Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

“Could she be hiding here?”

“In that dress?”

“didn't have time to change.”

“You mean that's regular daily wear?”

“And someone has been bringing up food.”

“Yup.”

“So at least one other girl would know.”

“We should ask them.”

“Right. Start with Ginger ...”

“Enough!” Chimera screams, putting fingers in her ears. “Stop this right now!”

We stop and wait silently.

“You're even worse than I thought,” she says, looking confused. “You are so full of shit. Why can't you just leave it alone?”

There are plaintive notes in her voice. For Chimera this is tantamount to admitting total defeat, so I am not surprised when she breaks down crying. Noble, however, is shocked, contrite, and ready to yield immediately. I shake my head, and he turns away with a pained look on his face.

Chimera doesn't notice any of that. She's busy drowning in tears. The green eye shadow turns out to be of a waterproof kind, it doesn't run or even smear, but Chimera is a sorry sight anyway.

“What happened?” I ask. So gently that my own voice scares me a little.

Chimera wipes her nose.

“All right,” she says with disgust. “I’ll tell you. You were going to drag it out anyway sooner or later.”

She turns away.

“From our windows you can see the counselors' floor. And also the roof,” she says, not looking at us. “Some time ago this guy wanted to jump off. He even slid down and hung there, holding with his hands. But he couldn't let go. I know how that works. Believe me, I know. Then I saw him again. Same place. Standing there and looking down. Just looking down. I managed to get the key, and so when I saw him next time I climbed up here too. And we talked about stuff. He even told me why he wanted to jump ...”

As I listen to this otherwise ordinary story it rings somehow very familiar. I swear I'm hearing about this for the first time, but the feeling of familiarity is unusually strong. And I don't understand where it's coming from.

Chimera's trembling fingers tease out a cigarette from the pack that's been sitting on the blanket. The long fingernails are covered in green polish.

“And that's it,” she says. “We started coming up here. Meeting here. It was our secret. For quite a while. Since before the Law. And then I had this dream. A bad one. So I dragged myself up. And now I sit here feeling like an idiot. Funny, isn't it. The dress. Me keeping the watch for three days straight, and he still doesn't come. And I mean, it's just a dream, right, but I couldn't stay still, I kept thinking what if this one was really prophetic, and then I might be too late. Now you can laugh all you want.”

Humpback pops up through the hatch. He's got on his tattered shirt made from strips of cloth and also a miner's hard hat mounted with a flashlight. The hump, the bare feet, and the shaggy mane peeking from under the hat give him a slightly otherworldly look.

“don't forget to tell him everything,” Chimera says, pointing the cigarette at Humpback. “About this painted moron taking residence in the attic. He’ll die laughing.”

“Who is he?” I ask.

“None of your business.”

“Hey, are you coming down or what?” Humpback says. “Because Tabaqui said you wanted to ...”

I look into the eyes rimmed with green shadow and see in them a rainbow-colored pathway, a corridor leading to... But even before I step into that corridor of unsaid words coming at me in a low whisper, I can tell that it ends at a door. A locked door, and behind it, someone whom I know very well. I feel his scent, even without opening that door. I take a step forward ...

“don't you dare sneak into me,” Chimera squeals, and I barely manage to shrink back, avoiding the emerald fingernails flashing not half an inch in front of my face.

“Hey, cool it!” Noble catches her arm. “One Blind is quite enough.”

“Then he shouldn't be sneaking inside me!” Chimera thrashes, trying to free her hand. “Tell him not to do that! And get out of here!”

“Sphinx, you'd better go,” Noble says, wrestling with Chimera. “While I'm still holding her. Got it?”

I get up and sleepwalk to the hatch, where Humpback is waiting for me in his ridiculous outfit, swinging his bare legs over the drop.

“Going down?” he says, jumping up. Then takes a length of rope out of his pocket and passes it through the belt loops around my waist. “Just insurance. In case I can't hold on to you.”

I stumble down the hallway, eyes staring fixedly ahead. Something is interfering with my progress. I finally realize what it is and stop, and at the same moment Humpback crashes into me from behind.

“Sphinx! I've been calling to you all this time, didn't you hear? Or are you planning to walk on a leash from now on?”

He takes off the safety rope, loops it around his hand, and stuffs it back into his pocket.

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” I say. “Just thinking.”

“That's some thinking! All right, I'm going back up to get Noble down before he's devoured. That Chimera seems a bit unstable. It would be better not to leave them alone for long.”

He disappears and I forge on, all the way to our room, where I sit on the floor just inside the door and observe Tubby wander under the bed, humming and getting covered in dust.

I look at him for such a long time that he manages to traverse the space under the bed, crawl to the center of the room, flip over a chair, and gum everything that fell off it.

Then Noble and Humpback return.

Humpback is just in time to take someone's sock away before Tubby puts it in his mouth. Noble throws a towel on the table and says that water is out in the whole House.

“Why were you doing that?” he asks. “What did you need her confession for?”

“I have this feeling that it concerns me too,” I say. “I don't quite understand why or how, but it concerns me. And I don't like it.”

Noble sidles up on the bed and pulls off the colored smock.

“Forget it,” he says. “Forget the whole thing. Disgusting business.”

“He can’t,” Humpback says. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but whatever it is, Sphinx is not letting go of it. I can see it in his eyes.”

Nanette angles to drop on his head but slips on the hard hat and flops down on the floor, deeply offended.

“How do you do it?” Noble asks. “I had this impression that she was going to spill it all, whatever you needed to know.”

I close my eyes.

“It was back in the summer,” I say.

Chimera didn't say that, it's my own insight. Why is it important that I shouldn't know who it was? Is it because he too is afraid of me? I've almost caught him. I think I can figure it out now even without diving into Chimera's eyes.

“I’ll go find Blind,” I say, getting up.

“Wait. I’ll go with you.” Noble pulls a knot of shirts out of the dresser. “Except I need to change first. Still, I don't understand why it's suddenly so important to you.”

“Neither do I,” I say, and an unpleasant chill down my spine makes me cringe.

Half an hour later, in Black's giant red-and-white jersey with a number on its back, my back crisscrossed with surgical tape, I scour the House in search of Blind. Noble also has on one of Black's jerseys, in white and blue. His number is twenty-two. People we meet on the way ogle us in shock, apparently suspecting that this is an advance notice of the new fashion about to be established. The progressive-sporty style. These stares seem to unnerve Noble, but he's handsome even in a jersey hanging down below his knees. It gives him this edgy hobo flavor with a dash of the dump. Combined with his looks, the effect is simply stunning.