The Gray House

The backpacks came out the best. Tabaqui was almost completely hidden, and Noble turned away as soon as he noticed that I was trying to draw him. So I crosshatched the backpacks, filling them with volume and increasing their hanginess, put the shadows underneath, and had started to fill in the patterns when Tabaqui crawled over and all but lay on top of the pad, clogging the line of sight from me to just about everything else.

“Why have you stopped drawing?” he asked with surprise when I put the pad back.

“Your head is in the way,” I said honestly. “Also I don’t like people pushing my arm.”

Tabaqui decided to take offense. He rolled over and turned his back to me. I knew by now that he could not remain offended for long, and I ignored it. But I didn’t want to draw anymore. I wanted to eat.

“Anything edible left?” I asked.

Noble nodded at the nightstand.

“Sandwiches. There must still be a couple in there. Help yourself.”

The throw draped over the bed was never quite pulled taut. It always bulged and rippled in impassable folds. To crawl over them was excruciating. I tried. Tabaqui said that I looked like an unfaithful wife whom a sultan ordered rolled into a carpet before drowning.

Noble helped me untangle myself—an outstretched hand—presented the packet of sandwiches—a heave to the nightstand—and returned to his corner—another heave. About two paces for someone with working legs. And he managed not to upset anything, not to bump into anyone, and naturally didn’t get snarled along the way. Since only yesterday night Noble had done the same thing in total darkness, on the bed crammed with bodies, this shouldn’t have been a surprise. But this time he never deigned to part with his magazine, which, somehow, he continued reading, which meant that one of his arms was otherwise engaged! I was astonished. It wasn’t simply that I felt inferior next to him. I was ready to burst into tears.

It wasn’t enough for the man to be offensively beautiful and to pull off these impossible feats, no, he had to do it without even noticing! Honestly, had he been preening about, showing off his superiority, he would have been easier to tolerate.

Noble was gnawing at his finger and flipping through the magazine, his face permanently screwed into a disgusted grimace that indicated whatever he was reading was complete trash. He was floating someplace he did not particularly want to be, but could not force himself to descend back down to the godforsaken real world. Even if it was only to look where he was crawling and ascertain whether he was taking what he wanted from the nightstand.

“Noble,” I said, “sometimes I get this impression that you’re just faking it.”

He glanced at me distractedly.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that you’re not really a wheeler at all.”

He shrugged and went back to his magazine. “Everyone’s entitled to their impressions.” He didn’t say it out loud, but sometimes it wasn’t necessary to actually say something for it to be understood.

“Could it be that you really are heir to the dragons?” I said. “That you’re actually flying all this time, and we just can’t see it?”

“Want an explanation?” someone interjected suddenly.

I looked around.

It was Black. He was lying on his bed with a notepad under his chin, chewing on a pencil. Looking like a large sheep dog with a thin bone in its teeth.

In the time I’d been living in the Fourth, I had already gotten used to two of its inhabitants always being silent. Alexander and Black. Theirs were different silences, though. Alexander was silent like a mute, while Black was silent with a message. I really should keep my mouth shut, or something along those lines. So used was I to his silence that I drew a complete blank when Black suddenly spoke. I even dropped my sandwich. Which naturally landed butter-down. And egg-down as well.

“What?”

“I said I could explain,” Black repeated. “If you’d like.”

I said that I would. And tried to recall what I’d been asking about.

Black sat up and pulled off his glasses.

No one ever sat on Black’s bed except him. Nor lay down on, fell onto, put his feet on top of, or threw dirty socks over. Nobody put anything on it at all. That bed, always crisp, perfectly tucked and turned, seemed thoroughly out of place here. As did Black himself. As if at any moment he could sail away on it headed for some distant shores. To where his species lived in its natural habitat.

“It’s simple, really. See this bed?”

Black pointed at Humpback’s bunk over his head. The upper section that would have stayed behind even if the lower part did set sail.

I said that of course I did.

“What do you think would happen if you were to be hung off of its side? So that you only held on to it with your hands, like on a high bar?”

“I’d fall down,” I said.

“And before you fell down?”

I couldn’t quite catch what kind of answer he was expecting. I earnestly traced the sequence of events in my head.