The House of Discarded Dreams

“Interesting,” Balshazaar drawled. “Why so nice?”

Vimbai considered telling him that she was usually nice, but instead settled for a reason he was more likely to believe. “We need you.”

“I’ll help you,” Balshazaar said. “Only I’m not sure if I even want to leave here—it’s nice. Secure. Bring the leg and then ask your questions. However, know that I promise nothing.”

Vimbai extricated herself from the pocket universe, and reported on what she had seen. At the mention of the horseshoe crabs’ souls, Felix made a small sound of terror.

“It’s all right,” Vimbai said. “They are not doing anything. And they are much smaller and a lot less scary than the ones that crawled out.”

Felix shook his head and the long tongues of his hair stretched and contracted, reminding Vimbai of the way leeches moved—she had observed them in her invertebrate zoology class, and was endlessly fascinated by how they managed to grow long and thin one moment, and short and stout the next.

“I’ll give him the leg,” Vimbai decided, “and ask him about what else he saw. And what he knows about fish.”

“Not yet,” Felix answered. “Let me think about that. I’m not sure I really believe him.”

And so Vimbai was left alone again, while Felix retired to his room to do his thinking. He puzzled her—his inability to make up his mind and his frank terror at the things living in his hair surprised and bothered Vimbai. He should’ve had enough time to come to terms with it, she thought, especially since he had been so nonchalant about extricating the Psychic Energy Baby from the phone wires. It took her a while to realize that he never got around to telling her about how he came to wear a personal-sized black hole around his head. Then again, men were good at avoiding questions.

She remembered how excited her mother had been when they traveled to Harare—especially excited to see her favorite nephew and Vimbai’s cousin Roger. Roger seemed to be one of those kids who were so great one could never hope to compare to them—and Vimbai resented Roger before she even met him, even though he was not a kid anymore, but already a grown man, with a wife and intentions of starting his own business. Vimbai’s mother talked to him on the phone for hours, making plans, and phone bills be damned.

When they had arrived, Roger was not home—he was not in Harare at all. The relatives said that he was on vacation, but by their sidelong glances and uncomfortable shuffling, Vimbai surmised that the vacation was a polite lie. Roger’s wife had stayed home, and nobody seemed to know anything about his destination. Vimbai’s mother did not believe the excuses either—she became thin-lipped and taciturn, and did not again mention Roger until they went back home.

It was two years later that Vimbai and Roger finally met. Roger had started his business—something to do with laptops or some other technology Vimbai had only pragmatic interest in, and he traveled to the US under some business pretense or other. In truth, they all knew that he wanted to see Vimbai’s mother who was never good about hiding her disappointments—they came through even in long-distance phone calls.

Roger arrived on schedule, and quickly filled the house with his laugh that seemed to be coming directly from his diaphragm and his expansive gestures. He was smaller than Vimbai expected, and sadder—when he thought that no one was watching him. He did not have to apologize—he only hugged Vimbai’s mother until she cried and hugged him back. Roger said, “I’m sorry, Auntie,” and that was that.

But not as far as Vimbai was concerned. Roger was difficult not to like but she persevered, helped by the eternal teenage sullenness. She watched him across the table, her arms crossed in front of her with disapproval. For all his laughing and joking and telling stories and flashing pictures of his baby son, he noticed.

“What’s the matter, Vimbai, cousin?” he asked her one day. Normally, Vimbai would’ve avoided a direct confrontation, but he caught up with her as she exited the bathroom, and there was simply no missing each other in the narrow hallway. “Did I do something to tick you off?”

“You blew off my mom when we went to Harare,” Vimbai said.

He whistled. “That was a long time ago, muroora,” he said. “You don’t forget, do you? Take after your mom.”

“Where were you then?” Vimbai said. “Just don’t say vacation, or I’ll have to slap you.”

He laughed unexpectedly. “Why do you care so much?”

“You should’ve seen her face,” Vimbai said. “She really missed you then, and you weren’t there. She cried every night.”

