The House of Discarded Dreams (3 page)

Maya patted Vimbai’s hand in gratitude, making her blush a bit. “I don’t really know, but I guess this is when people are . . . honest, I guess. They know they’ve been beaten, and they are out of tricks for a while—they really know that they are fucked. And yet, there’s this thing when they try to tell themselves that it’s not that big of a deal. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like if they cannot lie to themselves about what happened, they start diminishing its importance. When they are honest, they almost have to be deluded, you know?”

Vimbai considered. “I’m kind of getting it, I guess.” She wasn’t really sure that she was getting anything, but she wanted Maya to like her so badly. Vimbai suspected that the spell of the house that lulled her so much tried to tie her not only to the house, but also to its inhabitants. Otherwise there didn’t seem to be a reason for her to feel so invested in what Maya thought of her.

Vimbai attended classes, dutiful but disengaged, caught in the slow molasses of movement of time and the sucking embrace of gravity. The world came through muffled, and only the house and the dunes and the ocean remained real. Winter was coming, and there was a first dusting of miserly snowflakes scattered almost invisible on the frozen sand one morning in November.

That day, Vimbai stepped onto the hoary porch and saw that the very character of the dunes had been transformed—they lost their fluid, mutable aspect and even though they remained the same in appearance they now stood motionless, seized by the ice within, trapped into immobility.

Vimbai’s bare toes curled instinctively, cringing away from contact with the cold boards of the porch (which, as her investigations had shown, harbored no nests of adorable foxes). She hugged her shoulders and stared at the leaden water, visible between the dunes, barely puckered by waves. Her fingertips grew numb, and the hairs inside her nose grew stiff with frost, singed with the smell of ozone. Still, Vimbai lingered in her robe, thinking of her mother—the first serious frost always put Vimbai in that frame of mind. As long as she could remember, it was the time when her mother grew pensive and quiet, and when pushed given to reminiscence. It was in November that Vimbai’s parents left their home and came to the U.S.

Vimbai strained to see over the water—it just seemed impossible that the entire continent could be hidden by the curving razorblade cut of the horizon, bleeding now the first red streaks of dawn. Her breath formed tight white clumps in the air, like the memories of the still invisible clouds overhead.

Her mother had to regret
something
—and Vimbai suspected ever since she was little that her mother still, twenty years later, was not convinced that she had made the right decision. How could one know something like that, how could one not agonize over how life would’ve turned out if one had made different choices? Even Vimbai, with her sheltered existence and precious few choices with any consequences, wondered. Those were small things, insignificant perhaps, but she wished sometimes that she had chosen differently.

She breathed open-mouthed on her fingers, numb and discolored by cold, and thought about that kid, the little ten-year-old whose name she never learned. She was in high school then, old enough to largely ignore the kids playing in the elementary-school yard she passed on her way to classes. She walked alone, absorbed in her thoughts, and paid no mind to the persistent cries emanating from the schoolyard. The word that jettisoned her out of her preoccupation was ‘lion’—not the sort of thing one heard often under such circumstances.

“Go hunt a lion,” a largish and very pink boy shouted. “Go back to Africa.”

Vimbai stopped and stared at the small black kid in ill-fitting white shirt and khaki shorts, backed up against a set of monkey bars. A few other children surrounded him in a tentative semicircle, not quite backing up the assailant but not dissuading him either. Non-committal, waiting to see how things shook out. Little vultures.

The small kid said nothing and just swallowed often and hard, as if trying to dislodge the words stuck in his throat.

The pink boy advanced half a step, and the semicircle drew up on itself tighter, the kids smelling blood now, just a moment away from taking part.

“Leave him alone,” Vimbai said.

The pink kid turned to look at her; she still remembered the expression of contempt in his eyes. Without saying a word, he returned his attention to the cornered kid in the white shirt. “Go hunt a lion,” he said again, with rather more force, as if challenging Vimbai to climb the fence and kick his plump behind.

Vimbai looked at her watch; she was already running late, and kids did this sort of thing all the time. “Stop it.” She raised her voice to be heard over the rising hum of the other voices that had decided to join in.

Her stomach had ached when she turned and walked away.

In her darker moments, like that day watching the cold ocean over the frozen dunes, she wondered if she somehow upset her karmic balance that day, if everything that ever went wrong since then was the result of her failure. She had wished she would see this kid again, but no matter how many times she walked past the elementary school, he was not there.

Vimbai winced at the pain in her feet the moment she shifted her weight, and she hobbled inside, trying to remember how long it took for frostbite to develop. “Not clever,” she mumbled, “not clever at all.”

