The House of Discarded Dreams (8 page)

“You spoke to Peb,” Vimbai said. Not really a question, just a statement of fact heavy with implication.

“Well, yeah. You were either staring out of the window or on the porch with your face in the water and butt in the air. What was I supposed to do?”

Vimbai shrugged, pleased that Maya was so willing to have this argument rather than dismissing Vimbai’s words or denying her any demands on Maya’s time and attention. “I’m just surprised. Where are your animals?”

“Roaming somewhere.” Maya entered the cave, swallowed by the darkness, and only her voice reached Vimbai, strong and clear. “Funny thing how they always come when I call. I wonder now if everyone has a secret animal army.”

“Then why doesn’t everyone know about it?” Vimbai asked, and followed.

The cave was utterly dark, but just before Vimbai was ready to get scared and start flailing in search of a wall or anything solid, the darkness opened up before her, and she glimpsed the familiar walls with studs incompetently hidden under layers of paint, and the ‘Keep Out’ sign on Felix’s door.

Maya waited for her in the hallway. “You’ll be all right?”

Vimbai noticed that she was no longer shivering and nodded. “I’ll be fine. I’m just going to go lie down for a bit.”

“Okay. My dogs and me, we’ll go roaming for a bit, but I’ll check on you later.”

“Dogs?”

Maya laughed. “I know, but I have to call them something. They act like dogs anyway.”

Vimbai headed to her room, pushing aside the familiar curtain of dangling vines, bromeliads, and occasional orchids, their white roots twined like tortured fingers. It was pretty, she had to admit, and the shortcut from downstairs Maya showed her made her mind swell with possibilities. Maybe it was time to let the crabs do what they were doing…. And then she remembered the undead giants again and cringed.

Vimbai lay down on her bed, pulling her blanket over the one her grandmother wrapped her in. She squeezed her eyes shut, chasing away the gruesome images that crowded her retinas as if tattooed there. Funny, Vimbai thought; she was perfectly fine with the spirit of her dead grandmother making coffee in the kitchen and sometimes talking on the phone that was once again full of static and whispers, yet she refused to contemplate undead creatures. Spirits seemed cleaner to her, uncontaminated by rot and flesh. There was purity about the ghost, a creature of mere spirit, with its human flaws falling away, leaving the clean burning fire of the soul. The
vadzimu
was above and beyond her razorblades and her belief that politics was only relevant when it interfered with her vegetable garden.

Warmth came gradually, and Vimbai did not notice the exact moment when she no longer felt cold. She snuggled into the blankets as if they were a nest, and smiled. Tomorrow, she thought, tomorrow she would feel better and she would go roaming with Maya and her dogs, and would not think about the terror that dragged their house along, crawling across the sandy bottom on rotten broken legs. She would forget the aggressive shrubs and the hospital smell that still lingered in her room.

“Wake up, Vimbai, wake up, wake up.” The voice droned as if from a great distance, and for a while it was possible for Vimbai to pretend that the voice was a part of her dream. Then a hand shook her shoulder unceremoniously, and she opened her eyes, annoyed.

Felix’s hair had grown restless since she last saw him—it reared up and guttered like flames in the wind, reached out to lap at Vimbai’s pillow. One especially long and hungry tongue stretched toward her face but Felix batted it away, his hand disappearing momentarily.

Vimbai pushed herself up on her elbows and yawned widely, too tired to care. “What?” she said. “Why’d you wake me?”

“I am troubled,” Felix said. “We are out of beer.”

Vimbai sat up, awake now. “Are those separate statements, or are you troubled because we are out of beer?”

“Separate.” Felix sighed, miserable. “Although lack of beer doesn’t help.”

“What’s the problem?”

“There are things happening . . . up there.” Felix pointed upward to his hair, in a small gesture as if afraid that the hair would notice. “I don’t know what to do. There were things . . . crawling out of there, and I didn’t know anything could leave there.”

“What sorts of things?” Vimbai asked.

Felix shuddered. “Dead things. With legs and long spiky tails, just last night. I woke up and almost died, I swear.”

Vimbai swallowed and hugged her knees to her chest to ward off the chill thrumming along her spine. “They are the ones pulling the house now. But what were they doing in your hair?”

