The House of Discarded Dreams (19 page)

The
wazimamoto’
s truck had fallen silent and the man-fish crawled away, muttering dark obscenities and vague promises; he begged them to come and visit him at the lake as soon as Maya made up her mind. Her dogs had grown bored and dispersed, hunting crickets and whatever other small and timid life crawled between the great concrete imitations of real boulders—real somewhere in the outside world, the world beyond these walls, the world that seemed a dream sometimes.

Vimbai had run out of comforting words, and could only sit next to Maya, her legs folded under her cold and numb, with only occasional prickling of phantom pins and needles suggesting that they were still alive; Vimbai’s arms, goosebumped and heavy with fatigue, wrapped around Maya’s unresponsive shoulders. How long had they been sitting like this?

Forever, Vimbai thought. Her head grew heavy with thwarted sleep, leaning against her will on Maya’s indifferent shoulder, merciless gravity pulling her eyelids close. Galaxies were born and fell to dust, constellations swirled and traversed the skies millions of times, changing their position slowly, imperceptibly—and still, the two girls sat in the ruins of a great civilization, quiet and uncertain about the fate of a dead grandmother.

“Come on,” Vimbai coaxed gently. “Let’s go home—you don’t have to decide anything here.”

Maya shook her head, and Vimbai was unsure what she was objecting to. Finally, Maya shook her head one last time and stretched, breaking open the protective ring of Vimbai’s arms. “I don’t suppose I have a choice now, do I? Let it be, then. How do we get her to the
wazimamoto
?”

“We can wait here,” Vimbai said. “We can wait for them to show up. I will ask the horseshoe crabs to bring her to us—on their little backs, on their slender legs. They have no souls that would leak into her.”

Maya nodded. “Ask your crabs to bring her then, I don’t mind.” She heaved a shuddering sigh. “I wish my grandmother was more like yours.”

Vimbai understood what she meant—a bare spirit was better than a lifeless body. The separation of flesh from soul was a terrible thing—all death was terrible. But the ghosts, the
vadzimu
and other spirits, were pure and comforting, offering protection and advice, telling stories and doing dishes, really alive rather than dead. After separation of flesh and spirit, it were the spirits that remained alive. Vimbai shuddered at the memory of Maya’s grandmother—nothing but a flesh suit, grotesque and unwieldy in its white gloves and floral hat, especially meaningless because the corpse did not need protection from the cold or embarrassment. It was inert and still, its trappings betraying the anxieties of the living.

And this is how she was when the horseshoe crabs, summoned by Vimbai’s insistent call, aided by the
vadzimu
(who Vimbai could not see but easily imagined as she stood on the porch, peering into the water and gathering the undead arthropods for their mission), marched to the concrete tower somewhere on the edges of the house, as far as Maya’s consciousness could reach, and picked her up on their backs. They moved like a lumpy river of olive-slick carapaces and gray infested meat and pale broken legs, dragging through the dust and the linoleum of the house, a small dead woman on their backs—her face peaceful, as if she were lying in state with her hands crossed on her chest and her starched white slip barely peeking from under the edge of her black skirt. Dead—certainly dead enough to suck away whatever psychic energy the
wazimamoto
had squirreled away, inside of their faceless, soulless bodies—if the man-fish was to be believed, at least.

Chapter 19

When the procession of crabs appeared, so solemn, so grotesque, carrying the small dead woman, Maya suppressed a quick sob and covered her face with her hands. Vimbai could not help but hug her again, a mute comfort of companionship and implied understanding the only offering she had to give. And after the crabs had settled in a patient unmoving (undead) circle, surrounding the dead woman and her hat.

“You better leave,” Vimbai told the crabs. “Please. If you stay, Peb’s tongue . . . the psychic energy we’re after might jump into you. I mean, you’re not wearing your souls now, are you?”

No
, the crabs whispered, mournful.
Our brethren have their souls, but ours were drained and stolen, damaged forever—why didn’t you tell us that you couldn’t keep them safe?

“I’m so sorry,” Vimbai answered, a deep blush blooming forth under her skin, ready to reach the surface as soon as she finished speaking. “I thought I found them in time.” And then, the blush; the memories of the horseshoe crab souls came forth, unbidden—their spirit shells impaled on long needles, the ghastly
wazimamoto
contraptions penetrating their gills and their eyes, their shells, with the casual brutality of those who wanted nothing but blood blood blood, medicinal blood for their antibodies and serums, blood they could drain from those who did not consent to it and then toss them back, used up, half-dead. Or quarter them and cut them up, stuff them into traps that would soon be crawling with thick slimy eels.

She had seen one of these traps being pulled out of the water once—the mesh bag reinforced with steel hoops that kept the trap open and barrel shaped, with a half-decomposed mass within it, unbearable to look at—it dripped and stank, and the fisherman who held the rope on which the trap was suspended seemed oblivious to the stench.

Vimbai had felt like gagging and looked at her classmates (it was a fieldtrip for her very first marine bio class, and they were doing a unit on fisheries, which meant fieldtrips and talking to the fishermen a lot, and going on their boats to check their nets). Those trips always made Vimbai so nauseous.

