The House of Discarded Dreams (15 page)

Vimbai smiled—she did not begrudge others their fear. “Yeah. Plus, if they collect blood, they would have to keep it somewhere, right?”

“If it’s a dream, they can keep it in an old hat,” Maya said. “But I do see your point.”

The two of them walked toward the hospital, the slash of its sign disfiguring the night like a scar. The hospital seemed familiar, and with a squeezing of her heart Vimbai recognized it as Cooper, the University hospital where her father worked—the same tower of glass and steel and painted concrete, the looping driveway and the parking lot, and the parking garage—a towering structure alongside with the hospital proper, the path inside it winding endlessly, corkscrewing into the sky.

Vimbai motioned for Maya to be careful, and the two of them bent low, holding hands, moving in short dashes between the wrought iron gates and a small copse of trees and shrubs surrounding a couple of bird baths and benches—a handkerchief-sized piece of nature, wedged mercilessly among all the death and artifice of the towering stone.

Maya’s dogs waited for them by the bird baths, and only signaled their joy at Maya’s appearance by drumming their tails on the ground.

“Good dogs,” Maya whispered.

“I think we better go through the garage,” Vimbai said. “I’ve been at this hospital before.”

“You know where the blood bank is?”

Vimbai shook her head. “No, but I know how we can get to the offices and the patients’ rooms and the nurses’ stations without disturbing anyone.”

“Okay,” Maya whispered. “Lead the way.”

Sneaking by the turnstile that dispensed tickets and let the cars through was not a problem, and they tiptoed under the white dead light of halogen lamps that lit rows upon rows of rusted cars on cinderblocks, cars that would never drive anywhere—not even in this dream made substance. The pavement between the rows of cars had cracked, letting through thin, anemic stems of grass. Large chunks of asphalt had been cleaved off, as if by the stomping feet of giants, but Vimbai knew that it was grass and the young saplings that pushed upward among the cars that did it. Young trees, jacaranda and cherries, apple trees and maples reaching eagerly toward the fluorescent lights. They did not know any better, and mistook their artifice for the real sun.

They walked to the floor marked ‘D’, and Vimbai judged that they were sufficiently high above the ground. Maya’s dogs stayed subdued and pensive, and clustered around Maya’s ankles like a rust-colored, clumped and very scared rug. Vimbai calculated that they were somewhere on the fourth floor, and it suited her—she figured that if the
wazimamoto
expected them, they would watch the ground floor and the security checkpoints with vigilance. A quiet entry through the service corridor linking the parking garage to the hospital was a stroke of brilliance, Vimbai thought.

The emergency exit linking the parking garage with the main building was closed, and Maya heaved a sigh. “I suppose we have to go back down now, and risk the main entrance.”

“Not yet,” Vimbai said. “Let me try something.” She patted her pockets and smiled when she found her wallet—habit was stronger than reason in her, and even though she had not anticipated a need for an ID when she left the house this morning, she still stuck her wallet into the back pocket of her jeans.

“You’ll set off the alarm.”

Vimbai shook her head. “My dad works here. I mean, in the real Cooper. He showed me how to do this.”

“You think it will work here?”

“It should. It is my Cooper, I think.” Vimbai pressed the edge of the credit card between the doorjamb and the dented edge of the door, where the underlying blue-gray aluminum showed under the chipping yellow paint. She wriggled the card until it clattered and caught something—a sense of solid metal transmitted to Vimbai’s fingers as she felt the tapered edge of the lock and pressed, pushing the door smoothly open.

“Wow,” Maya said. “You’re good.” She and her dogs followed Vimbai inside, into a short and blind corridor ending in a set of swinging double doors. Vimbai remembered those doors—they led through storage closets and sometimes surgery recovery rooms, the utility spaces filled with rolled up cables and wire to the actual corridors, wide and well-lit, which would take them to the patients’ rooms, and various doctor offices and the nurses’ stations.

Oh how little Vimbai loved them, those small islands of order and clean-smelling paper, tables and desks where the ragged doctors and interns could sit down to catch their breath or eat a meal or catch up on paperwork. So clean, so sane—and among this order in chaos, these islands in the stormy sea, was her father, like a king of his atolls and the captain of the ship, always calm and composed even when people hemorrhaged on the gurney while he fitted the IV bag, even when there were so few free beds they had to park the gurneys by the nurses’ station. He moved among them, elegant and dignified, like royalty in charge of morphine pumps and gauze packs, the lord of disposable syringes and enameled bedpans. With the same smooth motion, he slid a needle into a collapsed, pale vein and handed Vimbai a cup of hospital Jell-O, the taste of which was still one of her favorite things in the world. She was proud of him, and unlike her mother he never felt compelled to say more than was necessary, and thus largely avoided being embarrassing to her.

