The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  The deathly stillness that follows these words scares Smoker, but also fills him with an unexpected gloating.

  Humpback, crumpling the handkerchief, his face slowly reddening.

  Tabaqui, in his cloak of many colors, frozen solid, with the bite of food he was chewing visible under the skin of the cheek.

  Blind, fingers on the strings almost as thin as the strings themselves. His face remains hidden.

  Sphinx on the headboard, like a perched bird, eyes closed.

  “One’s all about chicks and shells, the other—ostriches,” Sphinx mumbles. “One set of metaphors for both.”

  “Why don’t you please shut up,” Black says, breathing heavily. “Like you didn’t piss yourself. You’re the same as them!”

  “Sure. Not the same as you, thank God.” Sphinx sighs. “All right, if you’re done trying to mess with our heads . . .”

  “Oh no-o-o,” Black smirks drunkenly. “I haven’t even begun. That was . . . by way of introduction. Letting Smoker have a nice, clear look at you. At the way you . . .” Black is shaking with mute laughter, unable to speak. “At the way you all alerted. Dogs, every one of you. Crazy, huh?”

  He wipes the tears off his cheeks.

  “Black, what were you drinking?” Humpback asks, panicked. “Talk to me. How are you feeling?”

  Tabaqui makes frantic swallowing motions, trying to dislodge the piece of a bread roll stuck in his throat.

  “Great!” Black shoots up and displays a wide, toothy smile. “I am feeling great!”

  Smoker moves away a little. Black grabs his shoulder and whispers loudly in his ear, drenching him in alcoholic reek, “Did you see that? No, I mean it. Did you see them?”

  “Yes. Yes, I saw them,” Smoker says, wincing. Black has him in a steel grip. “Black, I saw everything. Calm down, please.”

  “You saw them, right?” Black shakes him. “Remember it well, and just wait till graduation day comes. We’re going to have so much fun!”

  It’s not fun for Smoker right now. He yelps when Black tightens his grip even more, and tries to pry his fingers apart, hissing in pain.

  “Black, let go! Please!”

  Black releases him, and Smoker falls back on the bed with a sigh of relief.

  “But tell you what, graduation is nothing. What I would really, really like to look at is them in the Outsides. Just a glimpse, you know! A minute or two! Because I can’t imagine them there, I really can’t, you know. I am trying and trying, and I simply can’t.” Black screws his eyes tightly shut. “Maybe I could help one of them cross the road or something,” he mumbles.

  Blind recognizes himself in Black’s fantasies and smiles.

  “Or hold back my dog if it decided to jump on them.”

  Tabaqui finally defeats the roll and issues an indignant squeal.

  “Your dog? What do you mean, your dog? Where did that come from? It’s not enough for you to roam the Outsides stalking your former packmates with the intent of dragging them from curb to curb, you have a dog now? Is it trained to hunt us? So that all you need to do is just sic it? Make it sniff the socks you swiped from us and then say, ‘Get ’em, my precious.’ Is that it? That disgusting . . . Disgusting . . .”

  “Bull terrier,” Sphinx prompts in a whisper.

  “Right! Bull terrier! That man-eating horror! That ghastly, revolting beast! What kind of sick shit is that?”

  “Tabaqui, pipe down.” Blind laughs. “He said he’s going to hold it. I’m facing a real possibility of being dragged across the street whether I like it or not, and I am not complaining. Even though I might have left all of my worldly possessions on the other side. Both the begging bowl and the piece of cardboard with ‘Blind, destitute, please help’ on it.”

  “Hold?” Tabaqui screams, his eyes ablaze. “Hold? Ha! You can’t stop those bulls when they get an idea in those idiotic stumpy heads of theirs. They’re all completely loony. And this one is going to be specially trained! Don’t you get it?”

  “But Black, he’s not some kind of wimp, see,” Sphinx says, shaking his head. “Besides, it’s going to be his doggie, his pride and joy, his sweetie girl. Hunt together, eat together . . .”

  “Shut up, you morons!” Black screams. “Assclowns!”