“And this is how you catch eels,” the bearded old man said.

Vimbai had been peering into the trap, puzzled—there didn’t seem to be anything in there, except the fishy organic rot and a few broken segmented legs tipped with pale pincer claws. And then the mass started to move—seethe, churn, roil, like a pot of stew left in the sun for a few days roiled with maggots—and Vimbai had to look away just as the writhing black eels started falling through the mesh and slithering across the wooden pier.

“I’m never eating eel sushi again,” one of Vimbai’s classmates muttered in her ear.

“These are usually not for sushi,” the professor explained cheerfully, his stereotypically gray goatee shaking with glee. “These are used as bait for the large-mouth bass.”

It was then that Vimbai had decided that she would work on horseshoe crabs, on saving them from the awful destiny of being bait for bait, so recursively demeaned.

And now, standing in the ruins of the Great Zimbabwe and faced with their accusing stalked eyes, she blushed and looked away. “I am sorry I could not protect you. I swear to you that I tried. I did my best.”

She feared their accusations, but they remained silent, looking at her with an indecipherable expression in their beady eyes. Vimbai couldn’t figure out if they had forgiven her, these crabs that were now doomed to forever remain undead, or if she should apologize further.

Maya broke the awkwardness. “Can you hear that?”

Vimbai listened to the distant sound—lapping of waves, she had thought initially. Rustling of leaves, pounding of surf, beating of wings. For a moment, her hope of seeing the people in winged boats once again flared up, but she soon recognized the thudding of a car engine.

“They are coming back,” Vimbai told the crabs. “You better leave if you don’t want to be fed to the catfish.”

The crabs finally listened and skittered away, one wide glistening river of olive and gray and brown, and Maya’s dogs followed them at Maya’s command—there was no use for them, and no point in them trying to protect Maya from the rapidly approaching danger.

Vimbai and Maya were left alone again, with only the dead body as their protection from the
wazimamoto
. And Vimbai’s scars—she almost regretted not having offered Maya to carve some protection into her skin, and simultaneously found this way of thinking horrifying and repellent, just like she found her grandmother’s beliefs in mutilating her own daughters wrong.

The medical truck pulled up to them, squealing to a slow laborious stop by the largest of the slabs. The old-fashioned cab of the truck was filled with the faceless surgeons, and they also clustered along the railings, their hands mere pale latex gloves that looked as if they contained nothing but air. Their faces remained hidden behind the gauze masks that could not disguise the absence of human features beneath the draping of their folds.

They disembarked from their vehicle as it groaned under their shifting weight, its shocks raising it higher above the ground as its passengers stepped down from it. They gave the body of Maya’s grandmother only a cursory glance, immediately pegging it for something that offered no drainage possibilities, and moved past it, toward Maya—they must’ve remembered that Vimbai was not accessible to them.

As they moved by the dead body, Vimbai saw thin wisps of rainbow-radiant energy start peeling from them, swirling into a complex geometric shape in the air right above the dead woman’s forehead. The
wazimamoto
faltered in their tracks and grasped with their gloved hands at the dancing, laughing apparition—the soap bubble, the shining glassy skin stretched over the countless phantom legs, a teasing smile of ethereal dimensions.

The shimmering shape remained floating and suspended, and time itself seemed to slow down and hover, twining around it like a strange dimensional pretzel. The
wazimamoto
slowed their motions, and their gloved hands grasped at the apparition as it leaked out of them—rainbow and brimstone!—as if trying to force it back into their pale hollow chests.

And yet, Vimbai thought, it was not their fault—it was not their fault that they kept draining life out of everything they saw, like it wasn’t their fault that now they were struggling, like ragdolls, against falling apart as the bright tongues of light exited them and filled the prostrate body of Maya’s grandmother with their ghostly light. Was it just Peb’s tongue? Vimbai thought. Or were there are other psychic energies, other dimensional body parts that the
wazimamoto
had collected somewhere along their dream travels—and now they were all unraveling.

Vimbai thought—or some uninvolved part of her did, as the rest of her mind alternately recoiled away from the spectacle and drew closer to it, not to miss a single spark, a single wisp—of how pretty it was, how reminiscent of Peb himself, of his shimmering misshapen glory. And she was reminded of the aurora borealis, which she had seen only once, on her class trip to Alaska; the shimmery stretchy wisps lifted the dead woman off the ground and filled her—they seemed to be wearing her like a suit, as if the dead flesh was just a mask to hide the terrible and glorious lights inside.

Vimbai pressed Maya’s head against her shoulder, wishing she could hide her from the traumatic scene unfolding before them, protect her with embrace. The sigils on her arms glowed with a molten color of burning tissue and embers, and she kept hugging Maya closer. “Don’t look, don’t look,” she muttered. “It’ll be okay, I promise you, I promise.” Maya’s tears burned through the thin cotton of Vimbai’s t-shirt.

