The House of Discarded Dreams (20 page)

Maya drained her cup. The grandmothers had gotten acquainted by then, and chatted amiably, with Peb lolling and crying nearby, refusing to be ignored by the grandmothers.

“Grandma,” Maya called. “Will you survive if you give Peb his tongue back?”

“Which one is his tongue, child?” the grandma answered.

“Oh damn it,” Maya said. “We might need Felix again.”

Vimbai clapped her hands over her mouth. “Oh, poor Felix! We left him all alone since last night!”

“Or longer,” Maya confirmed. “Plus, that universe of his was drained.”

“There’s still some floating on the surface outside,” Vimbai answered. “Maybe. Balshazaar poured it out. Let’s go check.”

“I would say that you’re talking crazy,” Maya said and stood, “if I wasn’t used to all of us talking crazy.”

On the porch, they stood a while, both surprised that the sun was so bright and large and real outside—and there were smells, familiar smells of the ocean and a new, coppery odor Vimbai could not immediately place. It didn’t matter though—she thought that they were spending so much time indoors, in the constantly growing, mutating house, in its musty smell and its fake sky painted over the ceiling; with its sheetrock ridges and furniture mountains, carpet lawns and meat windows.

“It’s nice to be outside,” Maya said.

Vimbai nodded. She stared at the water, choppy with small stubborn waves, solid and angry. The waves butted against the porch, and there was no trace of Felix’s remaining universe as far as the eye could see. “Damn it,” Vimbai said.

Maya kneeled on the porch, peering between the boards—it wasn’t too long ago, Vimbai remembered, that she imagined a nest of foxes under it, thought she observed a quick liquid movement of a long-tailed creature. “Look at this,” Maya said.

Vimbai kneeled next to her. The water was dark under the porch, and until Vimbai’s eyes adjusted to the shifts of light and shadow, to the narrow stripes of sunlight and sudden collapses of darkness, she wasn’t sure whether she was seeing just water, or something else. Soon enough her eyes grew sensitive enough to discern the nuances, and she sighed with relief as she recognized the dark oily substance trapped under the porch. “How do we get it out?”

“I think I know,” Maya said, and jumped to her feet. “You stay put, I’ll go get Felix.”

Felix was revived somewhat by the mention of his errant black hole, and he rushed outside, his lips, white as sheets, trembling with weakness and relief, a savage hope battling the familiar fears. He stuck his hands between the floorboards and wept as the thick oily fluid flowed up his pale arms and slopped over his neck and face and head, in an orgy of recognition and achieving completeness.

There were times, Vimbai thought, when things just came together—the constellations aligned and the world turned in such a way that the Coriolis forces of the world pushed all the disparate things and influences so that they came together in a beautiful swirl. Perhaps the house was too big to truly see that, but the kitchen was not—and Vimbai held her breath, wishing for this moment to stay with her as long as it could. There were Vimbai and Maya, standing by the sides of the screen door, their backs propping up the walls. They held hands in mutual support and anticipation, the jointed lock of their fingers hanging by the doorknob, as if it too was capable of admitting them somewhere else.

The grandmothers sat by the table, opposite each other, their eyes locked—one ghostly and one undead, but grandmothers nonetheless, and one could not help but love them, love them in ways one could not love one’s parents out of pride and embarrassment and too much baggage and adolescent arguments. Perhaps those resentments too would burn away in a clean spiritual fire, Vimbai thought; for now, grandmothers sufficed.

The horseshoe crabs Vimbai thought of as hers and Maya’s dogs were not in attendance, with the crabs being under the ocean and industriously pulling the house along, and the dogs temporarily exiled to the porch, where they squinted at the sun and panted with their tongues lolling; neither seemed to mind much at not being included in the ceremony.

And then there was Peb, floating grandly over the kitchen table, and Felix standing nearby, somewhat less pale, somewhat more animated ever since he managed to collect the remnants of the oily universe from under the porch and reattach them to his skull. It wasn’t anything like his old do—there was no magnificence left there, it was barely enough to cover his head with a thin film, but, as they all had observed in turn, it was better than nothing at all.

Felix swallowed a few times as he looked from Peb to Maya’s grandma and back. His Adam’s apple, suddenly large and fragile under the transparent skin like a porcelain egg, bobbed in rhythm with the swallowing. He licked his lips a few times. “Here goes,” he said, and dipped both hands into his hair. Both came away covered in what looked like tar but Vimbai guessed at the gooey space of his former universe, and squeezed Maya’s hand tighter.

Maya squeezed back. It was a bad time, Vimbai thought, but then again, is there ever a good time for anything? And just as Felix reached his stained fingers into Maya’s grandmother’s mouth, Vimbai whispered under her breath,
I love you
, looking straight ahead and addressing no one in particular.

