The Gray House

TABAQUI

DAY THE EIGHTH

He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,

With his name painted clearly on each

—Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

In the morning we get a surprise. Flyer home from the Outsides, bearing the ordered goods. An exceedingly rare occurrence. Rat comes in before the first class with a black travel bag slung over her shoulder. She drops it on the teacher’s table. The zipper whines. Rat—black lipstick, white makeup, a regular vampire—pulls packages from it one by one and arranges them on the table. Lary snatches the one that obviously contains a record from the general pile and makes off with it. I pick up the heavy box tied with a pink ribbon. After that I am lost to the world until I am able to dispose of both the ribbon and the wrapper and have a peek inside. Oh, the heavenly scent! The chocolate backs all glistening in neat rows. Each in its own crinkly nest, on its own little placemat, covered with delicate tissue. I lift it, touch one of the backs, and lick the finger. Then I count how many there are. Two layers, four chocolates in each row, and the rows are also four. That seems to make thirty-two. I close the box and hide it in my desk. The ribbon goes there as well. Now I’m ready to look at what everyone else got.

Black has fled to the windowsill with a stack of magazines. Before Blind’s hungry, grasping tentacles Rat pitches three cans of coffee, four cartons of cigarettes, a pack of AA batteries, and dark glasses of an especially ghastly persuasion. Humpback has a set of combs and a meerschaum pipe. There are two more packets on the table, but we don’t get to open them, as R One appears suddenly in the middle of the classroom inquiring what it is we think we’re doing when the class has already started and the teacher is on the way. Rat somehow escapes his attention.

We quickly whisk away the items, the packaging, ribbons, string—in short, everything that smells of fun and can therefore upset the teachers, who are excluded from it. Rat zips up the bag and leaves.

“How’re you feeling?” Ralph asks, stopping at Noble’s desk.

“Good,” he says with a shrug.

Ralph nods, walks away, and hovers over Smoker’s head.

“What about you?”

Smoker blushes and blinks.

“All right, I guess.”

Ralph gives him a look, as if he has deep suspicions concerning Smoker’s all-right feelings, before scampering to his own chair.

During lunch break I keep pestering Sphinx until he relents and directs Alexander to take the map of New Zealand off the wall. We have two pictures stapled under it. Big ones, each almost the size of half the map.

One of them, done in black ink, is of a tree, gnarly and sprawling, almost denuded of leaves. On the bare branch there’s a lonely frazzled raven, and underneath it, by the roots, what looks like a garbage pile. Even though the garbage is just regular human trash, it’s still somehow obvious that it was the raven that’s assembled it—the bottles, the bones, the concert tickets, the wall calendars. And the reason it’s so sad appears to be that the whole of its life has turned into that waste. So the picture is actually about anyone and everyone, funny at first sight and somber at all the subsequent sights. Like every picture Leopard’s ever drawn. The second is in color. A scrawny, sand-colored cat in the middle of a parched desert. It’s got emerald-green eyes and looks a bit like Sphinx. Apart from it, there’s only the cracked earth and ghostly brush populated by yellowish-white snails. On the ground near the cat’s paws are broken snail shells. The shards are covered with scratches that are actually notes and Latin proverbs. Also on the ground, someone’s footprints. Could be a bird, could be an animal. The prints straggle by where the cat’s sitting, loop around the brush, and disappear somewhere in the distance.

We look at the pictures for a while. They make us a bit depressed. The first drawing belongs to me and the other one to Sphinx, but they are in fact communal property of the pack. So valuable that we never leave them out on display, to make sure we don’t get used to them. We look and remember Leopard. They’re his present to us. Blind usually takes part in the ritual as well. He has his own ways of reaching the right frame of mind, and we could only make wild guesses at what those are. But he never skips the picture-viewing sessions. The animals in the corridor are accessible to his fingers and he knows them as well as we do. Before filling them in, Leopard always scored the outline into the wall. But these he only knows from our descriptions.

So here we are, sitting and standing before our treasure. Looking at it and not looking, at the same time. Seeing it. Listening and thinking. Then we put the map back and return to the daily grind. Smoker isn’t asking questions, which is a bit strange. Could it be that he too is finally growing up?