The Gray House

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