The House of Discarded Dreams (7 page)

In high school, she wondered if perhaps she was a lesbian—she had a short but intense crush on a classmate named Elizabeth Rosenzweig, a tall British girl with long black hair who looked at everything as if it were too boring to even bother raising her eyelids all the way up for. They had a lot of classes together, and sat next to each during lunch, each thinking desperately of something to say to the other. Vimbai treasured one time they had stayed after school together because Elizabeth needed to copy a part of some assignment Vimbai and she were doing together, and her smooth cool hand touched Vimbai’s, chapped and burning.

When Elizabeth went away for the summer, Vimbai missed her with the pointless urgency of first love, and she cut shallow marks into the insides of her arms and thighs—they had healed completely, but if one knew they were there, they could be seen as thin lines slightly paler than the rest of her skin, now just an annoying reminder of past foolishness.

When Vimbai started college, her classes preoccupied her too much to worry about not having a boyfriend or a girlfriend or some sort of significant other. It amused her to think that if she delayed dating long enough, her mother would be relieved if she brought home anyone—even a girl; even a British girl. Perhaps some day she would run into Elizabeth again, maybe at the mall or the coffee shop down the street, when Elizabeth visited home during the break—she went to college out of state. And maybe then they would reminisce and go to the movies, and at least then Vimbai would not have to worry about dating for a while. This passing thought grew into a justification with time—at least, Vimbai used it as an excuse to keep to herself and avoid any possibility of romantic involvement.

She considered it now, and wondered at the relief a part of her felt at being stranded at sea with some ghosts and two roommates—at least, she did not have to explain herself here all the time. And there was no possibility of Elizabeth showing up here, and making Vimbai feel awkward and inarticulate.

“Is there something wrong with me?” she asked the
vadzimu
. “I mean, shouldn’t I want to love somebody?”

The ghost shook her head and patted Vimbai’s hand. “There’s nothing wrong with you or anyone here.”

Vimbai smiled and moved closer, as if to cuddle up to the old woman—but then remembered the razorblades. She settled for touching the
chipoko’s
hand instead. It felt (and, Vimbai supposed, was) immaterial, just a little warmer than air and light—yet solid enough to hold, just like Peb.

“Peb is falling asleep,” Vimbai said. “Why don’t you tell him a story?”

Grandmother smiled. “I suppose I could. Which one do you want?”

Vimbai shrugged. “Whatever you like.”

“I do know quite a few,” grandmother warned. “But I suppose there’s no harm.”

Her voice soothed Peb and made Vimbai sleepy. She dipped in and out of sleep, like a fisherman’s bob on the surface of water, catching brief snatches of serpentine and seemingly endless stories about baboons and rabbits and other animals who all had active social lives and spoke on the phone a lot. Just as the sun rose in front of the window (they were heading east, it seemed), a word her grandmother said jolted her awake.

“Man-fish,” grandmother said.

Vimbai sat up. “Is that from Marechera’s book? I didn’t know you read him.”

“It’s not just from the book,” grandmother said. “It’s a
nyaya
, a myth. Everyone knows it’s not really true, but we tell it anyway, because it always contains truth, and not the boring part of it.”

“Will you tell me?” Vimbai said.

The
vadzimu
nodded. “Sleep, granddaughter, and you will see everything you need.”

Vimbai rested her head on the windowsill and dozed off, lulled by the quiet lapping of the waves against the house wall outside and the soft whining of the Psychic Energy Baby.

Her dreams, just like her eyes underwater, seemed an amalgam of her own and her grandmother’s notions—a rather disconcerting situation, since the blend of the two had the quality of a comical nightmare about it. She dreamed of a broad river, Limpopo perhaps, or maybe Zambezi. There was rumbling of turbulent water off in a distance, but Vimbai stared at the smooth surface and large shallows by the bank. Her feet sank into the muddy soil, and a few grass stems brushed against her bare ankles. It looked like a good place for a swim, and she jumped into the warm muggy water cannonball-style, releasing a plume of spray and pungent, green smell of the river water.

She opened her eyes underwater, and squinted against swarms of silt particles that swirled before her, carried by the turbulence of her dive. She spotted a hippo with a calf, but remembered that she was just dreaming, and swam past them with nonchalance. A string of bubbles rose from her lips, but she breathed easily underwater, and she swam through the wide flats overgrown with grass, and into the deep channel of the river. There, she noticed that there was no more air escaping her lungs, and that she likely had no lungs left—her feet had fused into a wide lobed tail, and brown patterns covered her skin. A pair of whiskers hung from her lip and registered every disturbance in the flow of water. Vimbai did not need a mirror to figure out that she was now a catfish, and she sank all the way to the bottom and rested in the mud, feeling, listening.

