The House of Discarded Dreams (5 page)

Under the several hundred yards of water, down on the bottom, horseshoe crabs burrowed in the sand, their movements sluggish in the cold water, the spikes of their tails pointing uniformly north. They had flat, almost round bodies that glistened pretty shades of dark green and light brown, and their blue blood flowed leisurely through their open circulatory systems. They were spent, depleted—bled almost dry and thrown back by human hands where they lingered in a disconcerting state between life and undeath. They had enough blood not to die—yet not quite enough to keep them living. So is it any wonder that the crabs—ancient, trilobitic—whispered stories of vampires that came in boats and then white medical trucks? Is it surprising that they told each other about people who stole blood from their veins and tossed them back, always back, so they could linger in the cold water never quite recovering?

Above them, the house floated, its inhabitants asleep inside. Vimbai was the first to wake up and come downstairs, where the ghost grandmother was entertaining the baby with some songs and hand-clapping. Peb clapped along, with all eleven of its hands, most of which were far too large for its tiny psychic body.

Vimbai glanced at the window and grabbed the kitchen counter for support—instead of the familiar landscape of dunes and sea, there was just a tapestry of green and pale blue and gray. The dunes had vanished, or so she thought until she looked out of the window and saw nothing but the ocean and the sky stretching as far as she could see, and felt a faint spongy rhythm of the floor below her feet.

“Where are we, grandmother?” she asked.

The ghost stopped singing. “We sail across the sea,” she said.

“Where to? Why?”

“Perhaps it’s a curse some witch, some
muroyi
, put on you,” the ghost said. “Or perhaps it is you who started the journey to get where you need to be.”

Vimbai groaned with frustration. Grandmother was just like Vimbai’s mother (or the other way around)—both expected her to somehow comprehend her heritage, to become a Zimbabwean like her parents. They wanted her to have a clear purpose in life, even though Vimbai herself rarely thought past applying to graduate schools. And no matter how much they loved Vimbai, she could feel that they lamented the fact that she came out American, as if it were a sad accident, a birth defect of some sort. They wanted her to be like them, to care about the same things they cared about.

“I’m not going on any journeys,” Vimbai said. “I have classes, and Maya has work. Where is she?”

“Sleeping,” Peb said. “She is sleeping and dreaming of tall spires and the sad creatures on the porch.”

“You mean, under the porch,” Vimbai said.

“There’re only horseshoe crabs under the porch,” Peb corrected. “And even they are yards and yards below.”

Vimbai faltered then, torn between the conflicting impulses to go check on her housemates, and to stare out of the window, and to see if Peb was lying about the creatures on the porch.

The latter won, and she tiptoed to the front entrance and peeked outside through the transparent window on top of the door. She could only see the edge of the steps, already crusted over with barnacles and wreathed in seaweed, and the tiny waves lapping at the porch. She opened the door and looked out through the screen.

There were three creatures, the size of smallish dogs or largish cats, covered in reddish-brown fur streaked through with yellow highlights. Pointy muzzles and pointy ears swiveled toward the creaking on the door, and the shiny black eyes stared at Vimbai with savage hope instantly supplanted by disappointment. They had narrow tails, bald save for the spiky tufts on their ends, and their needle teeth gleamed like icicles. They were like no animal Vimbai had ever seen, half-foxes, half-possums.

“What are they?” Vimbai whispered, looking at her grandmother’s ghost out of the corner of her eye. Funny, at this moment of fear she looked to the ghost as her family, the only kin Vimbai had nearby. Blood always called to blood, no matter how distant.

“They are spirits,” grandmother said. “
Mashave
, alien spirits that are following your friend.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” the ghost answered, and picked up Peb to give herself something to do. “Everyone has one spirit or another following them, and who knows why?”

“What about Felix?” Vimbai wanted to know. “Is his hair—”

“
Ngozi
,” the
vadzimu
interrupted. “It’s the maw of an angry spirit that wants to devour him. He must’ve committed a truly abominable act!””

