Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

I always knew Sphinx had one good turn in him. That he didn't stay back just because. I remembered that he'd received something from Jackal that no one else had, before or since. If anyone were to get Tabaqui to hand him something that none of us common folk could even dream of, it was Sphinx, no doubt about that. It was also clear that he was going to use that present sooner or later, and I thought that's when I'd get to know what it was. But it took so long to finally happen that by that time, I'd almost forgotten how much I wanted to find out.

It was my second show that made me famous. So much fuss, I've never been able to replicate it since. On the one hand, it hurts that the later works remain underappreciated, but on the other it's more important that I know them to be stronger. I'm not ashamed of the earlier paintings, but when you're twenty-two you tend to bare your soul a little too eagerly, and also amateurishly at times. It makes you somehow uneasy, looking at them afterward. Uneasy at yourself, and at the fact that it's exactly the amateurishness that gets people so excited. I am wiser now, and so are my paintings. The only detail that keeps reappearing again and again, dragging over from the old times, is the stuffed bear. I still can't get rid of it. It just learned to hide better, that's all. On the latest canvases it's been painted over. It's not visible. But it is still there, lurking under the layers of paint. Probably one day I may be able to leave it behind, even though for me it has long become something of a spooky talisman, an insurance policy, guaranteeing long life for the paintings.

He liked those of Eric's paintings that I didn't understand at all. For example, the works of his stripy period, as I call it. Circles within circles with triangles encroaching on them, all that geometry. All in black and white. Even the infamous teddy bear morphed into a pile of triangles. Sphinx stood in front of one of them for forty minutes, I'm not kidding.

It was on the day after the opening. We always went when the crowds thinned out. I walked around the collection once, twice. When after the third loop I found him still stuck in front of the same picture, he turned to me and said, “You know, Smoker took more of the House with him than he thinks.”

The painting was of those same tired black-and-white circles. Edge to edge. It looked like nothing so much as a dartboard, complete with a dart stuck in it.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I guess I just don't get modern art. Especially of this kind.”

“Time does not flow like a river. A river that you can't enter twice,” Sphinx said. “It is more like circles on the surface of the water. That's a quote, I didn't invent that.”

He raised his gloved artificial hand and pointed at the dart in the middle of the target.

“And if into those circles you drop something, say, a feather, like it is here, it would generate its own circles, you see? Small, weak ones, almost invisible... But they will expand and intersect with the large ones.”

I tried to visualize what he was talking about. I felt like Winnie-the-Pooh, a Bear of Very Little Brain. I probably even started to smell of moldy stuffing.

“So you think that is what it is?” I said, staring at what stubbornly refused to become anything but a dartboard.

He nodded. His face was lit up by inspiration, like some insane prophet's. At times like that I always get a sneaking suspicion I’m being hypnotized.

“If you were this feather, where in the past would you have wanted to drop? What would you change?”

This got me depressed. What would I change in my own past if I could? Everything, for a start. But I doubt that anything good could come out of it anyway.

“I'd have to be dropping nonstop,” I said. “There are too many places.”

“You've got one shot,” he insisted. “One single shot.”

“Then I wouldn't bother. My life can't be changed in one shot.”

He switched off the mesmerism.

“You don't understand,” he said, turning away. “Your life can't be changed, period. It's already half-lived. The only thing you could do is go to a different loop. Where you would not be the exact same you.”

“Why would I want to change something there?” I said. “If it wouldn't mean a change here.”

The damned tie was biting into my neck. All I wanted to do at that point was to go away from this place. I guess Sphinx noticed the state I was in.

“Let's go,” he said. “You're turning red.”

And we left. Eric wasn't at the show that day. Or I would have asked him a couple of things.

When we saw him we didn't put two and two together at first. I mean, sure, we realized that the boy was the spitting image of Blind. But we couldn't imagine it was really him. I mean, think about it. Would you if you were in our place? Would anyone?

So this one time Sphinx shows up, and he's not alone. Climbs out of the car, cracks open the rear door, and pulls out this scarecrow. Thin as a rail, and all covered in some kind of nasty rash. All of ours already had the chickenpox and all that, so we don't sweat it, make it look like we don't notice even. And it's clear as day who he looks like. Makes you feel uneasy, like you saw someone carrying a photograph of his late wife with him everywhere. You don't exactly come out and say it, right? So we don't. But the kids get to him right away, because he looks such a city slicker in his white sneakers and his stickered shirt, they can't help themselves. So they gather around and start discussing his clothes, his rash, how he can't even move he's so scared. Teasing him.

But not that hard, you know. I decide to knock some sense into them, because he's a guest and that's not the way to treat guests, and I take a step toward them, and then someone, I guess it was Red's youngest, pulls at his sleeve. And that's when it hit the fan.

He lost his dark glasses in the melee, and then it was obvious. To anyone. I mean, anyone who'd ever seen Blind. At least that's what I thought. I was wrong. Termite, for example, did not get it.

“Oh, look!” he said. “Blind's little boy! Would you look at that, a perfect likeness!”

I wasn't going to argue with him. Heredity is now one of his favorite topics. How nurture's got nothing on nature.

The kids were so upset when they saw they were picking on an unsighted that we didn't even need to tell them off.

But Sphinx took his boy behind the barn and gave him a good scolding. To tell you the truth, I couldn't help it and peeked a bit, to see what was up. And I wasn't alone. Red got there first. So we see Sphinx blabbing his head off, and the kid just stands there, calm as could be. Maybe listening, maybe not, no way to tell.

“Poor Sphinx,” I whisper to Red.

“Depends on the point of view,” Red shoots back. “didn't you get lectured about the proper way to behave when you were a kid? didn't that make you want to throw up?”

“What would you have done in Sphinx's place?”

“Told him that it was a brave thing to do,” Red says without pausing even for a second. “And to keep standing up for himself.”

“What? You mean, him?” I say, aghast. “Tell him to keep it up? This guy here?”

Red stares at me strange like. And asks if I am really as stupid as I look.

What do you say when someone insults you to your face? I turned around and left.

After we packed the goons off to bed, Horse got off the phone and I stopped fretting about the size of the long-distance bill that was bound to arrive after his intimate chat with Lary, that is, after things calmed down a bit and Sphinx and I were the only ones left out on the deck, I asked him where he'd dug up that boy.