But Vimbai herself looked—she looked at the conflagration of plasma and earthly fire, at the sputtering sparks from her own unintentioned charms and the spirit lights, at the flames that were springing up to consume the surgical scrubs and the latex gloves—so obviously empty now. The facemasks and the gauze, the hats and the rubber hoses were all going up in a giant bonfire that sprang where the
wazimamoto
had previously stood.

The fire roared up, up, and it spread sideways, bathing Vimbai’s face in a blast of hot air, like the lick of a tremendous tongue. Vimbai retreated behind one of the slabs, Maya still held securely in her arms, Maya’s face turned carefully away from the fire and the shambling puppet of her dead grandmother who lumbered slowly away from the spreading flames, her white eyes wide open and pouring out the same tormented fire that spread on the ground.

The grass turned to ash and the saplings bent and sputtered sap, crackling and groaning, their green branches bending and twisting like thelimbs of contortionists. The fire circle spread until it reached the truck, and Vimbai ducked behind her slab, expecting an explosion, just like anyone who had ever seen an action movie would.

To her surprise and secret disappointment, the fire did little more than melt the metal tires—apparently, the vehicles of colonial vampires did not use gasoline; the paint on the sides burned and crackled, swelling up in blisters and bursting. The rails and the cab heated to bright red and then white, and then they buckled and melted, turning into a soft clay and then viscous liquid. As it flowed to the ground, covering the burned grass and whatever ash was left of the
wazimamoto
’s former shapes, Vimbai realized that the vampires and their truck were gone now, and whatever terrible essence had animated them was not trapped in Maya’s grandmother’s body, which stood silently in the clearing, unaffected by either fire or molten metal. The old woman looked quiet, pensive almost, and if it wasn’t for the white light streaming from her wide-open eyes the color and appearance of boiled eggs, she wouldn’t have warranted a second look from a passerby; just an ordinary old lady, wearing a hat and gloves as if heading to church on a Sunday morning.

Maya sobbed behind her. “Grandmother?” she whimpered, sounding disturbingly like a small girl. “Granma, is this really you?”

The old woman turned with a clockwork-like motion, and opened her arms to Maya. “How you have grown,” she said by way of greeting, and Vimbai did not know whether she should’ve held Maya back as she rushed into her undead grandmother’s embrace.

The
vadzimu
had made a pot of
mat
é, and even thoughtfully filtered it through a cheesecloth (Vimbai did not even know they had any cheesecloth, let alone what to use one for). Vimbai made a small cry of relieved gratitude and poured herself a cup, for a moment abandoning the unpleasant thoughts that had been swirling in her mind all the way home. Was Maya’s grandmother really herself, just animated by energies better not to be contemplated, or was it just a sham, the
wazimamoto
disguised to assume a new form? And, most importantly and most impossibly, if they were to return Peb his tongue (another matter the feasibility of which Vimbai could not possibly assess), would it mean the destruction of Maya’s grandmother, be she real or illusory?

The
vadzimu
took the presence of another grandmother well. The two of them shook hands and engaged in some small talk about the best way of cleaning off residue from the inside of a coffee machine carafe, and Vimbai and Maya sat by the table, momentarily reduced to the age of twelve or thereabout, and drank their
maté
and listened.

Peb floated into the room, and Vimbai tensed as soon as he zeroed in on Maya’s grandmother. He hovered up to her and started crying—a terrible wordless yowling, like that of a cat.

“He wants what’s his,” said Vimbai’s grandmother, and reached for Maya’s, reassuring. “Don’t worry, dear. He can wait a bit longer.”

As Peb wailed and whined, demanding, Maya turned to Vimbai. “We can’t just give his tongue back to him, can we?”

“I don’t think we have a choice,” Vimbai said. “Look at him—he’s so little.”

Maya heaved a sigh. “This is my grandma you’re talking about.”

Vimbai patted her friend’s hand; it looked so alone and weak splayed on the Formica surface of the kitchen table that Vimbai felt like crying. “I know. But Peb . . . he’s been with us since the very beginning, remember? Sure, he looks weird and all, but he’s our friend, like Felix.”

Maya stroked some shallow cuts on the table surface, running her fingertips along their ragged ridges. Vimbai thought about the kitchen table back home—her parents’ house, which she still considered home, no matter how much the house in the dunes grew on her. That table bore no cuts or irregularities of any sort, its surface smooth and polished daily by a soft cloth—it was so soft, in fact, that little Vimbai used to sleep with this cloth after she managed to liberate it from the kitchen cupboards.

“Do you think it will hurt her?” Maya said. “If Peb gets his tongue back, will my grandma go back to being dead?”

“I don’t know,” Vimbai said. “Ask her.”

Maya gave her a tormented look. “I can’t. What if she says yes?”

“Then we get the man-fish and beat the fuck out of that slimy bastard,” Vimbai said and scowled, feeling rough and dangerous for once. “Then he would have to help us to sort things so that Peb gets his tongue back, and your grandmother can stay. Or at least—” Vimbai saw Maya’s face, and didn’t finish her sentence. There was too much hope mixed with fear in her dark eyes.