It was time to go back. Blind stuffed his knife in the pocket, wrapped the other one in the paper again, and lowered it into the hiding place. The brick slotted back into position. My sweater, Blind remembered. I need to pick it up. He went out, clicked the padlock shut, and mounted the stairs. The stairway to the second floor he took at a run. He was almost out of time. The night was fading away. The Forest was quickly devouring it. The hallway, the doors, the silence. The first sounds of morning were on the cusp of bursting in, and then he would be invisible no more. It was an unpleasant thought, and it made Blind hurry up.
SMOKER
VISITING THE CAGE
I felt like a corpse the entire day after Fairy Tale Night, and only started showing signs of life late in the afternoon. And it came in stages. First I mustered enough strength to wheel down to the bathroom and meet a sinister red-eyed monster there, who then turned out to be myself. I had to do something with him, so I decided washing him would be a good start.
Alexander helped me undress. I wouldn’t have managed. My hands shook as if I had been drinking for thirty years straight. I refused to believe that one single bender was capable of reducing me to such a sorry state. After parting with my pajamas—they were so saturated with pine scent and alcohol that I easily could have used them to scare away mosquitoes—I went to sit in the shower and then returned to the dorm.
It was around six. I still wasn’t able to divine precise time without the aid of a watch. I clambered onto the bed somehow, took a pad from under the pillow, and started drawing whatever. The backpacks and bags on the bed rail, all in a row. Tabaqui’s head, peeking out of the blanket cocoon he’d wrapped himself in. Noble, yawning.
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.
“I’d hang there. And then fall down. Hang for a while and crash.”
“What if you were to be hung like that daily?”
It dawned on me a little.
“Are you saying I’d hang for a bit longer every day?”
“Good job! Smart boy.”
Black bit on the pencil again and went back to his notebook.
“But I’d only need to fall down once, and then there wouldn’t be anyone to hang anymore. I’m not a cat, after all.”
“That’s exactly what Noble thought. Once upon a time.”
Noble threw away the magazine and stared at Black. It was a withering stare.