A catfish can grow very large, and they do it by staying close to the bottom, eating anything organic, and growing fast enough to quickly become too large for most predators—crocodiles, perhaps, would still be a threat to a giant catfish, but catfish did not become large by being careless. The mud and the brown color of their skin protected them from view.

Something stirred in the water—catfish’s whiskers sensed a wild thrashing, like a panicked impala trying to wrench free of a crocodile’s jaws. The catfish headed in the direction of the commotion, staying close to the bottom, stealthy and cunning.

Catfish would eat pretty much anything. If there was a hunt, a death, they would pick up whatever remains fell to the bottom. And if the victim was a person—well, so much the better, so much more to pick up and savor.

It was a stupid boy who had decided to go swimming after a large dinner. He swam too far from the shore when a spasm in his belly twisted him into a knot, and his nose and mouth flooded with the taste of rich river mud. A stronger or a more composed swimmer would not have drowned—he would’ve calmed himself down and bobbed on the water, breathing, waiting for the spasm to pass. But not a scared boy who thrashed more as water flooded his mouth and his belly grew heavy with the river he swallowed. And everyone knows that a river is simply too large for a human child.

When the boy stopped writhing and sank quietly to the bottom, pulled along by the weight of river in his belly, catfish moved closer. He had no teeth to tear the flesh, and he waited patiently for those who would cut the boy open and let the catfish feed on morsels they dropped in their frenzy—bits of intestine, shreds of skin were welcome; being a catfish, he was not picky. But then he found something he did not expect.

There was fluttering in the water, a movement too small to notice for anyone but a fish with sensitive whiskers. It went past his face, and even though he could not see anything with his nearsighted beady eyes, the catfish opened his mouth and slammed it shut, and felt a small wriggling in his belly. It was the soul of the drowned boy, and the catfish became aware.

Vimbai—her consciousness still distinct within the tiny dull mind of the fish—wondered what the fish would do, and what would happen to the soul of the boy. It bloomed side by side with hers, filling the catfish with a new sense. His small eyes snapped open, and he saw the river for the first time, like he had never seen it before. Even though his eyes were weak, he discerned every undulation of the bottom, every silvery flash of the passing fish. He watched the water turn from green to red as the crocodiles arrived and started their meal; he watched with curiosity as his former body was torn apart by snapping jaws. He ate a few dropped morsels, but the hunger—the forever hunger that propels every catfish forward—had subsided, dulled by curiosity and flood of new sensations as the minds of the boy and the fish circled each other, sizing each other up. Vimbai remained an observer, lodged there in the catfish’s mind like a foreign body, a dream splinter.

The catfish—or man-fish as he called himself—grew older and larger by the year, and the boy inside became a part of him. He remembered everything the boy remembered—the faces of his family and how many chickens they had, the name of the prettiest girl in his village, the address of some relatives in Harare. But the memories became mere decorations, baubles suspended in the vast and labyrinthine mind of the fish. He grew more cunning and more clever, but not more compassionate or introspective. He remained a catfish at heart, and he always hoped for another body and another soul.

Chapter 7

The next morning they were still at sea; the waves were more restless than ever before—they reared up and flung their foam-topped crests against the walls of the house and expired in salty sprays. Vimbai ran from one window to the next, clearing away either meat or succulent green tendrils that always grew across the panes when she was not watching, anxious for any sign of motion. But the waves masked whatever trail the house had been leaving, and she feared that they had stalled or the ropes had torn or the crabs had died. The memory of her man-fish dream came back, and she imagined the scavenger fish crawling onto the nets, squeezing into the crab and eel traps to devour the gruesome bait left for them by the fishermen.

She imagined her horseshoe crabs now, dead on the cold pebbled bottom of the ocean, devoured by the wily fish—and, she thought, those fish would devour Vimbai’s soul as well. If the crabs followed her because they had some connection to her, then, Vimbai reasoned, a fish could potentially get to Vimbai. More and more she relied on her grandmother’s way of thinking, and with every passing minute the urge to check on the crabs grew stronger, almost physical, in her chest.

And yet, they had warned her. There were fairytales and forebodings, there was fear. Vimbai felt just like she did when she was little, when her mother left her by the supermarket’s entrance and told her to wait. Vimbai waited until the thoughts swarmed: what if mother left without her? What if she forgot about Vimbai? What if she fell and needed help? She knew that she should wait, but anxiety would get the better of her every time and she would go looking, and then they would spend a good half-hour looking for each other along the endless rows of shelves that seemed to house everything except whatever one was looking for at the moment.

Before the memory finished flashing through her mind, Vimbai knew that she would have to check on the horseshoe crabs—whatever fairytale punishment was reserved for her would surely be better than the agony of not knowing and yet driving herself desperate with anxious imaginings, just like her mother’s yelling at Vimbai for not staying put was far better than waiting in one spot.

