The House of Discarded Dreams (12 page)

Vimbai nodded. “What about Peb? What do we do about his tongue?”

“I don’t know,” Maya said with a hint of irritation. “You can go back to that catfish and ask him. Or you can go chasing after the trucks, anyway if they exist at all. Or go talk to your crabs. I’m staying here. You can stay, or you can go for Felix and the rest. Do what you want, but I’m not leaving.”

Vimbai sat by Maya for a while, until the silence between them acquired the taut quality of stretched fabric, ready to tear any second. Then she stood up. “Thank you for showing me. I hope you’ll be home for dinner.”

Maya made a noncommittal sound and jerked her shoulder.

“In any case, I’ll see you later.”

Maya remained silent, and Vimbai started her lonely descent down the endless stairs and then the rocky hillside, down and away, farther and farther from the dead woman and her coffin and her granddaughter, carrying on the vigil through all the intervening years.

Vimbai’s face grew numb from the cold, and the smell of salt and seaweed assaulted her, making her eyes water—she had been spending so much time indoors that the natural smell of the ocean she used to love felt astringent and too strong. She wrinkled her nose and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. “Come on, little horseshoe crabs,” she muttered. “Let’s see how you’re doing.”

The
chipoko
stood beside her, ready to help and guide and breathe as if one with Vimbai. Her quiet posture and hands, roped with veins, folded in front of her, filled Vimbai’s heart with heavy, regretful blood. There she was, her grandmother who moved and talked, and yet she was as dead as Maya’s. Just a ghost, a dream of a vague memory from many years ago.

“I’m ready, grandma,” Vimbai said, and felt the ghost’s hands fill hers, and her grandmother’s eyes look through Vimbai’s with the wisdom and sadness of too many years. She wanted so bad to be kind to the ghost, even though it was most likely just a product of her imagination; she so wanted to show her kindness—kindness she had been too young and too arrogant to show her in life, her heart hidden away from the old woman by the thin crisscrossing of scars on Vimbai’s mother’s wrists and ankles.

She submerged her face in the stinging, harsh water, sharp little bites of salt pinching her cheeks. She opened her eyes to look at the crabs. Her mouth opened of its own volition, salt flooding her mouth and nostrils, her eyes disbelieving.

The crabs—undead, terrible—stopped their movement and turned as one, looking back at her. She could not see their eyes, hidden deep in the fissures of their shells, but she could feel the age-old fatigue and stone-cold fear, the disappointment and sadness that seared like a knife across an open palm.

You promised us,
they whispered
. You promised.

“I know,” Vimbai said. “I’m sorry—it was an accident. I tried not to peek, honest.”

And now you see our disgrace and degradation, our soulless shells, our bodies thrown into death so that they could crawl, crawl forever across the sandy ocean bottom, crawl without fatigue or fear or hunger or thirst or lust. And you promised to protect our souls from diminishment.

“They are safe,” Vimbai said. “I saw them—they are safe.”

The crabs seemed to heave a sigh, although Vimbai was not quite sure if such a feat was possible without either lungs or air.
Are you sure? We feel uneasy.

“I’m sure,” Vimbai said, the creeping sickness of doubt settling in her stomach. “I’ll check again as soon as I have a chance. But meanwhile, I have a question for you—do you know who could’ve stolen a ghost’s tongue?”

Those who don’t want anyone to speak, those who keep everyone mute. Those who hate life while they vow to protect it.

Vimbai’s lungs felt ready to explode, and she came to the surface with a wracking gasp. Water dripped off her chin, froze in thin icicles in her hair. The vision of the medical trucks and the mute men dressed in surgical scrubs passed before her inner eye. The man-fish splashed in his lake, grinning, his yellow cat eye sly and laughing, cold. The vampires and the stealer of souls, somewhere close. Inside the house, Vimbai almost cried out, inside the house! So close, so ridiculous—like one of those urban legends, she thought, when the victim realizes that the phone calls are coming from inside the house. Ridiculous lies, like the one about a man waking up in a tubful of ice.

She remembered the scar on cousin Roger’s back, and cringed. There was no tub of ice, like there was no phone. And yet, the man-fish, the urban legend of a distant place, laughed and frolicked in his lake, and his gravelly voice rubbed the insides of Vimbai’s ears raw.

