The Gray House

VOICES FROM THE OUTSIDES

Smoker

I still get asked about those events from time to time. Less frequently now compared to twenty or even fifteen years ago. But many do remember. It’s amazing how many. They remember that I had something to do with that story and imagine that it somehow influenced my soul and my paintings.

I have met with quite a few of the former occupants of the House since graduation. Some have done pretty well for themselves and others barely scrape by. There are probably also those who are in pretty dire straits, but since they are not in the habit of attending my personal shows, I can’t vouch for their existence. Of those who remained in the town, I know six. They meet regularly to wallow in memories, but I’ve never felt the need to join their company. There are none among them whom I’d really like to see. I actually see very few people, apart from Black.

I collected news clippings about the Sleepers for a while, but then abandoned the whole thing. It was too painful, thinking about them, imagining them. Easier to deal with the living or with the truly dead.

Horse

No, we none of us went to visit them. What’s the point? Not even Red. First it was because we were lying low, and then there was too much to do. But I never wanted to anyway. We knew about them, I mean, who was where and stuff, but going there—no, that didn’t happen.

Black

Honestly? I don’t care about the Sleepers. I’m not even going to pretend that I’m grieving for them. It was their own choice, their decision, and the last thing I would do is drag myself over there clutching a bunch of carnations, drowning in snot around the corpses. Because let’s face it, corpses is what they are. Living corpses who don’t give a damn about any emotions coming from me. What would I be busting my tail for, then?

Red

I do visit them from time to time. No flowers, of course. Why shouldn’t I? I even got myself a special permit. I didn’t do it before because I didn’t want to blow the cover on our guys, because naturally the “dormice” were under constant surveillance. Now that no one cares, I can do it. And I don’t consider it to be perverted or anything. There’s nothing scary about them. They don’t wither, they don’t waste away, they don’t look like corpses at all. Besides, it’s always fun to visit with old friends. I don’t tell the guys about this. They might think themselves obliged to accompany me and start hating themselves for not wanting to. Nobody needs that.

Smoker

Lary and Needle moved to the suburbs. He is now a part owner of the repair shop where he started back then as a grease monkey. She’s keeping the house. They have two kids, the eldest daughter got married recently. I was at the wedding, gave the newlyweds a picture. Not one of mine, though. Mine are not everyone’s cup of tea. It was amusing to follow the expression on the bride’s little face as the present was being unwrapped, and to note the look of relief when they could finally see it.

Lary and I never talk about the Sleepers or the vanished. We keep a knowing, competent, friendly silence about the subject if we happen to meet. But we do discuss other Outsides-mates, and he always has some exciting new piece of information for me because he tries to keep up with what’s happening as much as he can. Horse and he are still very close, even though Horse is still living with the commune (the sect, let’s be honest here) founded by the passengers of the bus and the Devout. It’s a royal pain to drive all the way there, but Lary performs the pilgrimage at least every month. “In honor of past friendships,” he says.

Needle

I’ve never said anything against old friends. Never told my husband he couldn’t see someone he wanted to. But those trips are very hard on him. He’s not himself for days afterward, almost as if he’s ill, or something bad happens to him there. I am a mother. It’s my duty to think about the children first. I surely don’t want people blabbing around them that their father lived in that place, you know what I mean? I come from there myself, and I’m not ashamed to admit it, but it doesn’t mean such things should be discussed with strangers. Nobody could say that I am not like everyone else. I am a normal woman, and that’s exactly what the children need—normal, regular parents. And as for that commune . . . excuse me, but it is not a place where I would ever go myself, not that my opinion matters, of course. And they are not the people with whom I would want to have anything in common.

Hybrid

Oh for Pete’s sake, we didn’t do nothing! It’s just that Red took it into his head that we should support the Sleepers. Those who were going completely unclaimed, at least. With no relatives. Because who knows, right? So we passed a plate around. We weren’t doing too bad at the time, so we could’ve swung it ourselves, but we thought that maybe some of the guys would like to chip in. Nothing sinister. And then Needle made it look like we came to rob them. Of their last shirt, like. They’re pretty well off, you know. And we helped them with everything we had in the very beginning, when they didn’t know squat about how the Outsides worked. Two stupid kids in love! Right, whatever. Lary came afterward, with all kinds of excuses, brought a couple of coins. We never took anything from them. Imagine if she barged in right after him and demanded we give all of it back!