She had been getting used to the otherworldly light shows; still, when Felix pulled out a writhing, rainbow colored fish, Vimbai gave a little gasp of surprise. The small thing flapped and strained against his fingers, ethereal, and for a moment Vimbai thought that Felix had extracted something he wasn’t supposed to. But Peb reached out with seven or eight of his limbs and grabbed the brightly colored appendage and stuffed it in his mouth. He smiled then, and babbled happily about the ethereal dimensions and the deepest chasm filled with molten sulfur and black iron.

Vimbai’s eyes turned to the grandma—the old lady gave Felix a disapproving look of her white eyes and coughed, delicately covering her wrinkled mouth with one white-gloved hand. She coughed for a while, as if clearing her throat from dust and grime accumulated over the years (and Vimbai suspected that was the case); grandma hacked and caught her breath and hacked again, with great inhales and sharp coughs reminiscent of the tearing of butcher’s paper. When she was finally able to stop, she extracted a small white handkerchief demurely tucked away into her sleeve, and mopped the corners of her eyes and her mouth. “Good Lord,” she said. “Maya, are you wearing cutoffs made from man’s jeans? Have you lost your mind?”

Maya let go of Vimbai’s hand then, and she rushed across the kitchen floor elbowing Felix out of the way, and she gave her grandmother a great hug, crying and laughing at the same time.

And what was Vimbai going to say about that? Nothing, that’s what—she kept her lips sealed, because she too had her grandmother who had no reason or way of being here, because sometimes hows and whys did not matter as much as the greatest gift in the world, the biggest privilege imaginable—the ability to look at someone whom one had lost, and to tell them all the things you always wanted to say but did not have a chance. The second chance, the greatest gift—and who was Vimbai to deny it to anyone, least of all Maya?

Chapter 20

Vimbai watched the sun rising over the ocean—still a thin silvery stripe, with the clouds just barely turning pink and golden.

Maya came out onto the porch and stood next to her. “Nice sunrise. I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen one—properly, I mean. Driving home after the night shift doesn’t quite count.”

“Sunrise is a sunrise,” Vimbai said. “You okay?”

Maya nodded. “Yeah. Just trying to get used to the idea that my grandmother is, you know, a zombie.”

“Mine is a ghost,” Vimbai pointed out.

Maya heaved a sigh. “Do you think ghosts are cooler than zombies?”

“No way.” Vimbai smiled. “Zombies are way cool. Although the ghosts are too.”

“And undead horseshoe crabs?”

“They are in their own category,” Vimbai said. She pointed at the dark stripe on the horizon, something she had been trying to discern the shape of since it was light enough to see anything. “What does this look like to you?”

Maya looked, her hand shielding her squinting eyes, and grinned, wider than Vimbai had ever seen her smile. “This is land, Vimbai. This is land! We’ll get us some milk soon.”

“And afterwards?”

“I still vote for staying in the house and being queens of all we see,” Maya said. “I don’t think we’d get to keep our grandmothers in the outside world.”

“I’m sure they’ll be fine in the house,” Vimbai said. “But we . . . you and I, we need to go outside now and again. I want to see my parents, and I would like you to meet them, and I hope they are not too mad at me—I mean, they would be mad, but they’ll forgive me, I hope. And I want to go back to school, and I hope to get away with academic probation for such a long absence, and I worry that I won’t be able to.”

Maya smiled. “I know. Still, it’s tempting to imagine what it would be like, to leave everything behind like that, and just explore and name things, wouldn’t it?”

“Sure,” Vimbai said. “Maybe we’ll be able to—maybe the house will keep growing on the inside, and we can take weekend trips to its distant reaches.”

“And we can go and visit the man-fish.”

“Oh, damn it!” Vimbai clasped her hands to her chest. “I completely forgot that I promised him a spell—I better take care of it before he gets pissed off and starts walking around swallowing souls.”

“I’ll come with you,” Maya said. “Do I need to bring the dogs with me?”

Vimbai shook her head. “Nah, let them be. I will need a knife, though.”

Maya followed her in the kitchen and stayed close, as Vimbai rummaged through every drawer looking for the sharpest knife. “You think you know what you’re doing?”

“Yeah,” Vimbai lied, and shot a reassuring smile in the direction of both grandmothers. She headed for the door before the grandmothers got suspicious and started asking what they wanted with sharp knives. Maya followed, her expression alternating between giddy and doubtful.