“Where’s Felix?” she asked the
chipoko
as soon as the two of them separated and the ghost stood next to Vimbai once again.

“He went for a walk,” the ghost said. “Come home with me—the baby needs comfort.”

Vimbai felt guilty about forgetting the tongueless Peb’s troubles. She only thought of his misfortune as a mystery to solve, to get to those who would harm the rest of them, and did not consider how he felt, alone and mutilated. “What can I do?”

“Tell him a story,” the ghost said. “Stories always help.”

Chapter 12

Vimbai took over the Peb-consoling duties as soon as she entered the house and found Peb curled up in the oven. Peb whimpered, and the ghost nudged Vimbai—she said she had ran out of stories; not entirely, she was quick to mention, just for the time being. Surely, she would be able to think of something later. Meanwhile, she said, would Vimbai think of a story to tell poor Peb?

Vimbai thought of all the fairytales her African babysitters told her—Ghanian and Kenyan tales mixed with each other in her memory, and she felt ashamed that she had become one of the people who so intensely aggravated her mother—people who could not tell one culture apart from another. But Peb cried, and she sighed. All the fairytales, all the Tutuola she had read would have to do, and her mother was not here to criticize the mishmash. Her mind crowded with images of women turned into beasts and the ghosts calling each others on the phone. Vimbai drew a breath and said, “All right, don’t cry and listen. This is a story about a boy named Munashe. His mother turned into a lion one day—or at least, this is what he thought.”

Oh, how she wailed. The sky shuddered and storm clouds split open at her hoarse, inhuman cries. Munashe cringed at his mother’s unarticulated, bare suffering, at her voice rising higher and higher, lunging for heaven. He looked at blood that came out of her mouth and curdled on the earthen floors and rank pallet, black and granular like coffee grounds. He listened to the sound of her fingernails biting into the floor, dragging across it with the jerky movement of the dying.

He sat by her, trying not to be annoyed at her eyes, white with fear, swiveling in her hollow-cheeked face. He made nice, and brushed her long hair out of her face, stroked her cheek with filial attention.

“Let me go,” she pleaded in staccato gasps.

He tried to make his voice soothing, reassuring, as if talking to a child. “Where would you go, mother? You’re too weak to walk, and no village would take you.”

“Munashe.”

“I can’t, mother. You should be grateful that I am staying here with you.”

“Please.”

He sighed. “You should’ve thought about that before you went and turned into a lioness.”

She gasped and cried some more, and he could not help but laugh. The woman was deluded enough to think that she was still human. She tried to convince him, thrusting her dark, withered arms into his face. “Look at me. I am not a lion, I am your mother.” As if he couldn’t see the hungry beast looking out of her eyes, the red glow of its pupils burning hotter than the embers of the cooking fire. He heard from old men that women went wild, turned into beasts, and there was only one way of turning them back into humans.

He took a charred piece of impala meat from the coals, and offered it to his mother. “Will you eat now?”

She cried. “It is too hot, too black. I can’t eat this.”

He nodded to himself. She wanted raw meat, of course, like any lion would. He tried to do good by her, taming her with cooked meat, but so far she hadn’t taken any. And her time was running short. AIDS was killing her, and if she went as a lion, her afterlife would be bleak—if she would even have an afterlife.

He ate alone, in the retreating light of the fire. The darkness reached for him, spreading its hungry fingers like a wrathful spirit, its bottomless mouth opened wide to swallow him whole. His mother made no other sound but her labored breath, and the faint scratching of her fingernails on the floor. Like a beast, she wanted to crawl away, to find a secluded place in the savannah grass, where she would expire alone, lamented by wind, buried by ants, kissed by red dust. Fortunately, she was too weak to do so. He waited for the scratching to stop before he went to sleep, curled on the earthen floor of the grass hut. Far away, hyenas gloated. They knew that a lion would be dead soon.

When Munashe woke up, his mother was dead, her eyes opened wide but blind, her pallet stained with sweat and blood. Munashe grunted his discontent, and hurried toward the doorway of the hut. There, he stopped and clamped his hands over his mouth to hold back a wail of terror that swelled in his chest. Instead of the yellow, undulating expanse of the savannah, punctuated by lopsided umbrellas of acacias, a solid green wall of forest surrounded him. There were no lions or hyenas, but only colobus monkeys chattering up in the trees.