  “I can just see it. The morning stroll. Him in a gray checkered overcoat, and the bachelor’s delight by his side in a gray sweater. He is holding Blind’s old sock in his hand . . . In a plastic bag, to better retain the scent . . . They’re out on their daily quest.”

  “Shut up! You are all scared shitless, that’s what!”

  “Of course we are,” Sphinx confirms, frowning. “We’re petrified, believe me. One look at your dog . . .”

  “That god-awful abomination,” Tabaqui jumps in.

  “Especially when you can’t really see it,” Blind adds.

  “That bandy-legged gait.”

  “That pirate squint.”

  “That studded collar. Oh my, oh my!”

  “And the gray sweater.”

  “Leave my dog alone!”

  Black’s scream is drowned by the squall of laughter. Sphinx slides down the bed frame and crashes on the floor.

  “Cretins! Nitwits!”

  Black shakes the common bed, then overturns it, growling, and storms out, tripping over his own legs.

  “Crazy bastards,” comes his voice from the anteroom, his retreat punctuated with crashing and clanking.

  “The mop. The water bucket,” Alexander whispers, carefully fishing Smoker from under the mattress.

  Sphinx flings the blankets aside with his feet.

  “If he’s busted the boombox, he’d better not be coming back. I’m going to kill him personally.”

  “Did you see the way he went at us for that crummy dog?” Tabaqui exclaims happily, crawling among the shards of broken glass. “He could’ve crushed us all! Now that’s power. That’s what I call a proud owner!”

  Smoker feels his head, realizing that, to his total surprise, it doesn’t hurt anymore. He couldn’t help laughing with the others, and now he’s racked with guilt. As if by that he betrayed Black. Black, lonely and furious, expertly provoked and goaded. Could he maybe not have seen that Smoker was laughing?

  Humpback and Alexander turn the bed back up and start picking up stuff off the floor.

  “Actually . . . ,” Humpback says thoughtfully. “Actually, bull terriers are remarkable animals. Very brave and very loyal.”

  “Who says they aren’t?” Blind asks.

  Humpback shrugs.

  “I don’t know. I got this impression that you are not too fond of them.”

  Tabaqui clucks contentedly.

  The boombox suddenly screams at full tilt, and Blind quickly hushes it down.

  “It’s alive. Black is in luck today.”

  Sphinx wiggles his shoulders to make the jacket settle properly. One of his cheeks is covered in wet tea leaves, and the collar of his shirt turned brownish.

  Smoker discovers a goose egg on his head. That must be the reason for the missing headache.

  “By the way, what makes you think that the dog Black is going to have out there will be a bull terrier?” he asks Sphinx.

  THE HOUSE

  INTERLUDE

  The House had several places where Grasshopper liked to hide. One of them was the yard after dark. He liked his thoughtful places. That’s what they were for, those special spots where he could hide, disappear from the world and think. And in a strange way the places themselves influenced the thinking.

  The yard distanced him from the House. When he was down there, the House allowed him to look at itself from a different angle, through different eyes. Sometimes it looked like a hive. Sometimes it turned into a toy. A painted cardboard box with a removable roof. Everything in it was real—the figurines, the furniture, all the way down to the tiniest things—and at the same time he could take off the cover and see who and what had moved where. It was a game.

  He played it, and other ga
mes too, with their own thoughtful places. Behind the large sofa in the waiting room, smelling of dust, where the accumulated fluff, like pieces of a gray rag, floated away when he breathed on them or simply moved a bit. That’s where the heart of the House was located. Steps echoed through it, voices of those passing by reflected in it, but the estrangement and the invasive thoughts of others could not reach here, he was left alone with his own mind and his own games. He was in the belly of a giant, and he listened to the rumbling around him, felt the beating of the enormous heart and shook with the coughs. Part belly of the giant, part darkened movie theater, and also part Blind, a very small part, because it prompted Grasshopper to strain his hearing for the soundless stirrings, to guess the meanings of conversations by a few stray snippets, and the identities of people by their steps, all in the hazy slumber of thinking. The thoughts that came to him here were viscous, translucent, invisible; the strangest thoughts he ever had. To snap out of this game he needed to lie down on the floor. To feel the coolness of the boards and the slippery leather of the sofa’s upholstery. To reclaim his body and the world around him from the nothingness he dissolved them in.