Vimbai and Maya hurried to the man-fish’s lake. The way was so familiar now, so ordinary that Vimbai barely paid any attention to the usual overnight terrain alterations—there was a small hill built of rolled up, twisted laundry, and on the other side of the path a freshly sprung puddle of Jell-O and rich mud. Weak and pale stems of rye fringed the path and brushed against Vimbai’s bare calves, like stiff cat whiskers.

“Do you think that land we saw was . . . is really New Jersey?” Maya said. “I mean, could it be some never-never land or something?”

Vimbai shrugged. “I doubt it. The crabs know where they are going, and they know New Jersey. They would tell us if they were lost . . . wouldn’t they?”

“Of course,” Maya said. “Just wondering, you know? These past few weeks have been a bit—”

“Weird?” Vimbai interrupted.

Maya smiled and nodded. “Yeah. If you’re aiming for the understatement of the century.”

“You’ve been coping well.” Vimbai sucked on her lower lip, considering her words. “I was getting an impression that you were rather . . .
reveling
in it.”

“I never thought it would make sense to freak out or whine about shit,” Maya said. “Roll with the punches, dontcha know. But this stuff, this . . . this house and the ghosts and my dogs—all this has been great. I like it, and sometimes you just have to stop worrying about what’s possible and what isn’t, and how it’s all going to play out, and what will happen to you and if you’re losing your mind.”

“You thought that you might?” Vimbai said.

“And you didn’t?”

Vimbai shook her head. “I would’ve, if it was just me. But with you around, being so cool about all this . . . I never really doubted.”

The cattails and reeds fringing the man-fish’s lake greeted them with sage nodding to the nudgings of a light gentle wind, and the sun reflected in a thousand facets on the lake’s surface.

There was a movement, a splash by the small island of wild rice not too far off the bank. The man-fish waited for them, his wide mouth twisted in a grimace of acute displeasure that eerily reminded Vimbai of her mother. “Finally,” he said. “Took you long enough to show up.”

“Sorry,” Vimbai said. “We’ve been battling blood-draining monsters.”

“Successfully, I assume.” The man-fish gave Vimbai a long measuring look. “Of course. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“And you would.” Maya shook her head. “You really know how to hedge your bets—you would be here no matter what.”

“You don’t seem to understand the man-fish,” the man-fish said.

Vimbai nodded. It seemed impossible to understand such a creature, like it was not possible to understand the vampires. There was that solitary drive, the terrible single-minded obsession that Vimbai lacked and yet did not envy. “I suppose we don’t,” she said. “Then again, what are you going to do?”

“You don’t understand the survival.” The man-fish crawled closer to the bank, his wet browned skin glistening in the sun as his humped back and the stiff dorsal fin breached the water surface. “You don’t know what it is like, constantly thinking of not dying, and finding enough to eat so you can live another day.”

“Maybe not,” Maya said. “But you need Vimbai now, so you better be nice to her.”

The man-fish grumbled and crawled closer still. “All right, all right. So what say you, witch-girl?”

“I’m definitely not a witch,” Vimbai said, even as she doubted her own words. Her thoughts ran in so many directions at once now—was she really a witch, or was her magic born merely of love and desperation? Would her mother be mad at her if she knew? Of course not, Vimbai thought. She would be mad at Vimbai’s long disappearance first of all, and if she was ever kicked out of school or even put on academic probation, she would be even madder. Magic was quite far down on the list of things Vimbai’s mother would get mad about. “But I can cut you good. It’s a pity I didn’t bring a fish knife.”

Maya snickered, and the man-fish rolled his beady eyes. “Very funny,” he said. “Go ahead—less talking and more cutting, and I only pray that you’re more proficient in the latter than in the former.”

Vimbai eyed the wide expanse of the man-fish’s flank and back, brown and green like silt, like river mud. He swelled immense, and his eye still glimmered with malice he never bothered to conceal. And what sort of magic could she pour into such a creature? She could only rely on her vague understanding of how these things worked, and she reasoned that if her love, her unrequited desire fueled the protective spell she had somehow carved into her forearms, then to quench the insatiable thirst for souls she had to offer something the opposite of it—satisfaction, satiety, contentment. Vimbai smiled, since this was something she knew quite a bit about.

She turned to Maya. “I’m going to tell a story—it’s a traditional
ngano
, and I’m a
sarungano
, a storyteller. You’ll be the audience and you’ll have to ask me questions when I stop, all right? And answer mine when I ask you.”

“I’ll do my best,” Maya said, and looked puzzled. “Is it like a spell?”

“It’s like a story,” Vimbai answered. “
Ngano
is how children learn.” She cleared her throat and started, the knife in her hand rising and falling in rhythm with her story.

“Who is the wisest animal in the forest?” Vimbai said.

Maya opened her mouth and laughed. Then said, “I don’t know. Who?”

