Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

Smoker discovers a goose egg on his head. That must be the reason for the missing headache.

“By the way, what makes you think that the dog Black is going to have out there will be a bull terrier?” he asks Sphinx.

The House had several places where Grasshopper liked to hide. One of them was the yard after dark. He liked his thoughtful places. That's what they were for, those special spots where he could hide, disappear from the world and think. And in a strange way the places themselves influenced the thinking.

The yard distanced him from the House. When he was down there, the House allowed him to look at itself from a different angle, through different eyes. Sometimes it looked like a hive. Sometimes it turned into a toy. A painted cardboard box with a removable roof. Everything in it was real—the figurines, the furniture, all the way down to the tiniest things—and at the same time he could take off the cover and see who and what had moved where. It was a game.

He played it, and other games too, with their own thoughtful places. Behind the large sofa in the waiting room, smelling of dust, where the accumulated fluff, like pieces of a gray rag, floated away when he breathed on them or simply moved a bit. That's where the heart of the House was located. Steps echoed through it, voices of those passing by reflected in it, but the estrangement and the invasive thoughts of others could not reach here, he was left alone with his own mind and his own games. He was in the belly of a giant, and he listened to the rumbling around him, felt the beating of the enormous heart and shook with the coughs. Part belly of the giant, part darkened movie theater, and also part Blind, a very small part, because it prompted Grasshopper to strain his hearing for the soundless stirrings, to guess the meanings of conversations by a few stray snippets, and the identities of people by their steps, all in the hazy slumber of thinking. The thoughts that came to him here were viscous, translucent, invisible; the strangest thoughts he ever had. To snap out of this game he needed to lie down on the floor. To feel the coolness of the boards and the slippery leather of the sofa's upholstery. To reclaim his body and the world around him from the nothingness he dissolved them in.

He stretched his legs, probing the strange feeling of their length, their strength, the springs coiled inside. The power was everywhere, but the strongest part of it was lodged in himself, making him wonder how he managed not to fly apart—this much power could not possibly have fit in the slim body wedged between the wall and the back of the sofa. It yearned to whirl in a wild tornado, spiraling out of control, sweeping the lightbulbs off the ceiling, tying the floor rugs in knots. Grasshopper, tucked away in the giant's stomach, became the giant himself. Then it faded, melted away, as did all of his games sooner or later. But when he scrambled out from behind the sofa he still remained light as a feather, felt small and insubstantial. He was a giant in the body of a mouse, and his giant power shrank to the size of a walnut and sneaked into the flimsy suede bump on a string around his neck.

The power was akin to an enormous genie reduced to a vortex to slip into a minuscule bottle. This game was his favorite. Its scent was that of the amulet, of Ancient and his room. All his secret games originated from Ancient's room, grew out of his tasks that nourished Grasshopper's amulet just as Ancient's hand fed the triangular fish in the green tank. He played the game of the thoughtful places, the game of lookies, the game of catchies, and all of them he carried out of Ancient's room, all of them were transparent and inconspicuous like the powdered food of the triangular fish.

Lookies required him only to look. Look and see more than those who were immersed in themselves and their worries. Turned out they didn't see much at all if they didn't look closely. If they didn't need to. To play lookies, you had to watch not only someone you were talking to but also everything that was happening around you, as much as you could without turning your head or shifting the eyes from side to side. Who stood or sat where, and what they did. What was in its usual place and what moved or disappeared. The game was boring if he regarded it as a task, and exciting if he just played it. It made his eyes hurt and filled his dreams with jittery flashes. But he did start to notice things he hadn't before. As he entered the room he now saw drops and splashes, indentations in the pillows, objects moved from where they were before—the traces of events that had happened in his absence. He knew that if he played it long enough he'd learn to uncover who left those traces, the way Blind knew them by their scent or breath. Blind had been playing hearies and rememberies since birth—the two invisible games, out of four, that were open to him.

Grasshopper waited. One day out of seven belonged to Ancient. On movie nights he performed his magic using words and cigarette smoke in the darkened room—the weary, cantankerous senior in a threadbare dressing gown, the red-eyed shaman privy to the mysteries of the invisible games. Grasshopper read the words on the door as if they were incantations: No knocking. No admittance. Then he knocked and admitted himself into the stuffy room, where both the Purple Ratter and the Dog That Bites lurked in the dark, and the shadows whispered Spring is the time of horrible changes , where the table lamp was wreathed in tendrils of smoke, and the Gray Shaman told him, “Well, here you are.” And dropped amulets against evil eye in wine puddles. Amulets stared at him through the red liquid, the fish stared through the glass of their tank. Grasshopper's back broke out in goose bumps, and it was the scariest and the most beautiful time in the whole world.

When several hours later he was in his bed half-asleep, he imagined that there was something sharp living inside him, something that became sharper still with each visit to Ancient, who was slowly honing it on a magical whetstone.

Grasshopper and Humpback were observing the dogs. Humpback was also shaking snow and dirt out of his coat. Dogs sniffed at the earth under their feet. The most impatient of them had already bolted, run away to other places that also might somehow provide something edible.

“It's not enough,” Humpback said. “Not even close to enough for them.”

“But it does give them a bit of strength,” Grasshopper noted, “so they can go and search for more food.”

They walked away from the fence. Hoods hanging low, shoes squelching in the mud, they shuffled across the slush of the yard. The white markings on the asphalt peeked through where the snow had already melted. In summer those indicated the volleyball court. Humpback came up to one of the cars that some teacher had neglected to put inside the garage and prodded the iced-over fender with his finger.

“Cheap trash,” he said. “This car, I mean.”

Grasshopper liked old cars, so he didn't say anything. He squatted to look for the icicles on the underside of it, but there weren't any. They shuffled on, toward the porch.

“You know what? I feel much better now that we fed them,” Humpback said. “All the time that I think about them I feel... uneasy. But then when I feed them it goes away.”

“I see these black cats sometimes,” Grasshopper offered distractedly. “Sneaking under the bed. Or under the door. They're really tiny. Strange, huh?”

“That's from your fuzzy looking. Everyone keeps telling you to stop the fuzzy looking. But you keep doing it. I'm surprised it's only cats and not, I don't know, elephants running around. Like Beauty's shadow, you know.”

“That way I can see much more,” Grasshopper said, trying to defend the lookies, more out of habit than to really convince Humpback.