The House of Discarded Dreams

Page 9

Peb babbled in response, talking about ethereal planes and dizzying stars. It seemed to miss other dimensions, too black or too fiery to describe.
“It’s okay,” Vimbai consoled. “You’ll learn to like it here, and my grandmother knows so many stories—ngano, the folktales that tell children how to live in the world, and nyaya, the myths people make up to pass the time.”
The vadzimu was done with the dishes and sat on the stool by the counter, her eyes hollow and her wrinkled hands folded in her lap. Such fragile birdlike hands, Vimbai thought, dry like twigs, wrapped in the cured leather of old skin that spent decades in the tropical sun. Vimbai barely remembered this woman, how she was in life—just her own passing embarrassment at the old woman’s superstitions, and just as ephemeral a regret that they spoke different languages and thus were unlikely to connect.
Vimbai noticed with a measure of satisfaction that the ghost, at least, was more fluent in English. If it had also grown less superstitious remained to be seen.
“Grandmother,” Vimbai said. “Look at this—it’s a psychic energy baby.”
The old woman looked and reached out, instinctively—as if there was really nothing else to do with babies but to pick them up and hold them, no matter how ethereal and burdened with unnecessary extremities; no matter how dead one was. And even after Vimbai went to bed that night, she heard quiet singing and cooing from the kitchen, along with the thin gurgling voice of the Psychic Energy Baby.
That night the tides had grown especially, inexcusably high—through her sleep Vimbai heard the lapping of the waves somewhere very close to the porch of the house, and through her sleep she thought that the sea was pulled so close by the gravity of the moon that sloshed happily in the darkness of Tortoise’s belly. She dreamt of Tortoise, his smiling face smeared with moonlight, white and thick as milk, the oceans of the world following on his heels—oceans always followed wherever the moon went, tortoise or no.
Meanwhile, the waves whispered into the yard, their salty tongues singeing the roots of the few arbor vitae planted near the house; they poured under the porch spooking those who lived under it and chasing them up the steps, where they remained, wet and shivering, their backs pressed against the closed door and their fur growing slow icicles. They listened for Maya’s sleeping breath in the depths of the house and whimpered softly.
The gentle fingers of the ocean pried the house from its foundation, carefully shaking loose every brick and every cinderblock, never upsetting the balance. The waves lifted the house on their backs arching like those of angry cats, and took it with them, away from the shore. In the darkness, the lighthouses shone like predatory eyes, and everyone in the house slept except for the vadzimu, who remained alert and awake, singing to the sleeping Peb, curled up in her lap like a cat, in a language no one but her understood.
The night continued much longer than usual—before the sun rose, the house had drifted far into the ocean, where water lay smooth as silk, wrinkling occasionally under the sleeping breath of the wind.
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.”