Smoker

I saw Red at the opening night of my latest exhibition. He lives in the same commune as Horse, and is considered a person of authority. Kind of like a respected elder. At first the whole affair was being run by the old night guard who had joined the fugitives after the graduation, but he’s been long dead, leaving behind only his collection of broken clocks, so now Red is the big man there.

He looks like an aging rock star, fairly washed out but still deadly. Hair halfway down his back, a tattoo on his forehead, a necklace of dangerous-looking claws. He generated way more interest than my paintings ever could. All the photos from the exhibition featured Red, from different angles, and the paintings only ended up in a shot because he happened to be staring at them. The poor photographers just couldn’t keep their lenses off him, and I totally understand them.

Red’s got eight children (he swears that they’re all from his wife), four dogs, two horses, and a flock of sheep. He showed me pictures of all of them except the latter, and it would have been a nicely satisfying day had he not picked a fight with my manager. It was a messy, juicy scandal, and there were too many reporters hanging around to let it go to waste. Red was raring to go, calling Black a traitor and a renegade, and it took no small effort to shut him down, and an even bigger one to explain to the curious what these two possibly could have had in common with each other.

Black

I know many people consider me a traitor. So what? I couldn’t just stand by and watch that shyster pull for his side at our expense day after day. I should have smelled it from the start. Two former Leaders in one place. But I thought I had it under control. I had the numbers, six of mine against three Rats. But then some of them went away, some things changed, and before I knew it Red was already on top, and it was too late to roll it back. He’s made a neat little profit for himself, I’m sure. It wasn’t an easy time for the commune, but we would’ve gotten our stuff together even without his financial shenanigans. Hard work and a steady hand, that’s all we needed.

Smoker

Red was the only one to try and talk to me about the Sleepers. After the fight we holed up in the bar across from the exhibition hall. Holding an ice pack to his shiner, he told me with a significant smirk that there were fewer Sleepers now. A lot fewer.

“How’s that?” I said. “They woke up?”

“No. They vanished. The first couple of cases they wrote about, but since then mum’s the word. Don’t you read the papers?”

I don’t read papers and I don’t watch TV, but I decided not to elaborate on that. It wasn’t a pleasant topic even by itself, and Red’s smugness only added to it. The whole thing reminded me of that time when I asked a lot of questions and received no answers, until it almost drove me crazy. So I didn’t ask. Not about who vanished, not about where they went. Red was obviously expecting my questions, and when he realized he wasn’t getting any, he soured and quickly left. I haven’t seen him since.

Red

If you ask me, he’s gotten too bigheaded. All those exhibitions, reporters. I mean, he’s a nice guy, but a bit too jumpy for my taste. “Devoted to his Art,” Old Man would’ve said.

I like him, I respect him, I value him and so on, but he’s not getting out in the fresh air enough. And there’s no air in his pictures either.

Smoker

I see Sphinx only rarely. He’s a child psychologist now, working in a boarding school for the blind and legally blind. Or maybe not anymore. An exceedingly strange person. Never misses my exhibitions. Visits the Sleepers. Tags along with my father when he goes fishing.

He can show up tanned in the middle of the winter and bring a yellow-blue butterfly in a glass case as a present. His wife is a bit of a mystery—one day she’s there with him, the next day she isn’t anywhere, and her disappearances can last for months. He’s got the most unusual dog in the world—a German shepherd guide dog that is trained to train other German shepherd guide dogs. I have inquired specifically with people who know about these things and they all say that it simply cannot exist. He also keeps an owl. And collects antique musical instruments.

In the last ten years he twice received inheritances from some murky sources. For some reason he doesn’t think it at all strange. He didn’t even try to find out who those people were. I have no idea how he spent all that money, all I know is that it didn’t make him a penny richer.

They are very tight with my father. I suspect it’s at his prompting Sphinx comes to visit me at the low points in my life, to frolic in the fields of compassionate psychology. I dutifully pretend that it’s helping me. Except when I don’t.