“I dunno,” Felix sobbed.

“You said your hair separates things,” Vimbai said slowly. The hypothesis was starting to form in her mind but lacked shape, and Vimbai hoped to coax it into proper expression by verbalizing it. “So there were crabs, undead ones, separated from their lives. In your hair. So I assume they crawled in there first, without you noticing.”

“I was sleeping,” Felix said and glared defensively, his eyes staring in opposite directions, giving him a simultaneously angry and confused look.

“They said it was too cold to go to New Jersey,” Vimbai said. “Maybe they decided to become undead to get us there.”

“A hell of a sacrifice,” Felix said. “But . . . you were in there.”

“Partially.”

“And yet your soul did not leave you.”

“I know,” Vimbai said. A thought skimmed at the edge of her consciousness, too fast to grasp properly. “Say, do you know anything about man-fish?
Njuzu
?”

“No,” Felix said. “What’s that?”

“It’s a Zimbabwean urban legend,” Vimbai answered. “It’s a fish who swallows the souls of the drowned, and then it itself becomes sort of human. Like it can talk and stuff.”

“You thinking it might work with crabs?”

“I don’t know,” Vimbai said. “Only my grandmother was talking about man-fish, and then I dreamed that I was one. And then Maya’s pets are afraid of fish.”

“And then there’s the house that attracts ghosts.”

“And your hair.”

They sat a while, puzzling, unable to tease any sense from the conglomeration of occurrences and half-baked ideas. That was the trouble with the supernatural, Vimbai thought—you didn’t know what laws ruled it, and what was a coincidence and what was a sign and what was weird and what wasn’t. It was like a whodunit, only the clues refused to be arranged into any sort of hierarchy or a straight narrative, and most of the time it wasn’t even clear if they indeed were clues; a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces were blank.

Felix’s mind was apparently on the same track. “It’s like life,” he said. “I just don’t know what matters and what doesn’t and what I should pay attention to. But these crabs, they were just creepy.”

“They are victims,” Vimbai said, although she was not so sure about the undead variety. “They . . . they are killed and bled half to death, and thrown back in the ocean. And it’s not just about them—so many birds feed on their eggs, and without feeding they cannot migrate. They would die without the crabs—these crabs carry so much on their backs.”

Felix nodded. “Is this why you’re studying them?”

“Uh-huh,” Vimbai said. “And because they are so ancient . . . and we can kill something so ancient, so irreplaceable. It’s just wrong, you know?”

“I didn’t see it as a moral issue.”

“All conservation is a moral issue,” Vimbai said, and thought of her grandmother downstairs. “Be it animals or people or cultures. Some things are just . . . unique, and if you lose them, you can never get them back.”

Felix touched his hair, cautiously. “I think this thing is unique.”

“Probably,” Vimbai agreed. “God, I hope so.”

“You want to look inside again?”

Vimbai shrugged. “Maybe. Why don’t you take Balshazaar out and ask him if he saw any crabs or if he knows anything?”

Felix slumped. “I knew he would tell you,” he said. “I shouldn’t have taken him out, only you have to understand. What, you think it’s easy living with this thing?”

“I don’t know,” Vimbai said. “What is it like, and where did it come from?”

“It was a long time ago, sister,” Felix said. “I don’t even know what I remember and what I imagined. Does it matter?”

“I don’t know. Listen, if you want to talk, maybe we should go for a walk or something. You can show me around.”

“I haven’t seen much myself,” Felix answered. “But there is a place that’s sort of nice. I’ll wait for you outside.”

Vimbai waited for the door to close behind Felix, and got dressed. She really needed to get some laundry done, and she quickly gave up on finding matching socks. One white and one striped, it didn’t matter. Thankfully, t-shirts and shorts were abundant.

Felix led her down the hallway and into a closet that abruptly transitioned into a view of a desert, with a lake in the middle of it. The sand surrounding it was red and dry like Kalahari, apparently unaware of the abundance of clear, cold water in its midst. The sun was getting warm, and Felix offered Vimbai a handkerchief to cover her hair; she accepted with a muttered thanks.

