The Gray House

TABAQUI

DAY THE THIRD

They roused him with muffins—they roused him with ice—

They roused him with mustard and cress—

They roused him with jam and judicious advice—

They set him conundrums to guess.

—Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

By the time I pry open my eyes, the morning has already morphed into the day. Guests are gone, as are all traces of them ever having been here. Alexander sweeps out the broken glass and cigarette butts. Lary is sitting all forlorn, his head wrapped in a towel. Someone seems to have put thistles in my eyes and filled my throat with especially scratchy saliva.

“Hey,” I say in a frail voice. “What’s the time?”

Alexander drops the broom and stares at me in horror.

“Must be dying,” Lary says to him, ruefully shaking his betoweled noggin.

Al gasps and runs out, forgetting to close the door behind him. I shouldn’t have scared him like that. A simple recitation of the list of all the places where it hurts would have sufficed. I already regret what I said. Though it’s flattering, to be capable of arousing an emotional response of this magnitude.

“And you had to choose the first day of the new Law for it,” Lary continues selfishly.

“No one chooses the day of their death,” I say.

The pack has an entire arsenal of treatments for every ailment, mostly contradictory. First Humpback dutifully pokes me in various places as prescribed by ancient Chinese wisdom. Then, following Sphinx’s method, I am stuffed into a bath hot enough to cook me alive. I do not protest, because Sphinx’s method knows only two variations: scalding hot or freezing cold. They fish me out, pull a sweater over my naked body, slather my back with something that feels like fire, wrap a scarf around my neck, and put socks on my feet, preceded by a thorough alcohol rub.

At this point in the course of treatment I no longer can distinguish whose method is which and try to rip off all of that stuff, but they hold me rather fast while Blind produces a jar of honey from his secret stash, a very small one, and proudly parades it before me. As if I’m still capable of being moved by such things. Then they feed it to me, and force me to wash it down with milk. I have to suffer it until I begin melting under the layers they’ve wrapped me in, sweating milk and coughing out cream.

Pity me, who is in favor of only one method of healing the sick: tender loving care.

Sphinx entertains me by reading from The Mahabharata. Humpback plays the flute. Lary mashes lemons with sugar in a bowl, while Blind keeps watch, preventing me from slipping away. I grow so tired of these ministrations that I manage to fall asleep inside the fiery, honey-infused cocoon, and all the sarcastic repartee regarding tormentors and torturers, ready to escape from me and enlighten the pack, remains unsaid and tickles me all through the night, insinuating itself into my sweaty dreams.