Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

I've never said anything against old friends. Never told my husband he couldn't see someone he wanted to. But those trips are very hard on him. He's not himself for days afterward, almost as if he's ill, or something bad happens to him there. I am a mother. It's my duty to think about the children first. I surely don't want people blabbing around them that their father lived in that place, you know what I mean? I come from there myself, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, but it doesn't mean such things should be discussed with strangers. Nobody could say that I am not like everyone else. I am a normal woman, and that's exactly what the children need—normal, regular parents. And as for that commune... excuse me, but it is not a place where I would ever go myself, not that my opinion matters, of course. And they are not the people with whom I would want to have anything in common.

Oh for Pete's sake, we didn't do nothing! It's just that Red took it into his head that we should support the Sleepers. Those who were going completely unclaimed, at least. With no relatives. Because who knows, right? So we passed a plate around. We weren't doing too bad at the time, so we could've swung it ourselves, but we thought that maybe some of the guys would like to chip in. Nothing sinister. And then Needle made it look like we came to rob them. Of their last shirt, like. They're pretty well off, you know. And we helped them with everything we had in the very beginning, when they didn't know squat about how the Outsides worked. Two stupid kids in love! Right, whatever. Lary came afterward, with all kinds of excuses, brought a couple of coins. We never took anything from them. Imagine if she barged in right after him and demanded we give all of it back!

I saw Red at the opening night of my latest exhibition. He lives in the same commune as Horse, and is considered a person of authority. Kind of like a respected elder. At first the whole affair was being run by the old night guard who had joined the fugitives after the graduation, but he's been long dead, leaving behind only his collection of broken clocks, so now Red is the big man there.

He looks like an aging rock star, fairly washed out but still deadly. Hair halfway down his back, a tattoo on his forehead, a necklace of dangerous-looking claws. He generated way more interest than my paintings ever could. All the photos from the exhibition featured Red, from different angles, and the paintings only ended up in a shot because he happened to be staring at them. The poor photographers just couldn't keep their lenses off him, and I totally understand them.

Red's got eight children (he swears that they're all from his wife), four dogs, two horses, and a flock of sheep. He showed me pictures of all of them except the latter, and it would have been a nicely satisfying day had he not picked a fight with my manager. It was a messy, juicy scandal, and there were too many reporters hanging around to let it go to waste. Red was raring to go, calling Black a traitor and a renegade, and it took no small effort to shut him down, and an even bigger one to explain to the curious what these two possibly could have had in common with each other.

I know many people consider me a traitor. So what? I couldn't just stand by and watch that shyster pull for his side at our expense day after day. I should have smelled it from the start. Two former Leaders in one place. But I thought I had it under control. I had the numbers, six of mine against three Rats. But then some of them went away, some things changed, and before I knew it Red was already on top, and it was too late to roll it back. He's made a neat little profit for himself, I'm sure. It wasn't an easy time for the commune, but we would've gotten our stuff together even without his financial shenanigans. Hard work and a steady hand, that's all we needed.

Red was the only one to try and talk to me about the Sleepers. After the fight we holed up in the bar across from the exhibition hall. Holding an ice pack to his shiner, he told me with a significant smirk that there were fewer Sleepers now. A lot fewer.

“How's that?” I said. “They woke up?”

“No. They vanished. The first couple of cases they wrote about, but since then mum's the word. don't you read the papers?”

I don't read papers and I don't watch TV, but I decided not to elaborate on that. It wasn't a pleasant topic even by itself, and Red's smugness only added to it. The whole thing reminded me of that time when I asked a lot of questions and received no answers, until it almost drove me crazy. So I didn't ask. Not about who vanished, not about where they went. Red was obviously expecting my questions, and when he realized he wasn't getting any, he soured and quickly left. I haven't seen him since.

If you ask me, he's gotten too bigheaded. All those exhibitions, reporters. I mean, he's a nice guy, but a bit too jumpy for my taste. “Devoted to his Art,” Old Man would've said.

I like him, I respect him, I value him and so on, but he's not getting out in the fresh air enough. And there's no air in his pictures either.

I see Sphinx only rarely. He's a child psychologist now, working in a boarding school for the blind and legally blind. Or maybe not anymore. An exceedingly strange person. Never misses my exhibitions. Visits the Sleepers. Tags along with my father when he goes fishing.

He can show up tanned in the middle of the winter and bring a yellow-blue butterfly in a glass case as a present. His wife is a bit of a mystery—one day she's there with him, the next day she isn't anywhere, and her disappearances can last for months. He's got the most unusual dog in the world—a German shepherd guide dog that is trained to train other German shepherd guide dogs. I have inquired specifically with people who know about these things and they all say that it simply cannot exist. He also keeps an owl. And collects antique musical instruments.

In the last ten years he twice received inheritances from some murky sources. For some reason he doesn't think it at all strange. He didn't even try to find out who those people were. I have no idea how he spent all that money, all I know is that it didn't make him a penny richer.

They are very tight with my father. I suspect it's at his prompting Sphinx comes to visit me at the low points in my life, to frolic in the fields of compassionate psychology. I dutifully pretend that it's helping me. Except when I don't.

I decided then that I was going to stick with the guy until he gets his feet under him. When we first met he was going through a very rough patch. I don't know how many years it took me to figure out that I needed him way more than he needed me. We'd just go fishing. Or to the movies. Listen to the music of my youth, look at the photographs of my girlfriends, talk about my son. Only later did it dawn on me who was humoring whom. I don't know how he did it. That's just the way he is, always giving more than he receives. He understood that I desperately wanted to take care of someone, and did the one thing that Eric never had—gave me the permission. With him I feel like a real father. And a friend. I quit drinking, I'm a vegetarian now, I dropped thirty pounds and twenty years. Now you tell me, which one of us was saving the other?

Sphinx came exactly three times. First when they'd just sniffed us out, you know, “established the whereabouts of a group of the former boarding-school students who had disappeared without a trace” and so on. Like it wasn't us who allowed them to. We decided to legalize our status, that's all. We finally were of age and no longer afraid of parents swooping in. We had just one house for all of us, and one barn. We ate whatever came our way, slept in our clothes to save on heating, and worked. Day and night, like we were obsessed. He was here for a couple of hours. Said hello to everyone, sat down to dinner with us, and left. Some were imagining he came to stay, but not me. I saw that he only needed to make sure we were all right. And he didn't want to upset Black. Because Black was panicked, even if he didn't show it. The second visit was six, maybe seven years later, I can't say for sure. That time he was with us a while. Maybe because Black was no longer here. But it was still clear he wasn't staying. I asked him, joking like, when he was moving in. “To do what? Farm with prosthetics or mooch off your work?” he said. And the third time that thing happened.