The House of Discarded Dreams (16 page)

“Come with us,” Vimbai told him. “I can’t carry you now.”

Peb sulked but bobbed along, silent and obedient. Vimbai felt her stomach churn—she had forgotten all about his tongue. “I don’t have it,” she said out loud. “But we know where the
wazimamoto
are, and I can probably make them give your tongue back to me, but I need to talk to my grandmother first.”

It wasn’t exactly a lie—Vimbai did hope that the
vadzimu
would be able to shed some light on the mystery of the sudden burning signs appearing on her skin. Even though she probably didn’t know anything about the
wazimamoto
, she probably knew more about magic than Vimbai. Vimbai wished her mother was here too, because she was the one who wrote papers comparing voodoo with hoodoo, and correcting the many misconceptions she believed white Americans to have—it always puzzled Vimbai that those articles always seemed to be written for white people; possibly the ones who read those articles and became qualified to run Africana Studies departments. However, they still managed to focus primarily on the aspects of
muti
that used human organs cut out of living people, which annoyed Vimbai’s mother to no end. “It’s as if they only want to see the folk magic practitioners as savage mutilators,” she would say. Vimbai would then think of cousin Roger and nod in agreement; economics simply didn’t make for as compelling a monster as a dark-skinned medicine man in traditional garb. And mutilation certainly held a kind of grim fascination that always made the headlines.

They made it home when the sun was rising among the slanted ceiling beams of the main hallway, and they made it to the kitchen by midmorning. Vimbai’s dead grandmother had a coffee pot waiting for them, and apologized for the lack of sugar, even though it was certainly not her fault—the ghosts did not eat or drink a thing, and only cleaned excessively.

When the
vadzimu
saw the marks on Vimbai’s arms, she gasped and looked closer—even though the flames had died down somewhat, the patterns still glowed the angry red of molten iron. “These are
muti
marks,” she proclaimed. “And they protected you from danger—did your mother have them done?”

There was an intensity of hope on the grandmother’s voice that made Vimbai cringe. The ghost still waited for forgiveness, and seeing her daughter follow in her magical footsteps would be a certain sign that Vimbai’s mother was not angry with hers anymore. “No, grandma,” Vimbai said. “I made them myself—only I didn’t know then what they were.” (
Protect me from a broken heart
.)

The
vadzimu
shook her head. “One needs to be a
n’anga
to make those; one needs to practice
Un’anga
, the folk medicine. Or voodoo, like witches do.”

Vimbai wished she paid closer attention to her mother’s articles—she only remembered that
Un’anga
used both medicinal herbs and spiritual cures, and that most people frowned upon it nowadays. People had no use for spirits anymore, the ghost grandmother said, shaking her head from side to side. They even called the creator by a different name, just like they called their country by a wrong name. It was always the British missionaries, renaming things and demanding respect for their god, the same respect they were so unwilling to offer anyone else.

According to the
vadzimu
, the protection marks that glowed so brightly on the inside of her arms could not be made willy-nilly, by just anyone. One had to go to a
n’anga
for things like that, or to
muroyi
, the witches shrouded in mystery of such a malignant and disreputable nature that only the truly wicked and desperate dared to inquire into it. Of course, Vimbai had spent enough time with her mother to interpret it to mean that the witches were mostly unpopular with the white Christian missionaries and thoroughly vilified by same. Just another form of control, but right now it seemed of little use to her. She was more curious about the roots of the magic, the source of
muti
power.

On the other hand, she wondered at her ability to perform such magic—was it that the
vadzimu
was wrong and
muti
marks could be drawn by anyone with enough conviction? And really, how often did they get tested anyway, in the outside world so devoid of magic, be it in Harare or Atlantic City?

Or—and this is what gave Vimbai such a headache—could it be that she was special somehow, that in her genes there were little coils of African nucleotides that knew somehow about the
muti
and the scars, about protective and injurious magic alike? “This is such a stereotype,” she heard her mother’s voice in her mind, and smiled at the ridiculousness of it all. “Like being of African ancestry means that you automatically know voodoo—it’s such offensive nonsense.” Still, the thought lingered, even though she knew full well that revealing herself to be a conjure woman would be a political disaster in her mother’s eyes.

Maya and Vimbai had put Felix to bed, to let him recover from the awful draining he had just undergone and quite unsure of what else they could do for him. They convened in the kitchen by the coffee pot to survey their progress and plot further plans of action.

“It doesn’t look great,” Maya said and made a face at her black and bitter coffee. “Not terrible, but not great. Pluses: we got the crabs back, and Felix too. We know where they are. We know that your marks repel the medical men but not the fish.”