The monkeys saw him, and wrinkled their faces, baring tiny, needle-sharp teeth that curved inward. “Munashe,” they sang in nasty childish voices, “Munashe, mother-killer.”

Their taunt, as direct as it was cruel, brought him out of the daze. “No,” he yelled back. “It was not my fault. AIDS killed her, not I.”

One of the bigger monkeys swung on the bough and leapt from branch to branch, until its face was level with Munashe’s. The monkey’s breath smelled stale, and its inward-curving teeth glistened like small yellow fishhooks. “Really?” it hissed. “Did you take her to the doctor, did you make sure that she ate well? Did you care for her in her comfortable home, or did you drag her away from people, from help?”

“I was trying to help. She turned into a lion—she wouldn’t eat anything but raw meat.”

The monkey’s eyes gleamed; its terrible mouth opened wide, and the monkey cackled, the sound of its laughter like scratching of dead leaves. The monkey leapt and landed on Munashe’s shoulders. Before he could toss off the unwelcome rider, the monkey’s hind legs and long tail wrapped around his neck, and the sharp claws of its hands dug into tender cartilage of Munashe’s ears. “Run now, donkey boy, mother-killer!”

Munashe twisted and struggled to get out of the monkey’s hurtful grip, but it only laughed and tightened the chokehold of its tail, and wrenched his ears until they bled. Exhausted and terrified, Munashe ran, as the monkey steered him by the ears, deeper into the forest.

It was dark and stuffy under the canopy of the tall trees, and thorny lianas snagged the sleeves of his shirt and his trouser legs, ripping them, digging into his skin until he bled. His lungs expanded and fell, but sucking in the humid air was like trying to breathe underwater. His vision darkened and he took a faltering half-step, stumbling on the ropy roots, falling, anticipating the touch of soft ferns that lined the forest floor. A sharp tug on his ear made him cry out and right himself, picking up his step.

“You don’t get to rest, mother-killer,” the monkey screeched in his ear.

He ran until the air turned purple and then black, and strange noises filled the air. Something hooted, something chuckled, something else whined in a plaintive, undulating voice. Before the darkness swallowed him, he saw a single bright light beckoning him from behind the trees. The monkey made no objections as he directed his torn feet toward the light.

He came across a grass hut nestled between two strangler figs. The light he saw came from a small lantern perched atop the flat roof.

The monkey gave him a quick, vicious smack on the back of his head, and Munashe bent low, and hurried through the blanket-covered doorway.

“I brought him as you asked,” the monkey said, and leapt off his shoulders, to take place next to a military-style woodstove that filled the hut with unbearable heat.

In the glow of the embers, he saw a low cot, and an old, fat woman that reclined upon it. Her bare breasts glistened, framing her swollen abdomen, from which a belly button protruded like an upturned thumb. Her bright eyes held Munashe’s for a moment. “Well, well,” she said. “Looks like Tendai did a good job.” She gave the monkey a fond glance, and it hopped and chittered.

“Who are you, lady?” Munashe’s cracked and swollen lips moved painfully.

“I am Tapiwa,” she said. “You will serve me until your debt is paid.”

Munashe was about to protest, to say that it wasn’t his fault, but only sighed. The salt of his sweat burned like fire on his cracked lips. He felt certain that no matter what he said, he was already judged and found responsible for his mother’s demise. His only hope of returning home was to listen and to obey; perhaps then they would let him go. “How may I serve you?” His gaze wandered involuntarily to her elephantine thighs circled by rims of fat, and to the dark, curly vegetation of her pubic hair.

Tapiwa noticed the direction of his glance, and shook with a booming laugh. “Ah, not that way, boy. I have bad bedsores, and I need someone to take care of them. Tendai and Robert are not strong enough.”

“I’ll do whatever you need me to, lady. But can I have a drink of water?”

Tapiwa nodded. “You may drink and you may rest. Tomorrow morning, you start.”

