The House of Discarded Dreams

Vimbai nodded, thinking, listening to the bubbling of the kettle on the stove—the vadzimu did not approve of the whistle, and wrenched it free from the kettle’s nozzle, like a pacifier from the lips of a recalcitrant infant. The dead air and the strange apparition, the taste of longing and dust settling over everything, testified to the veracity of the ghost’s words, and Vimbai felt like crying as she thought of the expanse the three of them had created and populated with sad little remnants of themselves. And it was so hard to decipher sometimes—was the man-fish Vimbai’s or Maya’s? Had the cribs comprising the ridge they named after Fay King Chung sifted out of Felix’s dead universe, or were they Maya’s forgotten memories? It was impossible to tell sometimes.

“Have something warm to drink,” grandmother said. “It’s getting chilly.”

Vimbai poured herself a cup of boiling water, sweetened it with a spoonful of sugar (there was still plenty), added a drop of lemon from a bright yellow squeeze bottle (getting low), and headed to the porch. She had no desire to see the undead horseshoe crabs or their underwater secrets, she just wanted to be away for a while, separate from the crushed hopes that sprawled everywhere and filled the house to near bursting.

She stared into the horizon, gray sky welded to gray ocean, with barely a shadow to separate the two. Vimbai imagined what it would be like, to see a passing ship in the distance; to notice a darkening of the horizon that would then grow into a humped shape, and to yell, “Land ahoy!” To see a bird—an albatross, perhaps, or a seagull—circling above. But the ocean remained as quiet and lifeless as the house, and Vimbai suspected (without verbalizing it, because it would be too painful) that it was not the real ocean but a product of the house, its sick effluvium. And yet, and yet . . . she smelled the salt in the air and the sharp sting of iodine, of crushed seaweed, and she hoped. She hoped that the horizon would split open and finally admit a welcome sight—a sandy beach with humped dunes in the background, boardwalks bleached by wind and salt into a gray weightlessness of driftwood, and a tall figure, her neck craning, her head tilted back to see better. Come home, baby, come back home. We miss you and we forgive you and we promise that everything will be all right, we promise.

I’m coming mama, I’m coming back, Vimbai thought but did not dare to whisper. In her mind, the small figure on the beach grew more distant, retreating, until there was nothing but the sky and the heavy sluicing of cold waves.

Felix finally decided to let Balshazaar out, to let him roam around the house—it didn’t seem fair, to keep him all alone among the silent souls of the horseshoe crabs; besides, the universe that had been growing and mutating around them did not really seem all that different from the one Balshazaar currently inhabited.

“I think,” Felix told Vimbai and Maya at dinner, “it’s like letting him from one dream into another. If it were a real world, that would be a different story.”

“What is the real world?” Maya said, and gave a cock-eyed look to her fork and the anemic piece of ravioli impaled on it, drizzles of tomato sauce like blood. “But whatever; I don’t suppose it would alter things in any way.”

“Famous last words,” Vimbai mumbled, but did not argue further.

“It’s settled then.” Felix beamed. “I sort of felt bad about keeping him there after I showed him the world . . . at least if he did not know what was outside, it wouldn’t matter.”

“Can’t miss what you don’t know about,” the vadzimu said.

Vimbai shivered—her mother spoke in these words, her stern intonations bleeding through. “You can’t show people the western lifestyle and expect them not to want,” she would say. “It’s cruel, to show and to lie like this—in a hundred years, people in the rest of the world won’t be able to live like we do, but they will want it even more. Greed and jealousy, that’s the problem with cultural imperialism.” Another speech Vimbai knew by heart, another one of her daily conundrums where disagreeing would be monstrous but agreeing unbearable.

“Peb,” Vimbai said out loud. “Would you mind fetching the phantom leg from my room? Just don’t take it—it’s for someone else.”

Peb rose like fog from the vadzimu’s back where it was clinging, blue and smoky like a Picasso painting. For some reason, Vimbai wanted to show him Guernica, and see what he thought of it, if he liked the blind eyes of the little girl who seemed oblivious to the limp hand cradling her. Peb nodded and floated away, like mist, like smoke, like an elusive fish skittering and disappearing in the thick of water.