Vimbai decided that it was not the time to investigate this fascinating point. She had to wake up Maya, and together they would decide what to do. The house was working its subtle magic on Vimbai, and she did not consider the possibility of the house sinking—her concern was with finding her way back home, preferably before she missed any more classes.

She ascended the steps and stopped in confusion—the layout of the house had been changed dramatically. The hallway stretched farther than she ever remembered it being, farther even than her idea of the house’s size would allow. Moreover, at the end of the hallway where she remembered her room being there was inside a solid wall of fragrant and green vegetation, twining along the walls and cascading from the ceiling like a curtain. Bright flowers bloomed and wilted, their petals falling on the floor as each flower transformed into green and yellow fruit; drops of dew condensed and slid along the midribs of large leathery leaves. Thankfully, the door to Maya’s room was still visible.

Vimbai knocked.

Maya’s hoarse voice mumbled something, and then rose. “Come in.”

Vimbai did. She found Maya sitting up in bed, staring out of the window. “Did that old woman do this?” she asked Vimbai without ever turning.

Vimbai had not considered this possibility, but discounted it. “No,” she said. “Of course not. That woman is my grandmother—well, her ghost, in any case. An ancestral spirit.”

“Are they good?” Maya asked.

“Usually,” Vimbai said and tried to remember what she knew of the relevant folklore. “They are the link between people and the creator,
Mwari
. Sometimes witches command them to do harm, but I don’t think this is the case. She said she needed to tell me a story, and then she just stayed. Peb likes her.”

“Great,” Maya said. “A ghost babysitter for the Psychic Energy Baby.”

“There are also animals on the porch,” Vimbai said. “Everyone seems to think they are yours.”

“Did you see them when you first came?” Maya asked. “I remember you looking under the porch.”

“No,” Vimbai said. “But I did see them today—they are on the porch now. The water chased them there, I think. They seem cold.”

“What happened?” Maya said. “Do you know why we are floating?”

Vimbai shook her head. “The ocean carried us off.”

“Or it’s a flood,” Maya said, grim. “Has it occurred to you? There’s another flood and the only ones who survived are us and a few ghosts we have along.”

“And your animals,” Vimbai added. “What are they?”

Maya shrugged. “They do not like fish, that much I know.”

Vimbai looked around the room, not because of any pressing curiosity but to distract herself from the sight of the water and the nagging fear that Maya might be right, that the world had simply disappeared overnight and there was no back to go to, no classes to catch, no parents to reassure. Vimbai rubbed her throat to chase away a large and cold stone that suddenly formed there. She looked at Maya’s chairs and the shelf with knickknacks, at the stack of paperbacks, their covers worn into illegibility, and at the beanbag chair that sat in the middle of the bedroom like an imposing toad. It was a simple room, with precious few traces of personality—surprising for a dwelling inhabited by someone as distinct as Maya. In fact, Vimbai thought, the same could be said about Felix’s room as well as Vimbai’s own. In this house, there was no need for posters or furnishings or any other mass-manufactured claims to individuality, there was no need of proclaiming to the house that this was a room belonging to any specific person, with formed tastes and idiosyncrasies. The house took care of that—the very fact of them living here was enough to attest who they were.

“Get dressed,” Vimbai said and headed for the door. “I’ll check on Felix, and you take care of your creatures. Grandma is making breakfast, so we can eat and decide what we should do.”

She avoided looking at the wall of greenery hiding the door to her room—instead she headed for Felix’s room and knocked. Felix opened almost immediately, dressed and as alert-looking as his bloodshot eyes allowed. Vimbai thought that his hair did look a bit like the open maw of some spectral predator.

“Yes,” Felix said. “I saw. And I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Fine,” Vimbai said. “Come and eat breakfast with us. And if you want to see the things from under the porch, you can.”

In the kitchen, Maya had commandeered a few dishes, and fed the three shivering animals canned tuna. Vimbai was glad that they had just made a shopping trip, and at least there were plenty of cans in the cupboard. Despite being separated from the electrical supply, the refrigerator still hummed and sputtered, and the stove worked as well. Vimbai made a mental note to check the TV and the phone as she settled on her usual stool and poured herself a cup of thick, oily coffee her grandmother had made. She waited for Felix to come downstairs and take a seat, and for Maya to finish fiddling with the pack of half-foxes, half-possums. Even the
chipoko,
the ghost, ceased her shuffling and stood quietly by the stove, the Psychic Energy Baby and all its phantom limbs cradled in the strong crook of her arms.