A couple of lawn chairs reclined by the bank, surrounded by a sparse growth of dried up grasses and papier-mâché trees, tall enough to reach Vimbai’s knee.

“Maya doesn’t come here,” Felix said. “There’s fish in this lake.”

“What kind?”

“Take a seat and you’ll see.”

Vimbai did, and Felix took the other chair. They sat in silence, watching the smooth surface of the lake, gray and reflective like mercury, until there was a loud splash and a fish came bounding out of the water and into the air. It somersaulted and entered the water. Vimbai did not need a second look to confirm what she knew from the moment Felix mentioned Maya—it was a catfish, and a large one at that.

As they watched, the catfish stuck its flat head out of the water and gave them a narrow-eyed, jaundiced look. “You have a tasty soul,” it said to Vimbai, and leered.

Chapter 8

Back in her room, Vimbai could not calm down her heart. She was too disturbed to be really embarrassed about running away from a fish, and only a small measure of her discomfort resulted from her recent show of cowardice. Not that Felix cared—he seemed to have fears of his own, fears of undead things that somehow crawled into his hair and separated their bodies from their mortality. That was enough to make anyone nervous.

They sat on Vimbai’s bed, like scared children, and occasionally one or the other would steal a quick look at the door, as if the catfish would somehow follow them here. It was silly, of course, Vimbai told herself, just like it was silly of her to shower with her eyes open for weeks after seeing a horror flick. But some things were just not subject to rational reasoning, and recently that particular mode of relating to the world had been taking one hit after another.

“We have to talk to Balshazaar,” Felix said. “I have to know what he’d seen. Only I don’t think I should take him out again.”

“Why not?” Vimbai breathed a nervous laugh. “He’ll fit right in with the psychic energy baby and the undead crabs.”

Felix winced. “Don’t remind me,” he said, and stood up.

Vimbai watched him pace from door to the window, until he noticed the phantom limb he’d given Vimbai the same day Peb joined them.

He smiled. “You still have this thing.”

“What else would I do with it?”

“Give it to Peb.”

“I like it,” Vimbai said. “ And Peb has plenty already. It seems so . . . delicate.” The limb indeed resembled a work of art with its translucent veins and milky nerves twisting below the glassy skin like tree branches.

“Take it with you when you go talk to Balshazaar,” Felix said. “If you convince him to come out, maybe he can use it to get around.”

Vimbai raised her eyebrows. “Somehow you bypassed the point where I agreed to look back there. Besides, you just said that it wasn’t a good idea to take him out.”

“I don’t know.” Felix stopped pacing, his eyes simultaneously expressing great consternation in opposite directions. “Maybe you could look inside and see if there are still any crabs left there. I’m afraid . . . afraid to put my hand in there.”

“So you want me to risk my face.”

“You at least can see.”

“What if it takes my soul?”

“It didn’t before.”

Vimbai thought that after jumping blind into a cold ocean she really ought to know better. Instead she sighed and carefully eased her head inside Felix’s hair.

Balshazaar was there, floating vaguely as was his wont. “Hello again,” he said.

“Balshazaar,” Vimbai said. “Have you seen any horseshoe crabs around?”

“Sure did.” Balshazaar bobbed, his chin pointing to his left.

It took Vimbai’s eyes a moment to get used to the dusk in Felix’s hair, and she saw several small translucent crabs that clung together in a tight cluster. The souls or lives or whatever it was they shed like old carapaces and left behind, just so they could take Vimbai back home. Acute pity made her catch her breath and whisper, “I’m sorry” to the crabs. They remained motionless, devoid of any spark that would indicate that they could hear and understand her.

“Balshazaar,” Vimbai continued. “Would you help us? There are things happening we don’t quite understand, and since you had a chance to observe the happenings here, perhaps you could explain them to us. Figure out what’s going on.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“A leg,” Vimbai said. “A phantom leg, but it is nonetheless functional.”

“Interesting,” Balshazaar drawled. “Why so nice?”

Vimbai considered telling him that she was usually nice, but instead settled for a reason he was more likely to believe. “We need you.”