“And we still need to get Peb’s tongue back,” Vimbai said and sighed. “And I feel so bad about Felix—we should’ve protected him.”

“I’m not the queen of Felix,” Maya said, scoffing. “He took off all by himself, and we had other things to deal with, remember? Like you jumping straight into the catfish’s mouth.”

“I did not,” Vimbai objected weakly and without much conviction. “In any case, we did not protect him. But the crab souls are back, and maybe we should hide them somewhere where neither the
wazimamoto
nor the man-fish would find them.”

“Good idea,” Maya said. “Where?”

Before the word left her lips, they both knew the answer. The safest place there was—a tall hollow tower, glass and concrete, the lone platform on top where there was a coffin with an old woman, and blankets and empty candy wrappers betrayed Maya’s secret nest. “Will you take them there?” Vimbai asked. “The dogs can carry them, and no one will get to them there.”

Maya nodded. “It’s okay, I suppose, as long as it’s temporary.” She breathed a short laugh. “That’s a silly thing to say. I guess everything is temporary, especially here, right?”

“Right,” Vimbai said. “Just make sure you keep an eye out for Balshazaar.”

“I don’t think he would ever bother us again,” Maya said. “I mean, he got what he wanted, right? Felix’s universe is destroyed and he would never have to be locked up in there.”

“Maybe.” Vimbai thought about Balshazaar’s parchment skin and sunken eyes, the grotesque phantom limb fused to the withered remnant of his neck, and sighed. “I just don’t think we can trust him.”

“Of course we can’t.” Maya smiled. “We just have enough shit to worry about without him, so I’m saying don’t worry about him unless he pops up.”

“Sounds good.” Vimbai momentarily envied Maya this clarity, this ability to separate the essential from the secondary. Vimbai lacked that skill, doomed to forever swim in the soup of relative values and conjectures, where everything was conditional and everything seemed to have equal importance, always competing for her attention. It was good to have Maya around.

“Okay then,” Maya said. “I’ll go take care of the crabs. What about you?”

“I’ll try to figure out what the deal with my scars is,” Vimbai said. “I’ll check on Felix, and then I’ll figure out how to get Peb’s tongue back.”

Chapter 16

Vimbai sat by Felix’s bed, with Peb bobbing nearby like an obedient and grotesque fishing float. Felix slept, or possibly descended into a deeper and more disturbed state—his eyes flickered back and forth under the closed eyelids, like quick little mice in the grass.

Vimbai put her hand onto his forehead—smooth and cool, not a sign of fever —and considered whether she should keep it there for a while longer, to offer comfort, until he moaned and thrashed, twisting from under her hand as if it were too heavy or burned his skin.

Vimbai sighed and withdrew, under Peb’s silent and, she imagined, accusing stare. To avoid it, she studied the bare walls of Felix’s room, just slightly covered with lacy lichen and peppered moths camouflaged between the lichen patches, only their black eyes and long, twitchy antennae betraying that they were still alive. She leaned closer to one of the moths, to take a closer look at its small furry body and the delicately powdered white and gray wings. The moth fluttered, and Vimbai could hear the high-pitched squeal of the scales rubbing together and the soft whispering of the body hairs brushing against each other.

The
chipoko
stood on the threshold—Vimbai only noticed her when she looked up from the trembling velvety moth, and her gaze stumbled over her grandmother’s. She seemed as troubled and as silently accusing as Peb.
I didn’t do anything wrong
, Vimbai wanted to say, but the burning on the insides of her arms belied her innocence. Somehow, she had managed to do it to herself, Elizabeth Rosenzweig or no.

Oh, Vimbai remembered her face so well, the curve of the soft cheek fuzzed with tiny hairs only visible under direct sunlight, light and dear like the crosshatching of a peach. Same color, and, Vimbai imagined, same taste—would it be that a girl with such a sweet blush, such soft creamy cheeks was not so different from a piece of fruit, not animal but plantlike in her innocence and sugary sweetness? Bees should be following her around, attracted by the invisible dripping of soul nectar; birds should be building nests in the dark thickets of these eyelashes, long and tangled like the branches of sagebrush.

The memory ached, and the ache resonated in the curves of her inner arms, doubled and tripled and twined around her elbows as the scars puckered and reopened, rivers of gray ash shot through with some residual sparks, playing and skittering across the surface. Now it seemed that just a memory of Elizabeth was enough to bring these formerly dormant charms to life; so Vimbai decided to remember.

