Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

“And besides, my bandana is unquestionably more beautiful, tending as it does more to floral motifs. But it's a matter of taste, naturally.”

“You should be ashamed, Sphinx.” Mermaid laughs. “Next thing, you're going to be saying your legs are longer ...”

“And they are! You mean they aren’t? And my head is of a much more dignified shape. He can't even dream ...”

“Stop being such a baby! Or I’ll have to get you a bib and a onesie. You'd think he's doing something bad to you.”

We go silent and study the surrounding landscape for a while. No, that's not a fight at all, we never fight, just a sensible time-out for processing of new information. Usually people smoke in pauses like this one, but Mermaid is a nonsmoker and I don't have any on me, so I bravely do without, only allowing myself to sweep the ground with my eyes, because it's in places like this where the good cigarette ends like to hide.

“Should we go now? I think I'm getting sunburned on my nose,” Mermaid says. “Was it very upsetting, what I just said?”

“No. But I need some time to adjust. Let's go find cigarettes and something for your nose before it starts peeling.”

We get up. Mermaid looks at me, squinting a bit. How long was I here, on this bench? Not too long. Why does it seem like hours, then? Could be that it's bewitched, this innocuous-looking bench. Someone has placed an enchantment on it, and now it provokes anyone who sits on it to speak their mind.

We shuffle back to the House, pushing our shadows in front of us, headless and almost round at this hour.

“At least now I know why you dislike the Longest so much,” Mermaid says.

The porch meets us with the suffocating scent of geraniums. Pots with those flowers, which I can't stand, have been placed all along the length of the railing.

“Curious. Not a single face in the windows. Something must have distracted all those people from spying on us. I wonder what,” I say. “By the way, your Hate until the grave is of the exact same color as this geranium.”

“I'm going to throw away that shirt,” Mermaid says thoughtfully, mounting the stairs. “You are obviously against it.”

“Could you bleach it out or paint over it or something?”

The stairs are completely empty, not a soul, neither on the landing above nor below. I have no idea where everyone is, but it explains why they weren't ogling us from the windows. There's an all-hands going on somewhere in the bowels of the House. Mermaid listens intently and comes to a decision.

“Kiss me while no one's around.”

We get comfortable on the landing, leaning against the railing, and seize our moment amid the lull of the House. Quite short, or maybe it only seems that way. When we resume walking, my head is spinning slightly, and my stride is less self-assured than usual.

The hallway is empty. If they all did gather somewhere, it's not on this floor. Then at the other end we see two lonely, straggling silhouettes and make our way toward them. Blind and Rat. Such a beautiful couple, it makes your heart skip a bit. Both pale like corpses, shading to bluish under the eyes, identically emaciated, bordering on dystrophy. Blind also seems to be split open from the neck down to his navel. His shirt hangs in strips, exposing skin covered in long scratches. A sinister sight, especially considering that Rat's fingernails have traces of blood on them.

“There you go,” I say to Mermaid. “Something like your Kama Sutra , only with selected chapters from Marquis de Sade thrown in. doesn't look too nice, does it?”

Mermaid looks at me reproachfully (translation: “You didn't have to do that”) but I'm already wound up, so on the way to the dorm I expound on sexual deviations, with Rat and Pale One listening politely and in silence. That makes me a dozen times madder than if one of them just told me to shut up.

The four of us barge into the dorm, finding no one there except Jackal, totally absorbed in purring into a tangle of colored wires. The wires grow out of the wall and disappear back in it, most of them dangle idly, not going anywhere and not connecting anything, but about a dozen or so form the trunk snaking all the way to the walls of the girls' dorms, and some of them even as far as rather specific sets of ears. This is Jackal's generous gift to all the lovers out there who are “separated by the circumstances,” to quote Jackal himself, except the gift is absolutely useless without his active participation, he being the only one who can make heads or tails of the jumbled mess.

We walk in on him in the middle of a direct contact with someone from “over there,” and he's just communicated that “Well then, I guess you're even dumber than you look!” Upon seeing us he nods excitedly, shielding the mic, and rolls his eyes, miming terminal exhaustion.

“Where's everybody?” I ask.

He doesn't hear me, of course, and continues to bow and smile.

Mermaid goes through the contents of the nightstand to find a first-aid kit for Blind. Rat sits down on the floor and freezes, head in hands, bloodied nails buried in her hair. She has on a leather vest, leaving arms and shoulders bare, and badges hang around her neck. An outrageously skinny girl, the kind you don't often meet, thankfully. It could be that she really can get satisfaction only when kissing is accompanied by disemboweling, that she needs strong emotions that are not accessible to her except through refined methods. Who the hell knows, but the thought that Blind is encouraging her in this gives me the creeps.

Pale One slowly divests himself of the remains of the shirt. Mermaid passes the vial of something mediciney to him and looks compassionately at the process of anointing the wounds.

“Why don't you go there yourself, darling, and don't stop until you've reached the Outsides,” Jackal recommends to someone and pulls out the earbud. “Is it ever hard to hold a conversation with certain personalities! Labors of Hercules! And where have you all been hiding, if I may be allowed to ask?”

Tabaqui then takes a look at our appearance, nods to himself, apparently having come to some sort of conclusion, and says, “They’re all downstairs, by the way. Shark's preaching again, aren't you interested to find out what that's about?”

Tabaqui has been in his Button Period ever since the last masked ball. He's covered in them, as iridescent and multicolored as an acid trip. The permanent collection of the button museum has as its backdrop a scarlet tailcoat with wide lapels (that way there's more space for them), but the jeans are relatively undecorated (or it would interfere with crawling), which vexes Tabaqui so much that, once ensconced in place, he flips the coattails to the front and starts fidgeting, trying to catch the reflection of the electric lamps in the countless pieces of shiny metal, and he's not content until he resembles an eye-watering imitation of an oversized Christmas-tree decoration.

“Who was that you were just squabbling with? Not Catwoman, by any chance?” Mermaid asks Tabaqui as she pulls the wet, mud-encrusted sweater off me.

“Of course not. With Catwoman it's never that trivial. And who said I was squabbling? I am simply keeping up the fighting spirit in some people. Providing both human contact and an occasional shake-up to those in need of it. It wouldn't do to sink into benign complacency and lose the edge only because you couldn't find anyone to tick you off at the right moment.”

“So who were you ticking off?”

“doesn't matter.” Tabaqui sticks the earpiece back in and chooses a wire from the bundle. “You do agree with the principle, though, don't you? Calling the party, over.” He scowls into the mic. “Feral Wolfdog here. Talk to me, my mysterious and lonely friend!”