go. That you needed me for something known only to you. That I would never be free until I left you, even though I lied to Smoker about the freedom being inside of a person wherever he happens to be. I was afraid that you changed me, made me into your toy. I needed to prove to myself that I could live without you. I blamed you for Elk, and for Wolf. Elk was killed by accident and Wolf was killed by Alexander, but it was easier to think that it was your fault than to admit that the fault was with Wolf. That he was neither kind nor wise, the way I imagined him to be. That he wasn’t perfect. That Elk wasn’t perfect. Easier to blame you than admit that. Easier to say that you killed thirty-odd people than to see that they were cowardly fools or little children who had lost their way. Easier to think that it was you demanding Pompey’s death than
to imagine that it gave Blind pleasure to kill him. Easier to be sure that you forced me to remake Noble than to know that I liked doing it . . . Easier to hope that Blind lied about Mermaid than to concede that she really does not exist in this world, neither she nor her strange parents, nor their addresses that they gave to me so eagerly. So much easier just to believe in all of that than to realize that she was your gift, given to me in the hopes of holding on to me when the time came, only with that, not by force or deceit.”

  Sphinx would be talking until he was exhausted, until the words dissolved in the frigid air with the little white clouds of his breath. Then he’d get up and climb down from the pile of icy debris, slipping awkwardly. When he’d turn the corner of the wall with the addresses he would see that they were no longer there, and neither were the phone numbers. It would be dirty white, with multicolored spirals, triangles, suns, and moons . . . And the wondrous ugly beasts roaming underneath. Crude, sharp toothed, their legs of different length, their tails sticking straight up rigidly.