She was not particularly good at love—never had been, too awkward and easily discouraged, too self-conscious and ungainly. It had always been easier to back away and cry quietly after dark, so that her parents would not hear, so that her hot tears soaked into her hair and the cool cotton of the pillowcase, so that they burned her eyes like coals. It was easier to treat love as something imaginary, as something one indulged in in one’s head, guiltily yet zestily, like daydreaming. Loving Elizabeth Rosenzweig from a distance was a snap—it was even easier when they went to different colleges and never even talked anymore, since Vimbai was too preoccupied with love to have bothered to develop a friendship or even a casual bond.

The scars, she realized now, were just like those daydreams—not action but a symbol, a substitute for doing. Neither cutting nor daydreaming accomplished anything but they offered a refuge, an escape from otherwise painful thoughts—painful enough, she realized, to have possibly pushed her into action as long as she didn’t let herself become distracted. And yet, her longing was potent enough—
important
enough, she told herself—to imbue her scars with some protective magic. She made them to protect herself from having to go out there and declare her affection, and probably being rejected—to protect her from a broken heart. Who could have imagined that they actually worked?

“Enough staring, grandma,” Vimbai said. “I’m not a witch, and you know that. You should be grateful—you should be happy I have this magic, or I would’ve been dead otherwise.”

“I realize, granddaughter,” the
vadzimu
answered. “Would you like to see the crabs?”

“Yes, please.” Vimbai smiled—she missed the sight of her silent underwater army working so hard—their legs so brittle and segmented!—to get them home, despite the cold and the season and the cruelty of the man-fish. They were entirely too good, Vimbai thought, and she promised to herself to dedicate her life to making sure that horseshoe crabs were no longer chopped up for eel bait or bled into near-oblivion by the faceless monstrosities that holed up in the Cooper Hospital of the Harare of her dreams.

The weather had grown milder—the wind outside died down, and the smell of the ocean did not seem as sharp. It had grown almost spicy, heated by the tremulous and pale sun that reminded Vimbai of spring rather than fall. Could it be? No, she chased the thought away as ridiculous. No, just a slightly warmer-than-usual day, common enough at any time of the year. She waited for the
vadzimu
to enter her, to occupy the same Vimbai-shaped amount of space as she herself occupied, and pressed her face underwater.

“You are safe,” Vimbai reassured them. “Your souls are safe, waiting for you in the tallest tower where neither fish nor truck can get to them.”

The horseshoe crabs mumbled and whispered their thanks, reassured, and their legs worked faster—Vimbai watched the shadow of the house, a square small outline that did not at all match the bounty of space and landscape within, crawl and flicker over the long narrow sandbars, glide like a manta ray over the deeper trenches where small fish played in silver schools. The horseshoe crabs picked up the pace—they almost flew now, their cracking undead legs working so fast that Vimbai feared that they would suffer a final break and fall apart, splinter and disintegrate like termite-infested wood.

Vimbai was no longer terrified of the crabs’ unnatural undead state but rather felt profound pity and anxiety, now that the crabs’ souls were back and protected by the death magic of Maya’s grandmother. Vimbai did not know whether the
wazimamoto
had any ways of finding out information except for what Balshazaar and the man-fish told them. What if they had some hidden sense, the way villains always know everything in horror movies? What if even now they and their medical truck were on their way to intercept Maya and her dogs, to steal the crab souls back, to be drained and dissected, and quartered afterwards to be stuffed into eel traps, fish bait, useless in death as they were in life?

She chased these thoughts away as she watched the bubbles of her breath rising to the surface. They stretched and danced, their surface radiant, as they multiplied and shimmered and burst as soon as they reached the surface. There were none coming out of the crabs, which wasn’t surprising, but Vimbai wished she did not know that the gills—delicate feathers she had studied under the microscope so many times—remained unmoving and useless inside their chitinous shells.

“It’s okay, little crabs,” she said. “We’re going to make it home soon, and it’ll be warm and nice, and you will all come ashore and lay your eggs—there will be plenty for the birds and still there will be thousands of new crabs hatching and playing in the waves. And I’ll keep your souls safe for you.”

The crabs chittered back, excited.
Soon
, they agreed.
We know that we are close—we recognize the signs, the sandbars. We feel the scent of the familiar water, we recognize the manky stench of river silt flowing into the ocean. We know these salt marshes, we know the screeching of terns and gulls overhead. We are close, so close.

