Blind shrugs. “I’m not sure. Maybe he didn’t notice. I mean . . . people don’t usually pay too much attention to the exact composition of someone else’s vomit, do they? What do you think?”
“They usually don’t. Why? Was there something to pay attention to?”
“Well . . . Honestly? The mice didn’t have enough time to get digested. And there wasn’t much in there besides. That could disguise them, I mean.”
“Blind. Enough,” Sphinx says, wincing. “Spare me the details. Let’s just say I hope with all my heart that Ralph wasn’t looking too closely at how you redecorated his office.”
“Me too. But the silence that followed was a bit strange. I’d even say stunned.”
“How is a stunned silence different from a regular one?”
“Different shade.”
“I see,” Sphinx says. “Well, if it’s the shade, we’re all screwed. It means he saw. And what his thoughts on that are we’ll never know. Which is for the best.”
Blind grins.
“He that increaseth knowledge?”
“Something like that,” Sphinx says.
“This Ralph fellow sure is meddlesome. Gadding about at night . . . sticking his nose in other people’s business. Bugging them with idiotic demands afterward. Irritating.”
Blind takes a step away from the sink, jerks the towel off the hook, and wipes his face. Sphinx studies the footprints on the tiles. Bloodred.
“Your feet could do with a washing too. Where did you manage to cut them?”
Blind runs his hand over the soles.
“I did, huh. I don’t remember where. That dump on the way, probably.” He adjusts the sweater again. “Look, I’m really tired right now.”
“Why do you always put on those rags?”
Sphinx is almost shouting. Blind doesn’t answer.
“Why do you walk over glass barefoot?”
No answer. Sphinx’s voice drops down to a whisper.
“And why the hell don’t you even feel that you’re bleeding until someone tells you!”
Blind is silent.
Sphinx sighs again and walks out quietly.
The light is still on in the dorm. Noble is smoking, wrapped in the blanket on the edge of the bed. Smoker, in a hushed whisper, recounts to Lary and Humpback the horrors of finding himself inside a cat’s skin. Tabaqui, his face still bearing traces of total bliss, is asleep, clutching the backpack turned inside out.
SPHINX
THE LONGEST NIGHT
Tabaqui’s tale, take four.
Afternoon tea, take three.
Jackal is alert and perky. He’s already had time to doze off, wake up, provide additional details that he seems to have missed the first three times around, and start on the composition of a song worthy of the occasion. Lary and Humpback, in coats over pajamas, are crouching around the coffeemaker like trappers around a campfire.
“Some people have all the luck . . . Getting to see all that stuff,” Lary sighs—and launches another half hour of Tabaqui’s rapid-fire gibbering. Everyone’s sick of it by now, except for him and the Bandar-Log.
Blind returns, a pale emissary from the world of shadows. From head to toe, exhibit one for Jackal’s gruesome fantasies. The pack studies him and his stained sweater. Mostly the sweater. Naturally. It’s not often you see something like that.
Tabaqui even pauses for a while, preening himself proudly, as if to say “See what I mean? The night is full of horrors!” Like it was he who personally dunked Blind in blood and vomit. Sinister visions loom before the pack, and I suddenly notice that Smoker is nowhere to be seen. I wonder if he’s been drowned in the toilet. It’s been constant vigilance with him recently. He’s acquired this nasty habit of methodically getting on everyone’s nerves.
“What a dirty . . . oh-oh-oh . . . sweater you have,” Jackal’s syrupy voice is chanting. “Where, oh, where did you manage to get it that way?”
Pale One ignores Jackal’s entreaties and crashes down on the bed. Lary, shaking the remains of his sideburns, winks at Humpback. Humpback turns away.
“So,” Black says in a disgusting tone of voice. “Yet another Leader bites the dust?”
Who is he addressing, I wonder.
Tabaqui takes it to be him and immediately begins rehashing the gruesome narrative for the fifth time.
“We hear someone screaming. So I say, ‘Something happened.’ So we go looking, and you can’t believe what we see . . .”
Black walks out.
“It’s R One running from somewhere in the direction of the stairs,” Humpback finishes the sentence. “How about enough, Tabaqui? How many more times are you going to go over this?”
Tabaqui takes offense. The way babies usually do when someone takes away their favorite toy.
Noble, still wrapped in a blanket, looks at me bright eyed.
“Want to play some chess?”
