The House of Discarded Dreams (13 page)

The skeleton’s grinning mouth moved close to Munashe’s face, breathing out the smell of liquor and stale meat. It drew a great breath, and Munashe felt millions of tiny teeth gnawing on him, moving under his skin, shaving off his flesh pound by pound, yet never spilling any blood or damaging his skin.

When he opened his eyes, the skeleton seemed bigger and fatter—as much as a skeleton can be fat. He nodded to Munashe and got into his car. “Tomorrow night wait here for my uncle. He’ll help you.”

“Wait!” Munashe waved his arms after the Cadillac as it started its graceful ascent. “What’s your name?”

“Fungai,” the skeleton answered, and he and the Cadillac were gone, swallowed by the weakly glowing branches.

The next day, Munashe felt weak but almost cheerful as went about his task. Tendai and Robert, the monkey brothers, noticed, and each gave him a vicious smack and an ear-boxing. Even that could not dispel Munashe’s good mood, and he grinned through the tears.

“Ah, you’re learning,” Tapiwa said. The living shroud of maggots that simmered on her back did not seem to inconvenience her in the least.

Munashe looked up. “Learning what?”

She shrugged, sending the maggots spilling over the pallet and the floor, where Tendai and Robert made quick work of them. “That there is a point in every pointless task,” Tapiwa said.

Munashe was not sure if he agreed. A pang of guilt coursed through his body—taking care of his mother was a pointless task; she would have died anyway. So instead he chose a task he thought he could accomplish—taming the lion back into human form.

When the night fell, he snuck outside and waited by the giant strangler fig. He wondered if Fungai’s uncle also drove a Caddy.

Something tugged on the shreds of his trouser leg, and he looked down. He almost cried out at the sight of a small baby next to him that stood on all fours, its tiny, long-fingered hand clutching the fabric of Munashe’s trousers. Worst of all, the baby’s face was projected on a large TV screen; instead of a head, the TV perched atop the baby’s shoulders, dwarfing his small, withered body.

Munashe swallowed hard a few times. “Are you Fungai’s uncle?”

“Yes,” flashed the letters on the TV screen. Then, they were supplanted by a large red question mark that took up the entire screen.

“How can I heal Tapiwa’s wound?” Munashe said. “How can I go home?”

“One or the other,” the screen said.

“Both, please. I can’t leave until she’s better.”

The baby’s face reappeared, smiling. “You could. I could help you leave right now,” it said. Apparently, the TV had sound too.

Munashe bated his breath. This was better than he dared to hope. Still, he resented abandoning his hopeless task, no matter how pointless. “Help her first, and then help me leave.”

“One or the other,” the screen said.

“Then help her. I know I can leave after she’s better.”

A question mark again.

Munashe sighed. “I don’t know for sure, but I think this is how it works.”

Fungai’s uncle shrugged his tiny baby shoulders, and showed his face again for a moment, before displaying a chart. “Find the kobo tree -> Find the Lady-Who-Lives-Inside -> Ask for a wishing thread -> Ask for her price.”

“What’s a kobo tree?” Munashe asked, but Fungai’s uncle was already crawling away, the mahogany casing of his television head striking tree trunks that stood too close to his path.

The next night, Munashe set out looking for a kobo tree. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was supposed to be looking for, but reasoned that it would be easy enough to recognize. His expectations were fulfilled once he saw a majestic blood-red trunk, crowned with blue foliage and peppered with small yellow flowers.

“Lady?” he called. “Lady-Who-Lives-Inside?”

The Lady-Who-Lives-Inside stood before him as soon as he uttered her name. She was a tall young woman, the most human-looking creature he had encountered so far. Munashe thought that she was just like any woman in his village, until he noticed her stomach—or rather, that she did not have one. There was a large round hole in her midsection, where her belly should’ve been, framed by the arches of her ribs and pelvis, and festooned with red fragments of gore that fringed the empty space, as if her organs had been ripped out of her.

“I need a wishing thread,” Munashe said. “What is your price?”

The spirit reached inside of the hole and pulled out a thin string of sinew, red and blue and yellow. “For this,” she said in a high nasal voice, “I want the same from you.”

Munashe nodded and clenched his teeth as the spirit’s clawed fingers—ten on each hand—pried apart his skin and muscle, sinew and bone, until a tiny piece of Munashe dangled, dizzying, in front of his face.

“There,” the Lady-Who-Lives-Inside said, and gave him her thread. “Touch it to whatever wound you wish to heal, and it will be done.”