When Peb returned with the leg, he and the vadzimu watched with a mix of curiosity and, Vimbai suspected, a trace of jealousy. Peb had relinquished the phantom leg with a quiet sigh, and now the leg stood on the kitchen counter, perfect and smooth like blown glass. Maya sat back, her arms crossed, her plate bearing an arabesque of tomato sauce forgotten in front of her. She frowned slightly, and her front teeth bit her lower lip.

Felix dug through his hair two-handed. A few times his face twitched into a grimace, and Vimbai guessed that he was touching the horseshoe crabs’ little immobile souls. Finally, he gave a small cry of triumph and pulled out the desiccated head.

Balshazaar looked around him, and smiled when his eyes met Vimbai’s. “Good seeing you again,” he said.

“Hi,” Maya interjected, still frowning. “I’m Maya.”

Balshazaar was introduced in turn to the vadzimu and Peb, and Vimbai thought that he seemed quite unperturbed by the new environment. Perhaps Felix had shown him more than he told Vimbai, or perhaps he could see from the inside of his hair somehow. She chased the thought away as silly—she had seen the inside of Felix’s hair, isolated from the rest of the world by inky blackness.

The phantom leg took to Balshazaar, despite the yipping and growling of Maya’s dogs—they cowered away from the pruned face perched atop of the transparent leg, which was growing clouded, as if diseased by the contact with alien and dead flesh.

Balshazaar wobbled and made an awkward hop on the kitchen counter, knocking over an empty ravioli can.

“How does it feel?” Vimbai asked him.

“Fine, fine,” Balshazaar answered, his thin scarred lips shaping a slow smile. “Will take a bit of getting used to, but I’ll manage.”

They watched him hop and bounce along the countertop, then jump down to the floor. He traversed the kitchen from the counter to the screen door, and from the screen door to the pantry. He then disappeared inside—presumably, to investigate the rest of the house.

“He’ll be back,” Felix said, and gave Vimbai a hopeful look from his right eye. “Won’t he?”

“I’m sure he will,” Maya said. She sounded as though unsure if that was a good thing. “You realize that now real people are in a minority, right?”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘minority,’ ” Vimbai answered, and shot an apologetic look to the vadzimu. “She is my grandmother.”

“She’s a ghost,” Maya corrected.

“Ghosts can be vengeful,” Vimbai said.

Maya shrugged. “Should we go look for a supermarket again? Or if you want, there’s a new forest by the attic. We could go name it, and see if anything cool lives there.”

“In the morning,” Vimbai said. “I want to check on the crabs.”

“I’ll come with you,” Maya said.

They sat on the porch for a while. Vimbai looked underwater, her grandmother’s sight letting her see the creatures as if they were close by. When she came up for air, she shook the water out of her hair. “I’m not supposed to see them,” she said. “And yet I’m supposed to keep them alive somehow.”

“While they are undead,” Maya said.

“It’s temporary, I think,” Vimbai said. “They left their souls in Felix’s hair.”

Maya laughed, the sound resonating far over the ocean. “I can’t believe this sentence makes sense to us. That there would be a world in which it’s normal shit to say, you know?”

“I know,” Vimbai said. “In any case, I suppose they are safe. They will get us home, I have no doubt of that.” She did.

“Yeah,” Maya said. She sidled up to Vimbai and dangled her feet in the ocean despite the cutting cold and darkness. “Provided we want to go home.”

“Sure we do,” Vimbai said. “We’ll still have the house, you know? If our dreams are changing it, then there’s no reason for it to change back once we’re in New Jersey.”

“Perhaps we cannot dream as well in New Jersey.” Maya pulled her feet up and rubbed them with her feet. “The water’s freezing. I better go get a pair of socks.”

“I’m going to bed,” Vimbai said. “I’m tired. And it is hard to look under water, even with my grandmother helping me.” She could not quite describe the heartbreak, the dull sickness in her stomach when she saw the creatures covered now with a thick mat of barnacles, hagfishes sliming through the cracks in their carapaces. But their legs kept moving, always moving, like the long restless fingers of a sickly pianist.