Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

The buttons shine next to the rainbow tangle of the wires. I glance past them to the open doors of the cabinet, to the carefully folded sweaters, shirts, and vests. I can't complain of a particular paucity with regards to my wardrobe, but to find something in there that would be uncommon enough to be inaccessible to someone with a desire to imitate it suddenly seems a challenge. Almost enough to consider becoming a human display case, in the manner of Lary or Jackal. Then at least I can be sure of being unique in my ugliness.

Mermaid reads my thought again.

“I can make you a vest out of colored rope. I have this huge skein, grass-green. Unless Catwoman's kids got to it.”

Tabaqui seems to be listening in, even through the earbuds. He turns sharply around and stares.

“Keep it down,” I say to Mermaid. “Or you’ll end up doing ten of them, and then sewing a hundred buttons on each. And that would be child labor.”

Tabaqui leans precariously in our direction and cocks one ear. Mermaid grabs the closest shirt and drapes it over my shoulders.

“I think I better go to our side and see if there's anyone lying there prostrate with a heart attack,” she says with concern. “Some people have really peculiar notions of charity.”

“Sure, go ahead. I’ll go down to the first, find out what's the buzz. I've been separated from society ever since this morning. Also from food and cigarettes.”

Blind, already in a fresh tee, stuffs a pack of Camels into my breast pocket.

“What was all that long talk with Ralph about?” he asks. “Inquiring minds want to know.”

“Potential runaways. People being slowly squeezed out of the House. He's got them all on a list, those who'd like to bolt as soon as they can.”

“Those counselors sure like their pieces of paper,” Sightless One says, astonished. “Could it be that they all suffer from memory problems?”

He picks up his backpack, also emaciated.

“Let's go listen to Shark. He's been at it for half an hour already, must be just about getting to the point by now. And he's got a whole mound of paper.”

“Could you take that thing off my head, please,” I say. “It's starting to get on my nerves.”

Blind sweeps the bandana off me. Mermaid is waiting for us outside the door, peeking in when she thinks we're not looking. Rat is still on the floor, face buried in her hands. She doesn't seem in any hurry to leave.

“Oh, hello,” Jackal breathes beguilingly, hugging the mic. “Could this be number fourteen oh-one? It has been a while. How are you doing, oh-one? I've missed you. Hope the feeling is mutual?”

Blind and I appear in the lecture hall and immediately find ourselves in the thick of action. Shark, sweating from heat and indignation, shouts into the mic that periodically cuts out, the audience is partly listening, partly dozing off, and the aisles between the rows closest to the lectern are strewn with paper, as if someone clumsy was trying to film a snowstorm.

I crouch down and slip into the center row. Blind copies my movements step for step, even pinching the bottom of my shirt to steady himself. Shark notes our being late but is too busy to comment. He's about to move to “documentary evidence of the above-mentioned,” in the form of a pile of paper delivered by obsequious Pilotfish. Blind and I position ourselves on the ugly metal chairs and join the listeners. There aren't many of us—those who really are listening. Mainly the first rows, occupied by the teachers.

“The results of the mandatory testing ...”

The pack is in a state of drowsy apathy. The perkiest around here are Tubby, gnawing on a carrot, and Needle, counting the stitches of her next knitted masterpiece. Humpback is nodding halfheartedly to the song playing through his earphones. Alexander is using a safety pin to extract a splinter out of his finger. I look a bit farther out, into the Hound rows, where Black's pink shaved head looms. Four Hounds next to him mimic his pose exactly—arms crossed, one foot on the seat of the chair in front. In their desire to be like their Leader they put even Logs to shame, but if what Mermaid said is true, I shouldn't be the one laughing. Especially considering that I almost shoved my own foot on the next seat in the same fashion, and now can only sit like a statue and stew silently. Because, after all, who's supposed to be copying whom?

“Almost no one managed to score even a fifty! Which is the bare minimum for an average numbskull!”

Shark furiously tosses a pack of the pernicious “yes-no” sheets into the air. They flutter and settle down, forming another layer of the fake snow. So that's how it got there.

“Let me explain to you what this means! It means that the vast majority of you are not qualified to fill any position that requires a functioning brain! You are outside the boundaries defined by your peers!”

The teachers' row, second from the podium, turns around as one, to look at us reproachfully. The counselors don't bat an eye. We have long ceased to be capable of surprising them. The mic cuts out again. Shark continues his harangue, not noticing it, then pauses and starts screaming even louder than before.

“You're basically imbeciles! Explain to me, will you, who do you think you've dealt this devastating blow by your stupid tricks? Me? You think I'm going to cry over it? Try to convince someone up there that you're smarter than this? You maybe think I care where you end up when you get out of here? Or what you're going to do there? It's your own lives you flushed down the toilet, you halfwits!”

I realize that I did sneak the foot onto the next seat. I let it stay there. I refuse to sacrifice the basic necessities of life only because I don't want to be copied.

Blind yawns and hides inside his palm. The lemur-like fingers easily swallow his entire face, including both his forehead and chin. A simple gesture, sure, but one that can't be copied by anyone present. I sit there, consumed by dumb envy. All right, enough. Time to shake off the paranoia. I suddenly realize that it's not Blind's hands I envy, not his independently alive fingers, but merely the gesture that I can't appropriate. Am I really as stupid as I often appear to myself to be?

Shark's latest “maybe you think” is unexpectedly picked up and amplified a hundredfold. The soundest sleepers wake up with a start. Tubby drops his carrot. Humpback winces and stuffs his earbuds farther in. Even Shark himself cringes up there at the lectern.

“Therefore,” he continues more calmly, “all the exams that were to take place this month have been canceled, along with the general evaluation, even though you're supposed to have been preparing for it since the end of last semester. Both have now lost any modicum of significance. The results of your testing are not going to allow you to enter any institution of higher learning. Not that you had any chance of that before.”

Noble turns his face, curtained by the silver-colored dark shades, to me and stretches his lips in a wide grin. I smile back and then see, to my horror, that he's surrounded by sloppily made copies as well. I shake my head but the ghosts refuse to disappear. A couple of Logs on both sides of Noble, the High Keepers of Noble's crutches, one per person. Both are wearing mirrored glasses and Noble-style goatees. With no time off for chewing, gossiping, or Shark's speeches, Zit and Termite polish the crutches with their handkerchiefs and scrape dirt off the rubber tips. A ridiculous, risible sight. I can't help but smile. Noble lifts his eyebrows quizzically. I nod at his retinue. He shrugs—“What are you going to do?” Ginger's colorful crest is flaming by his elbow, her translucent chin sunk into the hands is positioned a little lower, and then the slanted front teeth and devoted eyes of the crutch-bearers, proud of their assignment. I again note with surprise how much Noble grew up during his trip to the Outsides. It only took him six months to learn to accept stoically the things that still push me over the edge.