Now, she poked her head through the double doors, to survey empty corridors—not even the memories of patients’ shadows graced them, and even the nurses’ station—this forever source of light and comfort—remained silent and dimly lit.

“Where to now?” Maya whispered.

It was a good question, Vimbai thought, and the one she had no answer to, except peering into every room on this floor and then going to the next. How many floors? Ten? Fourteen? How long would it take them? “Can your dogs sniff him out?” she said.

Maya crouched down next to her dogs. “Come on,” she told them. “Go search. Search, okay?”

The dogs pummeled their tails on the ground and smiled, their open mouths and bright tongues colored scarlet-red. Finally, they stood as one, and walked tentatively toward the stairs on the other end of the hallway.

The dogs yelped a little until Maya hushed them, and started up the stairs. One floor, two, three—Vimbai was starting to lose count, and followed mechanically, barely noticing the turns of the stairs, reminded of the hollowed out building that had become Maya’s grandmother’s shrine—just as cold the stone, just as endless the stairs. Vimbai shivered and wished the morning would come.

The dogs led them to the top floor, and then into the hallway. Vimbai saw a sign for some medical department—a Bone Clinic? She did not remember one being there. She followed the dogs and Maya, her legs tense as if ready to take flight at the slightest provocation, into the reception area of the Bone Clinic and then into the office.

At first, she thought that she was looking at a row of chairs, and half a second later she realized that these were backs of the medical men, clad in green scrubs, all the same height and size as they crowded together, side by side, around a narrow surgical table. There were tubes conducting some black and foul liquid, and there was a pale body, translucent even—and Felix’s disjointed eyes looked at them (one at Maya, one at Vimbai) with raw suffering.

The
wazimamoto
turned to follow his gaze, and as they parted, Vimbai wanted to scream—Felix’s hair, his little cursed universe was gone, taken apart and slurping down the tubes. Then she heard Maya gasp and clutch her hand, and as she looked at the
wazimamoto
, she felt like gasping too. Their faces were concealed by gauze surgical masks and caps pushed low over their white brows beaded with sweat. But even these contrivances could not disguise the fact that the
wazimamoto
had neither noses nor eyebrows, neither lips nor chins; even their eyes were the barest hints, slight depressions in faces otherwise smooth as eggs. Vimbai only made a sound when she realized that, despite these limitations, the
wazimamoto
managed to smile at her somehow, with the invisible predatory smiles of nightmares.

Chapter 15

Vimbai’s fear blinded her to everything but her faceless opponents—her field of vision narrowed into a tiny spotlight over the bloodless, featureless faces that managed to leer at her. On the edges of her vision, a black vortex swirled, blotting out Maya’s pleading mouth and the incredible paleness of Felix’s face, the rusty-colored dogs. She only saw the green cloth masks moving slowly in and out, like an air sac on a frog’s neck, with a terrible mockery of breath.

The words she had carefully prepared and rehearsed in her mind were nowhere to be found, and Vimbai wished that her mouth wouldn’t be so dry and so sour, and the
wazimamoto
didn’t advance on her so slowly and menacingly. She took a step back, and felt the smooth surface of the door with her back.

Her vision slowly returned, and she could take in the buckets filled with sloshing fluid, viscous and black like tar—the sad remains of Felix’s universe, she guessed. The buckets were so many, the tar in them so unlike the air and the vibrant movement of Felix’s coif . . . it made her want to cry.

“Why?” she whispered, addressing no one on particular. “Why did you do that to him?”

The answer came in a crowding of words and images thrust forcibly into her mind, without any gentle mediation if words—this felt like an assault, like any true telepathy would, thought Vimbai. This flood of images, this relentless and redundant droning that penetrated even into the secret places behind closed eyelids. The words insisted that Felix’s universe had to be destroyed—must be destroyed, they said, it must be destroyed because with too many conduits there were too many drafts blowing the ethereal dimensions through and through. It had to be destroyed because Balshazaar made it a condition—he did not want to go back in, or even risk having to go, and he promised to deliver the delicate soul shells of the crabs in exchange for their promise to get rid of the stupid remnant, an appendix of a universe. They did so, they kept their promise, and that was a good thing, wasn’t it?—they got rid of it in the same way they went about accomplishing anything: draining. They drained Felix, and now his face was as white as the sheets underneath him, and his skull, fragile like an egg, traced with a web of veins like cracks, shone in the dusk of the Bone Clinic, unprotected and pitiful.