Vimbai’s story ended abruptly when Felix walked into the kitchen. Vimbai momentarily pitied him for his pale translucent skin—she could see a blue vein pumping away on his temple, just where the darkness of his hair started. He looked so vulnerable, so distraught with his eyes pointing in opposite directions. He rummaged through the refrigerator—the habit all of them had developed recently, even though they knew there was little of value there; still, the foolish hope that they had somehow overlooked a soda bottle in their endless searching refused to leave.

“There’s nothing there,” Vimbai said.

“I know,” Felix answered, and commenced rummaging. “Have you seen Balshazaar?”

“Not recently,” Vimbai said. “Why?”

“I was looking for him, and he’s nowhere to be found.”

“This place is big.” Vimbai adjusted Peb who was starting to doze off on her lap. “Say, can I take a look inside your hair?”

“Good idea,” Felix agreed. “Maybe he went back in there.”

“You would’ve seen him, wouldn’t you?”

“Unless I was sleeping.” Felix sighed and slammed the fridge door closed. He stood in front of Vimbai and bent down dutifully, letting her inspect his hair.

She pressed her face forward, cautious of what could be waiting for her inside. It could be a trap within a trap within a trap—she was not convinced that the house was safe, let alone Felix’s hair. It took her a while to adjust to the darkness inside, and the sleeping movement and inarticulate mumbling of Peb in her lap were disorienting.

She squinted, looking at the familiar dusty-gray landscape. Balshazaar was not there, and she felt relieved for a moment—until she realized another, more troubling emptiness. The empty spaces were gray like the rest of the contents of Felix’s head, and it took her a while to realize what it was she was not seeing, what it was that reminded her of her promises with its nagging absence.

The horseshoe crabs’ souls were gone—not a carapace, not an errant leg or a tail spike remained. They had disappeared, and for a moment Vimbai’s eyes looked back and forth, searching for what could not be found. The souls her crabs had entrusted her with were gone. She had failed them, and—she suspected—she had failed her own hope of ever returning home, her parents, so sick with worry, and Maya; if they never got home, there would be nothing left for Maya but to play with her dogs and to sleep by the coffin, until she grew weaker and weaker, until the terrible men in the medical trucks came for her—came for all of them, to drain their blood and to toss their weak, not quite alive bodies into the lake, where the man-fish would make short work of their souls, consuming them like he had undoubtedly consumed those of the horseshoe crabs.

Vimbai freed her face from Felix’s hair. Her eyes met his, and she frowned. “Oh Felix,” she said. “We’re in so much trouble right now.”

Felix swallowed hard. “I see. What do we do?”

Vimbai drew a breath and petted Peb absent-mindedly, like one would a sleeping cat. “We have to go and find the man-fish and the men in the medical trucks. And we have to get Peb’s tongue and horseshoe crabs’ souls back.”

Chapter 13

“Enough is enough,” Vimbai said. She had sent Peb to retrieve Maya, and as soon as she and her dogs showed up, she swung into action. As little as it appealed to her, Vimbai decided that now was the time to take serious action. It was her failure that the horseshoe crabs’ souls were stolen. It was her job to set it right.

She made everyone assemble in the kitchen, which she thought of as her command post. She also suspected that here they were protected by the benign magic of the stove and the refrigerator, guarded from the eavesdropping of the man-fish and other entities she was not yet sure about. She had decided that Balshazaar was an enemy—after all, who but him knew where the horseshoe crabs kept their souls?—as well as the men in the medical trucks. And she especially did not want the horseshoe crabs to overhear her and to learn about her failure.

She looked at the
chipoko
and Peb in her arms, at the intense, open-mouthed Maya’s face, who looked at Vimbai as if she had just met her, and was expecting something profound or interesting. Vimbai noticed Felix standing by the window overgrown with flat hairy leaves, his shoulders hunched over and his hands buried in the black hole surrounding his head with an equal measure of despair and concern—he seemed to be constantly checking for things going in or out, if anything was being stolen away.

“So this is what we’re going to do,” Vimbai said. “We’ll go to the man-fish, and we tell him to give the crabs their souls back. And I bet he would know how to get us home.”

“Or how we got here in the first place,” Maya interjected.

“Maybe that.” Vimbai considered banging her hand on the kitchen counter, but decided against it. “But now we need to take care of business.”

“How do we do that?” Felix asked.

“We’ll talk to him,” Vimbai said. “He’s a fish. Maybe we can threaten him or something.”

“How do you threaten an eater of souls?” the
vadzimu
asked.

“Surely there’s something he needs,” Maya said. “Or is afraid of. I’m with you, Vimbai—let’s go.”

“Felix and Peb should come too,” Vimbai said. “We need Peb—he can point out whoever hurt him.”