She headed down the hallway but found that the steps leading downstairs had been overgrown by a particularly prickly variety of barberry bushes. She tried to struggle down the stairs, but the thorns left painful scratches on her arms and legs. Vimbai wished she had the machete they kept in the kitchen, behind the stove. She called for Maya or Felix, but no help or even answer came.

She tried to push through the prickly bushes but they pushed right back, gouging deep marks into her shoulders, tearing at her jeans like angry claws. She retreated and the bushes followed, pushing her into her room with unseemly glee. She backed away until her room was overgrown by barberry and a particularly nasty medicinal smell, and her back was pressed against the windowsill and thorny branches studded with bright red berries waved in her face. Only then she realized that the vegetation inside the house was rarely so aggressive, and felt the first prickling of fear and sting of her sweat in the new scratches on her forehead.

Vimbai had no other recourse but to open the window. It was close enough to the surface of water, Vimbai reasoned, and she could easily swim to the porch—despite the cold, she felt confident that the distance was short enough to cover with two or three long strokes. Plus, it would give her an excuse to sneak a look at the crabs, and then she would get the machete and deal with the insolent vegetation. She drew in a deep breath and pushed through the window, dangling ungracefully for a moment and then plunging, head first.

She did not expect the cold to be so cutting—the embrace of steel-cold water tightened around her chest, and Vimbai sucked in a breath and reached for the porch. It bobbed farther away than she expected, and with the resignation of someone in a bad dream she realized that the house was moving away. She tried to swim, but her lungs felt frozen and heavy, and her legs and arms weighed her down with useless bone and cramped muscle.

She called for help then, her voice too small to be heard in the house. Her legs kicked hard as she tried not to let panic set in, and she called for the crabs, for her grandmother, for anyone to come and help her. Her legs leaden, her arms useless, she felt herself slipping, sinking under the surface, and with no grandmother to keep her warm to guide her vision, there was only murky water; it poured into her mouth and filled her stomach, heavy like a brick.

And then, a hand—several hands, several arms, as many as an octopus, lifting her, pulling her head above the water. Several legs kicking by her, various in size, but all strong. Vimbai recognized Peb. She was too muddled and cold to feel real surprise, just extreme gratitude. So there was a reason why the silly thing was attaching every phantom limb it could find to itself.

And then, the porch swam into her field of vision, and she reached out her hand—clawed, unfeeling—to hook it on the edge. Peb helped her up, dragging her out of the water, and held her, protective and sympathetic, as she retched what felt like gallons of seawater. Her teeth would not stop chattering.

Maya and Vimbai’s grandmother came out of the kitchen and hustled her inside, to sit close to the stove they turned on for just that purpose, and to be rubbed by large fluffy towels. Vimbai was too muddled to make sense of their exclamations, and only felt vague irritation when they persistently shook her by the shoulder and kept asking if she was okay and if she could feel her feet and fingers.

“Hypothermia,” Maya kept repeating. “This ain’t good.”

The ghost brought blankets and warmed them by the open oven, and Peb hovered nearby. Vimbai closed her eyes—all the movement and noise distracted her from something nagging at the back of her mind, persistently enough to distract her from the fact that she had nearly drowned.

And like a photograph in a vat of developer, the image appeared in the black background of her eyelids. It was a palimpsest of the image she had seen underwater but was too frightened to absorb at the time. Now, it stood before her with a steady clarity.

She saw the ropes stretched taut and the horseshoe crabs festooned along them all the way from the bottom to the foundation. They did not pull but were carried—and Vimbai cried out and opened her eyes once she discerned the beasts that did all the pulling.

“She’s in shock,” Maya said to the ghosts, and patted Vimbai’s hand. “Hang in there, sweetheart. You’ll be fine, you just have to warm up a little.”

Vimbai just shivered in response, thinking of the monsters—giant, ancient—pulling the house along. Monsters that left deep gouges in the sand, barnacles on their cracked carapaces, their eyes rotted out, their tails broken. They moved on clawed legs covered in cracked exoskeleton, exposing rotting bits of their flesh. Hagfish followed them, occasionally swimming up and ripping out chunks of putrid flesh, and still they moved—gigantic, undead horseshoe crabs, animated by some ancient and unknown will.

The
vadzimu
took Vimbai’s hands into hers. “What have you seen, granddaughter?”

Vimbai shook her head and looked away, afraid that the terrible vision would leak from her eyes into her grandmother’s. She did not want to share, not just yet—sometimes one had to be alone with knowledge to absorb the enormity of it. Sure, a burden shared was lighter, but sometimes one needed to appreciate the entire weight so that the future relief would seem all the more precious. So Vimbai swallowed and stared out of the window, feeling blood pulsing in her lips, warming them.

The kettle blew a sharp whistle, and Maya hurried to make her a cup of tea. Vimbai swallowed the scalding fluid, not caring that the skin in her mouth peeled, her stomach filling with warmth—filling with life, and the sensation was enough to chase away the terrible image crowding her mind.

