The Gray House

Fields stuck with telephone poles, cracked asphalt, the white dividing line barely visible, half-buried in blowing sand. The wind twists Black’s jersey, which I’m still wearing, tickling my belly with its icy fingers. Noble tries to put up the collar of his coat, but it immediately tears off and remains in his hands. He flings it away in disgust.

“Ready to go?”

Black rushes forward purposefully, shouting, “The speaker! I left it in the middle of the hallway. Better go pick it up before someone swipes it!”

I look back at the door, but it has already disappeared. Of course. Noble hobbles ahead, catching the crutches in the cracks of the pavement and digging them back out, cursing and swearing. Through the rips in his pants I can discern something green and leafy springing up.

The clouds loom threateningly. It’s going to rain soon. Black is already far away. This endless highway for him is just a few feet of wooden floor. That’s the reason he’s moving with such an astounding speed, throwing surprised looks back at Noble and me.

“Where are we going?” I ask Noble.

“How would I know?” he says indifferently. “It’s your Jump, you figure it out.”

He notices something in the grass, stops and pokes it with his crutch. There’s a cigarette end stuck to the rubber tip when he brings it back. Noble peels it off and carefully stashes it in his pocket.

“That’s nice,” he says. “Forgot my backpack. A couple more like that, and there’s a whole smoke right there. You be on the lookout for them too, so that we don’t miss any.”

I peer into the withered grass.

“You’re catching on fast, Noble,” I say. “Like it’s an everyday thing for you.”

Noble laughs, exposing sharp teeth.

“Not every day. But not rare either. Wasn’t it you who explained that there was nothing special about me doing it?”

“It was,” I agree. “But it looks like I’ve bungled the explanation if you keep shuttling back and forth. I should have scared you more thoroughly.”

“Oh, you have,” Noble says. “Don’t worry. But we’re on the boundary, not inside. We can go back anytime we want.”

“Boundary has its own dangers,” I keep pressing.

He looks at me in surprise.

“What dangers? It’s only our own guys here, isn’t it?”

I choose not to argue further.

A purplish bolt of lightning suddenly splits the sky above us.

“We’re going to get wet,” Noble says, looking up and shivering under his rags. “Black must have found his precious speaker by now. Not falling through has its benefits.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“I’m not blaming you. It was my idea to follow you here.”

Five or six crumbled milestones later we finally get a bearing. The sugar cube of the roadside diner, still far away. Surprisingly, there’s no rain yet. But it starts to get dark unnaturally fast.

The closer we get to the diner, the more attractive it looks. The white building with a steep-pitched roof and striped awning. There are a lot of cars in front of it, one more ancient than the next. A parade from the dawn of the automobile era. I used to collect cards with cars like that. Here they look decrepit. The most rickety rust-bucket convertible is occupied by two half-naked girls who start to squeal and wave as soon as they see us.

“Hey, big boys, wanna ride? Wind in your hair! We can jump off a cliff, groovy, man!”

One of them has Marilyn’s face, and her breasts under the skimpy faded bikini top bring to mind soccer balls. She parts her pouting lips and licks them expectantly.

“How ’bout it? A ride?”

We make our way around them and enter the diner, diving into the noise, commotion, and beguiling meaty scents. The small square room amazingly manages to fit an entire throng of people. They sit at the wooden tables, but they sit under and on top of them as well.

The tables haven’t been sanded and they are full of splinters; some of them still have patches of bark. The faces around me look unfamiliar. In reality I know all of them, of course. Colorful slogans blaze on the walls. As soon as I concentrate on one of them, it starts swelling, growing in size and obscuring its neighbors.

Noble and I grab a miraculously free table against the wall, under the unchanging woodblock print of a seascape. Someone in a chef’s toque and a golden carnival mask with a long beak drops a couple of plates off the tray as he rushes past.

I look closer. Finely minced meat over something grainy and yellow, like corn mush. Noble unzips his tattered coat and tucks in. He has a huge, glowing heart pendant around his neck, enclosing a flaming lock of hair of truly frightening proportions. I gulp the food in the same greedy fashion as everyone else. There’s a display attached to the wall underneath the print, its screen flashing green numbers, 2 and 2. Two times two. That’s the number of our table.

My plate is almost empty. The next table gets swarmed by a raucous gang of old farts in black leather, with unkempt beards. Their snorting and laughter drowns out everything else. Still, even over the din they’re causing I can clearly hear something angrily banging at the window.