The House of Discarded Dreams (10 page)

I’m coming mama, I’m coming back
, Vimbai thought but did not dare to whisper. In her mind, the small figure on the beach grew more distant, retreating, until there was nothing but the sky and the heavy sluicing of cold waves.

Felix finally decided to let Balshazaar out, to let him roam around the house—it didn’t seem fair, to keep him all alone among the silent souls of the horseshoe crabs; besides, the universe that had been growing and mutating around them did not really seem all that different from the one Balshazaar currently inhabited.

“I think,” Felix told Vimbai and Maya at dinner, “it’s like letting him from one dream into another. If it were a real world, that would be a different story.”

“What is the real world?” Maya said, and gave a cock-eyed look to her fork and the anemic piece of ravioli impaled on it, drizzles of tomato sauce like blood. “But whatever; I don’t suppose it would alter things in any way.”

“Famous last words,” Vimbai mumbled, but did not argue further.

“It’s settled then.” Felix beamed. “I sort of felt bad about keeping him there after I showed him the world . . . at least if he did not know what was outside, it wouldn’t matter.”

“Can’t miss what you don’t know about,” the
vadzimu
said.

Vimbai shivered—her mother spoke in these words, her stern intonations bleeding through. “You can’t show people the western lifestyle and expect them not to want,” she would say. “It’s cruel, to show and to lie like this—in a hundred years, people in the rest of the world won’t be able to live like we do, but they will want it even more. Greed and jealousy, that’s the problem with cultural imperialism.” Another speech Vimbai knew by heart, another one of her daily conundrums where disagreeing would be monstrous but agreeing unbearable.

“Peb,” Vimbai said out loud. “Would you mind fetching the phantom leg from my room? Just don’t take it—it’s for someone else.”

Peb rose like fog from the
vadzimu
’s back where it was clinging, blue and smoky like a Picasso painting. For some reason, Vimbai wanted to show him Guernica, and see what he thought of it, if he liked the blind eyes of the little girl who seemed oblivious to the limp hand cradling her. Peb nodded and floated away, like mist, like smoke, like an elusive fish skittering and disappearing in the thick of water.

When Peb returned with the leg, he and the
vadzimu
watched with a mix of curiosity and, Vimbai suspected, a trace of jealousy. Peb had relinquished the phantom leg with a quiet sigh, and now the leg stood on the kitchen counter, perfect and smooth like blown glass. Maya sat back, her arms crossed, her plate bearing an arabesque of tomato sauce forgotten in front of her. She frowned slightly, and her front teeth bit her lower lip.

Felix dug through his hair two-handed. A few times his face twitched into a grimace, and Vimbai guessed that he was touching the horseshoe crabs’ little immobile souls. Finally, he gave a small cry of triumph and pulled out the desiccated head.

Balshazaar looked around him, and smiled when his eyes met Vimbai’s. “Good seeing you again,” he said.

“Hi,” Maya interjected, still frowning. “I’m Maya.”

Balshazaar was introduced in turn to the
vadzimu
and Peb, and Vimbai thought that he seemed quite unperturbed by the new environment. Perhaps Felix had shown him more than he told Vimbai, or perhaps he could see from the inside of his hair somehow. She chased the thought away as silly—she had seen the inside of Felix’s hair, isolated from the rest of the world by inky blackness.

The phantom leg took to Balshazaar, despite the yipping and growling of Maya’s dogs—they cowered away from the pruned face perched atop of the transparent leg, which was growing clouded, as if diseased by the contact with alien and dead flesh.

Balshazaar wobbled and made an awkward hop on the kitchen counter, knocking over an empty ravioli can.

“How does it feel?” Vimbai asked him.

“Fine, fine,” Balshazaar answered, his thin scarred lips shaping a slow smile. “Will take a bit of getting used to, but I’ll manage.”

They watched him hop and bounce along the countertop, then jump down to the floor. He traversed the kitchen from the counter to the screen door, and from the screen door to the pantry. He then disappeared inside—presumably, to investigate the rest of the house.

“He’ll be back,” Felix said, and gave Vimbai a hopeful look from his right eye. “Won’t he?”

“I’m sure he will,” Maya said. She sounded as though unsure if that was a good thing. “You realize that now real people are in a minority, right?”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘minority,’ ” Vimbai answered, and shot an apologetic look to the
vadzimu
. “She is my grandmother.”

“She’s a ghost,” Maya corrected.

“Ghosts can be vengeful,” Vimbai said.

Maya shrugged. “Should we go look for a supermarket again? Or if you want, there’s a new forest by the attic. We could go name it, and see if anything cool lives there.”

