The House of Discarded Dreams

Vimbai did not know why she wasn’t interested in them—like all her contemporaries, she went through the pre-assigned stages of development. When she was in middle school, she read encyclopedias on the sly, hunting for dirty words and hoping for illustrations. She pored in secret over art albums that her parents kept out in the open, but looking at the paintings with them present felt uncomfortable, like a too-tight scratchy woolen collar. And yet, the actual boys with their stained hands and hostile eyes did not appeal to her.

In high school, she wondered if perhaps she was a lesbian—she had a short but intense crush on a classmate named Elizabeth Rosenzweig, a tall British girl with long black hair who looked at everything as if it were too boring to even bother raising her eyelids all the way up for. They had a lot of classes together, and sat next to each during lunch, each thinking desperately of something to say to the other. Vimbai treasured one time they had stayed after school together because Elizabeth needed to copy a part of some assignment Vimbai and she were doing together, and her smooth cool hand touched Vimbai’s, chapped and burning.

When Elizabeth went away for the summer, Vimbai missed her with the pointless urgency of first love, and she cut shallow marks into the insides of her arms and thighs—they had healed completely, but if one knew they were there, they could be seen as thin lines slightly paler than the rest of her skin, now just an annoying reminder of past foolishness.

When Vimbai started college, her classes preoccupied her too much to worry about not having a boyfriend or a girlfriend or some sort of significant other. It amused her to think that if she delayed dating long enough, her mother would be relieved if she brought home anyone—even a girl; even a British girl. Perhaps some day she would run into Elizabeth again, maybe at the mall or the coffee shop down the street, when Elizabeth visited home during the break—she went to college out of state. And maybe then they would reminisce and go to the movies, and at least then Vimbai would not have to worry about dating for a while. This passing thought grew into a justification with time—at least, Vimbai used it as an excuse to keep to herself and avoid any possibility of romantic involvement.

She considered it now, and wondered at the relief a part of her felt at being stranded at sea with some ghosts and two roommates—at least, she did not have to explain herself here all the time. And there was no possibility of Elizabeth showing up here, and making Vimbai feel awkward and inarticulate.

“Is there something wrong with me?” she asked the vadzimu. “I mean, shouldn’t I want to love somebody?”

The ghost shook her head and patted Vimbai’s hand. “There’s nothing wrong with you or anyone here.”

Vimbai smiled and moved closer, as if to cuddle up to the old woman—but then remembered the razorblades. She settled for touching the chipoko’s hand instead. It felt (and, Vimbai supposed, was) immaterial, just a little warmer than air and light—yet solid enough to hold, just like Peb.

“Peb is falling asleep,” Vimbai said. “Why don’t you tell him a story?”

Grandmother smiled. “I suppose I could. Which one do you want?”

Vimbai shrugged. “Whatever you like.”

“I do know quite a few,” grandmother warned. “But I suppose there’s no harm.”

Her voice soothed Peb and made Vimbai sleepy. She dipped in and out of sleep, like a fisherman’s bob on the surface of water, catching brief snatches of serpentine and seemingly endless stories about baboons and rabbits and other animals who all had active social lives and spoke on the phone a lot. Just as the sun rose in front of the window (they were heading east, it seemed), a word her grandmother said jolted her awake.

“Man-fish,” grandmother said.

Vimbai sat up. “Is that from Marechera’s book? I didn’t know you read him.”

“It’s not just from the book,” grandmother said. “It’s a nyaya, a myth. Everyone knows it’s not really true, but we tell it anyway, because it always contains truth, and not the boring part of it.”

“Will you tell me?” Vimbai said.

The vadzimu nodded. “Sleep, granddaughter, and you will see everything you need.”

Vimbai rested her head on the windowsill and dozed off, lulled by the quiet lapping of the waves against the house wall outside and the soft whining of the Psychic Energy Baby.

