He ran a little distance off and looked at the House from there. Then glanced guiltily back at the stairs, shrugged, and started walking along the wall. He reached the end of it, looked back one more time, and turned the corner.
Another wall. He ran the length of it and stopped.
Around the next corner he saw a backyard behind a chain-link fence. It was empty and dull and just as scorching as everything around it. The House itself, however, was completely different from this side. Colorful and cheery, as if it had decided to show another face to the boy, a face that was smiling. That was not for everyone.
The boy came up against the fence, to look at that face closer and maybe even guess who was painted on the walls. He saw a rickety structure made from cardboard boxes. A playhouse covered with twigs. Its roof was decorated with a flag, now limp in the still air, and the cardboard walls were hung with pretend weapons and small bells. The hut was inhabited. He could hear voices and noises from it. Several bricks surrounded a pile of black ashes near the entrance.
They are allowed to build fires . . .
He pressed against the fence, not noticing that it was imprinting a rusty lattice on his shirt and blazer. He did not know who “they” were, but it was obvious that “they” couldn’t be that old. He looked and looked until he himself was noticed through the roughly cut-out window.
“Who are you?” a slightly hoarse child’s voice inquired, and then a bandana-wrapped head appeared in the hut’s doorframe. “Go away. This is not a place for strangers.”
“Why not?” the boy asked, intrigued.
The hut swayed and let out two inhabitants. The third stayed inside by the window. Three faces, brown and painted, were staring at him through the fence.
“He is not from those,” one said to the other, nodding at the teeth of the high-rises. “He’s not from around here. Look at him, just staring.”
“We came by bus,” the boy in the blazer explained. “And then we walked.”
“So just keep walking,” came the advice from beyond the fence.
He stepped back. He wasn’t offended. These were strange boys. There was something not quite right about them. He wanted to understand what it was.
They, in their turn, were studying and discussing him openly.
“He must be from the North Pole,” said the little one with the round head. “Look at that coat. What a moron.”
“Moron yourself,” the other said. “He’s got no arms, that’s why he’s wearing it. They’re leaving him with us. See?”
They exchanged glances and started giggling. The one inside the hut laughed so hard that it started swaying.
The boy in the blazer took some more steps away from them.
They continued laughing.
“Staying with us, with us!”
He turned on his heel and ran, squaring his shoulders awkwardly to prevent the blazer from flying off.
He rounded the corner and crashed straight into someone who grabbed him.
“Hey, careful! What’s the matter?”
The boy shook his head. “Nothing. I’m sorry. I need to be over there. Please let me go.”
But the man didn’t.
“Come with me,” he said. “Your mother is in my office. I was already starting to worry about what I would have to tell her if I couldn’t find you.”
The man belonged to the cool house. He had blue eyes and gray hair and a hooked nose, and he squinted the way people who wear glasses usually do. They went up the steps, and the man from the House picked up the suitcase. The door was ajar. He stepped aside for the boy to come in.
“Those . . . in the hut. Do they live here?” the boy asked.
“They do,” the blue-eyed man said eagerly. “Have you met already?”
The boy did not answer.
He stepped inside, the House man followed him, and the door clicked shut behind them.
They lived in a room with shelves and shelves of toys, the boy and the man. The boy slept on the sofa, hugging a stuffed crocodile; the man, on a camp bed he had set up next to it. When he was alone, the boy would go out on the balcony, lie on an air mattress, and look down through the railing at the boys playing. He would sometimes stand up so they could see him too. The boys would raise their heads and smile at him. But they never asked him to join them down there. He was secretly hoping for the invitation, but it never came. Disappointed, he’d lie back again and look down from under the brim of a straw hat, taking in the high voices from below. Sometimes he’d close his eyes and imagine himself dozing off on a beach, lulled by the soft swishing of the surf. The boys’ voices morphed into seagull cries. The sun was turning his legs brown. The idleness bored him.
In the evenings they would sit on the carpet, the boy and the blue-eyed man whose name was Elk, sit and listen to music and talk. They had a creaking record player and records in tattered sleeves, and the boy would study the sleeves like paintings, trying to match the images on them to the music they contained. He was never able to. The summer nights walked in through the open window. They didn’t turn on the lights so as not to attract mosquitoes. Once the boy saw what looked like a rag cross the deep blue velvet of the sky. It turned out to be a bat, a mouse skeleton in a torn cape. After that he would always position himself so he could see the sky from where he was sitting.
“Why do you call yourself Elk?” the boy asked.
He was thinking of those elk who roamed the forests, with their horns lacy like oak leaves. And of deer, who were relatives to the elk but had very different horns. He’d thought about that for a long time before mustering enough courage to ask.
“It’s my nick,” Elk explained. “A nickname. Everyone who lives in the House has a nick, that’s just the way it is here.”
“I live here too now, do I have one?”
“Not yet. But you will. When they all come back and you move to one of the dorms, you’ll get a nick.”
“What will it be?”
“I don’t know. A good one, I hope. If you’re lucky.”
The boy thought about possible names for himself but couldn’t come up with anything. It all rested with them, those who were coming back. He wanted them to come back sooner.
“Why aren’t they inviting me?” the boy asked. “Do they think I can’t play with them? Or is it that they don’t like me?”
“No,” Elk said. “You’re just new in the House. They need some time to get used to you being here. This always happens at first. Have patience.”
“How much time?” the boy asked.
“Looks like you’re really bored,” Elk said.
The next day, when Elk came, he was not alone. With him was another boy, who never went out into the yard and had never before shown himself.
“I brought you a friend,” Elk said. “He is going to live here with you, so you are not alone anymore. This is Blind. You two can do whatever you want—play, go crazy, break furniture. Just try not to fight and not to complain to me about each other. The room is all yours.”
Blind never played with him, because he didn’t know how. He did attend to the boy dutifully: woke him up in the morning, washed his face, combed his hair. Listened to his stories, almost never saying anything back in reply, and shadowed his every step. Not because he wanted to. He assumed that this was what Elk wanted of him. Elk’s wishes were his command. Elk had only to ask, and he would have jumped off the balcony. Or the roof. Or pushed someone else off it. The armless boy was afraid of that. Elk was much more afraid. Blind was already grown up inside. A little grown-up hermit. He had long hair and a frog-like mouth always covered in red sores. He was pale as a ghost and extremely thin. He was nine. Elk was his god.
Blind’s memory was full of noises, smells, and murmurs. It did not go very deep—Blind remembered nothing of his early childhood. Almost nothing. About the only thing he could fish out was the interminable sitting on the potty. There were many little boys there, and they all sat in a row on identical tin potties. The memory was a sad one and it smelled bad. He calculated later that they were forced to sit like that for no less than half an hour each time. Many of them managed to do their thing early, but they still had to remain sitting, waiting for the others. This was discipline, and they’d been receiving discipline since birth. He also remembered the yard. They walked there, each holding on to the clothes of the one in front but still tripping and falling. At the beginning and the end of this chain walked the grown-ups. If anyone stopped or deviated from the prescribed direction, a loud voice from above would restore order. His world consisted then of two types of voices. One type brought guidance from above. Another was closer and more intelligible; such voices belonged to those like himself. He did not like them either. Sometimes the loud voices disappeared. If they went missing for a long time, he and others like him would start running, jumping, falling, and bloodying their noses, and it would immediately become clear that the yard was much smaller than it seemed when they walked around it in lockstep. It became cramped, and its surface hardened and scraped their knees.