“Sphinx. You’re stalking me like a hungry tiger stalks a lamb. If you want to catch people unawares you’ll need to make your walk less expressive.”
Sphinx pushes the urge to scream and kick deeper down and sits next to him.
“Let’s talk. I have a lot of questions.”
“Let’s. Where do we start?”
Blind’s unruffled attitude should be infuriating to Sphinx, but instead it saps the fight out of him. The fight and the desire to discuss anything at all.
“Black’s bus. I don’t like this business with the fake license. He can’t be any good at driving. Even if he did take a couple of lessons, that still isn’t enough. He has no experience. He’s going to kill himself and everyone else stupid enough to join him.”
“I don’t think so. He’s a very responsible person. Besides, it’s not like I can stop him from doing something after graduation. I can’t even stop Lary after graduation.”
“But you wouldn’t even if you could.”
Blind shrugs.
“That’s right. I wouldn’t. It’s his decision. He’s a Leader. Why in the world would I want to stop him?”
“I see. I had the feeling that this was going to be useless.”
Blind opens his eyes, sends his arm under his shirt, and scratches himself furiously.
“I thought you said you also had a lot of questions,” he reminds Sphinx.
Sphinx looks at him probingly.
“I did. It’s just that I’m not sure anymore if I should be asking them.”
“Try me,” Blind suggests.
“Do you know why they are being so thorough with the searches?”
Blind straightens up.
“I do.”
“And?”
“They’re afraid of the graduation. They are making sure no one’s assembled a stash of explosives, poisons, and so on.”
“Then why today? The graduation is not until . . .”
“Tomorrow. All we have left is this evening and this night. And also a bit of the morning, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
It is now Rats’ turn at the inspection table. The Pheasants have been checked and cleared, along with Elephant. It is likely that he managed to reach the toilet before it was too late.
“Where . . . ,” Sphinx begins, but has to clear his throat. “Where did you get that information?”
He speaks very softly, his outward appearance is completely serene, he does not make a single sudden movement, but the heads of those sitting at the table slowly turn in his direction. Tabaqui. Noble. Humpback.
Counselors extract condom packets by the fistful from Red’s backpack. It appears to hold an inexhaustible supply of them. The melancholy smirk of Rat Leader quivers and floats in Sphinx’s eyes, as if he were looking at it through a thick layer of water.
“Tomorrow morning they will call another all-hands,” Blind says. “Assemble everyone in the lecture hall and declare it. And about ten minutes after that the parents will start arriving.”
Sphinx is silent. He is counting the days that have been stolen from them, from him . . . from all of them. Seven. No, six and a half. A pittance. They would’ve flown past quickly. But now, robbed of them, he is so shocked that he’s unable to speak or react to what Blind is saying.
A lamp inside a pink shade switches on above them. The shade has the form of a glass flower, and there is a crack across the translucent bell. There’s something dark attached to the winding stem. Sphinx looks closer and realizes it’s a switchblade, hidden there to avoid the search. It’s an ingenious spot. He sees the knife, and also something on top of the frame around the locked serving window, something that’s been left there. He suspects that were he to stand up and look around he’d be able to see everything that’s been concealed around the canteen, all the invisible objects, dangerous and not, valuable and worthless, everything that counselors are trying and failing to discover. He is doing his best to avoid looking at people. Looking at them the way he used to, the way Ancient taught him to. Now is not the time. But when did he stop doing that? Simply looking. Simply seeing. Simply living in the present day. Not yesterday and not tomorrow. When did his hours and days grow diminished with the fears and regrets?
“How long have you known?”
“Since they settled on the date. Last Monday.”
The pink reflections of the lamp in Blind’s eyes, two tiny pink flowerlets. Under them, the somber grin. His fingernails tease and scratch the palm of the other hand. The hands are as restless as the face is calm. He used to know to look at Blind’s hands first, and only then at his face. There are a lot of things he used to do right, and doesn’t anymore.
