The Gray House

Everyone was so bubbly, everywhere you looked there were bright eyes and broad smiles, but as soon as they started speaking you noticed that their voices were shaking and their hands were trembling. Like they were all slightly drunk.

Humpback said he was going to perform an Irish jig for us.

“Just you wait. I’ll do it,” he said in a kind of voice people use to threaten suicide.

Then he tore apart the notebook with his poems, fashioned paper airplanes out of the pages, and tossed them out the window. Dropping one on the way. I picked it up, turned this way and that attempting to figure out what was written on it, and then rushed down to the yard to try and salvage the rest, but in the time it took me to drive down, half of them had been snatched up, and the other half landed in the muck and got dirty and soggy, rendering the letters completely illegible.

Tabaqui was singing nonstop. He must have done four dozen songs in a row, each one more depressing than the one before it. All funerals and broken hearts, all the time. Noble, the only one of us who had at least some success in the past in getting him to shut up, inexplicably decided to practice patience and just smiled.

Blind appeared about an hour and a half after our return from the canteen. He had one of his hands swaddled in a towel, and his complexion was so gray that Tabaqui took one look at him and fell silent. Blind looked like all the protagonists of his songs at once. Those about the funerals, and broken hearts, and abandoned wreaths. He said that he wasn’t feeling too good, climbed up to Lary’s bed, and lay there without a sound.

Tabaqui darkened. Wheeled around the room a couple of times and then also clambered up to join Blind. A little while later he peeked out, called to Alexander, requested to be taken down, examined one of his top-secret hiding places, and disappeared back into Lary’s bed with a bottle of brandy at the ready. Tabaqui had exactly one way of treating any ailments. The only variation came in the brand and alcohol content.

I don’t remember when exactly it was that I started to suspect that the graduation was happening earlier than the next week, and quite probably even tomorrow. I guess it was shortly before Blind’s arrival. It was definitely clear as soon as he appeared. When Ginger came in wearing the same cheerful expression as Blind and began hugging people left and right, my suspicion grew into certainty. She even hugged me. Like it wasn’t even a thing, like we hugged each other anytime we felt like it. That was the moment when I understood everything about tomorrow. And about today. Why the search, why Noble was willing to sit through the interminable funeral laments, why Blind looked like a corpse, and why Humpback was threatening to dance. And about the smiles, I understood them too. I mean, why everyone around was smiling like an idiot. I had this lump in my throat that stood in the way of words, so I too could only smile now, just smile and nothing else.

“Please look after my bear for a while,” Ginger said. “I’ll be right back.”

I took the bear from her.

“Oh, look, one more paranoid grin,” Sphinx said, entering the dorm. “Another one joins the fun.”

He looked at me intently, then at Ginger’s bear, which I was clutching tightly, because I did promise to take care of it even if I hadn’t quite put it in words, and then turned away.

“There’s all this bread in the Coffeepot,” he said. “From the canteen. No one’s turned up for dinner at all. Shark ordered everything to be brought into the Coffeepot. If we want to claim our share we should hurry. Hounds already started sneaking it away.”

Tabaqui got ready in a flash and wheeled away to get the bread, taking Lary with him. Before he left, he felt it his duty to smack me on the back. Cheering me up, I guess.

“Did you figure it out yourself?” Sphinx said.

I nodded. Then wheezed that it wasn’t that hard. We both looked up at Lary’s bunk. I noticed there was a paper airplane peeking out of Sphinx’s shirt pocket. The burns on his cheeks were still fairly bright, making him seem ruddily healthy.

Then came Black, who asked if we were in need of brute force. He was dressed like he was going out into the wilderness. Heavy boots coming up almost to the knee, cargo pants with a dozen pockets, a shirt on top of another shirt. All of it on the greenish-brown side of the spectrum. And a hat on a string behind the shoulders.

Sphinx said that the brute force would be needed in about half an hour. Black said in that case, he would return in about half an hour, and walked out, leaving behind a jar of olives.

Alexander hauled out the box of cups, all of them different sizes, and started arranging them on the table. Tabaqui and Lary came back laden with packages. In addition to bread, they turned out to contain two jars of sandwich spread, a wheel of cheese, a stick of salami, and a bunch of scallions.