The boy grimaced.
“He said I was supposed to learn how to fight. What for? He is always silent, like he’s deaf or something. So why doesn’t he just stay silent, because when he speaks it’s even worse. I used to think how it was so sad that he never said anything. Now I think it was better that way. I don’t need his fighting lessons. He punched me in the eye for some reason. I guess he’s jealous that I can see and he can’t.”
Elk thrust his hands in his pockets and swayed back and forth on his heels.
“Does it hurt?”
“No.”
The boy stood up and leaned over the railing, hanging down halfway into the yard.
“I’m sick of him. Sometimes it’s like he’s not right in the head. He’s weird.”
“That’s exactly what he says about you,” Elk said, holding back a smile, intently watching the dejected figure on the railing. “Do you still remember the deal we had?”
The boy pushed his feet off the floorboards and started swinging.
“I remember. No complaining, no sulking, and no grumbling. But I am not complaining and I am not sulking. I just went out for a bit of fresh air.” He stopped swinging and looked up. “Elk, look! It’s beautiful. The red sky. And the trees are black, like the sky burned them.”
“Let’s go in,” Elk said. “It’s even more beautiful from the balcony. Here you’re a mosquito buffet.”
The boy reluctantly peeled himself off the railing and followed Elk.
“And poor little Blind can’t see any of it,” he said with barely disguised glee. “I guess that could make him a bit edgy.”
“So describe it to him,” Elk said and opened the door. “He would very much like to hear about what he can’t see.”
“Yeah.” The boy nodded. “Sure. And then he can punch me in the other eye, so that we both can’t see, equally. He would very much like that too.”
Two boys on the balcony were lying head to head on an air mattress amid a sea of stale popcorn and cookie crumbs. The boy in a straw hat, with the empty sleeves of the shirt tucked under his stomach, was droning in a monotone, not taking his eyes from the vivid colors of the mattress cover.
“So they are white and they move, and the edges are like somebody was tearing them or chewing them a bit. Pinkish on the bottom. Pink is kind of like red, only lighter. And they move very, very slowly, and you have to look at them for a long time to notice. There aren’t that many of them now. And when there’s more of them then it’s not sunny anymore, and then when they turn dark they make everything dark too, and it might even rain.”
The long-haired boy lifted his head and frowned.
“Don’t talk about things that aren’t. Describe what is now.”
“All right,” the boy in the hat agreed and turned over on his back. “So they’re white, and pink on the bottom, and they float slowly, and it’s all blue around them.”
He squinted through his sun-bleached eyelashes at the smooth blue expanse of the sky, untouched by even a single cloud, and continued with a smile.
“It’s so blue under them, and above them too. They are like fluffy white sheep. It’s too bad you can’t see how beautiful they are.”
The House was empty. Or it seemed empty. Cleaners crossed its hallways every morning, leaving behind glossy trails of floor polish. Fat flies threw themselves against windowpanes in the empty dorms. Three boys, tanned almost to the point of blackness, lived in the cardboard hut in the yard. Cats went out for night hunts; they slept all through the day, curled in fuzzy balls. The House was empty, but still someone cleaned it, someone prepared the food and put it on the trays. Unseen hands swept away the dirt and aired out the stuffy rooms. The inhabitants of the cardboard hut came running into the House for water and sandwiches, leaving behind candy wrappers, blobs of gum, and dirty footprints. They were trying their best but there were too few of them, and the House was too big. The sound of their feet faded away, their cries were lost in the emptiness within the walls, and they ran back to their little encampment as soon as they could, away from the dead faceless rooms, all identical and smelling of polish. The invisible hands quickly erased the signs of their visit. There was only one room that remained alive. Those living in it were not afraid of the uninhabited House.
The boy didn’t quite know what scared him on the first day when they returned. What woke him up was the din of their presence. He opened his eyes and realized that the House was full of people, that the silence—the sultry summer silence, so familiar to him now after this past month—was gone. The House creaked, slammed its doors, and rattled its windows, it was tossing musical snippets to itself through the walls, it was bubbling with life.
He pushed away the blanket and ran out on the balcony.
The yard was brimming with people. They milled around the two red-and-blue buses, they laughed, smoked, and lugged their bulging backpacks and bags from place to place. They were colorful, tanned, rowdy, and they smelled of the sea. The yard sizzled under the burning sky. He crouched down, pressed his forehead against the railing, and simply looked at them. He wanted to join them, become a part of their charmed grown-up life. He was aching to rush down—and still he didn’t move. Besides, someone would have to dress him first. Finally he tore his eyes off them and went back to the room.
“Can you hear that?” Blind, sitting on the floor by the door, asked him. “Hear how much noise they’re making?”
Blind held the boy’s shorts for him. The boy quickly thrust his legs through the openings, one, then the other. Blind did the zipper.
“You don’t like them?” the boy asked, watching his sneakers being laced.
“Why should I?” Blind pushed the boy’s foot off his knee and put the other one in its place. “Why should I like them?”
The boy was barely able to wait for his blazer and refused the comb. His fair hair, grown out during the summer, remained disheveled.
“Come on, I’m going!” he blurted out. Then he ran, his feet unsteady from anticipation. The corridor, then the stairs, then the first floor. The door was being kept ajar by a striped bag. He ran out into the yard and froze.
He was surrounded by faces. The faces were unfamiliar, alien, they cut like knives. The voices—shrill, frightening. He was scared. These were not the people he’d rushed to meet. They too were browned by the sun, they laughed, they were dappled with patches of color, but they were all wrong.
He lowered himself onto the step, keeping his catlike gaze on them. A shiver ran down his spine. So that’s how they are, he thought bitterly. They are all assembled from little pieces. And I am one of them. I am just like them. Or will be soon. We are in a zoo. And the fence is for keeping us all in.
There was one in a wheelchair, white like a marble statue, with snowy hair and a haggard look, and another one, nearly purple, bloated as a week-old corpse and almost as scary. This one also could not walk, and he was surrounded by girls pushing his wheelchair. The girls laughed and joked, and each had a flaw; they too were glued together from pieces. He looked at them and wanted to cry.
A tall girl with black hair, dressed in a pink shirt, came near him and stopped.
“A newbie,” she said. The irises of her eyes were so dark they became indistinguishable from the blackness of the pupils.
“Yeah,” he agreed sadly.
“Do you have a nick?”
He shook his head.
“Then you shall be Grasshopper.” She touched his shoulder. “Your legs have little springs inside.”
She saw me racing down the stairs, he thought, blushing.
“There’s the one you are looking for,” she added and pointed toward one of the buses.
The boy looked and saw Elk standing there with a man in black trousers and a black turtleneck. Relieved, he smiled at the girl.