Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

By the time the lights go out I'm almost finished. I rummage in my pocket for the magical stone the color of Noble's eyes. The dragon, the ceiling, me—we all disappear in the darkness. I'm not scared. I take out the flashlight, point it at the eye socket, and insert the stone. It's holding. It fits, or maybe just sticks to the wet paint.

I fulfill my dream. Here it is—the ghost dragon, covered in lilies and with Noble's eye. It's running with the talons pointing at our room. That means return. Maybe something else as well, I have no idea. My job was just to put it here. I switch off the flashlight and sit there in the dark. I'm all sticky; probably covered with paint.

I don't know how much time passes before there's stomping, flashlighting, and cooing from below.

“Coo-ee yourselves,” I say. “I'm up here. Could you maybe have waited until morning? My rotting carcass would have been so glad to see you.”

“Pipe down,” Sphinx says. “It's no one else's fault if you decided to spend the night on this idiotic contraption.”

“He-ey!” comes in Vulture's drunken voice. “I would thank you for not dumping on my princely perch!”

They point flashlights at me and giggle. Then someone trips over the can and steps in the paint. Now I'm the one giggling.

“Damn!” Humpback yells. “There's shit all over the floor! He was making a trap for innocent passersby. Using bird crap!”

They finally take me off the ladder and carry me away. The actual carrying falls to Alexander, and everybody else just stumbles along, waving flashlights and singing.

If there's one thing I hate, it's being the only sober member of a drunk crowd. But by now it's useless for me to try and catch up with them. Not even with the help of Dearest's tequila.

They carry me inside and file in. Humpback is bringing up the rear, whistling into a flute. The dorm is so trashed it's scary. The nightlights leave a trail on the ceiling. Alexander puts me on the bed, and the rest keep circling the room in a conga line. Must be looking for dungeons and caverns.

Nanette is sleeping splayed out on the sandwich plate. I take her off, grab the last remaining sandwich, and eat it. The rest of the plates are empty. My favorite place is occupied by Elephant, fast asleep, clutching some kind of red ball. On closer inspection it proves to be our Chinese lantern.

Red and Blind are waltzing, but mostly walking into furniture. Humpback is trying to tootle on the flute in time with them. Blind is counting off loudly: “A-one-two-three... One-two-three... One ...” Each standalone “one” makes them freeze in place. Humpback then bumps into them and freezes too.

“To the girls,” Vulture proclaims, sniffing at his glass thoughtfully.

Who knows what he can be sniffing there. Anything liquid within reach has already been gobbled up. I set to gnawing on the remains of the sandwich. In this crotchety state I disgust even myself.

Sphinx plops down next to me, winks, and imparts, “A dragon be a mythical beast... While a white dragon, doubly so, because in addition to all of its other qualities it is also an albino, that is, an anomaly even among its own kind.”

“You noticed,” I marvel at him. “Managed to see! In total darkness!”

“I notice everything. Besides, it's not like you climbed all the way up there just to give the ceiling a fresh coat of paint.”

Then we sit and watch the others gradually switch off. Someone's singing from the direction of the window. Loudly and out of tune.

“Whose is this?” I ask, lifting an unfamiliar prosthetic by the strap. “I didn't know we had anyone else of that sort here.”

“It's a joke,” Sphinx says darkly. “A funny, merry joke. Humor among thieves, you might say.”

I decide not to pursue this and instead busy myself with going to sleep. Feeling worn out, grimy, and elderly, but also like someone who has responsibly carried out his duty. Also cold. As soon as I manage to get warm and cozy and finally drift off, I'm immediately woken up by Black. He's rattling the coffeepot against the bars of the bed and reading Kipling aloud. Some of those not yet asleep try to get him to pipe down, while the rest are having some kind of scholarly argument. I don't want to sort through the details, and I fall back asleep.

The second time it's a hyena's laugh that wakes me up. It trails off into sobs. Everyone except the hyena is fast asleep, and even the lights are out.

The third time I startle at dawn, who knows why. The party's over. The gray morning slithers in through the windowpanes. Insensate bodies stacked haphazardly, snoring. All is still and quiet, except for the barely audible ticking. That's the bitch that woke me up. I seek it by ear, by smell, I home in on it. It's a watch, lurking in the folds of the blanket. I lean over the edge of the bed, grasp for an empty bottle, place the watch on the floor, and smash it, using the bottom of the bottle as a hammer. It takes but a moment, and the ticking stops.

Black, asleep on the floor, raises his head and stares at me dazedly. Then falls back down. I drop someone's sweater on him and crawl back into my paint-smelling burrow.

“You sin, you pay.”

This had been pounded into me by Gramps, my crazy grandfather. I hope he burns in hell right now, because if such a place really exists he and those like him must end up in it. I cursed him with all the curses known to me, and they wore him down eventually. Very slowly, because he knew how to fight these things; besides, we were of one blood, he and I, so I received a portion of my own curses on the rebound. Let him burn, like a gas burner burns, heating up everything around him, as he never gave me even a smidgen of warmth.

The white plaque on the wall, letters of some unknown alphabet, four dozen shaved heads; whispered prayers and incantations. “... use the lemon juice, goddamn it, rub them until your arms fall off, because whoever saw an angel covered in freckles from head to toe? There ain't no such thing! You must of done it just to spite me!” So—never a single ray of light, always the dusk of the curtained rooms. Maybe they really did appear in the most visible places to spite him, covering the skin that never saw the sun, the skin rubbed raw with lemon juice. White toga smelling of lemons, a withered wreath of chamomiles with white centers. And the constant “Give us a miracle, reveal it to us!” Miracles that weren’t, and painted nails, and colored lenses that made the eyes water. But “Fuck it, it ain't no angel if he's not blue eyed!” He swore like a sailor as soon as he was out of earshot of his beloved brethren, his “sons and daughters.” The sanctimonious piety went straight into the trash when the last of them disappeared behind the door, and the monstrous dwarf sat down to his three-course fish dinner. Wreath hanging askew, thin fish bones extracted from the depths of the munching orifice. He had no use for napkins. Never. “They are an extravagance, unbecoming of the godly, you hear me, O winged one?” Also unbecoming of him was cutlery. And unbecoming of me—a table, a chair, and even “Angels don't eat, ha-ha, they are satiated by Holy Spirit!” Angels. Are curses becoming of them? Of course not. They discharge in your own body, pure sizzling electricity filling out every last hair instead of arcing to the one they were directed at. And then one day, a simple enchanted fish bone that's done its job. That was the first real miracle I wrought: to pass from MY FATHER's HOUSE, in capital letters, to a house. It could even be called my mother's, if only I ever had the slightest inclination to call it that. Exchanging house for house and Angel for Moron, because “He can't even read, the retard!” And “What have we done to deserve this?” They didn't need any miracles at all. Miracles scared them. Except those they saw on the Tube. It was their god, even though they didn't bow before it or whisper prayers to it, just stared at it through the clear lenses of their glasses, but the effect was still the same both here and there, the only difference being that there I at least had been useful for something.