“I’ll help you,” Balshazaar said. “Only I’m not sure if I even want to leave here—it’s nice. Secure. Bring the leg and then ask your questions. However, know that I promise nothing.”

Vimbai extricated herself from the pocket universe, and reported on what she had seen. At the mention of the horseshoe crabs’ souls, Felix made a small sound of terror.

“It’s all right,” Vimbai said. “They are not doing anything. And they are much smaller and a lot less scary than the ones that crawled out.”

Felix shook his head and the long tongues of his hair stretched and contracted, reminding Vimbai of the way leeches moved—she had observed them in her invertebrate zoology class, and was endlessly fascinated by how they managed to grow long and thin one moment, and short and stout the next.

“I’ll give him the leg,” Vimbai decided, “and ask him about what else he saw. And what he knows about fish.”

“Not yet,” Felix answered. “Let me think about that. I’m not sure I really believe him.”

And so Vimbai was left alone again, while Felix retired to his room to do his thinking. He puzzled her—his inability to make up his mind and his frank terror at the things living in his hair surprised and bothered Vimbai. He should’ve had enough time to come to terms with it, she thought, especially since he had been so nonchalant about extricating the Psychic Energy Baby from the phone wires. It took her a while to realize that he never got around to telling her about how he came to wear a personal-sized black hole around his head. Then again, men were good at avoiding questions.

She remembered how excited her mother had been when they traveled to Harare—especially excited to see her favorite nephew and Vimbai’s cousin Roger. Roger seemed to be one of those kids who were so great one could never hope to compare to them—and Vimbai resented Roger before she even met him, even though he was not a kid anymore, but already a grown man, with a wife and intentions of starting his own business. Vimbai’s mother talked to him on the phone for hours, making plans, and phone bills be damned.

When they had arrived, Roger was not home—he was not in Harare at all. The relatives said that he was on vacation, but by their sidelong glances and uncomfortable shuffling, Vimbai surmised that the vacation was a polite lie. Roger’s wife had stayed home, and nobody seemed to know anything about his destination. Vimbai’s mother did not believe the excuses either—she became thin-lipped and taciturn, and did not again mention Roger until they went back home.

It was two years later that Vimbai and Roger finally met. Roger had started his business—something to do with laptops or some other technology Vimbai had only pragmatic interest in, and he traveled to the US under some business pretense or other. In truth, they all knew that he wanted to see Vimbai’s mother who was never good about hiding her disappointments—they came through even in long-distance phone calls.

Roger arrived on schedule, and quickly filled the house with his laugh that seemed to be coming directly from his diaphragm and his expansive gestures. He was smaller than Vimbai expected, and sadder—when he thought that no one was watching him. He did not have to apologize—he only hugged Vimbai’s mother until she cried and hugged him back. Roger said, “I’m sorry, Auntie,” and that was that.

But not as far as Vimbai was concerned. Roger was difficult not to like but she persevered, helped by the eternal teenage sullenness. She watched him across the table, her arms crossed in front of her with disapproval. For all his laughing and joking and telling stories and flashing pictures of his baby son, he noticed.

“What’s the matter, Vimbai, cousin?” he asked her one day. Normally, Vimbai would’ve avoided a direct confrontation, but he caught up with her as she exited the bathroom, and there was simply no missing each other in the narrow hallway. “Did I do something to tick you off?”

“You blew off my mom when we went to Harare,” Vimbai said.

He whistled. “That was a long time ago,
muroora
,” he said. “You don’t forget, do you? Take after your mom.”

“Where were you then?” Vimbai said. “Just don’t say vacation, or I’ll have to slap you.”

He laughed unexpectedly. “Why do you care so much?”

“You should’ve seen her face,” Vimbai said. “She really missed you then, and you weren’t there. She cried every night.”

“That did not necessarily have anything to do with me,” Roger said and frowned. It was strange to see him in their suburban wallpapered hallway, blue cornflowers on white background.

“Still.” Vimbai leaned against the wall, her shoulder pushing against the familiar solidity of the wall. “Tell me.”

“And you’ll forgive me.”

“Depends.”

“No.” He shook his finger with emphasis. “You forgive your cousin, okay? And then I’ll show you.”

She shrugged. “Okay. What did you want to show me?”