“In the morning,” Vimbai said. “I want to check on the crabs.”

“I’ll come with you,” Maya said.

They sat on the porch for a while. Vimbai looked underwater, her grandmother’s sight letting her see the creatures as if they were close by. When she came up for air, she shook the water out of her hair. “I’m not supposed to see them,” she said. “And yet I’m supposed to keep them alive somehow.”

“While they are undead,” Maya said.

“It’s temporary, I think,” Vimbai said. “They left their souls in Felix’s hair.”

Maya laughed, the sound resonating far over the ocean. “I can’t believe this sentence makes sense to us. That there would be a world in which it’s normal shit to say, you know?”

“I know,” Vimbai said. “In any case, I suppose they are safe. They will get us home, I have no doubt of that.” She did.

“Yeah,” Maya said. She sidled up to Vimbai and dangled her feet in the ocean despite the cutting cold and darkness. “Provided we want to go home.”

“Sure we do,” Vimbai said. “We’ll still have the house, you know? If our dreams are changing it, then there’s no reason for it to change back once we’re in New Jersey.”

“Perhaps we cannot dream as well in New Jersey.” Maya pulled her feet up and rubbed them with her feet. “The water’s freezing. I better go get a pair of socks.”

“I’m going to bed,” Vimbai said. “I’m tired. And it is hard to look under water, even with my grandmother helping me.” She could not quite describe the heartbreak, the dull sickness in her stomach when she saw the creatures covered now with a thick mat of barnacles, hagfishes sliming through the cracks in their carapaces. But their legs kept moving, always moving, like the long restless fingers of a sickly pianist.

“Okay,” Maya said and squeezed her arm. “Dream us something nice for tomorrow, will ya?”

Chapter 10

Obedient, Vimbai dreamt. Her dreams were vivid—more vivid, it seemed, than the waking landscapes inside the house. She dreamt of smells and sounds, of saturated solid planes of color. She dreamt of Africa as she had half-remembered it from her trip, half-imagined from the coloring books her mother bought her, and then got upset when Vimbai colored children on the pages pink instead of brown. These books had lions and vast open plains Vimbai colored rust orange and brick-red, blue oceans populated by smiling whales (green polka dot) and their fountains (yellow, like the champagne her parents drank on special occasions).

Now Vimbai dreamed of a rust-colored savannah, with green umbrellas of acacias scattered at a distance. Two plush giraffes grazed among the leaves, their long and unrealistically pink tongues twining and snaking between black thorns shining like volcanic glass. A stuffed lion slumped in the shade, inanimate at the moment, and it did not even stir when Vimbai passed right by it.

There was a lake on the horizon, a smooth blue mirror, but Vimbai was weary of fresh water rife with catfish. Instead she headed for a group of gigantic stones—she guessed them for the Great Zimbabwe, the ruins that gave her country their name, even though they seemed grievously misplaced in the dream. Gray stones towered over Vimbai, their fissures greening with moss and slender grasses, and she thought that if the Great Zimbabwe was to ever fight Stonehenge, the latter would have its ass handed to it.

She passed through the arches and between walls, the remnants of a giants’ house, and came to the other side where round grass huts—arranged in a semi-circle, like one would see in a Discovery Channel documentary—teemed with people and dogs.

“Run away,” people shouted to Vimbai, and dogs barked. “They are coming, they are coming.”

Only then did she notice that they were packing bundles of their belongings and carried children, fleeing from some dream disaster.

At that point, Vimbai was quite aware that she was dreaming, and so she decided to stay behind and see what all the commotion was about. She waited until the huts emptied and the people all climbed into aerial boats moored nearby—long speedy hollowed-out tree trunks, fashioned with bright golden wings where oars would’ve been, topped by great scarlet sails. The sails filled with sunlight—like a gust of giant breath—and the boats took off through the air, fast as arrows, the wings on their sides beating in unison, the speedboat engines mounted in the rear of the boats strangely helpless and superfluous.

Vimbai watched their departure and disappearance, how they grew into tiny dashes on the horizon and dissolved in the expanse of the molten sky. She smelled dry grass and a whiff of motor oil, and she breathed hastily, lustily, in order to retain and remember them when she woke up.

And then she heard the sound of motors rumbling. It did not come from the boats but from between the stones of the Great Zimbabwe, and she surmised that it signaled the approach of whatever caused the mad flight of the aerial boats.

She heard a siren, and her feet moved against her will—a fear too visceral to overcome, the nightmare given to her by the Kenyan babysitter when she was just a baby, the sound of the medical trucks.