Smoker’s Father

I decided then that I was going to stick with the guy until he gets his feet under him. When we first met he was going through a very rough patch. I don’t know how many years it took me to figure out that I needed him way more than he needed me. We’d just go fishing. Or to the movies. Listen to the music of my youth, look at the photographs of my girlfriends, talk about my son. Only later did it dawn on me who was humoring whom. I don’t know how he did it. That’s just the way he is, always giving more than he receives. He understood that I desperately wanted to take care of someone, and did the one thing that Eric never had—gave me the permission. With him I feel like a real father. And a friend. I quit drinking, I’m a vegetarian now, I dropped thirty pounds and twenty years. Now you tell me, which one of us was saving the other?

Horse

Sphinx came exactly three times. First when they’d just sniffed us out, you know, “established the whereabouts of a group of the former boarding-school students who had disappeared without a trace” and so on. Like it wasn’t us who allowed them to. We decided to legalize our status, that’s all. We finally were of age and no longer afraid of parents swooping in. We had just one house for all of us, and one barn. We ate whatever came our way, slept in our clothes to save on heating, and worked. Day and night, like we were obsessed. He was here for a couple of hours. Said hello to everyone, sat down to dinner with us, and left. Some were imagining he came to stay, but not me. I saw that he only needed to make sure we were all right. And he didn’t want to upset Black. Because Black was panicked, even if he didn’t show it. The second visit was six, maybe seven years later, I can’t say for sure. That time he was with us a while. Maybe because Black was no longer here. But it was still clear he wasn’t staying. I asked him, joking like, when he was moving in. “To do what? Farm with prosthetics or mooch off your work?” he said. And the third time that thing happened.

Red

I always knew Sphinx had one good turn in him. That he didn’t stay back just because. I remembered that he’d received something from Jackal that no one else had, before or since. If anyone were to get Tabaqui to hand him something that none of us common folk could even dream of, it was Sphinx, no doubt about that. It was also clear that he was going to use that present sooner or later, and I thought that’s when I’d get to know what it was. But it took so long to finally happen that by that time, I’d almost forgotten how much I wanted to find out.

Smoker

It was my second show that made me famous. So much fuss, I’ve never been able to replicate it since. On the one hand, it hurts that the later works remain underappreciated, but on the other it’s more important that I know them to be stronger. I’m not ashamed of the earlier paintings, but when you’re twenty-two you tend to bare your soul a little too eagerly, and also amateurishly at times. It makes you somehow uneasy, looking at them afterward. Uneasy at yourself, and at the fact that it’s exactly the amateurishness that gets people so excited. I am wiser now, and so are my paintings. The only detail that keeps reappearing again and again, dragging over from the old times, is the stuffed bear. I still can’t get rid of it. It just learned to hide better, that’s all. On the latest canvases it’s been painted over. It’s not visible. But it is still there, lurking under the layers of paint. Probably one day I may be able to leave it behind, even though for me it has long become something of a spooky talisman, an insurance policy, guaranteeing long life for the paintings.

Smoker’s Father

He liked those of Eric’s paintings that I didn’t understand at all. For example, the works of his stripy period, as I call it. Circles within circles with triangles encroaching on them, all that geometry. All in black and white. Even the infamous teddy bear morphed into a pile of triangles. Sphinx stood in front of one of them for forty minutes, I’m not kidding.

It was on the day after the opening. We always went when the crowds thinned out. I walked around the collection once, twice. When after the third loop I found him still stuck in front of the same picture, he turned to me and said, “You know, Smoker took more of the House with him than he thinks.”

The painting was of those same tired black-and-white circles. Edge to edge. It looked like nothing so much as a dartboard, complete with a dart stuck in it.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I just don’t get modern art. Especially of this kind.”

“Time does not flow like a river. A river that you can’t enter twice,” Sphinx said. “It is more like circles on the surface of the water. That’s a quote, I didn’t invent that.”

He raised his gloved artificial hand and pointed at the dart in the middle of the target.

“And if into those circles you drop something, say, a feather, like it is here, it would generate its own circles, you see? Small, weak ones, almost invisible . . . But they will expand and intersect with the large ones.”

I tried to visualize what he was talking about. I felt like Winnie-the-Pooh, a Bear of Very Little Brain. I probably even started to smell of moldy stuffing.