Vimbai smiled and moved to straighten—her face had grown numb under water, and the
vadzimu’
s eyes felt indistinguishable from hers, a sure sign that she had spent too much time with her grandmother’s ghost inside her, and that the two of them were at risk of confusing self with other. But before Vimbai’s face had breached the surface, she felt a blinding pain in her side and stomach, as if from a kick strong enough to knock the wind out of her, and her arms and knees buckled under her, sending her toppling sideways into the cold, cold water, where nothing but the undead crabs waited for her.

The
vadzimu
’s presence saved Vimbai—because of the ghost, she had grown more impervious to cold, and her breathing underwater, while labored, was still reasonably comfortable. She grasped the rope that linked the house above to the crabs beneath, and hovered in the thickness of water, next to the clusters of dormant crabs. Her chest and stomach still hurt, and she could feel an ugly bruise spreading under her shirt, tracking its progress with a sensation of intense heat. That would be not even a bruise but a hematoma, Vimbai thought. Of course, there was also a question of who it was that kicked her under.

Balshazaar, her own and her grandmother’s voices whispered in unison. Who else but that conniving, shriveled old man? What other appendage was capable of such a swift and decisive kick if not a phantom limb they had voluntarily given him?

She considered getting out of the water, but decided against it—surely, Balshazaar was waiting for her on the porch, waiting for her to surface and to betray that she was still alive, still presented a danger or, at the very least, an obstacle. In the water, she would be vulnerable to him—apparently, her scars did not protect from any desiccated heads (or, as far as she could tell, from anything but the
wazimamoto
, which made some twisted sense—African magic deterred African phenomena.) He could drown her or hurt her while she trod water, helpless. It would be better to wait him out, to let him think that she was gone and drowned, so that he could tell the man-fish and they both could regret that her soul fell to the horseshoe crabs instead of the wily catfish. Then, it would be safe for her to come out.

Even though she had not seen her assailant, she felt sure that it was not the
wazimamoto
—they could not come into the house. Her Kenyan babysitter was quite clear on that—she insisted that they left people in their houses alone, and only drained blood of those who were destitute enough to sleep in the streets. Poor people, migrant workers, prostitutes, homeless children—they were the preferred
wazimamoto
targets.

And then there were her scars, her protection. She wondered if the
wazimamoto
were so scared of them because they did not expect
muti
but if they would find a way to work around them. She found thinking easier in this thick green water, bobbing halfway between the bottom and the surface, a perfectly balanced float, her hand holding the rope that dragged the house home. Maybe she could stay here for all time, she thought—it wasn’t bad, and she would be perfectly positioned to study her favorite crabs, with her mind and her grandmother’s special vision and the ghostly ability to breathe underwater.

Then she worried that she would spend too much time with the ancestral spirit inside her, and that their souls would get entangled somehow, would become one. Vimbai certainly did not want to become her grandmother: even though she liked her better now than before, she still did not want the old woman’s superstition or the conviction that
muti
, the mutilation magic, was somehow good for her children. She did not want her laments of the old days and the insistence that things used to be better when the British were in charge, just like she did not want her death, her endless stories that went nowhere, her narrow-minded ways.

A memory niggled at the edges of her mind, a half-forgotten fact from a botany lecture. She remembered the delicate, steady crosshatching of her drawings, the smiley faces of monocot vascular bundles and the perforated plates of the sieve tubes. The branching of the leaf’s veins, and the delicate internal structures of the anthers and pistils. And then there was something, something else—she remembered tracing the thin fibers snaking in-between the tissues of a vine’s stem, almost invisible filaments that penetrated the plant’s food and moisture supply, coiled into every cell and narrow space between vessels.

The parasitic plant, Vimbai remembered, the thing that hid inside another plant and only became apparent when it bloomed with its horrible febrile flowers—gigantic, three feet across, red and warty white. A gruesome flower that looked like slabs of meat and stank of rotting flesh;
Rafflesia
it was called, she remembered. Still, it took her a while of silent bobbing and being dragged through the numbing cold water to realize what the flower reminded her of—she recognized in its quiet creeping the same deceiving calm and even tenderness that she had felt as the
vadzimu’
s memories blended with hers, seamlessly twining between the threads of Vimbai’s life. She recognized the imperceptible shifts and subtle rearrangements of what made Vimbai the girl that she was, she felt the memories of her first love (Elizabeth, Elizabeth, her memories and dreams sang in unison) being pushed to the side to give just a hair’s breadth more space to the memories of red soil and dry summer months, of the red dust that hung relentless in the vegetable garden, the squash and the yams ailing in the heat. Her mother’s face shifted and flowed in her memory—from a stern woman with sharp cheekbones to a soft-faced girl and back again, the marks on her face changing from fresh cuts to almost invisible scars.