“That did not necessarily have anything to do with me,” Roger said and frowned. It was strange to see him in their suburban wallpapered hallway, blue cornflowers on white background.

“Still.” Vimbai leaned against the wall, her shoulder pushing against the familiar solidity of the wall. “Tell me.”

“And you’ll forgive me.”

“Depends.”

“No.” He shook his finger with emphasis. “You forgive your cousin, okay? And then I’ll show you.”

She shrugged. “Okay. What did you want to show me?”

He turned his back to her, and Vimbai thought that he was about to head back to his room to bring some evidence—pictures or flowers or whatever to make it all right. Instead, Roger carefully eased the hem of his white shirt from his belt, partially obscured by his nascent love handles, and pulled it up.

Vimbai stared at the very white and very straight scar that slashed diagonally across the left half of his lower back. At first, she thought that it was a particularly vicious muti mark, or some other creepy magic her grandmother believed in and that required mutilation. “What is it?” she said.

“A scar.” Roger lowered his shirt and turned to face her, blushing. “You’re such a curious little cousin, and I just met you and you already asking me questions my wife wouldn’t ask me.”

“Maybe she should. What is it?”

He sighed. “I needed money to start my business. Twenty thousand dollars—where would I get that?”

“It’s a lot of money,” Vimbai said. Especially in Africa, she thought. That was a fortune enough to propel one forward in life, not just pay off student loans or credit card bills.

“Yes. So I sold a kidney.”

She stared into his face looking for traces of jocularity, but he was serious, and the scar real. She felt herself blush. “I’m sorry I was a bitch to you, Roger,” she said.

He waved his hand in the air. “Don’t mention it, sister. And don’t tell your mom. Believe me, some things only you want to know.”

Vimbai had to agree as she remembered this conversation. She seemed to have a talent of getting hung up on questions everyone around her circumvented so smoothly—if people were leaves floating on the river surface, Vimbai would be the one that always got stuck against every obstacle, no matter how trivial and easy to bypass.

And now something else was nagging at her. She thought of the man-fish and how he manifested as soon as Vimbai dreamt him; then there was the vadzimu, who appeared when Vimbai imagined her as an entity that kept her and her mother so much apart. Now, the memory of Roger worried at her heart in the same way. What did it mean? she asked herself. Why did Felix’s reluctance to speak remind her of her cousin?

The scar. That was it, the way Roger hid his scar and its origin. Vimbai jumped to her feet and rushed to Felix’s room.

He was there, doing nothing, and only looked vaguely up when Vimbai came busting through the door.

“It’s a scar, isn’t it?” Vimbai said.

“Yes,” he said, paling.

How does a man become a scar, or at any rate end up wearing one around his head? Only Felix knew, what it was like to cut an umbilicus that bound one to the universe that bore him, and to wear the spectral navel that still festered with the remnants of the enclosed space and its dark inhabitants. A dying tiny universe, and poor Felix dangled on the end of it, like a superfluous appendage.

And unlike the Psychic Energy Baby, he could never hope to disentangle himself from the wires that kept him suspended, the appearance of him standing on the ground a mere illusion. Still, he managed a small unconvincing smile. “I didn’t know how to tell you or Maya. Or even what to tell you. And I still don’t understand how the two of you play into it—you’re dragging all those ghosts with you. And her, I don’t even know.”

“I’m dragging everything with me,” Vimbai answered. “Even Africa—only it’s not my parents’ Africa, it’s an imaginary one.”

“What is Maya dragging?”

Vimbai shrugged. There were the half-foxes, of course, and there was the wild streak, the talk of being queens of some imaginary kingdom, be it New Jersey or somewhere else. For the first time, Vimbai thought that it might not be a bad idea—perhaps Maya was the expression of their purpose, the reason for them being here, at sea, floating somewhere . . . or perhaps standing still. Or perhaps the house stood still as the world moved under it, offering its watery and glistening curving back as they slid inexplicably toward some destiny, some mystical version of New Jersey.