In the no-man’s-land between the two worlds—that of the teeth and that of the dumps—is the House. They call it Gray House. It is old, closer in age to the dumps, the graveyards of its contemporaries. It stands alone, as the other houses shun it, and it doesn’t look like a tooth, since it is not struggling upward. Three stories high, facing the highway, it too has a backyard—a narrow rectangle cordoned off by chicken wire. It was white when built. It has since become gray, and yellowish from the other side, toward the back. It is bristling with aerials; it is strewn with cables; it is raining down plaster and weeping from the cracks. Additions and sheds cling to it, along with doghouses and garbage bins, all in the back. The facade is bare and somber, just the way it is supposed to be.
Nobody likes Gray House. No one would admit it openly, but the inhabitants of the Comb would rather not have it in their neighborhood. They would rather it didn’t exist at all.
SMOKER
ON CERTAIN ADVANTAGES OF TRAINING FOOTWEAR
It all started with the red sneakers. I found them at the bottom of my bag. The personal-possessions bag, that’s what it was called. Only there was never anything in it with any touch of personality. Two standard-issue towels, a bunch of handkerchiefs, and dirty laundry. Same as everyone else. All bags, all towels, socks, briefs—all identical, so that nobody would feel slighted.
It was an accident that I found them. I’d lost sight of them long ago. An old present from someone forgotten, from the previous life. Bright red, wrapped in shiny plastic, the soles striped like a candy cane. I tore open the package, ran my fingers over the flaming laces, and quickly put on the shoes. My legs looked funny. I forgot they could look like that. They acquired this unfamiliar walking feel.
That same day, after classes, Gin took me aside and said that he didn’t approve of my behavior. He pointed at the sneakers and told me to take them off. I shouldn’t have asked why, but I did.
“They attract attention,” he said.
This was normal for Gin in terms of explanation.
“So?” I said. “So let them.”
He didn’t say anything. He adjusted the cord on his glasses and wheeled off. That night I received a note. Only two words: Footwear discussion. I was in trouble, and I knew it.
Scraping the fuzz off my cheeks I cut myself, and then broke the toothbrush glass. My reflection in the mirror looked completely terrified, but I wasn’t really afraid. Well, I was, but at the same time I didn’t care. I even left the sneakers on.
The assembly was held in the classroom. Someone had written Footwear discussion on the blackboard. Three-ring circus with clowns, except I wasn’t laughing, because I was tired of these games and the oh-so-clever people who played them, and of the place itself. So tired that I almost forgot how to laugh.
My place was at the board, so that everyone could see the subject of the discussion. Gin sat at the desk to my left sucking on his pen. To my right, Kit loudly knocked a steel ball bearing around a plastic maze until he got the reproachful looks.
“Who would like to contribute?” Gin said.
Many would. Almost all of them. To start it off, they called Gyps. The quicker to get rid of him, I guess.
We learned that everyone who tried to attract attention to himself was an egotist, a bad person, capable of anything and full of himself while at the same time completely empty inside. A jay in peacock’s plumes. Gyps recited the fable of the jay. Then he recited the poem about the donkey that wound up in the lake and drowned because of its own stupidity. He also tried to sing something to the same effect, but no one was listening anymore. Gyps puffed his cheeks, started to cry, and stopped speaking. He was thanked, given a handkerchief, and shunted behind a textbook, and the floor was given to Ghoul.
Ghoul was barely audible. He never lifted his gaze, as if reading something off the surface of the table, even though there wasn’t anything there except the scratched veneer. His white bangs were falling over his eyes, and he was sticking it back up with his saliva-moistened finger, but as soon as he fixed the pale strand to his forehead, it crept back over his eyes. You needed nerves of steel to look at Ghoul for long. So I didn’t look at him. My nerves were in tatters already. There was no need to fray them further.
“What is it to which the person in question is trying to draw attention? It would seem that it is just his footwear. However, this is not so. By means of his footwear he is drawing attention to his legs. Therefore he is advertising his handicap, putting it in everyone’s face. Therefore he is accentuating our common unfortunate condition without consulting us or soliciting our opinions. In a sense he is mocking us all . . .”
He chewed on this for quite a while. The finger traveled up and down the bridge of his nose, his eyes were getting bloodshot. Everything he could say I knew by heart—everything that was fit to be trotted out for the occasion. Every word emanating from Ghoul was just as colorless and desiccated as he was, as were his finger and the nail on that finger.
Then it was Top’s turn. Basically the same speech, and about as engaging. Then Straw, Sticks, and Bricks, the triplets. The Little Pigs. They would talk all at once, cutting each other off, and this I actually watched with great interest because I had not expected them to take part in the discussion. I guess they didn’t like the way I was watching them, or they got self-conscious and that only made it worse, but they ripped into me the hardest of all. They dragged out my habit of folding page corners (even though I was not the only one reading books), the fact that I had not contributed my handkerchiefs to the communal pool (even though I was not the only one with a nose), that I occupied the shower for longer than was allowed (twenty-eight minutes on average, when the norm was twenty), bumped my wheels while driving (and wheels need care!), and, finally, arrived at their main point—that I was a smoker. If you could call someone smoking one cigarette every three days a smoker.
They asked me if I knew the extent of damage caused by nicotine to the well-being of others. Of course I knew. I not only knew, I could easily give a talk on the subject, because over the last six months they’d stuffed me with enough booklets, articles, and pithy quotations on the dangers of smoking to comfortably feed a multitude. I was lectured on lung cancer. Then, separately, on cancer in general. Then on cardiovascular diseases. Then on some additional horrible ailments, which was when I stopped listening. On topics like these they could go on for hours. They would shudder, horrified, eyes lit up with excitement—like decrepit gossips discussing the latest murder or accident, drooling happily. Neat little boys in neat little shirts, so earnest and wholesome, but hidden underneath their faces were old hags, skin pitted with acid. This was not the first time I saw through to those wrinkled old crones, so it was not a surprise. They got to me so badly that I started dreaming of poisoning them with nicotine, all together and each one separately. Pity I couldn’t do that. To smoke my paltry once-every-three-days cigarette I went to hide in the teachers’ bathroom. Not even our own bathroom, god forbid! If I poisoned anyone or anything it could only be the cockroaches, because only the cockroaches ever ventured there.
The stoning had been going on for half an hour when Gin rapped his pen on the table and declared the footwear discussion closed. They’d just about forgotten the topic by that time, so the reminder turned out to be quite appropriate. They stared at the damned sneakers. They loathed them in silence, with dignity and with contempt for my childishness and tastelessness. Fifteen pairs of soft brown loafers against one fire-red pair of sneakers. The longer the stares continued, the brighter the shoes burned. Soon everything except them became gray and washed out.