They came from among the stones, emerging from and between them, coming up from the sifting, puckering soil that spat them out like something distasteful. They came like ants fleeing a forest fire, like impala fleeing the drought . . . They swarmed like locusts.

The trucks looked just like Vimbai imagined them—old-fashioned things, reminiscent of army trucks from the twenties, with wheels of solid metal that thumped softly on the dry ground. Brass rails ran along the open cabs and beds of the trucks, one on top and one on the bottom, and several men in blue surgical scrubs stood on the lower rail, hanging onto the top one, giving Vimbai an impression of children peeking over a split-rail fence. Large red crosses were painted on the cab doors.

Vimbai could not see what was in the open beds of the trucks, but she could hear a quiet and terrible slurping that filled her with quiet dread. It’s just a dream, she reminded herself. They cannot hurt you. And yet the trucks slurped and sluiced and thumped and moved closer, surrounding her in a ring.

The men in surgical scrubs, their faces hidden behind gauze that only left their tired, kind eyes and sweating white foreheads visible, jumped from the truck closest to her, and Vimbai saw a large flat cistern filled with pale blue blood. Several hoses snaked around its base, and one of the medical men grabbed a hose and motioned for his mates to hold Vimbai. Too late, she thrashed in their arms; too late she tried to will herself to wake up. But the hose got closer to her face, and now she could see a large needle glinting on the end of it. She struggled but the man’s gloved hands cradled her face, and the needle jabbed her neck. She felt her life draining away from her, her soul hanging by a thread, as the cistern got fuller. She did not struggle anymore, and the medical men let her arms dangle by her sides, her legs segmenting and treading the dry sand, her gills dry and desperate for the cool embrace of water.

“That’s a huge horseshoe crab,” one of the medical men said. “Toss it back.”

Vimbai wanted to scream and protest, she wanted to ask them to take her to the sea, to the life-giving salt water. But instead, they tossed her into the lake, where a hungry catfish waited for her, wise, smiling with its hard toothless mouth.

In the morning, Maya and Vimbai went for a walk in an aspen grove, which Maya recognized as her own. Her dogs tagged along, their fluffy-tipped tails swaying gracefully and their pointed possum faces grinning, bristling with white conical teeth. Their eyes gleamed brightly.

Vimbai kicked up the leaves littering the path, and they rustled and rose, and then fell back. Maya seemed pensive.

“I had a strange dream,” Vimbai informed, and told Maya about the men in medical trucks.

“That is a really messed up dream,” Maya said. “Jesus. Bad dreams are a hazard here, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know,” Vimbai said. “I thought the house had our old dreams . . . the ones we have discarded and forgotten about.”

“Maybe,” Maya answered. “I hope so.” She whistled to her dogs and they perked up: their tails wagged, and their tongues hung out. They crowded closer to Maya and stared at her expectantly, as if waiting for her to do something amazing or entertaining.

“They love you.” Vimbai sighed. “It’s really cool how they follow you.”

“Somebody has to,” Maya mumbled and bent down to scratch a few dog heads. When she straightened, she shot Vimbai a quick smile. “Don’t mind that, I’m just being silly.”

“It didn’t sound silly,” Vimbai said. “It sounded serious, actually.”

Maya shook her head. “So I whine a little every now and again. I’m allowed to.”

“I’m not saying you’re not,” Vimbai said. “Only you sounded so sad . . . is there anything I can do?”

“No,” Maya said. “There’s nothing, really. It’s just sometimes I think that all I have is these dogs and Felix and you.”

“No family?” Vimbai felt guilty that she had never thought of asking Maya such simple questions. Her own family occupied so much of her internal space that she assumed it was the same for Maya, unable to recognize a sucking emptiness in another’s soul.

Maya shook her head. “My grandmother died two years ago, and I never had anyone but her. But I’d rather not talk about it now. Maybe later.”

“Okay,” Vimbai said. “Fine. You want to go to the lake?”

“No.” Maya nodded at her dogs. “They are afraid of lakes—I think it’s the fish. The same fish you dreamed about.”

“This is what I wanted to see,” Vimbai said. “To make sure. Maybe it’s not even there anymore, or the lake is gone.”

“You’re not afraid?”

Vimbai considered her latest shameful flight from the catfish. “A little,” she admitted. “But if I don’t go in, I can’t drown, and it can’t take my soul. It can’t hurt real live people, can it?”

Maya shrugged. “I’m not about to find out. I don’t think you should either.”

Vimbai hesitated. It was so tempting, so sensible. But her promise to the horseshoe crabs beat in her heart, like ashes of Klaas. She promised not to let them die, and she had to make sure that the sinister catfish was not hatching any evil plans, like her dream seemed to suggest. “I must,” she told Maya.