Satisfied that all the house inhabitants—even the animal, even the immaterial—were present, Vimbai nodded to herself and took her first sip of coffee as a mariner.

Chapter 5

Houses floating on strange and calm seas under frozen skies that only occasionally work up the energy to scare up a few clouds and sift a few snowflakes are bound to be guarded by different laws than ordinary houses. Dimensions, for example—as soon as the house in the dunes became unmoored from the very dunes that gave it its nickname, it grew larger on the inside, sprouting additional turrets and rooms and crawlspaces, often hidden behind the walls and impossible to get to—but existing nonetheless. And the proximity of the black hole of Felix’s hair warped the spaces inside and pulled up additional layers and floors and realities in some phantasmagoric synergy.

At least, this is how it appeared to Vimbai. An act as simple as opening a bathroom door had to be performed with utmost care, because she could not be sure about what she would find on the other side—the best she could hope for was startling one of Maya’s needle-toothed critters drinking out of the toilet bowl; they always turned, glowering, their bright eyes looking over their hunched and almost-human shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” Vimbai said after the scattering footfalls of clawed and splayed paws. “I have to use the bathroom.” Secretly, she was relieved that the bathroom remained as is, for now at least.

Peb lolled in the bathtub, half-filled with cold water. Vimbai regarded him and decided to pee despite his presence—the thing that now had absorbed all available phantom limbs, save for the one in Vimbai’s room, always appeared in unexpected and inopportune moments, popping through the walls or the floor or the ceiling.

“And what are you up to?” she asked Peb as she sat thoughtfully on the toilet. “Grandma is probably looking for you.”

Peb shrugged its shoulders and several legs. “She treats me as a child.”

“You look like one,” Vimbai parried. “You told me you were a baby.”

“Not in any regular sense,” Peb answered. “Do you know what it is like, in other planes?”

“Same as in Felix’s hair?” Vimbai guessed and flushed the toilet. Miraculously, it acted as if it was still connected to a septic tank, but Vimbai felt guilty because she suspected that now it was connecting straight to the ocean.

“No,” Peb said. “The planes are radiant and singing. Felix’s hair is a dark and desolate place.”

“But it is a place,” Vimbai said. “An actual place, bigger than it appears to be.”

“Oh yes.” Peb sank underwater and spoke in small exhalations of bubbles. “I think it’s a plane of some sort too, but not a very nice one.”

“What’s there?”

“Find out yourself,” Peb said, suddenly petulant. “I am busy.”

“You’re awfully cranky for a ghost,” Vimbai said.

No answer came and she exited the bathroom, ducking just in case there was a tree suddenly growing outside the door. With no classes to go and not much else to do but to explore the house, Vimbai headed for Felix’s room.

He let her in. He had changed the least of them all, Vimbai thought, and it was probably a good thing—any more weirdness added to Felix, and he would be closer in nature to the ghosts and Maya’s animals than to Vimbai and Maya. Maya, on the other hand . . . but that was something to consider later.

“Felix,” Vimbai said, politely. “May I take a peek inside your hair?”

His eyes rolled wildly, like those of a spooked horse. “Why would you want to do such a thing?”

“Curiosity,” Vimbai said. “And considering that we are in a floating house that sprouts new rooms every day, I think there may be some insight gained.”

Felix slumped, and shuffled over to his bed, to sit on it in a pose of defeat and remorse. “You’re blaming me,” he said. “I tried to tell you.”

“No one is blaming you,” Vimbai said. “What was it that you tried to tell me?”

“That there are forces in the world,” Felix answered. “Forces that run along invisible wires—like phone wires of the spirit, and sometimes you get trapped in them like Peb, and sometimes you stumble in the middle and get caught like a fly in a spider web…” He fell silent, shaking his head; the hair undulated along, with a barely noticeable delay—as if air provided too much resistance.