  He stretched his legs, probing the strange feeling of their length, their strength, the springs coiled inside. The power was everywhere, but the strongest part of it was lodged in himself, making him wonder how he managed not to fly apart—this much power could not possibly have fit in the slim body wedged between the wall and the back of the sofa. It yearned to whirl in a wild tornado, spiraling out of control, sweeping the lightbulbs off the ceiling, tying the floor rugs in knots. Grasshopper, tucked away in the giant’s stomach, became the giant himself. Then it faded, melted away, as did all of his games sooner or later. But when he scrambled out from behind the sofa he still remained light as a feather, felt small and insubstantial. He was a giant in the body of a mouse, and his giant power shrank to the size of a walnut and sneaked into the flimsy suede bump on a string around his neck.

  The power was akin to an enormous genie reduced to a vortex to slip into a minuscule bottle. This game was his favorite. Its scent was that of the amulet, of Ancient and his room. All his secret games originated from Ancient’s room, grew out of his tasks that nourished Grasshopper’s amulet just as Ancient’s hand fed the triangular fish in the green tank. He played the game of the thoughtful places, the game of lookies, the game of catchies, and all of them he carried out of Ancient’s room, all of them were transparent and inconspicuous like the powdered food of the triangular fish.

  Lookies required him only to look. Look and see more than those who were immersed in themselves and their worries. Turned out they didn’t see much at all if they didn’t look closely. If they didn’t need to. To play lookies, you had to watch not only someone you were talking to but also everything that was happening around you, as much as you could without turning your head or shifting the eyes from side to side. Who stood or sat where, and what they did. What was in its usual place and what moved or disappeared. The game was boring if he regarded it as a task, and exciting if he just played it. It made his eyes hurt and filled his dreams with jittery flashes. But he did start to notice things he hadn’t before. As he entered the room he now saw drops and splashes, indentations in the pillows, objects moved from where they were before—the traces of events that had happened in his absence. He knew that if he played it long enough he’d learn to uncover who left those traces, the way Blind knew them by their scent or breath. Blind had been playing hearies and rememberies since birth—the two invisible games, out of four, that were open to him.

  Grasshopper waited. One day out of seven belonged to Ancient. On movie nights he performed his magic using words and cigarette smoke in the darkened room—the weary, cantankerous senior in a threadbare dressing gown, the red-eyed shaman privy to the mysteries of the invisible games. Grasshopper read the words on the door as if they were incantations: No knocking. No admittance. Then he knocked and admitted himself into the stuffy room, where both the Purple Ratter and the Dog That Bites lurked in the dark, and the shadows whispered Spring is the time of horrible changes, where the table lamp was wreathed in tendrils of smoke, and the Gray Shaman told him, “Well, here you are.” And dropped amulets against evil eye in wine puddles. Amulets stared at him through the red liquid, the fish stared through the glass of their tank. Grasshopper’s back broke out in goose bumps, and it was the scariest and the most beautiful time in the whole world.

  When several hours later he was in his bed half-asleep, he imagined that there was something sharp living inside him, something that became sharper still with each visit to Ancient, who was slowly honing it on a magical whetstone.

  Grasshopper and Humpback were observing the dogs. Humpback was also shaking snow and dirt out of his coat. Dogs sniffed at the earth under their feet. The most impatient of them had already bolted, run away to other places that also might somehow provide something edible.

  “It’s not enough,” Humpback said. “Not even close to enough for them.”

  “But it does give them a bit of strength,” Grasshopper noted, “so they can go and search for more food.”

  They walked away from the fence. Hoods hanging low, shoes squelching in the mud, they shuffled across the slush of the yard. The white markings on the asphalt peeked through where the snow had already melted. In summer those indicated the volleyball court. Humpback came up to one of the cars that some teacher had neglected to put inside the garage and prodded the iced-over fender with his finger.

  “Cheap trash,” he said. “This car, I mean.”

  Grasshopper liked old cars, so he didn’t say anything. He squatted to look for the icicles on the underside of it, but there weren’t any. They shuffled on, toward the porch.