“So you think that is what it is?” I said, staring at what stubbornly refused to become anything but a dartboard.

He nodded. His face was lit up by inspiration, like some insane prophet’s. At times like that I always get a sneaking suspicion I’m being hypnotized.

“If you were this feather, where in the past would you have wanted to drop? What would you change?”

This got me depressed. What would I change in my own past if I could? Everything, for a start. But I doubt that anything good could come out of it anyway.

“I’d have to be dropping nonstop,” I said. “There are too many places.”

“You’ve got one shot,” he insisted. “One single shot.”

“Then I wouldn’t bother. My life can’t be changed in one shot.”

He switched off the mesmerism.

“You don’t understand,” he said, turning away. “Your life can’t be changed, period. It’s already half-lived. The only thing you could do is go to a different loop. Where you would not be the exact same you.”

“Why would I want to change something there?” I said. “If it wouldn’t mean a change here.”

The damned tie was biting into my neck. All I wanted to do at that point was to go away from this place. I guess Sphinx noticed the state I was in.

“Let’s go,” he said. “You’re turning red.”

And we left. Eric wasn’t at the show that day. Or I would have asked him a couple of things.

Horse

When we saw him we didn’t put two and two together at first. I mean, sure, we realized that the boy was the spitting image of Blind. But we couldn’t imagine it was really him. I mean, think about it. Would you if you were in our place? Would anyone?

Hybrid

So this one time Sphinx shows up, and he’s not alone. Climbs out of the car, cracks open the rear door, and pulls out this scarecrow. Thin as a rail, and all covered in some kind of nasty rash. All of ours already had the chickenpox and all that, so we don’t sweat it, make it look like we don’t notice even. And it’s clear as day who he looks like. Makes you feel uneasy, like you saw someone carrying a photograph of his late wife with him everywhere. You don’t exactly come out and say it, right? So we don’t. But the kids get to him right away, because he looks such a city slicker in his white sneakers and his stickered shirt, they can’t help themselves. So they gather around and start discussing his clothes, his rash, how he can’t even move he’s so scared. Teasing him.

But not that hard, you know. I decide to knock some sense into them, because he’s a guest and that’s not the way to treat guests, and I take a step toward them, and then someone, I guess it was Red’s youngest, pulls at his sleeve. And that’s when it hit the fan.

Horse

He lost his dark glasses in the melee, and then it was obvious. To anyone. I mean, anyone who’d ever seen Blind. At least that’s what I thought. I was wrong. Termite, for example, did not get it.

“Oh, look!” he said. “Blind’s little boy! Would you look at that, a perfect likeness!”

I wasn’t going to argue with him. Heredity is now one of his favorite topics. How nurture’s got nothing on nature.

The kids were so upset when they saw they were picking on an unsighted that we didn’t even need to tell them off.

But Sphinx took his boy behind the barn and gave him a good scolding. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t help it and peeked a bit, to see what was up. And I wasn’t alone. Red got there first. So we see Sphinx blabbing his head off, and the kid just stands there, calm as could be. Maybe listening, maybe not, no way to tell.

“Poor Sphinx,” I whisper to Red.

“Depends on the point of view,” Red shoots back. “Didn’t you get lectured about the proper way to behave when you were a kid? Didn’t that make you want to throw up?”

“What would you have done in Sphinx’s place?”

“Told him that it was a brave thing to do,” Red says without pausing even for a second. “And to keep standing up for himself.”

“What? You mean, him?” I say, aghast. “Tell him to keep it up? This guy here?”

Red stares at me strange like. And asks if I am really as stupid as I look.

What do you say when someone insults you to your face? I turned around and left.

Red

After we packed the goons off to bed, Horse got off the phone and I stopped fretting about the size of the long-distance bill that was bound to arrive after his intimate chat with Lary, that is, after things calmed down a bit and Sphinx and I were the only ones left out on the deck, I asked him where he’d dug up that boy.

“Where he no longer is,” he said, in the best tradition of the Fourth.

“Thank you for that informative answer,” I said. “What are you trying to prove by this, and to whom? That’s what I’d like to know.”

We were drinking hard cider, legs up on the railing. We didn’t turn the lights on, so that the nightlife wouldn’t get any ideas.

