The Gray House

We all became very close during that time. I guess nothing pushes people closer together than a shared secret. Lizard, Guppy, Dearest, and Dodo moved in with Sphinx and me. After us, the Third had the biggest loss, and they looked even more confused than we did. The Sleepers were moved to the hospital wing right away, but it was obvious that for Lizard and the rest of them the Third felt creepy. They only ever went there to water the plants and then came right back. Also we had two fathers, mine and Guppy’s, spending the nights with us, and once out of the four nights, Ralph.

Dearest was the first to be taken away. I don’t think he was right in the head. Other Birds assured me that this was normal for him, but clearly his presence bugged the hell out of them as well, and Dearest had gone home two days before everyone else.

At some point, I don’t remember exactly but I think it was on the third day, I realized that no one had asked a single question about Tabaqui. And no one came for him. Then I noticed other strange things. I hadn’t seen the Sleepers, and had no desire to gawk at them, as it were, the interminable discussions were quite enough for me. But the entire town seemed to know that there were twenty-six of them. We also knew that all the Insensible of the House were there. I counted our Insensible, added the girls, and got twelve. Which was too many. There couldn’t have been only fourteen others, because if you took us and the Third that would already make thirteen. I turned this over in my head for a while and then tried to forget about it. Anyone to whom I could point out this incongruence would simply tell me to go to the Sleepers and count them myself. We weren’t prohibited from visiting them, provided we had an escort. But my curiosity hadn’t yet reached the level where I’d actually drive over to have a look at something like that.

Eventually I couldn’t keep it in anymore.

“You know,” I said to Sphinx, “it seems that more people have disappeared from the House than we think. Blind, for example. And Noble. Everyone counts them among those who disappeared. Which means they are not there among . . . them, you know. But they did not leave with the bus, we both know that.”

Sphinx sighed and gave me a reproachful look. Almost like all this time he’d desperately hoped that I would refrain from asking him this very question.

“Striders go over completely,” he said.

After he had said that, he didn’t need to worry anymore that I would pester him with questions. There are sentences that cause the brain to activate its defensive mechanisms, and the first thing it does is stop asking. I came to the conclusion that they went and drove away not in two groups, but in three, and moreover, the third group, the smallest of them, was itself made of two parts—those whom everyone knew had disappeared, and others who were forgotten as soon as they had vanished. Tabaqui clearly belonged to that last one. And that wasn’t the weirdest thing about it.

A lot of stuff got left in the room that used to belong to those who had gone away, sunk into the unending sleep, or disappeared. Many of the things were painful to see, at least for Sphinx and me. But nothing, and I mean not a single thing of Tabaqui’s remained. Not even a button. I searched for them specifically. Turned over everything. Not a sock, not a worn slipper, not a pin, not a stale bread roll. Nothing. At all. I stopped looking for the traces of Tabaqui when I noticed that his drawings and writings had disappeared from the walls. There weren’t even empty spaces where they used to be. There was something there, just not what had been there before. And then it came to me that I’d forgotten his face. I could re-create him in my mind in general, the frizzled hair, the outrageous outfits, where he liked to sit, how he liked to chomp loudly, but his features eluded me. What color were his eyes? What about the nose—aquiline or snubbed? I thumbed through my sketches. I’d drawn Jackal a million times, in pencil, in ink, in crayon. I couldn’t find a single one. It was as if someone went methodically through my drawings and stole every one that depicted Jackal. Instead I found a bunch of sketches I’d never done. That is, I didn’t remember doing them, though they certainly were in my hand.

I told Guppy about this. I didn’t want to bother Sphinx.

“Tabaqui?” Guppy asked, frowning.

I swear, it took him two full minutes of racking his brain to figure out who I was talking about. So I was a little surprised when I found that my diary still contained Jackal’s musings, and the little figurine he made from a walnut and gave to me was still in my bag.

“A present stays back,” Sphinx said. “And if he considered what he wrote in the diary to be a present, it would also stay.”