They set out to the lake. Vimbai gritted her teeth and felt altogether grim: she felt her forehead furrowing with long horizontal lines, and her jaws and fists clenching, as if in a movie. She thought that it was the first time in her life she felt such resolve, such simple realization that she had to do something, and there was nothing that could stop her from doing it.

She missed her mother then—her mother who went to work every day with the same clenched fists and jaws, the same stern faith spilling out of her eyes. It had been easy for Vimbai partially because she had a mother like that, a mother who could march into the office of a department chair or school principal, and put forth her demands. She would not be swayed by the appearance of reason, by the soothing voices and sober explanations of why her demands could not be met. She would cross her arms and wait in silence, until they either caved or asked her to leave, thus granting her a moral victory at the very least. Vimbai wished she could be like this.

Then again, her mother had the dubious advantage of having to fight for everything, and most of these fights Vimbai was not privy to. She only caught tail ends of arguments and meaningful exchanges of glances between her parents, or occasional phone conversations with other faculty members in Africana Studies. Of talks over tea, of complaints about white people setting the Africana agenda, and how unfairly colonial it was.

Vimbai felt embarrassed of her ignorant indifference toward these battles, of her dismissal of things that had anything at all to do with Africana Studies or African politics or Africa anything. She was an American, she used to tell herself, and it had nothing to do with her, the only person in her family who spoke English without an accent. It was her parents that carried Africa within them, who could not let it go and kept obsessing over it years and years after it became irrelevant to them—and after they became irrelevant to it, immigrants, deserters, people who left their country and were in turn left behind, as it moved on without them.

“Everything had changed so much,” Vimbai’s mother kept repeating with quiet wonder as they walked through the streets of Harare, and she insisted that she knew these streets like the back of her hand but kept taking wrong turns and getting lost anyway. At night, she cried about it when she thought Vimbai could not hear her.

But if it was not Vimbai’s, this burden, this memory, why did she have an ancestral spirit following her and telling her stories, filling Vimbai’s eyes with her sad visions—
jacaranda trees in bloom
—despite everything? Why did she have her own Harare here, in this dune house from South Jersey? Why did the man-fish and the fairy tales, the
wazimamoto
of her Kenyan babysitter, follow her and refuse to let go? She could not shake them like she could not shake her parents and their sins and memories. Tied to them by the tenuous bond of blood, and through them, tied to the continent she neither knew nor particularly liked. She wondered if Maya felt this ancestral bond too, through the intervening generations and the accumulated twin heartbreaks of colonialism and slavery.

They approached the lake that stretched, deceptively peaceful and smooth, before them. The surface remained undisturbed, like a pane of green glass, and Vimbai decided that it meant that the man-fish was at the very least cautious, and possibly, she hoped, concerned. “You should be concerned, you bastard,” she muttered through her teeth. “You better fucking worry.”

Maya, who stopped at the lakeshore just ahead of Vimbai, looked over her shoulder. “Whom are you talking to?” she asked Vimbai. “And why are you swearing?”

“The man-fish,” Vimbai answered. “And sorry about the swearing.”

“I don’t care.” Maya laughed and turned back to stare at the lake. “In fact, you don’t swear nearly enough.”

Normally, Vimbai would’ve felt resentful: she hated it when people told her how she should talk or what she should act like, especially if they accused her of acting white—oh, how it turned her stomach. She suspected that Maya never said things like that because she had had the same words thrown in her face too. “I just never picked it up, I guess.”

Felix nudged Vimbai’s side. “What if it . . . the catfish. What if it doesn’t come out?”

“He always does,” Vimbai said. “Let’s just wait a little.”

The water remained still, and Vimbai picked up Peb who hovered by her elbow, as if having accepted her authority and the hope of help. She cradled him, his grotesque hands and feet brushing against her cheek like soft strands of seaweed. “It’ll be all right,” she whispered. “Don’t be afraid, little Peb. We’ll get your tongue back from the bad fish.”

Peb moaned and shook his head.

“What? It wasn’t him?”

Peb nodded, wailing for emphasis. It tugged Vimbai’s hair and pointed with seven or eight of its limbs, at something behind Vimbai.

She whipped around, only to see the quick movement of something disappearing in the low brush behind the stacked couches, just a few dozen yards away from the lake. She was not sure what it was, but it was low to the ground and moved in swift but jerking motion, sending the branches that concealed it into spasmodic trembling. “Balshazaar,” Vimbai said.

Felix turned. “Where?”

Vimbai and Peb pointed at the bushes, and Felix took off toward them, with a speed Vimbai had not suspected in him.

Maya looked after him. “Poor Felix,” she said. “She chases this stupid thing like it means something.”

“Maybe it does mean something to him,” Vimbai answered. “I won’t pretend that I understand anything about Felix.”