Her dreams, just like her eyes underwater, seemed an amalgam of her own and her grandmother’s notions—a rather disconcerting situation, since the blend of the two had the quality of a comical nightmare about it. She dreamed of a broad river, Limpopo perhaps, or maybe Zambezi. There was rumbling of turbulent water off in a distance, but Vimbai stared at the smooth surface and large shallows by the bank. Her feet sank into the muddy soil, and a few grass stems brushed against her bare ankles. It looked like a good place for a swim, and she jumped into the warm muggy water cannonball-style, releasing a plume of spray and pungent, green smell of the river water.

She opened her eyes underwater, and squinted against swarms of silt particles that swirled before her, carried by the turbulence of her dive. She spotted a hippo with a calf, but remembered that she was just dreaming, and swam past them with nonchalance. A string of bubbles rose from her lips, but she breathed easily underwater, and she swam through the wide flats overgrown with grass, and into the deep channel of the river. There, she noticed that there was no more air escaping her lungs, and that she likely had no lungs left—her feet had fused into a wide lobed tail, and brown patterns covered her skin. A pair of whiskers hung from her lip and registered every disturbance in the flow of water. Vimbai did not need a mirror to figure out that she was now a catfish, and she sank all the way to the bottom and rested in the mud, feeling, listening.

A catfish can grow very large, and they do it by staying close to the bottom, eating anything organic, and growing fast enough to quickly become too large for most predators—crocodiles, perhaps, would still be a threat to a giant catfish, but catfish did not become large by being careless. The mud and the brown color of their skin protected them from view.

Something stirred in the water—catfish’s whiskers sensed a wild thrashing, like a panicked impala trying to wrench free of a crocodile’s jaws. The catfish headed in the direction of the commotion, staying close to the bottom, stealthy and cunning.

Catfish would eat pretty much anything. If there was a hunt, a death, they would pick up whatever remains fell to the bottom. And if the victim was a person—well, so much the better, so much more to pick up and savor.

It was a stupid boy who had decided to go swimming after a large dinner. He swam too far from the shore when a spasm in his belly twisted him into a knot, and his nose and mouth flooded with the taste of rich river mud. A stronger or a more composed swimmer would not have drowned—he would’ve calmed himself down and bobbed on the water, breathing, waiting for the spasm to pass. But not a scared boy who thrashed more as water flooded his mouth and his belly grew heavy with the river he swallowed. And everyone knows that a river is simply too large for a human child.

When the boy stopped writhing and sank quietly to the bottom, pulled along by the weight of river in his belly, catfish moved closer. He had no teeth to tear the flesh, and he waited patiently for those who would cut the boy open and let the catfish feed on morsels they dropped in their frenzy—bits of intestine, shreds of skin were welcome; being a catfish, he was not picky. But then he found something he did not expect.

There was fluttering in the water, a movement too small to notice for anyone but a fish with sensitive whiskers. It went past his face, and even though he could not see anything with his nearsighted beady eyes, the catfish opened his mouth and slammed it shut, and felt a small wriggling in his belly. It was the soul of the drowned boy, and the catfish became aware.

Vimbai—her consciousness still distinct within the tiny dull mind of the fish—wondered what the fish would do, and what would happen to the soul of the boy. It bloomed side by side with hers, filling the catfish with a new sense. His small eyes snapped open, and he saw the river for the first time, like he had never seen it before. Even though his eyes were weak, he discerned every undulation of the bottom, every silvery flash of the passing fish. He watched the water turn from green to red as the crocodiles arrived and started their meal; he watched with curiosity as his former body was torn apart by snapping jaws. He ate a few dropped morsels, but the hunger—the forever hunger that propels every catfish forward—had subsided, dulled by curiosity and flood of new sensations as the minds of the boy and the fish circled each other, sizing each other up. Vimbai remained an observer, lodged there in the catfish’s mind like a foreign body, a dream splinter.

The catfish—or man-fish as he called himself—grew older and larger by the year, and the boy inside became a part of him. He remembered everything the boy remembered—the faces of his family and how many chickens they had, the name of the prettiest girl in his village, the address of some relatives in Harare. But the memories became mere decorations, baubles suspended in the vast and labyrinthine mind of the fish. He grew more cunning and more clever, but not more compassionate or introspective. He remained a catfish at heart, and he always hoped for another body and another soul.