The House of Discarded Dreams

“Your mom misses Zimbabwe?” Maya asked.

“Yeah.” Vimbai thought a bit about how to put it into words. “It’s hard for her. She was a historian back home, she knew all there is to know about Zimbabwe folk traditions, and here she teaches Africana Studies.”

“It’s important,” Maya said.

“And yet it’s not the only thing she could do, but it is the only job they had for her. So it’s hard, you know? There’s tension between the faculty, who are all black, and the department chair who’s white.”

Maya rolled her eyes. “Figures.”

“And Africans and African-Americans.” Vimbai heaved a sigh. “The whole voluntary immigration thing.”

Maya nodded that she understood and they walked in silence, pebbles and dry leaves crunching underfoot. The whole experience did not quite feel real—Vimbai noticed the especially artificial quality of the landscapes inside the house. Sure, there was a sun and a semblance of sky—at least, if she did not look too closely; if she did, the light fixtures and the whitewash of the ceiling became apparent, as if peeking through the illusion of the natural phenomenon. No, it was something more fundamental, and it took her a while to puzzle out that this quality was due to the absence of smell. She could smell neither water nor knee-high grass, only indeterminate stale and warm odor, like a pillow freshly slept on.

She was about to share her observation with Maya, when Maya pointed to their right.

“Look!” Maya said.

Something gleamed at a distance, just over the spiny ridge made of some unfamiliar rock layered like slate, baby cribs, and a tangle of steel cables, and they hurried up the slope. Vimbai breathed deeply, trying to taste something in the air, anything but the dull stale smell of the old house. The gleaming behind the ridge grew brighter and higher, as if there was a sun hiding behind the jumble of rock and the discarded trash. It spilled over the ridge, casting a hazy halo, and reflecting off the metal guardrails of the broken cribs. Vimbai would’ve thought that they were in a landfill at sunset, if it weren’t for the cursed absence of smell.

Maya hurried ahead and stopped as she crested the ridge. She was cast in silhouette against the golden light, and Vimbai felt her breath catch—there was such beauty in the outline of her roommate, such elegant simplicity in the cast of her shoulders, the set of her chin. Such strength and confidence in her legs and feet planted slightly apart; she was an explorer surveying the new land opening in the water gap, a discoverer of unknown lands and landmarks, the namer of things. Her dogs crowded around her, their black shapes filled with a quiet dignity their usual selves woefully lacked. Vimbai, enchanted, wanted neither to move nor look away.

Maya turned, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “Coming, Vimbai?”

“Yeah,” Vimbai said, and reluctantly moved up the slope, into the bright light. “What is it?”

“See for yourself,” Maya said.

Vimbai hurried ahead, now that Felix also reached the crest and stood quietly staring down; Vimbai could not see whether he was impressed or awed, or merely waited for Vimbai to catch up to them and share in the view.

She stepped onto the crest, wobbly under her feet, shifting with all the inclusions of broken handles and rolled up spools of cable. She looked down and cried out in surprise and wonder.

The light they’d seen came from the second sun hovering over the rooftops, as if it were about to set, but it never quite dipped below the line of buildings. But it wasn’t the houses that drew Vimbai’s attention—it was a line of trees covered in blue and purple blooms, blue fire flickering around the branches but never consuming them, the pure ferocity of jacaranda trees in bloom. Even though Vimbai had not seen them for herself, the memory she shared with her grandmother and her mother’s stories left no doubt in her mind.

Yet, as she looked at the buildings, she decided that it was not Harare—at least, not the one she remembered. Town homes from the richer parts of the city mingled with traditional round huts one could still find in the provinces, and suburban New Jerseyan Cape Cods and bungalows. It was Harare of Vimbai’s dreams which jumbled things she did not quite remember with those she knew well. These were the streets she sometimes drove in her very first car, a Geo her parents got her, she suspected, as a joke; she drove along them in her dreams, frustrated that she was unable to find home and that all the streets led in random directions, never intersecting in any satisfactory way. The city where she and her mother never fought, and friends and relatives from New Jersey and Zimbabwe dropped by without any rhyme or reason, and dead grandparents were alive and spoke English and told Vimbai they loved her . . . just like the vadzimu did.

