There we go. Now he’s choking. And I’m not handy with the taps on the back. It’s very hard to gauge the strength of a slap with prosthetics. This ruins many friendly gestures for me. I pull my legs up on the bench, put my chin on my knee, and watch him coughing spasmodically. A child playing with matches. Makes a fire, imitating his daddy lighting them, and then is honestly surprised when real firemen show up in a real fire truck. You’d think he had those books when he was a kid where this causal relationship was featured in big letters, short words, and colorful pictures.
“And now you’d like to go away,” I say to him. “Or at least for me to stop talking. Everyone gets that, so don’t worry.”
Ralph is hunched over, fingers buried deep in his hair. I can’t see his face, but the posture tells me that he’s not feeling too good.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says. “And I would like you to continue.”
Resilient, isn’t he?
“Too bad,” I say. “I like this conversation less and less the longer it goes on. Besides, I’m waiting for my date.”
He doesn’t believe me. I lean back again and close my eyes.
We banged the hell out of that door. We almost smashed it to splinters. If they hadn’t let us out I’m sure we would have. Because by morning nothing was holding us back anymore. We had sat there through the night, docile and patient, respecting the will of the seniors and their big reasons. We knew we were too little to be taking part in the proceedings. The snub made us want to cry, but we held on. That night wasn’t the last for us, but it was for the seniors. It belonged to them. We spent it on two mattresses on the floor of the biology classroom. They had remembered to bring in the mattresses. And a bucket.
“There were fourteen, fifteen of us,” I say to Ralph. “They hadn’t given us time to dress or put on shoes. Siamese, Stinker, and Wolf they took away separately. Must have figured that a mere locked door never would have stopped those guys. And no one had been able to locate Blind. He’d disappeared before they came. The only one of us who hadn’t been locked up that night. The pajamas we were in, Magician’s crutch, and a pack of candies were all we had. We’d gone through the entire pack in the first half hour, and the crutch we used in the morning to bash the door. We threw everything at that door trying to break it, because by then it was obvious that they’d forgotten about us being there, and that we could only rely on ourselves if we ever wanted to get out.”
The unpleasant memories make Ralph cringe. He was there too. Most likely he was among those who did come to let us out. They tried to corral us, but it would have been easier to hold on to fourteen streaking meteors. We swept away our saviors and tore down the hallway, screaming hoarsely. Some of us were already bawling, even as we ran. Simply because we were scared. We did not yet know what had happened. Where it was we were in such a hurry to get to, I still cannot understand. But I remember well what did manage to stop us. The puddle. A small pool, richly crimson, right at the Crossroads. And in the middle of it, a half-submerged white sail. A handkerchief. It still comes to me in my dreams. Was that puddle really as boundless as it seemed to us then? Anyway, it made one thing absolutely clear: no one could lose that much blood and live. I looked at it, transfixed, and all the time I was being jostled from behind by those who kept arriving. They shoved me in the back, forcing me to take tiny steps in its direction. A step, then another, and another. Until I realized that my socks were soaked through. I don’t remember anything after that.
After six long years I returned and finally learned what had come to pass that night. But it forever remained for me something remote, out of the distant past. I hadn’t lived through it with the others. One of the most horrible nights of the House begins and ends for me with the crimson puddle, the half-submerged sail of the handkerchief, and my own cold and sticky socks.
When I awoke, after six years by my time and a month for everyone else, I saw a strange creature in the mirror. Bald, scrawny, much too young, staring wildly . . . I realized that I was going to have to start my life all over again. And cried. Because I was tired, not because I had no hair. “An unknown virus,” they explained. “You are most likely no longer contagious, but we’d like to keep you quarantined for just a while.” The days spent in the quarantine saved me. Gave me time to adapt. To get rid of some of my grown-up habits, to get used to the new skin. The Sepulcher staff dubbed me Prince Tut. The transformation from Prince Tut to Sphinx took me another six months.
Ralph is silent. An eternity passes.
“Curious,” he says. “There was blood everywhere. The floor, the walls. Even the ceiling, I think. But your memory only managed to hold one single puddle.”