“We have a Fairy Tale Night ahead of us,” Blind says. “It will also be Long. And then it will be morning. All things come to an end.”
Sphinx slumps against the wall and closes his eyes. He’s out of practice of seeing everything at once, and it’s tiring for him. Anyone who looks at him now would assume he’s dozed off, but even through the closed eyes he still feels the alarmed glances of the pack. Even Smoker’s, seemingly.
“I wonder if they are ever going to leave me alone,” Sphinx whispers.
As he opens his eyes he sees the canteen wobble in and out of focus. The wind is howling through the fence he’s sitting next to, as if playing on the harp with strings of rebar. The battered road overgrown with weeds, the telephone poles stretching out to the horizon, the sunset sky splashed purple—all of that combines into a semitransparent hologram through which he still distinguishes the shape of the canteen and the spectral figures ambling aimlessly around it. This overlapping of the two worlds, the real one and the ghostly one, makes Sphinx nauseated. He knows that if he concentrated on seeing one of them, the second would immediately blink out of existence, but something is not letting him choose between them, so he tries to keep both pictures going, even as the nausea and the vertigo grow more intense.
“Sphinx! Stop it right now! What do you think you’re doing? This is not a game!”
The habit of obeying Blind works at the level of reflex. A very old habit. The canteen fills out with color and volume, the road and the fields on both sides of it disappear.
“Sorry,” Sphinx says. “It happened kind of by itself. I didn’t want to.”
“Exactly,” Blind sighs. “You either want or you don’t. Choose the direction before you start running.”
Sphinx is amazed at how precisely Blind read his actions. That what he really wanted was to run. But not where the House wanted him to.
“I am so sick of being cooped up here.”
“Why didn’t you just say so? Easily accomplished.”
Blind stands up resolutely and pulls Sphinx after him, striding toward the inspection table almost at a run and sending the conspiratorial Logs scattering, frightened by the abruptness of his movement. Sphinx runs after him. He’s afraid that Blind is going to crash into one of the counselors and then they will regard it as the beginning of the assault. Fortunately Blind stops a couple of paces short of Sheriff’s blubbery belly.
“Could we please be excused?” he asks politely, earnestly staring into the empty space above the counselor’s head. “We do not have any backpacks with us.”
The queue does not raise any complaints, and neither does Sheriff, already beyond nervous. They are perfunctorily searched and pushed out.
“The entire House is yours,” Blind whispers as soon as the door closes behind them. “Except for the First, but you’re not exactly eager to go there, are you?”
“I’m not,” Sphinx says sullenly. “I’m not eager to go anywhere except my bed. I need to grab some sleep and get my head together. It’s going to be a long night.”
Blind slows his pace. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but there are some questions that I need to ask you too. The bed will have to wait. We can go to the Coffeepot. Or we can go to another place, where you’ll have enough time to sleep, watch the sun rise, have a breakfast, and collect your thoughts be
fore we have our talk. Your call. The second choice would save us a lot of trouble.”
Sphinx stops and looks at Blind intently.
“No,” he says firmly. “I prefer the Coffeepot.”
“As you wish.”
There isn’t a single soul inside the Coffeepot. Blind goes behind the counter and rummages there, searching for coffee. Sphinx directs his actions. After having obtained two cups of black coffee, they independently choose the same table, under the window that no one’s bothered to reglaze. Somebody has put a rag under it, but didn’t think to push away the table, and now the oilcloth features an elaborate puddle of grayish rainwater. Blind plops an ashtray in the middle of it and is surprised when he has to shake the droplets off himself.
Sphinx looks out, at the cloudy sky.
“Looks like there’s going to be more rain tonight,” he says.