She decided to call her parents, just to tell them that she remembered what was important to them, and that she cared. Her roommates still slept, given to late hours and disorganized lifestyle; Vimbai would have disapproved if it didn’t mean that in the morning she had the house all to herself. She walked in slow mincing steps, letting the sensation and accompanying pain revitalize her toes, to the phone—an almost extinct rotary affair, gleaming with slick black curves and the soft creamy ivory of the rotating disk. She picked up the receiver and listened for a while; she was puzzled by the static that inhabited the wires of the phone—it seemed haunted, like the rest of the house, alive with blurred disembodied whispers, and Vimbai thought that if only she listened carefully enough, she would be able to discern the words and the sobbing laments of the little ghost.

The static ceased just as she hovered on the brink of understanding, and the phone beeped and inquired whether she needed assistance from the operator. She sighed and dialed the number.

And once again it was as in a dream, with slow cloying molasses weighing her eyelids and her lips, as she whispered that she was sorry and that she loved them.

“Vimbai, are you all right?” her mother said. “You always sound so tired. Are you getting enough sleep? Are you staying up late?”

“No,” Vimbai said, and then, “yes.”

“Vimbai…”

“I am getting enough sleep. I’m not staying up late. I just miss you.”

Her mother remained quiet for a while. “You can always come back home,” she finally said.

“I can’t. I have a lease.”

“At least, you can visit. How’s Saturday for you? I’m making stew.”

These words coaxed a smile—Vimbai was unreasonably attached to the bland beef stew and rice, the food so generic it could be hardly counted as traditional. “Okay,” she said. “I can make Saturday.”

“Good,” Vimbai’s mother said. “It is decided then.”

And then her voice faded, and the ghost in the wires spoke—clearly, for the first time.

Vimbai was not sure how much time had passed—she slumped on the floor, her frozen feet forgotten, the receiver pressed hard to her ear, listening to the stumbling, simpering words that poured out. She did not dare to ask any questions for fear of the ghost in the phone falling silent, spooked away by the fleshy human voice. So she let it talk, clutching the receiver with desperate force, afraid to loosen her grip and let go of the mystery inside it.

The ghost was not a ghost at all, or so it claimed—it claimed to be a psychic energy baby, birthed in some ethereal dimension, and pulled into the phone by the powerful magnetism of phone signals. It remembered with perfect clarity how it came to be—remembered coalescing from the reflecting membranous surface of the world, streaked with reflected light, humming with surface tension under the pressure of emptiness underneath. The Psychic Energy Baby found form among the emanations of people’s minds and the susurrus of their voices, it found flesh in the shapes their lips and eyes made, the surprise of ‘o’s and the sibilations of ‘s’s; its skin stretched taut like a soap bubble, forged from the wet sound of lips touching; its thoughts were the musky smells and the breath of fresh bread. Its fingers spread like ribcages, and its nerves twined around the transparent water balloons of the muscles like stems of toadflax, searching restlessly for every available crevice, stretching along cold rough surfaces. Its veins, tiny rivers, pumped heartbeats striking in unison, the dry dallying of billions of ventricular contractions. And it spoke, spoke endlessly, it spoke words that tasted of dark air and formic acid. It could speak long before it took its final shape.

And when it happened, when all the sounds and smells and words in the world, when all the thoughts had aligned so that it could become—then it found itself pulled into the wires, surrounded by taut copper and green and red and yellow insulation; twined and quartered among the cables, rent open by millions of voices that shouted and whispered and pleaded and threatened, interspersed with the rasping of breaths and tearing laughter. It traveled through the crisscrossing of the wires so fast that it felt itself being pulled into a needle, head spearing into the future while its feet infinitely receded into the past, until it came into a dark quiet pool of the black rotary phone, where it could reassemble itself and take stock.

When Maya woke up and came downstairs, she found Vimbai still sitting on the floor in her robe, the silent receiver in her hand, her face buried in her knees and her shoulders shaking with sobs—not grief-stricken but merely shaken and amazed beyond words.

To Vimbai’s surprise and gratitude too deep for words, Maya was neither skeptical nor disbelieving when she heard the tale of the Psychic Energy Baby. “It happens,” she said. “Don’t you have classes to go to?” Maya’s shift at the casino’s bar did not start until eight p.m., and she left the house late.

Vimbai shrugged. “Who cares,” she said. “There’s that thing in our phone. I think it wants to get out.”

“Of course it does,” Maya said, her rich voice acquiring a soothing tone as if speaking to a cranky child. “Don’t worry, we’ll get it out. Just as soon as Felix wakes up. Come on, I’ll make coffee.”