She tried to make sense of it, as she always did—when she was little, she was taught that any problem had a solution, and if one just jiggled the pieces a little and squinted, looked at them sideways, then the general pattern would become apparent and everything would fit, suddenly, in a flash.

When she became older, she learned that some problems resisted such treatment—they were solved not by a flash of inspiration and sudden insight but by tedious, boring work—and too often, one did not truly solve them, just demonstrated enough of the ability to think to earn a passing grade, but the solution of the problem remained unknown.

But neither inspirational nor incremental approaches helped her to deal with the undead crabs. She was willing to accept that the house and the three housemates plus assorted ghosts fit together, that the horseshoe crabs were their allies and the fishes who devoured souls were enemies; she could live with her ability to control the crabs, just like she could forgive Maya her half-foxes and Felix his desiccated heads. But she could not move past the simple acceptance and start finding answers to why and how and who and for what purpose. She could only shiver in front of the stove and drink tea.

The two worldviews were at an impasse again, and there was not much Vimbai could do besides trying to incorporate them both; pinning them against each other so that either one would yield answers seemed far beyond her capabilities.

“Why did you jump into the water?” Maya asked, apparently judging Vimbai to have recovered enough.

“I couldn’t take the stairs,” Vimbai said. “I was attacked by the shrubs, and didn’t have a knife. I called, but no one came. There were prickly shrubs chasing me all the way to my room, and they smelled like a hospital.”

Maya arched her eyebrows. “I haven’t seen them, but if you say so. It was still a stupid thing to do.”

“I know,” Vimbai said. “But it’s not like there were other options.”

“There are always other options,” Maya said. “Come on, I’ll take you to your room, and I’ll show you a workaround for the stairs. And then you’ll go to bed and sleep and feel better, okay?”

“Okay,” Vimbai agreed and stood up, still shivering, clutching the warm blanket gathered at her neck.

The
chipoko
picked up Vimbai’s t-shirt and skirt off the floor. “Don’t worry, I’ll dry your clothes and bring them to you. Go rest now.”

Vimbai followed Maya, sulking a little—how come everyone but herself knew about this workaround? Then she remembered sitting by the window while Maya explored, but didn’t feel better for it.

Maya led them into the living room and opened the doors of the cabinet that housed assorted plates, dishes and knickknacks they didn’t quite have a place for. The knickknacks were gone now, subsumed by a path carefully marked in white sand, leading into a copse of tall and narrow trees—they lined the path like columns, and their branches twined overhead, creating a filigreed tunnel, black against the pale grey sky.

“Where are we?” Vimbai asked.

“Pantry,” Maya said, and shot her a smoldering look. “You really need to get to know the house, you know. It’s getting bigger every day.”

“But why?” Vimbai whispered, overwhelmed with the weight of accumulated disbelief. “What is happening to us?”

“Who knows?” Maya shrugged. “Who cares? Enjoy it while you can, why don’t you? There will be tons of boring shit in your life, okay? I promise.”

“Okay,” Vimbai sighed and followed along the path, next to a very clear and very fast brook that silvered between the trees. The path turned into a doorway Vimbai did not recognize, past a few skinned couches and a folded ladder dripping fresh white paint. Vimbai decided not to ask, since the questions were likely to yield only additional frustration instead of answers.

Maya grabbed her hand and squeezed hard. “Look, Vimbai,” she said. “It doesn’t matter why or how, don’t you understand? Back home, girls like us, we’re nothing. We work hard and make good, and sometimes someone might compliment you for it. But we don’t run things; they are run by white guys and rich people. And here, now . . . we make the rules, see? It’s ours. Maybe the house will grow bigger, and we’ll get some milk from ShopRite and come back here. We can be queens here, queens of all we see, of crabs and ghosts and oceans. We can float like this forever, and no one will ever tell us what to do.”

“What about Felix?” Vimbai said.

“What about him?”

“Nothing. Just haven’t seen him in a while.”

Maya shrugged and let go of Vimbai’s hand with one last squeeze. “You can be the queen of Felix if you want, I don’t mind.”

Vimbai wished Maya would hold her hands just a bit longer. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, it sounds nice. But we’re going back, you know? This feels like make-believe. A pretend world that doesn’t really matter. Wouldn’t you rather matter in the real world?”

“The queen of New Jersey,” Maya drawled, and laughed. “Maybe.”

They rounded the last outcropping of furniture and rock covered in what looked like fur, and Maya pointed at the mouth of a cave that yawned at them from between two striped signposts. “See? Can’t miss it.”

“Where does it lead to?” Vimbai asked.

“The hallway by Felix’s room,” Maya answered. “It’s interesting, both Peb and I noticed it—no matter how much this house changes, the paths stay constant. So you can’t get lost. Well, you could, but not really, not for long.”