The Gray House

BETWEEN THE WORLDS

Sphinx would take a room in the college dorm, tiny but private. He would spend the winter there, studying for the exams, and the winter would be the coldest in the last fifteen years. He would never find Mermaid. The address given by her parents would turn out to be nonexistent. Sphinx would visit everyone having the same last name as that strange family, then everyone with similar last names, and after two months of searching and asking would start to doubt if they hadn’t been a hallucination.

From time to time he would receive letters from his mother. He’d read the first two. The others, unopened, would go to the bottom of his suitcase. The reams of newspapers he’d buy and scan hastily would go into a pile outside his door, growing day by day. Some of them, with articles he found interesting, would join the letters in the suitcase. The neighbors would be polite and courteous to him. At some point he’d realize that he was leading the life of a hermit and try to become more outgoing. He’d start attending student parties.

After one of them, instead of returning to his freezing room, he’d go straight to the bus stop and board the first bus of the morning, the only passenger in it. Changing buses twice, he’d arrive at the edge of town.

The House wouldn’t be there, or rather it wouldn’t be the House. Three walls, still standing amid mountains of bricks and rubble. Blanketed with snow. He’d walk along the fence surrounding this future building site, find a place where the boards did not come together, and sneak into the former domain of the House. One of the remaining walls would be covered in writings, from top to bottom. Names, addresses, phone numbers, short notes. He’d read all of them, and wouldn’t find that which he wasn’t hoping to find anyway.

He’d complete the circle around the wall and sit down on the pile of rubble dusted with snow, feeling warmer each minute, against all the laws of nature that dictated he should be freezing.

“I’m sorry,” he’d say. “You seemed to me a monster that devoured all of my friends. I was sure that you’d never let me go. That you needed me for something known only to you. That I would never be free until I left you, even though I lied to Smoker about the freedom being inside of a person wherever he happens to be. I was afraid that you changed me, made me into your toy. I needed to prove to myself that I could live without you. I blamed you for Elk, and for Wolf. Elk was killed by accident and Wolf was killed by Alexander, but it was easier to think that it was your fault than to admit that the fault was with Wolf. That he was neither kind nor wise, the way I imagined him to be. That he wasn’t perfect. That Elk wasn’t perfect. Easier to blame you than admit that. Easier to say that you killed thirty-odd people than to see that they were cowardly fools or little children who had lost their way. Easier to think that it was you demanding Pompey’s death than to imagine that it gave Blind pleasure to kill him. Easier to be sure that you forced me to remake Noble than to know that I liked doing it . . . Easier to hope that Blind lied about Mermaid than to concede that she really does not exist in this world, neither she nor her strange parents, nor their addresses that they gave to me so eagerly. So much easier just to believe in all of that than to realize that she was your gift, given to me in the hopes of holding on to me when the time came, only with that, not by force or deceit.”

Sphinx would be talking until he was exhausted, until the words dissolved in the frigid air with the little white clouds of his breath. Then he’d get up and climb down from the pile of icy debris, slipping awkwardly. When he’d turn the corner of the wall with the addresses he would see that they were no longer there, and neither were the phone numbers. It would be dirty white, with multicolored spirals, triangles, suns, and moons . . . And the wondrous ugly beasts roaming underneath. Crude, sharp toothed, their legs of different length, their tails sticking straight up rigidly.

Sphinx would approach them carefully. He’d know better than anyone else where that wall had been, but now it would be right here. With all the creatures that inhabited it, great and small. The wolf with the sawlike teeth crowding his jaws, the yellow giraffe resembling a tower crane, the zebra looking more like a stripy camel, the spotted goblin, the green dinosaur, the faded outline of a seagull. As he looks closer, he’d see that in among the familiar drawings there would be others, also familiar but that never were next to them—the white bull swaying uncertainly on spindly legs, the dragon with the blue stone for an eye . . . and moreover, those that were familiar but actually had never been drawn—one more dragon, fiery scarlet, and a fish with a small bell tied to its tail. The bell would be real.

Sphinx would pluck it off the fish’s tail and hide it in the pocket of his coat. Then press his forehead against the wall. He’d stand like that for a while, listening to the silence surrounding him, until the silence became absolute, because it would start snowing. Coming down in an avalanche of enormous flakes, and Sphinx, blinded by them, would stumble around the ruins in search of the crack in the fence that would lead him out.

On his way back to the dorm, jostled by the bus ride, striding along the snowy street, he would think about the bell secreted in his pocket, fighting the urge to take it out and confirm that it really exists. Then he’d feel a prickly sensation in the other pocket, stop and pull out a white feather, so long that it would be impossible to put back without breaking it. He’d have to stick it in his hat, hoping against hope that it didn’t look too outrageous.

He’d meet his neighbor on the stairs, a morose bespectacled girl. She would say that someone was waiting for him.

“This tiny slip of a girl, with gorgeous hair,” the neighbor would add, eyeing the feather suspiciously. And of course, she would be immensely surprised when the untamed loner, the standoffish recluse in prosthetics, jumps at her and kisses her right there on the stairs, like a drunken reveler.

“And a feather in his hat!” she’d stress every time she tells the story. “Red nose, crazy eyes, and this huge feather!”

She would never admit that her neighbor seemed to her at that moment the most beautiful man in the world.