  “You know what? I feel much better now that we fed them,” Humpback said. “All the time that I think about them I feel . . . uneasy. But then when I feed them it goes away.”

  “I see these black cats sometimes,” Grasshopper offered distractedly. “Sneaking under the bed. Or under the door. They’re really tiny. Strange, huh?”

  “That’s from your fuzzy looking. Everyone keeps telling you to stop the fuzzy looking. But you keep doing it. I’m surprised it’s only cats and not, I don’t know, elephants running around. Like Beauty’s shadow, you know.”

  “That way I can see much more,” Grasshopper said, trying to defend the lookies, more out of habit than to really convince Humpback.

  Some tasks he couldn’t really keep secret. Poxy Sissies caught on to lookies almost immediately. And they hated it. It was very hard to hold a coherent conversation while playing lookies. Grasshopper still couldn’t, no matter how hard he tried.

  “Yeah, right,” Humpback snorted. “More indeed. More of the black cats that don’t exist.”

  “What’s the shadow that Beauty sees running around?” Grasshopper asked in a clumsy attempt to change the subject.

  “His own. But it’s kind of alive. Don’t go asking him, though. He’s scared of it.”

  They came to the porch and tapped their shoes on the steps to shake off the dirt. A senior girl was sitting on the railing, smoking and looking out into the yard. Witch. She didn’t have a coat on, only a suede vest over a turtleneck. Grasshopper said hello. Humpback did as well, but secretly crossed his fingers inside his coat pocket, just in case.

  Witch nodded. Water was dripping off the roof and ricocheting right onto her pants, but she paid it no attention. Or maybe she just liked sitting in this particular place.

  “Hey, Grasshopper,” she called. “Come here.”

  Humpback, who was holding the door for him, turned around. Grasshopper dutifully approached Witch. She threw away the cigarette.

  “You can go,” she told Humpback. “He won’t be long.”

  Humpback shuffled his feet by the door, looking at Grasshopper sullenly from under his hood. Grasshopper nodded to him.

  “Go. Look, you’re soaked.”

  Humpback sighed. He pulled the door wider a
nd entered it backward, not taking his eyes off Grasshopper, as if pleading with him to reconsider before it was too late. Grasshopper waited until he was gone and then turned to Witch. He wasn’t scared. Witch was the most beautiful girl in the whole House, and his godmother to boot. Not scared, but definitely uneasy under her fixed stare.

  “Have a seat. We’ll talk,” Witch said.

  He sat next to her on the wet railing, and her fingers pulled the hood off his head. Witch’s hair reached to her waist, like a shiny black tent. She never did anything to it, allowing it to flow freely. She had a very white face, and her eyes were so dark that the pupils flowed imperceptibly into the irises. Genuine witch eyes.

  “Remember me?” she said.

  “You were the one who named me Grasshopper. You’re my godmother.”

  “Yes. It’s time we got acquainted more closely.”

  She sure chose a strange place and time for it. Grasshopper was getting wet sitting on the railing. And it was slippery. And Witch wasn’t dressed properly. As if she’d rushed to get closer acquainted with him so fast she didn’t have time to grab a coat. He dangled one leg and touched the floor with his toe to steady himself.

  “Are you brave?” Witch asked.

  “No.”

  “That’s too bad,” she said. “I wish you were.”

  “Me too,” Grasshopper admitted. “Why do you ask?”

  Witch’s black eyes flashed mysteriously.

  “Getting to know you. You like dogs?”

  “I like Humpback. And he likes dogs. Likes to feed them. And I like to see him do it. But I do like them too.”

  Witch pulled one leg up, put the foot on the railing, and lowered her chin to her knee.

  “You could help me,” she said. “If you’d like, of course. If you don’t want to, I’m not going to be angry.”

  A drop found its way down Grasshopper’s neck. He shivered.

  “Doing what?” he said.

  This must have had something to do with dogs and being brave. Or maybe he just imagined that because she’d mentioned those things.

  “I need someone to carry my letters to a certain person.” Her hair fell down over her face. “Do you understand?”