Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

After that we're silent.

Black is darker than a storm cloud, his meat hooks folded over his chest. Humpback is ruffled and miserable, like a raven that's been ambushed by a bird catcher. I shudder to think how I look.

Counselor Godmother recites some sort of schedule. Minutes pass before I'm able to figure out what it's about, and all that time I'm fleeing the image of Elk that keeps catching up with me. Twice every year, at these all-hands meetings, he stood approximately where Godmother is now standing and made short announcements, smiling with his eyes. The same kinds of announcements she's making. Someone's achievements or setbacks, someone's health progressing or not. The physicals calendar. Except unlike with Godmother, everyone listened to him no matter what he was saying. Every single one of us in the audience. With bated breath. Because he was born the Catcher of Little Souls. You could grow up, free yourself, but even those who had gone into the Outsides long ago carried traces of his glances, his touches, may still be carrying them for all I know. Did a man like that have a right to be wrong? He least of all, not with all the hungry, yearning eyes on him. He had no right to make mistakes, to have favorites, or to die.

Godmother reads the list of those who have been prescribed vitamin shots. Then another list, much longer, of those whose body-mass index is not simply low, but shamelessly so. That marks the end of the ceremonies. The departing throngs file past us, walking and riding, rattling the chairs as they go. Up on the podium they cover the lectern and the portable screen that they'd hauled out for some reason. Then we're alone.

Humpback, Black, and I. We seem to have already said everything that needed to be said, and it's not entirely clear what we're waiting for and why none of us left with the others. I mean, I understand why Humpback hasn’t, he's busy being a lightning rod, but why do Black and I keep sitting here like we're stuck? Humpback waits, frets, tries to pretend he's dozed off. Black and I are still silent. Finally Humpback's patience snaps.

“How about we get going?” he asks plaintively. “Everyone's left already.”

Tacking between the upended chairs and avoiding the shoals of spit and cigarette butts, we reach the hallway. Huge blue letters stretch along the wall: GOOD NIGHT SWEET TEACHERS!The dot on the exclamation mark drips like a tear.

“Was it really painful? What I told you about Elk?” Black says, keeping pace.

“Not too much. It certainly explained a lot. I could have guessed myself, if only I'd given it enough thought. When you're little you imagine the grown-ups to be these flawless beings. And then you learn that it isn't so.”

“Sometimes you learn it not only about the grown-ups,” Black mumbles to himself, without elaborating who or what he means. “I guess you took my bodybuilders off the wall?” he asks suddenly, changing the subject abruptly, and I remember that it used to drive me nuts, this habit of his—jumping suddenly from one subject to the next, as if someone switched him off and then back on, but tuned to a different station.

“No, why?” Humpback says, surprised. “Still there, where you left them. Why would we want to take them off?”

“Revenge, Humpback. Revenge,” I cut in eagerly. “Not only take them off, but also stomp on them and rip them to little pieces. Like you need such simple things explained?”

“Sphinx, sometimes I really want to smack you one,” Black says. “So much that I have to grab myself by the arms.”

We go around a chair that someone sneaked out of the lecture hall but abandoned on the way. Black stops.

“There's one thing I need to tell you. If you promise not to laugh. It's about getting out.”

Humpback shrinks and hunches down, tightly gripping his backpack, as if preparing to fight someone who is about to push him into the Outsides.

Black bites his lip, trying to muster the courage. Looks at the walls, then up, then down at the floor, and finally at me.

“Whatever,” he says. “I guess you can laugh if you want. I happen to know where to get a van. Used, but in decent shape. And also I know how to drive. Learned it recently. Because I had an opportunity.”

We gape at him silently.

“Yes, I know it's bullshit,” he says quickly. “You don't have to tell me. I'm not a baby. What I just said sounds funny to me too, but I had to say it. I don't care if you die laughing now. I'm only asking you to keep it in mind, OK? That's all.”

He turns around and walks away, more runs away, eager to put as much distance between us as he can, as if pushed by the imagined tide of our laughter at his back.

“Black, we're not laughing,” I call after him.

He waves his hand without turning around and disappears up the stairs. A panicked retreat, there are no other words for it. Humpback and I exchange puzzled glances.

“Now this is something,” Humpback says. “There was this one guy in the entire House who dreamed about getting to the Outsides, and look what happened to him.”

“Good-bye, bull terriers in checkered vests,” I sigh. “There won't be much space in the van, even without them.”

“Stop it,” Humpback says. “It's not funny. That's why he ran away, because he didn't want to hear the lame jokes.”

“I would never tell them with him around. I'm not laughing, Humpback. How can I laugh at things like that? It's Tabaqui's kite, the one that he says the seniors used to fly away, except Black seems to have mastered the art of driving it.”

Humpback shakes his head.

“don't do it with me around either. don't laugh. don't say anything. At all.”

He kicks away the chair, even though it would have been easier to step around it, and plows ahead, shoving his hands into his pockets with such force that I imagine hearing the sound of the lining being ripped. Terminally upset, either by Black's words or by my reaction to them.

I follow him, turning this sad fairy tale over and over in my head. The one Black is trying so hard to believe. The magical mystery van. The children of the House rushing toward dawn, in a stolen car with Black at the helm, tearing down the highway, exuberantly belting out road songs. In the real world this trip is going to last for about an hour, tops. Pity. Because this fantasy is even more beautiful than having the seniors depart to the hidden world beyond the clouds by means of a kite. More beautiful and more touching exactly for the fact that it was invented by Black, the staunchest realist.

When we return to the dorm, only Ginger and Smoker are left there, sitting at the opposite corners of the bed and annoying each other. The tension is palpable enough for Humpback to immediately get out of the way and hide on his top bunk. I go to sit between those two, doing my best to disrupt their line of sight. Oh well, that's fair, now it's my turn to be the lightning rod. Even though Tabaqui is so much better at it than I am.

Ginger smokes, studying the smoldering end of her cigarette intently. Smoker peers now at her dirty sneakers, now at the ash she's shaking all over the place—a Pheasant to the core, all but writing notes about it in a diary. Ginger's irritation barely registers, but Smoker's is throwing sparks all the way across the room. My presence interferes with his indignation, so he shifts on the bed to better see her—dirty-uncouth-repellent, but something else too, more personal, I can't quite put my finger on it. Did she tell him off or pour soda in his precious sneakers while we were out? He's blushing every time he looks at her, gazes away but then looks again, almost forcing himself, and I become more and more curious. What was it she managed to do? I am clearly not cut out for the role of the lightning rod, so I rejoice when Jackal returns, whistling something cheerful and out of tune.