Vimbai rubbed her face. Oh, my jacaranda trees, she thought. Oh how I missed you and yet I cannot smell your sweet blooms, I cannot feel your breath on my face. The trees and the flowers and the buildings shifted and multiplied, and rotated and blurred, then swam into focus again like beautiful images in a kaleidoscope. She realized then it was tears that twisted and purified her vision.

Maya touched her shoulder—such a habitual gesture by now, the curve of Vimbai’s shoulder felt like it was shaped by Maya’s hand to fit into it, just like by her mother’s hand before. “What’s wrong?”

Vimbai looked up, into Maya’s worried face and Felix’s eye rotating away and then toward her, like a possessed bloodied apple. “It’s nothing,” she said. “This city . . . this is Harare, but not really. This is my dream Harare . . . in the Africa of the spirit.”

Maya smiled then. “This is it,” she said. “This house doesn’t become what we ask of it. It’s what we dream about—it’s our dreams that shape it, not us.”

Without saying a further word, Maya started the perilous descent down the crumbling precipitous slope. Felix and Vimbai followed, slipping and trotting awkwardly at times, sliding among the small avalanches of pebbles and refuse. Their feet left deep troughs as they descended, and already Vimbai was worrying about how they would get back up this steep slope.

She forgot all about it when she stood in the street, her heart sinking. From the distance, the place had seemed alive and real enough, but once inside she could not help but feel that she had wandered into a movie set—there were no people, and the houses seemed mere cardboard facades, and a single push would bring the entire street tumbling down. But the trees seemed real enough, and she reached up and touched a knotted branch, leaves like green spearheads, with bright stars of flowers clustered among them. With the slightest of pulls, the branch came off, and Vimbai cringed expecting this violation to dispel the mirage under the forever setting sun.

“It’s so pretty,” Maya said, and picked a branch too. “To bad I can’t smell anything.”

“It’s not you; it’s this place,” Vimbai said. “Listen, if this is where our dreams go . . . what’s with the dogs?”

“A Freudian nightmare,” Felix volunteered.

“Hush, silly boy,” Maya said. “I do dream of all sorts of creatures, you know. About being a queen of animals. I always wanted to work at the Philadelphia Zoo.” She said nothing else, but Vimbai could feel the sting in Maya’s words all the same—the acute hurt of someone who wanted to work in a zoo and instead served drinks at a casino. Life really had to work on having fewer discrepancies like this, Vimbai thought. And here they all were, surrounded by the ghosts of the dreams they gave up. Maya’s foxes-possums howled a bit and wagged their tails, and their beats resonated on the dry ground.

They did not find the supermarket or anything that would provide any variety in their menu. Instead, they collected great armfuls of blue flowers—Vimbai thought that the vadzimu would enjoy them, since she seemed as fond of these trees as Vimbai’s mother. And Vimbai herself felt deep gratitude that she was finally able to see them for herself, however distorted they were by her dream-memory, blue-purple, ice-cold. However devoid of scent.

The chipoko was pleased with the flowers, and as Vimbai told her about the dream Harare they had found, the ghost nodded along, her hooded eyes lowered to the opulence of flowers in her arms—so thin, so wrinkled. Vimbai piled the branches higher and the ghost held them like one would a child.

Peb hovered nearby, whispering of supernovas, but seemed drawn to the flowers. The ghost of Vimbai’s grandmother noticed too, and gave Peb a branch, which he immediately absorbed. His transparent hide grew suffused with the gentle purplish-blue color, and the twisted twigs of the branch poked out of his back like a grotesque fin. Vimbai did not question his need to incorporate everything that appealed to him, like she never questioned her grandmother’s attachment to jacaranda trees and her ability to possess Vimbai’s body.

“Maya thinks we’re dreaming this house,” Vimbai informed the vadzimu as soon as the old woman was able to tear her gaze away from the flowers. “Do you think we are dreaming it?”

“Some dreams you leave behind,” the vadzimu answered, her voice especially old and desiccated today. “Some dreams you discard along your way, like your baby clothes. They litter your past, like small corpses, like shed skins.”