He turned his back to her, and Vimbai thought that he was about to head back to his room to bring some evidence—pictures or flowers or whatever to make it all right. Instead, Roger carefully eased the hem of his white shirt from his belt, partially obscured by his nascent love handles, and pulled it up.

Vimbai stared at the very white and very straight scar that slashed diagonally across the left half of his lower back. At first, she thought that it was a particularly vicious
muti
mark, or some other creepy magic her grandmother believed in and that required mutilation. “What is it?” she said.

“A scar.” Roger lowered his shirt and turned to face her, blushing. “You’re such a curious little cousin, and I just met you and you already asking me questions my wife wouldn’t ask me.”

“Maybe she should. What is it?”

He sighed. “I needed money to start my business. Twenty thousand dollars—where would I get that?”

“It’s a lot of money,” Vimbai said. Especially in Africa, she thought. That was a fortune enough to propel one forward in life, not just pay off student loans or credit card bills.

“Yes. So I sold a kidney.”

She stared into his face looking for traces of jocularity, but he was serious, and the scar real. She felt herself blush. “I’m sorry I was a bitch to you, Roger,” she said.

He waved his hand in the air. “Don’t mention it, sister. And don’t tell your mom. Believe me, some things only you want to know.”

Vimbai had to agree as she remembered this conversation. She seemed to have a talent of getting hung up on questions everyone around her circumvented so smoothly—if people were leaves floating on the river surface, Vimbai would be the one that always got stuck against every obstacle, no matter how trivial and easy to bypass.

And now something else was nagging at her. She thought of the man-fish and how he manifested as soon as Vimbai dreamt him; then there was the
vadzimu
, who appeared when Vimbai imagined her as an entity that kept her and her mother so much apart. Now, the memory of Roger worried at her heart in the same way. What did it mean? she asked herself. Why did Felix’s reluctance to speak remind her of her cousin?

The scar. That was it, the way Roger hid his scar and its origin. Vimbai jumped to her feet and rushed to Felix’s room.

He was there, doing nothing, and only looked vaguely up when Vimbai came busting through the door.

“It’s a scar, isn’t it?” Vimbai said.

“Yes,” he said, paling.

How does a man become a scar, or at any rate end up wearing one around his head? Only Felix knew, what it was like to cut an umbilicus that bound one to the universe that bore him, and to wear the spectral navel that still festered with the remnants of the enclosed space and its dark inhabitants. A dying tiny universe, and poor Felix dangled on the end of it, like a superfluous appendage.

And unlike the Psychic Energy Baby, he could never hope to disentangle himself from the wires that kept him suspended, the appearance of him standing on the ground a mere illusion. Still, he managed a small unconvincing smile. “I didn’t know how to tell you or Maya. Or even what to tell you. And I still don’t understand how the two of you play into it—you’re dragging all those ghosts with you. And her, I don’t even know.”

“I’m dragging everything with me,” Vimbai answered. “Even Africa—only it’s not my parents’ Africa, it’s an imaginary one.”

“What is Maya dragging?”

Vimbai shrugged. There were the half-foxes, of course, and there was the wild streak, the talk of being queens of some imaginary kingdom, be it New Jersey or somewhere else. For the first time, Vimbai thought that it might not be a bad idea—perhaps Maya was the expression of their purpose, the reason for them being here, at sea, floating somewhere . . . or perhaps standing still. Or perhaps the house stood still as the world moved under it, offering its watery and glistening curving back as they slid inexplicably toward some destiny, some mystical version of New Jersey.

The house . . . Vimbai gasped a little and sat down on Felix’s unmade bed. “All of us,” she said. “It’s the three of us—your blind universe and my ghosts and Maya’s dogs. We did it to the house.”

“I assumed as much,” Felix agreed. “So what?”

“So maybe we can control it,” Vimbai said. “Maybe we can make it into something we want.”

“Like what?” Felix asked, perking up.

“I don’t know.” Vimbai thought of the curdled milk in Maya’s coffee and wrinkled her nose. “ShopRite, for starters. Or Farmers’ Market, whatever. Something that sells food and milk. I’m really sick of canned ravioli.”