Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

“Yes,” Blind admits. “But it's very hard. You can't really do that. The House doesn't like it and makes you pay.”

With fear, he adds silently. With the possibility of losing everything. With helplessness, banishment, and sometimes even death.

“When Ralph took me away,” he says with a shudder, “I thought that was the end of me. He said that he wasn't returning me to the House until I told him where she'd disappeared to. Where we have hidden her. And you know... If I hadn't dragged her over completely, I would have told him anything he demanded. Never in my life have I been more scared than at that moment. I ceased to exist. Turned into a nonentity.”

Blind is shaking and not noticing it. He brings the lapels of his buttonless jacket closer together over his chest. He doesn't realize how pitiful a figure he's cutting, and is surprised by Humpback's hand outstretched to him.

“don't say it.” Humpback grips his shoulder. “I understand. I am not going to ask you to bring me over completely.”

“No,” Blind says. “There's only one person for whom I will do that. For him I am prepared to pay the price. But no one else.”

“Try not to think about it, all right?” Humpback says.

Blind nods.

“I will find you there. And then I will bring you over. I'm allowed to do that to those who are already halfway gone. I think. I hope. But it might take time.”

“You don't have to,” Humpback says firmly. “Not for me.”

Blind nods again and slides down the trunk. The closer he is to the ground, the cooler the air around him, as if it's not the asphalt exhaling the heat of the day that's waiting for him there but a sea of tall grass. When he reaches the last branch he jumps off. His fingers touch the ground and encounter small squares of cardboard. A lot of them, like someone has spilled pieces of a child's jigsaw puzzle. It's the questions for the Oracle. Blind picks one up and puts it in his pocket.

“Hey,” he hears a dejected voice say from above. “What do you think the Pied Piper would be playing?”

“Madrigal of Henry the VIII,” Blind answers immediately.

The days are wound tightly, like strings. Each tighter and higher than the one before it. I feel like I'm sitting on a string waiting for it to snap. When it finally happens I’ll be thrown far, far away, farther than can be imagined, while at the same time staying exactly where I am.

Waiting is unpleasant business, especially when compounded by this heat.

The sky is piercingly blue, and all day I suffer from its presence, longing for the night to come and deliver me from it. Sometimes I imagine dead birds tumbling down from this sky. Broken and drained of color. I even seem to smell them. I bet if we looked hard enough we'd find a pile of rotting sparrows.

I fight the heat by collecting no one's things and sending out letters.

Sixty-four letters have now been sent to various celebrities, letters offering them the opportunity to take over the maintenance of the House, together with all of us in it. The first one to take the plunge will be provided with unlimited advice from me, in any field and at any time. I am also offering myself in a role of fortune-teller, astrologer, secretary, tamer of domestic animals, jack and master of all trades, shaman, talisman, and novelty desk ornament. So far no takers. I wasn't expecting any, of course. It's only sixty-four letters, after all. Not that many. But the fact that no one has responded at all, not even in jest, is troubling. It could be I haven't been persuasive enough. My advanced age must be showing.

Before exiting the room I let everyone in front go ahead and drive into the hallway after them, looking down unassumingly. Even though I'm dying to see how what we've worked on through the night looks in the light of day.

The appreciative hollering of the pack makes me blush.

“Wow!” they yelp. “Oh wow! Look at that!”

I so like giving surprise gifts. It is deeply gratifying, and it's a great pity that I only very rarely get the opportunity.

The blank walls the color of malted milk are no more.

We labored at the very boundaries of human endurance to remake them the way they're supposed to be. Everything—yes, we did tend more toward monumental than detailed, but none of it was done haphazardly—every letter is decorated with great care. It probably could do with more drawings, but that would mean sacrificing quality in pursuit of quantity. Everyone has limits.

“Yay!” Mermaid shouts and runs ahead, swinging her tiny backpack.

Smoker is busy copying some deep thought or other off the walls into his diary. The bloated three-foot-high letters glisten like wet lozenges. Even I am struck by how imposing all of it looks. It's not entirely clear what everything means, but that's unimportant. Others will come to work on the empty spaces between the drawings and the letters, and in a couple of days—no, scratch that, in a couple of hours—we're going to have important announcements, news, negotiations, poems, basically everything without which neither we nor our walls can function properly. We just gave it the first nudge.

Mermaid runs back and reports breathlessly that it gets even better.

“There are these six elephants trampling across, one after the other... and one of them is checkered. What's that mean, do you think?”

Smoker doesn't think it means anything. Sphinx suggests that it had been done simply to fill the space.

“Someone must have cut out a stencil.”

“Wait, is there by any chance this teeny-tiny aphid next to them?” Smoker says. “Next to the elephants, I mean. It should be green.”

Of course there isn’t. There is, however, a cute slumbering Lanthanosuchus with its little legs up in the air, but I don't want to spoil it.

Mermaid dutifully sets off looking for the aphid. We're moving along, already past the elephants, and everyone's still searching for that aphid.

“Aw. A dead crocodile,” Mermaid says sadly.

And they all agree. It appears that no one among them is capable of telling a sleeping Lanthanosuchus from a dead crocodile.

“Now I understand why we couldn't wake up Noble,” Ginger says. “And why he stinks of paint thinner.”

She adjusts Tubby's panama hat and wheels him ahead.

We catch up with them near the Third, where there's a significant crowd assembled. They're all silent, staring at the wall. I push myself through—and get the same knock to my senses that all of them have just received. This area was too far away from mine, and I didn't visit it last night.

They have left only rectangles outlined in black, with notes in the middle: Here was Antelope , by Leopard. Chalk, ochre, bronze paint. Surviving fragment of the diptych The Hunt .

Big letters snaking along the lower border of the empty frames say: STRANGER, BARE YOUR HEAD.

Ginger slowly pulls off Tubby's panama.

I put on dark glasses and drive away. Mustang clangs, sending the passersby scattering, both those in a hurry to get to the canteen and those not in a hurry to get anywhere: they all readily jump away, because as Mustang is becoming heavier and less maneuverable every day I'm having a harder and harder time steering it, while the dark glasses interfere with my ability to recognize obstacles. I can't take them off, the sunny weather ruins my mood, and they help mask all this sunniness. With them I can even pretend that the sky is overcast instead of bright blue, so I have been wearing them continuously for the last week, eager to deceive myself, and getting into accidents, but better a couple of accidents than the depression that will inevitably follow if I'm forced to live under the cloudless sky.