Vimbai sat at the kitchen table as Maya went through the ritual of brewing coffee. They didn’t bother with grinding whole beans, and Vimbai was getting used to the taste of coffee that came out of the can or a more fancy bagged variety—when it was Vimbai’s turn to shop, she went for shade-grown and fair trade, more out of habit than any conscious choice. This is what her mother always bought. The clinking of the carafe and hissing of steam, the smell of coffee felt comforting, and with every passing minute Vimbai was more and more willing to believe that the Psychic Energy Baby was just a product of fatigue, cold, and bad reception.

The coffee bubbled and poured in a fragrant stream, and Maya sat down. “This ought to wake Felix up,” she said. “He’ll get that baby out of those wires. Poor thing.”

“How?” Vimbai said. “What is Felix going to do?”

“What he always does,” Maya answered. “You don’t think he earns rent money by sitting around all day, do you?”

“I don’t know what he does,” Vimbai answered, and poured herself a cup. It warmed her hands and instilled a sense of serenity.

“Well, I’ll tell you. He’s a freelancer. Only what he does, no one else can. He separates things.”

“Oh?”

Maya laughed and drank her coffee. “Things you can’t see, like that baby in the phone. Felix says, they sometimes contaminate the things you can see, or the other way around.”

“People pay him for it?”

Maya nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“Like exorcisms?”

“Not those, the Catholics do them. Felix does more simple stuff. Like junkies with invisible insects under their skin, or amputees with phantom limbs.”

“He amputates phantom limbs?”

“I suppose he does. In any case, we’ll see what he can do, huh?”

Vimbai nodded. Somehow, the fact that Felix had an unusual occupation was easy to accept, and once accepted, any strange occupation seemed as reasonable as the next one. So if Felix made a living untangling the invisible babies out of the phone wires, what business it was of Vimbai’s? Who was she to judge? She felt only intense curiosity, and the weakest pang of guilt for missing her classes.

Chapter 3

Felix stumbled downstairs just before noon. His terrible eyes were mercifully closed, and his hair hung into his face in tangled clumps. Vimbai gasped—the long strands didn’t just obscure parts of his forehead, but rather seemed to consume them entirely. His face seemed streaked by darkness, fractured like a tiger hidden in shadows. Her encounter with the Psychic Energy Baby had jolted her enough to realize that what she assumed was hair—had no other option, really, but to assume that—was a conglomeration of darkness, of absence of light; a black hole, emptiness of outer space, a jagged nothingness. It spilled over Felix’s face, threatening to consume it and retreating when he tossed his head and smiled at Maya.

“Can I have some coffee?” he said.

“Of course,” Maya said. “Help yourself.”

Felix raked his insane hair out of his eyes, and his hands disappeared in blackness up to their wrists; he extricated them somewhat hastily, and his left eye rolled to look upward with a troubled expression.

Vimbai tried to think of a question to ask, but came short. She could only round her eyes and shrug at Maya.

“Felix,” Maya said the moment Felix took his seat by the table. “Vimbai found a ghost in the phone wires, think you can get it out?”

“It depends,” Felix said and winced at the too-hot coffee. “Does it want to come out?”

“I think so,” Maya said. “Well?”

Felix blew into his mug. “What kind of ghost is it?”

Vimbai finally found her voice. “It’s not really a ghost,” she said. “It’s a psychic energy baby.”

“Did you Google it?” Felix asked. “Don’t think I ever heard of one.”

Vimbai brought her laptop downstairs, but the results were disappointing. Psychic energy baby turned out to be one of the very few things Google had no insight on.

“All right,” Felix said. “It’s in the phone now? I guess I’d better take a look.”

It was the most words he had said since Vimbai moved in; in fact, he sounded remarkably coherent. It prompted Vimbai to blurt, “This is not really hair, is it?”

“No,” Felix admitted. “I’ll explain some other time.”

Maya and Vimbai followed Felix to the hallway where the phone huddled, forlorn, on its dusty shelf. Felix picked up the receiver and listened for a while, his bloodshot eyes rotating quietly in their sockets in opposite directions; Vimbai found that he looked thoughtful.

“Just static,” Felix said.

Vimbai sighed. “Just listen.”

Felix did. He listened for a long while, slouched against the wall, and the thoughtfulness started giving way to boredom, but then there was crackling in the receiver, and he startled upright. “That’s a Psychic Energy Baby all right,” he said, covering the mouthpiece with his hand.

“Will it ever grow up?” Maya asked, and bit her fingernails in excitement. “Will it be a Psychic Energy Adult?”

“How should I know?” Felix glared a little, both of his eyes managing to simultaneously focus on Maya. “The thing is unGoogleable.”

