Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

He stopped in front of the door that didn't have a number on it, with the glass transom on top. Here one more R , done in soap on the glass, greeted him. He slammed the door behind him and thus rid himself of his own nick until the next time he needed to go out into the hallway. This was both his office and his bedroom. He was the only counselor who spent nights on the second floor. Shark firmly believed that it constituted a colossal sacrifice on his part, and Ralph did nothing to suggest to him otherwise. It was enough to mention in passing, “I am at my post at all hours,” and he received everything he wanted, right away.

Ralph made a point of maintaining the heroic image of selfless service, even though the fear of the second floor he saw in other counselors and in Shark himself almost made him laugh. You had to have an extremely hazy understanding of them , or rather none at all, to imagine that they would go busting into a room and sticking a knife into a counselor just because. Because they were generally wicked, or because they had nothing better to do. He guessed at the existence of the Law. No one told him anything about it, of course, but by observing certain patterns in their behavior he deduced not only that the Law existed, but even some of its tenets. One, for example, made teachers and counselors untouchable, and it protected him unswervingly. The exceptions to it could come raining down only in that fateful time, the two weeks before graduation.

So it was useless to think about that, much less fear it, and he wasn't going to move to a different room now only because something could possibly happen in six months' time. He'd already committed the biggest folly of all by returning. Compared to that, worrying about his personal safety would be ridiculous. And whatever else, he wasn't about to spend his last months in the House in interminable conversations with Sheriff, or inebriated Raptor, who were both known to barge into any room on the third floor as if it were their own. Two bottles of beer were, in their opinion, reason enough to come for a visit, so once armed with those they didn't even bother to knock. The counselors traditionally drank. They weren't drunks, like Cases, they just drank. The difference was subtle and, admittedly, rather hard to notice at times, but they would all certainly take offense should someone have pointed that out to them. Cases were much harder to rattle. But there were some things even they resented. For starters, they didn't like being called Cases.

There weren't many people in the House who knew that Ralph was the one who'd given Cases their name. He didn't mean either their overall shapes or their mental state, as the common interpretations ran, but exactly cases, of bottles. Pinning a name on someone in the House was easy. All you had to do was walk out into the hallway at night, choose an appropriate place on the wall, scribble something on it, either illuminating your way with a flashlight or by touch, making sure that your entry did not stand out too much. It was going to be read anyway. The walls for them were the newspapers, the weekly magazines, the road signs, the advertising supplements, the communications office, and the museum of fine arts. All he had to do was put his word in and wait for it to have an effect. What happened next wasn't up to him. The name could have been forgotten and painted over, or accepted and taken up. Ralph never felt himself younger and more alive than when he went prowling in the night armed with a can of spray paint. That was all you needed, a flashlight and spray paint. Once he moved to the second floor, the task became even easier, but then he was almost caught, twice in a row, and had to stop adding his two cents to the House names, fearing that sooner or later he would be discovered and unmasked. He did not want to undermine their trust in the walls, since he himself received much that was useful from the same source. It required only diligence in reading and deciphering their scribbles. The wall was his entrance into their world, a ticket without which the admission would have been completely impossible. He learned to grasp new messages at a glance, distinguishing them from the tapestry of the old ones, once he knew the lay of the land. He never stopped to look closer—that could arouse suspicion. One unfocused glance, and he carried a riddle with him until the time when he could decipher it at night in his room, at his leisure over a cup of tea, the way others spent their time on a crossword puzzle.

Sometimes he succeeded, other times he didn't, but he never despaired, because he knew that the next day would bring another crop of messages worthy of thinking over. One thing bugged him, though, the abundance of swearwords, since they also demanded careful reading in case they concealed something important. Once the House inhabitants started hitting puberty, he even had days when he regretted his habit of reading everything they put out on the walls. Later the swearing abated, except around the Second, where it was still easy to drown in it.

He wasn't looking at the walls as he was walking down the corridor now. The intervening half a year changed the landscape to the point of unfamiliarity. He didn't want to overload his brain on the very first day of his return, trying to peel away everything they'd added in six months—where the crop of a single night was sometimes more than enough. But he still could not shield himself from the proliferation of the R . The letters jumped out at him, outlined and separated from the common muddle that was snaking over itself in places where the concentration of words and drawings was highest.

There might well have been intent behind this. But then, who was the target of it, he or they themselves? What was it supposed to be—a remembrance or a greeting? Something they were afraid they'd forget, or something they wanted to forget but couldn’t? He was gone, but at the same time he was still here. Never before had Ralph encountered the nicks of the dead written on the walls. They were never spoken of again, their things either distributed between the living or destroyed. Closing the gap, that's what it was called. One night of mournful vigil and then every sign of the person's existence was erased, especially from the walls. The same thing happened to those who left the domain of the House. They were convinced of the inevitable annihilation awaiting them in the Outsides. The departed were treated the same as the dead, while he'd managed to both move out and still remain embedded in the walls, by their own hands. They must have known he was going to be back. But how could they? How could they be so sure of something that he himself had doubted until the last moment?

Ralph dropped the duffel on the floor and sat on the sofa. Of course they knew. And now I know that they knew. Even though I haven't really studied the walls yet. They deliberately wrote it so that it caught the eye, so that once I was back I'd see immediately that they were waiting for me.

I might even start acknowledging that they pulled me in, wrapped me in the spell of the letters. Start imagining them dancing around those writings, mumbling incantations and drawing magic sigils. Thinking that the only reason I returned was because they willed me to. I've only been here for a couple of minutes and the insanity is already setting in. Or maybe that's what it takes, that anyone here needs to be at least a little mad? That this place does not tolerate those who aren’t?

He knew he was right, at least somewhat. One couldn't just walk out of here and then walk back in again. The House might not accept him. This had happened to others, he himself saw it not once and not twice, so he knew what he was talking about. Something might not accept him. It could not be put in words, it could not be subjected to logical analysis, this Something that was the House itself, or maybe its spirit, its essence. He wasn't looking for the right word, or for any word at all. It was just that, coming back, he knew that the final decision was not up to him. Not to him, not to them , and to Shark least of all. The House would either let him in or it wouldn’t. So maybe it was the House they tried to placate, marking its walls with his initials. To accustom it to the idea of him returning.