Maya sighed. “At least, take someone with you. Felix or Peb or your grandmother.” There was a hint of struggle as she pronounced the last word, and Vimbai thought that Maya had to feel a little sore, that it was not her grandmother who showed up to look after them and to make them coffee. That the
vadzimu
was Vimbai’s, even though Vimbai had a full set of parents and did not really need a ghost. And Maya . . . Vimbai could not be sure, but she suspected that Maya would trade all of her dogs for a glimpse of her dead grandmother.

“The
vadzimu
? She doesn’t leave the kitchen—only to go to the porch. I don’t think she wants to be anywhere else.”

“Why?”

Vimbai shrugged. “No idea. You know how ghosts are always restricted to one room. Or a hallway or whatever.”

Maya nodded. “I guess. But you did drive her here.”

Vimbai stopped, awkward. It was time for them to part ways—Maya seemed intent to continue down the path covered in yellow leaves, to the bluish grove of firs on top of a hill they named after Oprah. And Vimbai had to head back, past the rich deposits of old mattresses and into the desert, the yellow sand with two chairs on the shore of a silent, smooth lake, where the unspeakable cannibalistic horror of a catfish lurked beneath.

It was silly, Vimbai told herself. Perhaps it was just a fish with no intelligence and no accompanying malice; perhaps she just imagined its words. Perhaps the house was just a canvas onto which she projected her silly fears and believed them to come to life in the shifting, uneven light—much like her own carelessly tossed shirt transformed a peaceful chair in her childhood bedroom into a monster. Perhaps all she needed was a closer look, a light switch, that would let her see her own foolishness.

“I’ll see you later,” Maya said. “Just be careful.”

Vimbai headed for the lake. At first she thought of stopping by the kitchen and talking Peb into coming with her, but it was a bit of a detour. Besides, Peb being the creature of mostly spirit (and soap skin) could be vulnerable to the man-fish—provided the latter was real. It was better to go alone, she decided.

Vimbai waited on the lakeshore, looking for telltale circles in the water. She waited for the flip of a tail, the silvering of a side and the splash of a large slithering fish. She stood among the green cattails and succulent patches of sedges, their green inflorescences tilted like bayonets.

There was no sign of the catfish, and she considered retreating back to the lawn chairs, perhaps sitting down, kicking up her legs and enjoying a nap—for all the weird absence of smell here, inside the house it was much warmer than outside, subtropical even. Vimbai decided not to contemplate the heating bill—and after all, who said anything about a bill? For all she knew, they would never have to encounter anyone from the gas or electric company again. She finally understood what Maya was so jubilant about, imagining a life with no bills and no responsibilities, free to roam the endless plains of this dream Africa, with its forever flowering Harare and plush lions who cuddled and never bit, its mountains and ridges named and explored by them, by Maya and Vimbai, and not some dead unknown people. Their own world, their endless circus that had the good sense to run away with them.

Her feet sank into the soft soil of the bank, and she wiggled her toes, enjoying the sensation of thick ribbons of warm mud squeezing between them. She longed for the rich smell of river, of the green and decay and silt warmed by the sun, and she sighed. Their dream refuge had a serious flaw, no doubt about that.

She lifted one foot, and the mud made a sucking noise, an obscene slow kiss, as it released her. She turned around and froze at the sight of Balshazaar hopping along on his phantom leg, away from the lake. She was not sure if he had seen her, but crouched low just in case he turned around. There was no particular reason for her to hide, it just seemed like a good idea. Balshazaar roamed freely now, and Vimbai saw no harm in keeping a secretive eye on him, even if it meant crouching on the bank and getting mud on the knees of her relatively clean jean overalls.

Balshazaar never turned, and Vimbai watched the back of his shriveled head, parchment skin with a few long wisps of gray hair, disappear behind the straight line of the horizon—she knew that a grove of palms and couches waited just behind it, embraced by a clear gurgling brook with a pebbled bottom, where mayfly larvae built their strange delicate houses from straw and tiny shells cemented with silt.

“What do you want?” a voice came from behind. An unpleasant voice, with a strange suffocated quality to it—it sounded like a person talking without breath, a mouthed voice with no lungs behind it to give it strength.

The man-fish peeked out of water, his fins propping him up not far where Vimbai had previously stood. He was a large fish, beautiful in his way—brown and green patterns covered its wetly glistening sides, like a snakeskin boot. His eyes, small and golden, bulged a little out of his flat head, staring at Vimbai with an empty feline expression.