Blind sits next to him, lights a cigarette, positions it on the edge of the ashtray, and immediately lights a second one. He leaves it in his left hand, picks up the first one with his right and holds it in the air with the filter pointing away. Sphinx doesn’t have to bend or even turn his neck, the cigarette is hanging directly in front of his lips. To take a sip of coffee, Blind lowers both cigarettes into the ashtray and lifts his cup with one hand while simultaneously holding Sphinx’s cup in the other. All of this he does reflexively, without giving it a single thought, and just as reflexively Sphinx drinks the coffee and smokes in sync with him.
“Well?” Sphinx says when there’s less than half remaining in the cup. “Ask. Let’s get it over with.”
“You already know what I’m going to ask.”
“I do,” Sphinx says. “Am I staying or leaving?”
Blind nods.
“I am leaving. I’m sorry, Blind.”
His hands. Look at the hands, not the face, Sphinx says to himself. Then he looks up and sees the puzzled grimace. It dawns on Sphinx that what he said could have sounded to Blind as exactly the opposite of what he meant. If he’d said, “I am staying,” Blind would have understood right away. He still understood, but not because of the words, purely by the tone and the apology, he needs a couple of seconds to square it with the meaning of Sphinx’s “mistake,” and when he does his face turns to stone.
Sphinx wants to apologize again but stops himself. It would be worse than silence. He realizes that the way he misspoke, purely by chance, told Blind more than any explanation he could come up with. Maybe it’s for the best.
“Is this final?”
“Yes. And I don’t want to talk about it.”
Blind frowns.
“But I do. It’s because of them, isn’t it? Those who can’t leave?”
“No, not because of them. All right, maybe it is. But I wouldn’t have stayed even if everyone else did.”
He probably shouldn’t have said that. But he’s trying his best to be honest. Just as Blind is trying his best to remain calm.
“Why?” Blind says.
“It’s my life,” Sphinx says. “I want to live it. It’s no one’s fault that for you the real world is there, and for me it’s here. That’s just the way it is.”
“Does Mermaid know yet?”
“No.”
Sphinx turns away, to avoid looking at Blind’s face suddenly lit up with hope.
“But it doesn’t matter,” he says. “She will choose what I choose.”
“Happily, I suppose?”
Blind’s subtle clarification remains unanswered, to his delight.
“You sound very sure of yourself,” he says. “I get it, it’s love . . . for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer and all that. But what if she doesn’t have the same choice?”
“That can’t be.”
“It can. Believe me, it can.”
Sphinx feels a fleeting prickle of fear. Of a cold, hungry void. But then he sees the trace of a triumphant smile on Blind’s lips and realizes he’s toying with him.
“Blind, stop it,” he says. “I am not staying. And you are very bad with threats.”
“She can’t remain here,” Blind persists. “She is of another world, there is no place for her in this one.”
Sphinx looks at him, heavily and darkly, trying to gauge the degree of his sincerity, and can’t decide if Blind is lying or telling the truth. As usual.
“So be it,” Sphinx says. “If that is true, then we weren’t meant to be together. But admit it, you invented that a moment ago.”
Blind’s face remains unclouded. It’s his breath that sounds suddenly ragged, as if someone has just hit him.
“Yes,” he says after a pause. “I invented that a moment ago. To scare you. Of course she’s just a common girl. There are thousands more like her. The Outsides is lousy with them.”
The vengeful notes in his voice make Sphinx sit up.
“Do you know something about her? About where she came from?”
“From her parents, where else?” Blind feigns surprise. “Otherwise you’d have to assume she hatched out of an egg, right?”
Sphinx closes his eyes resignedly.
“I asked you once, and I’m asking you again. Stop this,” he says. “Enough. I am tired of living in the shadow of the House. I don’t need any more of its gifts, of its worlds that turn out to be traps. I don’t want to belong to it. I don’t want anything from it. No more lives that unfold before you as if they were real, and then you find out that you’re old, your muscles have atrophied, people look at you like you’re a reanimated corpse and celebrate your ability to tell the right hand from the left. I hate this, I’m afraid of it, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, even you, but you don’t see me pleading with you to stay here!”