Vimbai cleared her throat. Her head swam, and she felt as if in a dream, able to do and say anything. “Seriously, what’s with the hair?” she said.

Felix shrugged. “Not now.” He grunted and picked up the phone, leaving the phone jack connected so as not to lose touch with the Psychic Energy Baby. Both Vimbai and Maya held their breath and each other’s hands; Vimbai imagined that participants in a spiritualist séance would feel the same mix of disbelief, giddiness and fear lurking just under the surface as they did right now, watching Felix work his magic surrounded by peeling wallpaper and creaking floorboards, a black rotary phone the focus of his attention.

Felix thrust the phone into his hair; Vimbai whimpered a bit as the entire squat plastic box plus its dangling cord and the receiver were swallowed by the darkness. There was no way for it to fit—there was no way Felix could thrust his arm into his hair almost all the way to his shoulder, as narrow tongues of emptiness licked it, trying to pull it in. For a moment, Vimbai imagined Felix being sucked into the black hole of his hair and disappearing in a recursive black dot, but he managed to pull away, his hand still gripping the phone.

“That ought to do it,” Felix said. “I hope.”

Maya reached for the receiver and listened to the recorded incantation that suggested dialing 0 for the operator. “It’s gone,” Maya announced. “Where is it?”

“It’s in my hair,” Felix answered, as if referring to a moth or some other harmless but annoying insect. “Hold on.”

Now both of his hands disappeared into his hair up to the elbows, and moved about energetically. Vimbai though that he looked like a man reaching for something slimy and nasty in the garbage disposal—his face acquired the same apprehensive expression as it did every time he had to touch his hair. Vimbai used to think that her own hair was unruly, but it didn’t even come close to the existential horror of Felix’s.

He finally grabbed a hold of something and pulled—judging from his wincing and the restless motion of his hands kneading some invisible dough, that something was either slippery or reluctant or both. A few times his arms were pulled back in and struggled out again, the resisting prize still hidden from view.

There was a shriek and a wail, and Felix grunted as he pulled out the wriggling shape.

“Yep,” Maya said. “It’s a Psychic Energy Baby all right.”

Vimbai had not visited Felix’s room before—in fact, she used to avoid thinking about Felix, because even after she had lived in the house for a while, she found that he didn’t quite fit into her usual thinking patterns. He was the oddly shaped piece of a jigsaw puzzle that didn’t seem to belong anywhere, and probably had tumbled here from some other, entirely different set, but there he was.

And there she was, following him and Maya up the stairs to the small bedroom at the end of the corridor. A not very mature “Keep Out—High Voltage” sign guarded the door. This is where they carried the Psychic Energy Baby; it wailed, distraught, and struggled and seemed to resent the unfamiliar surroundings and the lack of the binding (yet directing) phone wires. Vimbai half-regretted ever bringing it to Maya’s attention.

Felix’s bedroom was surprisingly clean and tidy—the bed neatly made, books on the shelves, the desk amazingly free of piles of paper and stray objects such as found their way onto Vimbai’s. The only thing that was out of ordinary was the row of phantom limbs lined against the wall—there were hundreds of feet and legs and hands and arms, all cast in the same transparent substance as the Psychic Energy Baby, visible only by the curving of the reflected light stretched taut like a soap bubble.

“They are all . . . yours?” Vimbai said.

Felix nodded, his eyes rolling in rhythm with the bobbing of his head. “Well, they used to be somebody else’s. But once you detach a phantom leg or arm, the owners don’t want them. So I keep them—not like I can throw them away.”

“How do you . . . ” Vimbai posed, thinking of ways to better formulate the question. After some hemming, she gave up any hope of sophistication, and hoped only for coherence. “How do you do these things?” she pointed at the limbs and the baby that still lay transparent, cradled against Felix’s narrow chest.

Felix seemed to have only a tentative hold of the ways in which his hair—or a small universe that orbited the dome of his skull, whatever one wanted to call it—worked; he understood it only enough to exploit it. The universe which he explored like a blind man would, by touch alone, contained primarily clean socks, a few household objects, and a desiccated head or two (he promised to explain the heads later as well). Also, it seemed to work as a prism of sorts—except that if a prism could split a beam of light into its component wavelengths, Felix’s hair split any entangled objects into their components, be they material, spiritual, or both. Felix discovered it by accident, when he was quite young—a neighbor’s kitten crawled into his ’do, and got separated from its voice—the disembodied meowing haunted the house until they moved.

“So you could separate a person from their soul,” Vimbai said.

“If you believe in souls,” Felix answered. “I suppose. But then the person would be dead, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh for crying out loud,” Maya interrupted. “Yes, Felix, your hair is a deadly weapon. Now, do something about this baby.”