The morning brought feeble light and the smell of dead embers and sweat, as Munashe started on his task. It took him a few tries to roll Tapiwa’s bulk to her side. Waves traveled under her skin with every move, and his fingers slipped on her smooth, damp skin. Two monkeys—Tendai and his brother Robert—watched from the perch atop the woodstove.

Munashe puffed, but finally Tapiwa was stable on her left side, her left breast flopping to the floor. Munashe looked at her back and gagged—where her skin should have been, there was nothing but an open sore, running from her shoulders to her backside. A white mass shimmered and moved inside the wound, filling it, spilling to the pallet with every breath Tapiwa took. Maggots.

“What are you waiting for, boy?” Tapiwa said. “Clean them up.”

Munashe extended his shaking hand to the living carpet of vermin, and a few maggots popped under his touch. Still, he gathered a handful, looking for a place to throw them.

“On the floor, on the floor,” Tapiwa said, impatient.

He obeyed.

Tendai and Robert left their roost, and gathered the maggots with their long fingers, stuffing them in their mouths.

“You want to help me?” Munashe said.

The monkeys chattered and laughed, and shook their heads, their jaws moving energetically.

And so it went—Munashe scooped out the maggots by the handful, and the monkeys ate them, showing no signs of getting sated. Munashe kept his eyes half-closed, and breathed through his mouth; his mind wandered far away, back to his home village, to the fields worked by women and children, to the smells of manure and upturned soil, to the proud cassava mounds, surrounded by yam and cowpeas.

Munashe missed home every day of his joyless labor. While Tapiwa was not unkind, her wounds grew re-infested every day, and Munashe was starting to suspect that his labor would never be over. And he gave Tapiwa the care he did not give his mother, care he could not give to all the people in his village—hollow-cheeked men that came home from the city one last time, to their patient wives, thin and hard and strong like strips of leather. Tapiwa, the fat spirit—for he was sure that he was in the spirit forest—was all the sick, all those destroyed by the new way of life that he could not heal. Her sores wept for all.

At night, when the woodstove blazed, burning the already hot air of the hut, Munashe crept outside, under the sultry starless canopy of the forest, and prayed to the ancestral spirits to free him. He cried until his eyes ran dry, and rested in a crouch, listening to the night-sounds; there was chittering and chirping, sighing and moaning, wailing and weeping. And grumbling. His muscles tensed as he listened to the approaching roar—could that be a leopard? Twin lights shone through the treetops, and moved closer, like falling stars. Munashe’s mouth opened in awe as he realized that the sound and the light issued from a very old, very large Cadillac, painted bubble-gum pink. The Cadillac descended, leaping from branch to branch like a most agile monkey.

The Cadillac gripped a low horizontal branch with its front wheels playfully, swung, and somersaulted, landing in front of Munashe with a flourish.

“Hello, Mr. Cadillac,” Munashe said, shaken, but present enough to remember his manners.

“Hoo! What a dim boy!” the voice came from behind the tinted window. The window rolled down, and a smiling skull with red eyes blazing from under an old khaki baseball hat stared at Munashe. “Why would you think that the car was alive, hm?”

“I . . . I don’t know, sir.”

“It’s a spirit car.” The car door swung open, letting out a tall skeleton dressed in a tattered tuxedo, with sleeves and trousers that were too short. The skeletal remains of his neck were wrapped in a dirty red tie. “Now tell me what you need. You didn’t call me here for nothing, did you?”

Munashe told the skeleton his story, all the while marveling at the ease of spirit summoning in the spirit forest.

The skeleton listened with an inscrutable expression. “So, you want me to rescue you from your servitude?” he said once Munashe had finished.

Munashe nodded. “Please.”

“Maybe. But first, tell me—what did you learn from all this?”

Munashe stumbled for words. “I don’t know, sir. Maybe that everyone needs to be taken care of?”

The spirit skeleton nodded. “I suppose they do. What will you trade me for my help?”

“I don’t have anything,” Munashe said.

The skeleton’s eyes flashed. “You have flesh, boy. How much flesh will you give me for my help?”

Munashe closed his eyes, and thought about his mother. How emaciated she was. And still she lingered, grasping onto life with her stick hands. “Take as much as my mother had lost,” he offered.