And then there were the crabs—the soul-shells, the crab-ghosts—scattered about as at a market. Vimbai though back to the time where she was driving home from college, along one of the many quaint little roads linking the behemoths of the Atlantic City Expressway and Black Horse Pike, and she saw a small shop by the road, with a hand-painted “Fresh Crabs!” sign. She pulled over, figuring that a quick dinner of local crabs would be both delicious and socially responsible, and walked into the store. The crabs were indeed there—stuffed by dozens into buckets, they struggled and churned, a seething mass of captive bodies, too dumb to understand that the ocean was too far away to escape to, and Vimbai ran from the store, gripped by sudden disgust and despair. It seemed too cruel, too indifferent somehow—and now she wished that instead of running she should’ve bought as many as she could and driven them to the shore and released them into the ocean.

That would’ve been a noble thing to do, she thought as she watched hundreds of ghost crabs strewn about the ward. Some were cracked open, with long needles stuck in their gills and carapaces, the needles that pumped the blood (life force, the intrusive voices corrected) out of these soul shells and into the plastic bags, like the ones hospitals used for IVs. They drained everything, Vimbai thought, and remembered the words of the man-fish—it was their nature, to drain. They wanted to get to the horseshoe crab bodies, trudging restlessly along the bottom, getting them closer and closer to home, but meanwhile they were not going to pass up the opportunity to drain their life essence instead of blue, material blood. It mattered not a whit—like all colonial creatures, the
wazimamoto
were vampires, concerned only with taking and not so much with putting anything back in, or even giving any thought to the results of their actions. Even now, they told Vimbai about what they did without a trace of deceit or embarrassment—they could be ashamed about stealing blood no more than a bee could be ashamed about collecting nectar, or a beaver could be embarrassed about building a dam.

This, Vimbai thought, this was the trouble with evil—it was rarely malicious, usually born out of single-mindedness and narrow views. She wanted to share this insight with Maya, and Vimbai forced her eyes to find Maya, and to absorb the sight of the
wazimamoto
fitting a long rubber cord around Maya’s well-muscled upper arm, encircling her narrow but heavy biceps, and waiting for the vein in her arm to swell to the surface like a deep purple river upwelling with rain, to puff up under the skin like a tense wire.

Maya kicked at her captors, and her dogs growled and tore at their legs—but there was nothing for them to either kick or grab with toothed narrow jaws, nothing but the billowing green scrubs with an outline of shadow underneath. It was something neither of them had considered, and the man-fish of course did not warn them—the
wazimamoto
had no flesh and could not be hurt, they had no conscience and could not be deterred.

They grabbed the dogs and tied them together, lashed their paws and jaws with rubber hose and ropes, and tossed them in the corners, like they had done with the crab souls.

“Leave her alone,” Vimbai pleaded. This was neither a game nor an adventure anymore. “Please, let her be.”

The
wazimamoto
did not answer, absorbed as they were in their gruesome business. Their movements, spare and terrifying in their calm efficiency, seemed matched together, as if they had been working side by side for an eternity—and Vimbai guessed that they had been.

Before she could move, they surrounded her, moving swift and silent and smooth like water, and their hands found her arms and her neck, her eyes, her face—she looked and looked, in unrelenting terror, once she realized that each one of their hands bore ten fingers, long, sinuous and multi-jointed. They wriggled in a complex, spiderlike manner, as if following an internal rhythm.

They held Vimbai fast, just as they held Maya and her dogs—just like they held Felix on his narrow stainless steel table. Not a surgical one, Vimbai realized—at least, it was not intended for human surgery, it was too short and too narrow, a stainless steel table more suited for Maya’s half-foxes than full-sized humans—a vet’s table, just like the one Vimbai’s childhood cat was put to sleep on, meowing and distraught under the harsh lights and foreign hands that held it down.

She felt the stainless steel under her own back—quick and cold like water—as well as the tightening of rubber cords around her wrists and upper arms, the wrenching sense of bones being pulled against the coiling of muscles as she tried to bend her elbows, to keep her arms close to her sides.

The fingers on her skin felt cold and slippery, slightly trembling as if in fear, as they lashed her wrists to the restraints built in the side of the table. She waited for the inevitable kiss of the rubber hose around her arm, for the sting of a needle and the slow, lightheaded descent into unconsciousness. She half-welcomed it, as one welcomes relief from fear—so exhausting that one had to smile a little at the prospect of finally surrendering and not having to be afraid anymore, not having to tiptoe under the glare of white fluorescent lights awaiting a scare or betrayal at every step. Giving in and letting go was easier, and a moment of pain would be worth it.

She closed her eyes, but the prick of the needle did not come—instead, there were voices. The
wazimamoto
were speaking to each other, and although Vimbai did not understand the words, she recognized the intonations, wobbly with doubt and abrupt with panic.