“Is it a jaguar?” Her knife fell, leaving a long thin mark on the catfish’s smooth skin.

“No.”

The mark swelled with blood.

“Is it a baboon?” Another cut, crisscrossing the first at a sharp angle.

“No, it is not.” Even Maya fell under the spell of her rhythm and swayed along, and gave her answers in a singsong voice.

“Is it a hare?” The new cut fell, and the overall patter of crosshatching grew apparent to Vimbai.

Maya hesitated, and Vimbai shrugged at her, indicating the correct answer. “Maybe,” Maya said.

“Is it a tortoise?” The skin of the catfish was now developing a pattern of blood-stained, elongated rhombi.

“Yes?” Maya offered.

Vimbai nodded and smiled. “Go on, ask.”

“Why is it wise?” Maya asked.

“Because it does not chase after things.” Cut.

“Because it is satisfied with what it has.” Cut.

“Because it carries his house on his back and does not covet a new one.” Cut.

“He is never aggressive and yet he gets his way.” Nod to Maya.

“How?” Maya said.

The knife in Vimbai’s hand trembled and paused, raised over the devastation it had wrought—the skin of the man-fish was a pattern of bloodied diamonds, a horrible jester’s suit. “Because he knows that he already has everything he needs, and if he ever needs more, the creator will give him more. It is up to the
Mwari
, the creator, and the
mhondoro,
the tribal spirits, to give everyone what they need. Otherwise, the eyes grow greedy, the hands feel empty, and there’s never any satisfaction and no one is ever sated and happy with what they have.”

“Except the tortoise,” Maya offered, sounding more confident.

“Except the tortoise,” Vimbai agreed. “May the moon forever slosh in his belly.”

At her last words, the man-fish’s mouth snapped open—a dark tunnel of unquenched hunger—and he lunged, his jaws snapping shut just a hairbreadth away from Vimbai’s nose. She screamed out and jerked away, the hand holding the knife lashing out in a reflexively protective gesture.

Maya gasped nearby and out of a corner of her eye Vimbai caught a blur of motion as Maya struggled to her feet, as the man-fish slithered and snapped, trying to get to Vimbai’s soul, his evil reaching out in a final desperate gesture. Vimbai’s knife caught him across the throat, and the last cut, ragged and cruel, traced the pale skin below his jaw, carved away a good chunk of his snout.

The fish fell back, exhausted, the bloodied chunk of his face in Vimbai’s lap. She pushed him away, kicked his limp slippery body away from her, and struggled to catch her breath.

She dropped her hand with the knife down into her lap and looked at her handiwork. For a moment she worried that the man-fish would bleed to death, expire because of her incompetent magicking—and even he had tried to drown her not too long ago, even if he tried to steal her soul it would seem wrong to her, having killed someone who voluntarily went under her knife, preferring it to the needles of the
wazimamoto
and the eternal hunger of the cursed.

Then, the man-fish stirred, and the flow of blood stopped. The diamonds of his savaged skin glowed and silvered, and Vimbai and Maya could not quite believe their eyes and had to touch them with their fingers, to make sure that those were indeed scales—something no catfish ever had.

“Whoa,” Maya whispered. “How’d you learn to do this?”

“I didn’t,” Vimbai said.

“And that story?”

“I just made it up.” She tossed the knife to the ground and sat back, her weight pushing her heels deeper into the muddy soil. “I don’t really
know
anything. I just make shit up, you know?”

“Seems to work just fine.” Maya crouched low next to Vimbai, close enough for their knees to touch, and watched the man-fish’s continued transformation. His skin was now covered in perfect silver scales with small shimmering white and green spots, and his face was changing too—the whiskers had disappeared and his upper jaw curved into a haughty beak, extending his face forward, covering up the disfigured lower one. His head and body did not look flat anymore, but acquired the graceful proportion of a fast fish that did not feed on the bottom but propelled itself with strong strokes of its lobed tailfin.

“That’s a lake trout,” Vimbai said. “I think.”

“Is it good?” Maya dared to pat the fish’s head, and it flared its gill covers in response.

“Hey, Mr. Fish?” Vimbai said. “Can you still talk?”

The fish opened its mouth as if in silent laughter, splashed its tail in the shallow water like an oar, and—one, two, three—it was gone, disappeared under water. In just a few moments, the surface of the lake grew smooth like silk again, and did not betray the presence of a large fish underneath anywhere.

That night, Vimbai could not sleep. The thoughts of the previous day kept churning in her mind, and her imaginings of the day to come charged the air with great anticipation. She wasn’t the only one—the previous evening, even though no one had said anything about it, had been taut with barely concealed excitement.