Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

The long nail of his trembling finger was pointing right at the middle of my forehead. “There! This entity here is the reason we’re all knee deep in shit! And he's having coffee in bed instead of wearing a concrete suit!”

Tabaqui gasped in delight.

“Lary! Lary, what are you prattling about?” he squeaked. “What is this nonsense, my dear boy? How would you go about it? Where would you get your hands on that much concrete? Where would you mix it? And then how do you propose dunking Smoker in it? And what were you planning to do next? Flush the block down the toilet?”

“Shut up, you pipsqueak!” Lary howled. “Keep your mouth shut, just for once!”

“Or what?” Jackal wondered. “You’ll call upon your Log brothers to deliver a barrel of mixed concrete and a convenient footbath? Answer me this, buddy: if you're so handy with all this stuff, how come you still can't even cook a plate of spaghetti?”

“Because... shove it up your ass, you freaking idiot!”

Lary's screeching swept Nanette off the locker. She landed on the table. And other things did too. Our crow liked to butcher old newspapers in her spare time, and the pieces of the newsprint puzzle flew into the air and settled down like a short, dirty blizzard. Two scraps ended up in my coffee.

Then Lary's face, with the viciously squinting left eye, was right next to mine, and then a lot of things happened at once.

The coffee scalded my hand. My shirt collar twisted and squeezed my neck. The ceiling started spinning. With it spun the yellow kite, the empty birdcage, the wooden wheel, and the last pieces of the newspaper snow. This spectacle was so sickening that I closed my eyes to avoid seeing it. Miraculously, I managed not to throw up. Then I was lying faceup on the bed, gulping saliva mixed with blood and desperately trying to hold on.

Tabaqui helped me sit up and earnestly inquired how I was feeling.

I did not answer. I brought the faces around me into focus as best I could. Lary's wasn't among them. I had no doubt that this time he did break my jaw. I couldn't hold back tears, but the pain was nothing compared to the sweet concern everyone was showing. They behaved as if something heavy had just happened to fall on me.

Tabaqui proffered another one of his miracle pills. Sphinx told Alexander to get a wet cloth. Blind appeared from behind the bed and asked if my head was still spinning. Not one of them had intervened when all of that was happening. Or even told Lary what a bastard he was. This kind of treatment made me lose all desire to talk to them or answer their questions. I tried not to meet their eyes. I crawled to the edge of the bed somehow and asked for my wheelchair. I don't think the words came out right, but Alexander immediately brought it around. Then he helped me into it.

Once in the bathroom I washed my face, trying not to press on the tender spots, and then just sat in front of the sink. I didn't want to go back. A familiar feeling. I used to have it a lot in the First, except there, no one was allowed to be by himself for long. Here nobody cared about stuff like that. Anyone was free to wander anywhere he wanted, deep into the night.

The bathroom looked exactly the same as in the First. If anything, it was even more dilapidated. More cracks in the walls. The tiles fell away in a couple of places so that the piping showed through. And each remaining tile was covered in scribbles. The marker didn't hold well, it smeared and faded, and the flowing script made the Fourth's bathroom a bizarre sight, like a place that was draining away. That was urgently trying to convey a message but couldn't because it was melting and evaporating. The writing was on the wall, but no one could read it. I tried. It was legible enough, but added up to complete nonsense. It destroyed your mood. I usually ended up reading the same one every time, the one arcing above the low sink: Without leaving his door he knows everything under heaven. Without looking out of his window ... The rest of it was smeared, leaving only the very last word: Tzu. It drove me crazy that I found myself rereading it, and I'd even contemplated erasing it with a sponge, but something always stopped me from doing that. Besides, then I would have had to write something else in the glaringly empty space.

I wheeled over to that sink. Its edge was crusted with toothpaste, and the drain sported a clog of scum mixed with disgusting hair clippings. The hair was black. Having absorbed a large dose of this still life, I moved to the next sink. None of the wheelers in the Fourth had black hair, which meant that one of the able-bodied was carefully bending down to one of the low-hanging sinks while shaving, just to bestow the fruits of his piggishness on us. Or rather, I suspected, on me.

In came Alexander.

He brought another cup of coffee and an ashtray. Placed them on the edge of the sink. Put a cigarette and a lighter into the ashtray. The sleeves of his sweater flashed his fingers for a second; the nails were brutally gnawed off, bleeding. Then they went into hiding again. The sleeves were stretched and hung low, but he also grabbed them with the fingers from the inside to make sure no one saw his hands.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Not at all,” he answered from the door. And vanished.

So here were two things that I learned about him in one go. That he could talk and that he was eating himself alive.

Alexander's servility was more scary than pleasant. It brought to mind those nasty Pheasant tales of how other groups treated new arrivals. How they made them into slaves. I'd never believed them, but then I met Alexander, who seemed to have come straight out of those stories. A real person and at the same time a horror story made flesh. The way he carried himself was seriously shaking my resolve not to believe.

What did I know about the Fourth, when it came down to it? That, except for Lary, they behaved more or less normally toward me. They seemed nice, almost too nice for all those horrors attributed to them. But maybe I was exactly the reason? Who would need a slave in a wheelchair? Useless. He can barely serve himself. One who could move, now that's different. One like Alexander. Having arrived at this thought, I realized that the Pheasant poison was inside me and that I was going to die from it. But not before carrying it through the rest of my life.

That was the last straw. I looked in the mirror. At the swollen nose and the swelling jaw. Touched the bruise. Pressed it harder, locked eyes with my reflection, and suddenly burst into tears.

They came so easily that I was astonished. As if I was always on the verge of them, ready to go. I was ogling myself in the mirror, cup in hand, and crying away. To mop up the fluids that sprung out of me, it took at least a couple of feet of paper towels. I blew my nose one final time and in the mirror saw Sphinx.

Not his face, he was too tall to fit in the mirror designed for the wheelchair-bound. But even without looking at his face, it was clear that he'd been there in time for the deluge.

I didn't want to turn around, so I decided to behave like I hadn't seen him. I put down the cup and busied myself with washing. A very long and thorough washing. Finally, I wiped my face and saw that he was still standing in exactly the same place as before. Apparently he wasn't here to demonstrate discretion, so I had to pretend as if I'd just noticed he was there.

Sphinx had the same semi-assembled look, except he'd wrapped a shirt over his shoulders. The shirt clearly had been through a contentious encounter with liquid bleach at some point, and the jeans weren't much better, but taken together, the appearance was stunning. Sphinx was one of those types on whom any old rags looked presentable and expensive. I had no idea how he pulled it off.