Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

He leaves the speaker in the middle of the hallway, as a monument to our momentous meeting. I follow him obediently. We come out to the landing. Go down, continue on. In the lecture hall someone is tormenting the piano rapturously, as usual, and the waves of exuberance crest over the entire first floor. Black leads me to a half-empty room. It seems to be some kind of storage space, with cardboard boxes stacked against the walls. One is ripped slightly, and inside it I can discern a commode in plastic foam. We're in the graveyard of commodes.

Black grapples inside one of the boxes, mumbling indistinctly. Produces a bottle, and another one.

“It is my opinion,” he says, “that you need a drink. Can you hold this? I don't have any crystal goblets around.”

“I’ll try,” I say. “What's in it?”

“Grain alcohol cut with apple-juice concentrate.”

I laugh. Black upends an empty box and arranges the bottles on top of it.

“Your introduction to the Hound tastes. This is their favorite tipple. It's not that bad once you get used to it. It all depends on the ratio.”

“For all I care,” I say, “this could be pure alcohol.”

“I can see that.” Black sits down on the floor and unscrews the cap off one of the bottles. “Now what's happened? Want to tell me about it?”

I shake my head.

He passes the other bottle to me.

“As you wish. I'm not going to insist, of course.”

The doggy mix is unlike anything I've ever tasted. It's vile stuff, but after three or four gulps that no longer matters.

“Lay off a bit,” Black cautions. “It really goes to the head.”

“Hounds are strange,” I say. “As are their tastes.”

“Our tastes,” Black notes. “I'm a Hound now too, don't forget.”

“That's right,” I say. “Brown. Shaggy. Very big. Have you ever noticed what color eyes Alexander has? Feuille morte. Fallen leaves. Dappled.”

“Never thought to look.”

“Your loss. There's a lot hidden inside there. Do you know what my deepest secret is, Black? I mean, everyone has their own secret here in the House. And mine is that I can bail out of here anytime. Anytime I want.”

Black chokes and lowers the bottle.

“Where would you go?”

“Also here. But not exactly. The here that's a little out of here. But it's a secret, understand?”

“Got it,” Black says. “Inside the bottle with alcohol and apple juice. Looks like you've had enough.”

I spread myself across the wall and put up my legs on the box. The clamp on the rake is stuck closed, so I'm now doomed to be holding the bottle of Hound Delight until the day I die.

“Count the fingers for me, Black. I'm going to name for you the parallel universes suitable for hiding.”

“Go ahead,” Black says. “Be my guest.”

The door opens, revealing Noble, swaying elegantly between the crutches.

“Found you!” he says.

“Another one wearing my clothes,” Black says in surprise. “What's with you today? Noble, come here. Looks like he's already sozzled. Just started talking about parallel universes.”

“A fascinating topic.”

Noble floats toward us, flops down on an unoccupied box, and drops the crutches with a clatter.

I close my eyes, and open them again.

And find myself in everything at once. The walls, the ceiling, Black, Noble, even Noble's crutches. I am a vortex into which the world is emptying. The part of me that's the most intact is alarmed by what I'm doing. It's alarmed that it revealed the bottle stash to the other me and allowed him, the bald and crazy-eyed one sitting across with his feet up on the box, to partake of its contents.

This part is also the most convenient to operate, and it says, “Damn. I didn't know he was going to go to pieces like that. What do you think we should do, Noble?”

Yet another part of me, the one slowly crushing the cardboard box (the poor thing contained a bathroom sink once, and is now holding on for its dear life), is also irritated and a bit scared, and says, “Why are you asking me? What was it you gave him?”

I am sloshing inside the bottle, clinging somewhat to the sides, because one of my ingredients is a thick viscous syrup. I am not entirely colorless, and that's syrup again. There aren't any others like me, this kind of Me is only made here and exists here and nowhere else. I was stored among the commodes and I seem to remember that this Me is related to dogs in some fashion, as is the Me sitting across, while the other Me, the one looming over, thinks that I am poison.

My armpits are on fire, sending shooting pains down the rib cage, and my neck is stiff and it takes an effort to turn, and the box under me keeps sagging. I should probably get up before it goes completely flat.

I don't want to become the box too, the feeling of it is too unpleasant.

The Me slumped against the wall says, “The entire world is part of me now, do you understand that?”

I answer to myself, having jumped over to the buckling box, “Honestly, I would prefer not to.”

And immediately soar up and crash back down, expand in all directions and solidify, peek through thousands of tiny apertures with a billion eyes. I like this Me most of all, it's so peaceful and so enormous, a cube that contains all others. It's rather more like Us, and we are the foundation of the House, we carry and support it. It takes an effort to keep myself within the confines of this single room, because it is more natural for walls to be joined up with other walls, but for some reason I feel that this would be dangerous, even if I don't remember why exactly. I lose the sense of hearing. The little scurrying We, restless and much too emotional, move and squeak so fast that I can't pick up the high-pitched sound they produce. I am closer to being asleep than awake, this state is familiar to me, and only the apprehension of joining up with other walls keeps me from giving in to it entirely. But it becomes harder and harder. I am feeling more strain than the unfortunate box, but the Me perseveres as long as it can, and when its strength starts to fail I concentrate on the point where I am coming in contact with the hairless, metal-handed Me. I flow into him and hear Black say, “What do you say we go find Blind?” and Noble responds, “We can't leave him here like that.”

I sit slumped against the wall, feeling its smooth, cold surface with my shoulders and with the tape that's binding them, and recognizing in it an almost kindred spirit.

What I've just done is forbidden: dissolving in the environment is too addictive and too dangerous. Dissolving in people is safer, but inanimate objects tend to bind to the dreams and it's easy to get bogged down for years and not even notice. The trick with the walls saved me once, when I was a kid and life had served up a particularly scary episode. I had barely made it out that time, and gave myself a promise never to do it again. But promises are made to be broken, eventually, the way Alexander has broken his. I still can't bring myself to think of his words, of what he said about Wolf, but his broken promise I can already start to mull over. The short stint inside the walls calmed me enough for that.

I look back at Black and Noble.

“One of the variations of the Game,” I tell them, “is being in everything. You are in everything and everything is in you. It's dangerous, though.”

Black and Noble exchange glances.

“Never tried,” Noble says. “You're an extreme guy, Sphinx. That's not good.”

“He looks a bit more sober,” Black says hesitantly, pointedly addressing Noble, like a Spider within earshot of a patient.

I nod. A bit, yes. But not completely, because I'm still in the Game. Both Black and Noble look slightly unusual. Black must be forty-something. An imposing figure of a man, naked above the waist, with an axe tucked into his waistband for some reason. Handsome. Head balding in the front, face more lined than might be expected, but still. A Conan the Barbarian in his middle age.