“Like what?” Felix said, and sat on his bed, the baby sniffling and waving its transparent limbs in his lap.

Vimbai reached for the apparition. To her surprise, the baby had some heft—not as heavy as a regular baby would be, but it felt as a being of substance. It cried some more.

“There there,” Vimbai said. “You can talk, can’t you? Tell us what you want now.”

The Psychic Energy Baby (or Peb, as Vimbai mentally abbreviated it) stopped crying. “It was a dark and terrible place,” it said in a blur of a voice, barely louder than a sigh.

“What, the phone or his hair?” Maya asked.

The baby pointed at Felix, and its lower lip, itself reminiscent of a bubble of spit, trembled. “Something held me there,” it said. “It is not a good place.”

“I bet,” Vimbai murmured. “Now that you’re here, what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know yet,” Peb said. “But I’m not going back into the dark, neither wires nor him.”

“Fine,” Vimbai said. “Can you move on your own?” It did look awfully tiny and insubstantial.

Peb could—it turned out, it could walk or float, and walls and floors did not baffle it or contain its movement. It started investigating Felix’s room by sinking into the floor halfway, so just the transparent torso moved about, looking under the bed, until it finally crossed through the wall and disappeared from view. Vimbai and Maya sighed simultaneously.

“I don’t suppose it will pay rent,” Maya said. “It probably has no money.”

“It doesn’t have any pockets,” Vimbai agreed. “We should tell it to keep away from the bathrooms when we’re using them.”

“Phantom limbs are so much easier,” Felix said. “At least they stay put.”

“And look creepy,” Maya added.

Felix huffed. “And the Psychic Energy Baby that wanders through the walls at all hours is not creepy?”

“Not very,” Maya said. “At least, it looks alive.”

“It looks like a ghost,” Vimbai said. “Only I don’t believe in ghosts.” It wasn’t entirely untrue—Vimbai was never superstitious, and when she examined her belief system, she discovered that it was not sufficiently undermined to admit the possibility of ghosts. Or it was mere inertia, because if psychic energy babies indeed lived in phone wires and god knows what other hidden places, than there was no reason for ghosts not to exist either. And after all, weren’t phantom limbs also ghosts of a sort? “Do you mind if I look at your . . . the phantom limbs?” she said out loud.

“Help yourself,” Felix said. “Feel free to take any you like—I don’t really need them; only it doesn’t feel right to throw them away.”

Vimbai studied the limbs—smooth like blown glass, with the same sleek appearance, they seemed mannequins, although no mannequin had ever exhibited that many purely human imperfections and malformations. There were deformed nails, ingrown hairs, bones too visible just under the soap skin. There were hammertoes and hitchhiker’s thumbs, varicose veins, barely healed razor cuts and an occasional pimple or a scar. She touched one leg, cut off just below the knee, and almost jumped at the sensation of cool smooth and—most importantly—solid form under her fingertips, at the subtle humming of electricity just under the imaginary skin.

She didn’t know what she wanted with a phantom limb, but she carefully picked up the half-leg and carried it to her room. It fit nicely by the window, next to the space heater. There was a cold stab of draft coming from the window where the frame didn’t quite touch the wall, and Vimbai turned the heater on, letting its pink glow fall on the convex surface of the phantom calf. She sat at her desk and looked outside, where the leaden hem of the surf nipped at the frozen shore, and listened to the quiet rustling of the Psychic Energy Baby exploring the creaky old house.

Saturday came, and Vimbai drove reluctantly home. The street—so quiet on this cold day, so helplessly suburban—already felt alien. Like in a dream, the sidewalk familiar down to every crack and pockmark, the leafless peach trees in the front yard, the woven mat on the steps were just as she remembered them, seen clearly through the fisheye lens of separation. This is what coming home feels like, Vimbai thought, this is how her parents feel when they go to visit relatives in Harare—only even more so, their time and distance greater hundred-fold, thousand-fold than Vimbai’s.

When she came in, she realized that her parents’ house smelled of clean linen and a faint whiff of vanilla and nutmeg—something she never noticed when she lived here. She was separate from it now, separate enough to notice its smell. Separate enough to look at the kitchen table and admire the gleaming of white bowls in the slanted pale winter sunlight that poured into the kitchen through a large bay window. The things she had never noticed before, but now suddenly did.

At dinner, her parents talked the familiar talk—the department and the hospital, Africana studies and Zimbabwe politics. So Vimbai kept to her own thoughts and ate, rarely lifting her gaze off her plate. It was so easy to fall back into this pattern.