“You’re telling me you know what’s going on.”

Felix shook his head again, with greater vehemence. “I only know that there are forces, and we are crossing their conduits. And we probably shouldn’t. Like you shouldn’t look in my hair—there’s nothing there for you, nothing at all.”

“I shouldn’t or you won’t let me?”

Felix sighed. “I’ll let you but I do not think it’s a good idea. But go ahead, look, see what I care.”

Vimbai felt a cold wave of hesitation rise in her stomach. “I’m not going all the way in,” she said to Felix as much as herself. “I’m just going to look, okay?”

“Whatever,” Felix said and slumped some more.

Vimbai approached him in small childish steps. The black mass undulated closer to her face, and in it she saw quiet seething, like the surface of a cauldron full of boiling pitch—or at least what Vimbai imagined one would look like. It took an enormous effort for her to stretch her neck until her face—her eyelashes, her nose, her lips—touched its surface. It felt like sinking her face into a basin full of cold water—she was shocked at how cold it was, at how it singed her skin with frost.

She opened her eyes. It was dark at first, but as her pupils dilated and adjusted, she started to make out shapes at a distance—a mountain with a rounded top overgrown with what looked like trees bending in the wind and a faint white sickle (moon?) hanging above it.

Then the mountain shuddered, and two white round windows opened inside it. Vimbai jerked back as she realized that in the dusk she had misjudged the distance badly, and what she thought was a mountain in reality was a human head just inches away from her face, and the white circles were its dead eyes.

“Hello,” the head said. “You new?”

“I’m . . . temporary,” Vimbai said, and her heart—outside of here, distant—thumped like mad. “I’m just looking in.”

“Like all the legs,” the head said. “Funny, I see legs and hands and feet and only rarely—other heads.”

Vimbai nodded. “I have a body too, only it’s outside,” she said. “I’m Vimbai.”

“Balshazaar,” the head said.

Vimbai studied the head—it was quite old and quite dead, and very desiccated; Felix was not lying about that. The sparse hair covering its parchment-yellow scalp did resemble trees—each hair stood alone and separate and rather straight up. Long and deep furrows covered the face, and Vimbai thought that she noticed traces of faint green luminescence hiding inside them. Balshazaar was a landscape in his own right, and Vimbai could not think of a single thing to say to him. “It’s nice to meet you,” she finally managed. All the other questions rising in her mind were cut off by their overwhelming mundanity—what did it matter who Balshazaar was or where he came from or if he ever owned a body? Now he was just a desiccated head living in the hair of a really weird teenage malcontent. The rest seemed trivial.

“Going already?” Balshazaar said politely.

“Yes,” Vimbai answered. “I don’t belong here—see, there’s a whole other world outside, and—”

“I know,” Balshazaar interrupted. “I’ve seen it.”

“You used to live there?”

“No. Felix takes me out sometimes.”

“You don’t say.” Vimbai was angry at Felix now, for not telling her more and certainly for not letting them know that he had dragged a disembodied head out of whatever unknown dimension. It was one thing to amputate phantom limbs, and quite another to show Balshazaar the world. It was just like grandmother said, one did not screw around with things one did not understand.

Grandmother. The woman who used to be so ridiculous was starting to make sense; or at least she lacked Vimbai’s streak of rationality, which made her helpful in irrational circumstances. Grandmother lived—or used to, when she was truly alive—in the world where razor cuts protected from misfortune, and cunning
muroyi
, witches, could sic spirits on the living and make them ill. Grandmother would deal with a dead head like she dealt with all such problems—remember a remedy or go to a
n’anga
and have it fixed. Vimbai wished there were a healer nearby, someone who was versed in dealing with the supernatural rather than someone like her, who flailed and hyperventilated and tried to stay calm in the face of it—so far, that was all Vimbai could manage. Even her fear of the Harare healers had receded enough to think of them wistfully.

“I’ll be going now,” Vimbai said, and straightened. Balshazaar’s face diminished as it hurtled away from her, and Vimbai looked into Felix’s disturbing eye. She was not ready to tell him anything yet, and so she stalked away without saying a word. Felix was so disconnected from everything anyway that he probably didn’t even think her rude.