She opened her eyes, almost regretful, to see that Maya had been left alone. Her hand swelled and turned a disconcerting shade of dusky purple, but her blood was not being drained, and her dogs, restrained but unharmed, did not dare to bark at the
wazimamoto
.

Vimbai was about to ask their captors what was going on, when the scars on the insides of her arms started to itch. She wished her hands were not tied to the table and that she could scratch the maddening burning. Oh, Elizabeth Rosenzweig, she thought, why did you have to be so insidious, why did I have to be stupid enough to think that cutting these sigils into my skin would make you love me, or at least protect me from heartbreak?

She forced her head to her shoulder (it felt heavy now, disobedient and dumb with fatigue), and her eyes snapped wide open and her breath caught in her chest at the sight of the scars. They had changed from the barely visible, slightly raised traces of connective tissue into bright red, burning rivers shooting small flames and exhaling pungent sulfurous smoke. They twisted into fiery dragons and straightened into moats spewing fire, they coiled and flowed into complex patterns, and otherwise behaved in a manner no scars had any reason to.

She had reached a state of fatigue and surprise that made everything appear as a dream, and she accepted the dragons and the flames, as she accepted the thought that the
wazimamoto
were deterred and terrified by her scars, as if they were magic somehow, a charm against them.

“Hey,” she called to the assembled faceless surgeons. “Untie me, or else.” She did not know what to threaten them with and was afraid to bluff and make a bad mistake that would make it obvious to everyone that she had no understanding or control over her sudden power.

The medical men consulted among themselves, their surgical masks rising and falling, rising and falling, and one of them approached her cautiously, to untie the restraints on her right hand, and then quickly jumped back to join the others.

Vimbai used her free hand to free the other one, and sat up, rubbing her wrists. The scars on her arms flared, glorious tattoos of fire that burned but did not consume, and Vimbai jumped off the table, protected by their halo. She untied Maya, and smiled at her. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” Maya looked at her with a new expression, of deep respect and surprise. “Boy, did I ever underestimate you.”

“Get the dogs,” Vimbai said. “I’ll tend to Felix. And the crabs.” She turned to briefly glare at the
wazimamoto
and to show them her fist, just in case they forgot that they were afraid of her. No one had ever been afraid of her, and Vimbai found the new experience not altogether unpleasant—she suspected she would’ve enjoyed it more if she were not so shell-shocked by the experience, if indifference did not seem like the best coping mechanism available to her.

Felix remained on his slab, his head a defenseless egg, so unfamiliar and strange that Vimbai felt like weeping every time she looked at it. Her eyes met Felix’s tormented gaze—for once, his eyes seemed to be pointing on the same direction. “Felix,” she whispered. “Can this be fixed?”

He shook his head and cringed as the newly exposed skin touched the cold steel. “No,” he whispered back. “I think this is it—I hope there wasn’t anything valuable in there.” The loss of his private tiny universe had not seemed to reach him yet.

Vimbai unfastened the archaic leather belts that affixed his wrists and ankles to the table. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get going.”

Felix made no attempt to move, listless and disoriented like a cat without whiskers.

Vimbai grabbed his hands and pulled him off the table. He let her, inert, and stood, swaying slightly, making no attempt to walk or even flinch away from the medical men who clumped tightly together, watching them with the blind eyeless depressions on their featureless faces.

“I think we’ll have to lead him,” Vimbai said to Maya, who had finished freeing her foxes. “Help me to pick up the crabs.”

Maya nodded and motioned to her dogs—they seemed the least affected, and growled at the apparitions in green scrubs as they scuttled about the Bone Clinic, picking up the ghosts of the horseshoe crabs in their red mouths.

Vimbai and Maya stuffed the remaining crabs in their pockets and down their t-shirts, and Vimbai linked her arm with Felix’s. The glowing sigil on hers crossed over to his skin, and he shuddered a little, as if waking up. “Come on,” Vimbai urged. “Come quick.”

She felt uneasy now—the medical men seemed to have come to some decision, and even though they made no attempt to stop Vimbai and her roommates from leaving, there was a new sense of purposefulness about them, as if they just waited for them to leave the room to spring into action. Vimbai was also uneasy about the man-fish and Balshazaar, free and roaming the depths of the house somewhere.

Vimbai took a deep breath and pushed open the door, Felix hanging limply on the crook of her arm, and took a step into the silent and bright corridor of Cooper Hospital, inexplicably thrust into the center of her dream Harare.

They found Peb where they had left him—he bobbed up and down in the tree branches, seemingly content. Vimbai wondered if he experienced time in the same way they did, if he ever worried or became bored or counted to sixty to gauge how long did a minute take.