“All I want is to undo some mistakes made by one good man,” he said.

It sounded . . . normal. Like something that happens. Something that we all should be doing from time to time. Then he said that I would’ve done the same thing. If I’d had that chance.

When he said that, I had to work hard to bring my imagination to heel. Because why not? I’ve got four daughters, three of them gingers, and I know which one I love just a little bit more, and why. Even though the resemblance is mostly in my head.

“Maybe,” I said. “But this is different.”

He shrugged. I couldn’t say for certain in the dark, but I think he was smiling.

“To each his own,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “But to each not the same acquaintances.”

He flinched and spilled his cider.

“Shhh,” I said. “I didn’t say I blamed you. That was just envy, pure and simple. A very common phenomenon.”

We sat there silently for a while, finished what was left in the bottles, and I felt a sinister prophecy coming up.

“You’re going to catch a lot of grief with this guy.”

“I know,” he said. “I know that. It’s just that I wanted him to learn to love this world. Even a little. As much as I could teach him to.”

I guess it was cruel of me, because now he couldn’t have changed anything even if he wanted to.

“He will learn to love you,” I said. “And for him you are going to be the whole damn world.”

He didn’t say anything for so long that I realized he was afraid of the same thing. But he’s a stubborn guy, and it was clear he wasn’t going to back down. He’ll prove his point, to someone who would never know about it, or die trying. Funny, isn’t it.

I didn’t even ask about the rash on the boy. I got it. The House put its mark on him. In advance, in anticipation of losing him and before he could end up there. I didn’t tell Sphinx that.

“Right. Well, good luck,” I said instead. “If you ever change your mind, you’re welcome to stay. We’ve got loads of kids, all of them crazy. A little changeling would blend right in.”

In the morning they left. I watched them walk to the car, and I swear I couldn’t decide which one I pitied more. Sphinx, I guess. He has a history of attempting the impossible. And it doesn’t always work out in the end for him, not by a long shot.

Black

That’s all bullshit, and I’m sick of hearing it. I’m a grown man, not a baby who daydreams about hopping into a time machine and bringing back a small dinosaur for a pet. And if someone’s half-cocked brain is coupled with a sick sense of humor, I don’t see why the rest of us should sing along. I have no clue where Sphinx got that boy, and I don’t give a damn. Like there’s a shortage of undernourished blind orphans in the world, even if they also have black hair and white eyes. Yes, he could even be Blind’s, so? No one knows where he is or what he’s been up to. He could have rattled off a dozen mole rats like that. What he could never do is become a decent father.

As for Sphinx, he’s just the kind of man to turn any little thing into a planetary event. Into something mysterious and idiotic. He’s always been like that, since he was little. Drag in some piece of slime and go, “Ooh, look, the aliens left this!” I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turned out he stole that kid. That’s his style. He even managed to steal someone else’s father, and that’s got to be harder to pull off.

Smoker’s Father

Of course I’ve heard the talk. And of course it’s all made up. They are rather mystically oriented, those guys from the commune. Sphinx starting those rumors himself? He never did. The kid’s parents put the boy in his care for the summer, and then either the boy got used to him, or the parents decided it would be more useful to not take him back right away. It’s always advisable for children like that to have as much access to a specialist as possible. Adoption? Nonsense, have you any idea how much of an effort it is now to adopt? Especially for someone like Sphinx. And I am sorry, I’m not even going to discuss kidnapping.

Eric says the boy doesn’t really look like who everyone says he does. “Nothing in common.” Those were his exact words. And I believe him.

Smoker

I’m seeing very few people. I have many questions, but I’m not asking them. Never. There are times when I think Black knows the answers, but just as I’m about to ask he gives me this miserable look and changes the subject so abruptly that I can’t bring up the courage to say it. He’s so vulnerable then, it’s scary. I don’t want to blow holes in the protective shell he’s spent so much time and effort to build and maintain.

I have even less desire to go asking Sphinx. In his case it’s the very real possibility of receiving the answers that’s frightening. It’s too iffy between us as it is. I like him, but I can’t get over the fact that he has been given a choice. A choice I have been denied. And no matter how friendly he tries to be, his world will always be different. Not the same as Black’s and mine. We can never forgive him for that.