Maya nodded her agreement. “He’s a strange one, that’s for sure. I wonder how it is, to have the remnant of a universe hovering around you?”

“Or rather hanging down from the remnant of a universe,” Vimbai said. “Still, do you know what happened to him? Where he was before, and how he came to be here? Can we even comprehend that?”

Maya shook her head. “No way. I don’t even think about that—once you start, you can’t stop, because then you start asking how come he speaks English and if everyone there does, and how was he able to get a New Jersey driver’s license, or even if he did get it—maybe he always had it or found it in his hair, and what is he even doing, existing like that, you know?”

“Yeah,” Vimbai said, and cradled Peb closer. “I’m just creeped out by Balshazaar, and Peb seems to imply that it was he who had taken his tongue.”

“Could be.” Maya walked up to the water’s edge and tried it with her toes. “Warm. Anyway, maybe Balshazaar is pissed at Felix and at the rest of us because we’re Felix’s friends. Maybe he likes the fish for whatever reason.”

“And the men in the medical trucks,” Vimbai added. At this, Peb stiffened in her arms but did not utter a sound. Vimbai decided to let him be for now.

“You keep saying that there are these guys in trucks.” Maya crouched down and splashed water with her hands. “But I haven’t seen them, and no one else did either. How do you know they are even here?”

“Oh, I know,” Vimbai said. “Sometimes you just do.”

Sometimes, you just did. Vimbai did not believe in ESP—rather, she trusted that human instincts, having evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, were better at picking up signals indicating danger than her rational mind would ever be. Sometimes, one had to trust the gut feeling, whether it came from quick but persistent observations that had not reached her conscious mind yet or from internalized knowledge, too old and too deep for words. She did not need to hear her mother’s voice or see her face to know that she was angry—the anger colored the air in the house, pumped it full of tension that Vimbai could feel as soon as she entered the house.

And just like that, she felt the electric charge in the air, she felt the unseen and unspoken menace—the men and their trucks, the sense of
wazimamoto
crouching nearby. She had developed this fear as a kid, and now it came in handy—or in any case, it felt more constructive than the blind childhood panic that made her dart to the bathroom at night, running so fast that her feet seemed to barely touch the cold hardwood floors. The same panic that forced her to take showers with her eyes open, fearful that the moment she closed them, she would feel the cold hand of
wazimamoto
on the inside of her elbow and feel a long needle go in, so deep, scraping against the bone.

Now, there was still fear and the long sucking sensation in her stomach, and the rising hairs on her arms at the thought of violent needles. She bit her lip and tossed her head back.

Vimbai considered Felix compared to Maya—he did not seem like the same kind of roommate. With Maya, they could bond and argue; with Felix, any illusion of understanding was aborted before it even had a chance to take hold, with just one look at his eyes and his hair—inhuman, inhuman. There was no chance of casual chat, of friendly bickering—as much as she had tried, all she could do now was to try to accept his presence and help him as much as she could; not out of friendship as she would do with Maya, but rather some generalized compassion, the ethical obligation one felt to help other creatures or at least to be reasonably nice to them in order to consider oneself a good person. Even Peb seemed more human: no matter how many phantom limbs it had attached to itself and no matter how many flowering branches it had absorbed, Vimbai could understand its suffering and its pain. She could relate to it. There was nothing to relate to in Felix. So she let him go, chasing after Balshazaar through the low scrub, and let him disappear from her mental landscape as soon as she looked back to the lake. It was not indifference, she decided, just the mind’s inability to hold onto something so incomprehensible and smooth like an egg, missing any angles her attention could snag in. Instead, she stood next to Maya, Peb in her arms, and waited for the man-fish.

The man-fish finally decided to show himself, when Vimbai was about to give up and suggest that maybe they should come back tomorrow, although that would certainly kill the momentum of her accumulated decisiveness and rage. He popped up among the reeds, his transparent fanned fins propping him up. He looked bigger now—so huge, big enough to swallow Peb whole with his thick-lipped fish mouth. He smiled a little bit, and Vimbai held her breath, as if afraid that the fish would suck her soul out with the next exhalation. It also gave her time to look over the fish.

The lips and the whiskers, she thought, were just like Vimbai remembered them—undoubtedly catfish, and yet suffused with very human sarcasm as the fish thrust out his lower lip and eyed Vimbai. The eyes, golden and cat-like, seemed to smirk and wink, a difficult feat without any eyebrows or eyelids. His flat head, mottled gray and brown like a stone, seemed too heavy for his weak fins—it wobbled, and the massive long body had to follow suit, tilting slightly from side to side, compensating for the head’s appearance of feebleness.

“Did you take Peb’s tongue?” Vimbai asked as sternly as she could.