Vimbai padded to her room along the hallway that had grown a covering of soft, slightly wet moss, and lay down on her bed. A mattress and box spring, really—not a proper bed. She resented her grandmother’s arrival and the house’s ill-fated journey. Why did it have to happen to her, a perfectly rational person? Were those the superstitions of her ancestors that dragged her along, people long dead but unwilling to let go? It just wasn’t fair that someone she was related to by blood alone could do that, as if shared genetic background gave them some sort of power over Vimbai. She wondered if Maya too felt that same pull and resentment.

Maya. Maya who barely talked anymore and instead followed with her feral pack from one room to the next. They roamed like hunters, disappearing into the closets recently converted into thick suffocating forests, they swam in rivers that poured from the downstairs bathroom. Vimbai hated to admit that her worry about Maya was just a pretense designed to mask her envy and disappointment at not being invited. She too would enjoy a pack of furry familiars following her around, she too would like to be unconcerned about their future and the present circumstance.

Peb floated up through her pillow, its smooth skin and several feet and hands brushing cool against Vimbai’s cheek. “Don’t be sad,” Peb said, its former petulance forgotten. “Why are you sad?”

“I miss Maya,” Vimbai answered. “I wish I could go with her.”

“There are creatures under the porch,” Peb said cryptically. “The house found them.”

“They were on the porch,” Vimbai said. “And now they are gone.”

“No,” Peb argued. “Still under.”

“There are only horseshoe crabs there.” Vimbai sat up abruptly. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

Peb bobbed over her pillow, floating up then down, until it jetted higher up and disappeared through the ceiling.

Vimbai rubbed her face. “Horseshoe crabs,” she murmured. Poor crabs, bled half to death by
wazimamoto
in medical trucks. Vimbai jumped off her bed, reenergized by the possibility of a new discovery. There would be time later for Maya and Felix and Balshazaar; now was the time for horseshoe crabs.

Vimbai had never anticipated that she would be sticking her face into strange and unfamiliar places so much, but there she was—on her hands and knees on the porch, by the very edge of the water. The house had mutated again, developing a coquettish hem of round pebbles and pieces of seaglass, polished and clear. The barnacles hung onto the edge, their quick ghostly feet kicking food in their mouths hidden somewhere inside their chalky shells. If it weren’t for horseshoe crabs, Vimbai would’ve studied barnacles for the sheer weirdness of their anatomy and lifestyle.

Vimbai kneeled on the edge of the porch that currently fancied itself a littoral zone and studied the surface of water—smooth and clear, and so cold. Her breath fogged the air and touched the waves; Vimbai tried to cloud them with her breath like one would a pane of glass, but to no avail. She took a deep breath and thrust her face into the ocean.

The salt and the cold burned her skin, a million needles threading her cheeks. Her teeth ached. She opened her eyes underwater and they burned too, tears not helping the matters at all. The water around her seemed stationary, like a block of green ice. She couldn’t see very far, and her breath tried to break out of her chest like a caged and panicked bird.

Vimbai came up for a breath of air, and gasped, still crying from the cold and the salt and the sadness of all this water, always separating her from something she wanted. How could one love something so cruel, something so terrible to her parents? As if answering, a withered ghostly hand lay on her shoulder.

“
Sahwira
,” her grandmother said. “Girlfriend, my girlfriend. You look for thing no mortal eyes can see. Let me guide your vision.”

Her grandmother’s hands lay flat on Vimbai’s temples and pushed her gently back toward the water’s surface. For a moment, blind fear boiled in Vimbai—what if she were to hold her head down and never let her come up for air, no matter how much her heart thundered and her legs kicked and thrashed? What if she wanted Vimbai to be a ghost, like her, to finally touch the souls of her ancestors?

But it was foolish. The hands on her head were so gentle even without warmth, so kind, that Vimbai succumbed and let them guide her. She opened her eyes, and for a moment there was just familiar transparency without images, the endless wall of thick glass. And then her grandmother’s eyes entered her own.