It’s almost completely dark now. The wan strip of light in the sky has been extinguished. Wind is walking freely in and out through the empty frame. Blind is hunched over, clutching his head.
“Why did you refuse to go there with me just now? Were you afraid I’d drag you somewhere you can’t crawl out of? Leave you there and run away?”
Sphinx nods. “Something like that. You got it. Do you mean to say you wouldn’t?”
Blind raises his head.
“I don’t know,” he says fiercely. “I might have. Except it’s not that easy. You are stronger than you think. You’d get out. There are no doors there that wouldn’t open before you. But you are choosing to stay here and live out the rest of your stupid life as an armless cripple.”
The last sentence convinces Sphinx that Blind is teetering on the edge. He’s never used those words before. Never said them out loud. Blind is having a harder and harder time holding himself together. Sphinx is having a harder and harder time observing him in this state.
“People live with this,” he says.
“Of course they do,” Blind says. “Go ahead, live with it. I hope you don’t have an occasion to regret the choice you’ve made. I could have brought you over completely. You know that. Even Noble could have done it. Think about it.”
“Noble has others to take care of.”
Sphinx stands up.
The House is looking at him through Blind’s empty, translucent eyes. The House does not want to let go of him. For a fleeting moment Sphinx imagines that there’s no Blind in the room. Only someone, something, that would stop at nothing to keep him in. He feels a cold knot in his stomach. It passes as quickly as it came, and he again sees Blind, who’d never do anything to hurt him.
“Go away,” Blind says. “I don’t want to hear you again.”
If Sphinx had arms he would have pounded his fist into the table now. Maybe it would’ve helped a little. But there are no arms. The only thing he can do is leave. Everything that needed to be said, was.
He walks out into the hallway and stops as he hears a crashing noise from behind the closed door. Blind has done what he himself couldn’t, smashed his hand against the table. Sphinx closes his eyes and stands quietly for a while, listening intently, but there are no more sounds coming from inside the Cof
feepot.
SMOKER
Tabaqui told me to write in the diary that “Fairy Tale Night is coming.” We’ve just returned from the canteen, having spent more than four hours there, all told. I’ve never felt more drained in my life.
It’s not that the dorm looked especially ransacked. If anything, it was even cleaner than usual. But the probing hands had obviously rifled wherever they could, so everyone dashed to check on their secret places. I didn’t have any, which is why I unloaded myself on the bed and lay there while they ran around counting the losses. The biggest of the losses was the hotplate. That definitely got taken away. But most of the things that were then said to also have been lost were found afterward. And even though Lary kept whining that some incredibly valuable object had been stolen from him, no one believed him, because as soon as he checked his bed he perked up markedly and even spat out the metal thing he’d been sucking on all that time.
I was so tired that I thought I was going to switch off as soon as I touched the bed. But after lying there for a while I realized that I wasn’t sleepy at all. My tiredness was of the canteen, not of anything that was inside me, and our room cured me of it. Still, I couldn’t imagine that they would insist on arranging a Fairy Tale Night after a day as hard as this one. I was sure everyone could appreciate some rest.
“Go on, write,” Tabaqui said. “You’ll get to rest during the breaks.”
“What do you mean, breaks?” I said.
“This Night is going to have breaks in it. Everyone knows it’s the last one, so most probably it’ll go on till morning. Besides, we are expecting guests, so make an effort and behave yourself.”
I didn’t understand what that was about. When was the last time I didn’t behave myself with guests present?
It was an exceedingly bizarre evening. Very much resembling those evenings after which happened the nights I didn’t like to recall. When Pompey was killed, and the other one, when they cut Red and Crab was found dead.
Everyone was so bubbly, everywhere you looked there were bright eyes and broad smiles, but as soon as they started speaking you noticed that their voices were shaking and their hands were trembling. Like they were all slightly drunk.
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