The House of Discarded Dreams

“Okay,” Maya said and squeezed her arm. “Dream us something nice for tomorrow, will ya?”

Chapter 10

Obedient, Vimbai dreamt. Her dreams were vivid—more vivid, it seemed, than the waking landscapes inside the house. She dreamt of smells and sounds, of saturated solid planes of color. She dreamt of Africa as she had half-remembered it from her trip, half-imagined from the coloring books her mother bought her, and then got upset when Vimbai colored children on the pages pink instead of brown. These books had lions and vast open plains Vimbai colored rust orange and brick-red, blue oceans populated by smiling whales (green polka dot) and their fountains (yellow, like the champagne her parents drank on special occasions).

Now Vimbai dreamed of a rust-colored savannah, with green umbrellas of acacias scattered at a distance. Two plush giraffes grazed among the leaves, their long and unrealistically pink tongues twining and snaking between black thorns shining like volcanic glass. A stuffed lion slumped in the shade, inanimate at the moment, and it did not even stir when Vimbai passed right by it.

There was a lake on the horizon, a smooth blue mirror, but Vimbai was weary of fresh water rife with catfish. Instead she headed for a group of gigantic stones—she guessed them for the Great Zimbabwe, the ruins that gave her country their name, even though they seemed grievously misplaced in the dream. Gray stones towered over Vimbai, their fissures greening with moss and slender grasses, and she thought that if the Great Zimbabwe was to ever fight Stonehenge, the latter would have its ass handed to it.

She passed through the arches and between walls, the remnants of a giants’ house, and came to the other side where round grass huts—arranged in a semi-circle, like one would see in a Discovery Channel documentary—teemed with people and dogs.

“Run away,” people shouted to Vimbai, and dogs barked. “They are coming, they are coming.”

Only then did she notice that they were packing bundles of their belongings and carried children, fleeing from some dream disaster.

At that point, Vimbai was quite aware that she was dreaming, and so she decided to stay behind and see what all the commotion was about. She waited until the huts emptied and the people all climbed into aerial boats moored nearby—long speedy hollowed-out tree trunks, fashioned with bright golden wings where oars would’ve been, topped by great scarlet sails. The sails filled with sunlight—like a gust of giant breath—and the boats took off through the air, fast as arrows, the wings on their sides beating in unison, the speedboat engines mounted in the rear of the boats strangely helpless and superfluous.

Vimbai watched their departure and disappearance, how they grew into tiny dashes on the horizon and dissolved in the expanse of the molten sky. She smelled dry grass and a whiff of motor oil, and she breathed hastily, lustily, in order to retain and remember them when she woke up.

And then she heard the sound of motors rumbling. It did not come from the boats but from between the stones of the Great Zimbabwe, and she surmised that it signaled the approach of whatever caused the mad flight of the aerial boats.

She heard a siren, and her feet moved against her will—a fear too visceral to overcome, the nightmare given to her by the Kenyan babysitter when she was just a baby, the sound of the medical trucks.

They came from among the stones, emerging from and between them, coming up from the sifting, puckering soil that spat them out like something distasteful. They came like ants fleeing a forest fire, like impala fleeing the drought . . . They swarmed like locusts.

The trucks looked just like Vimbai imagined them—old-fashioned things, reminiscent of army trucks from the twenties, with wheels of solid metal that thumped softly on the dry ground. Brass rails ran along the open cabs and beds of the trucks, one on top and one on the bottom, and several men in blue surgical scrubs stood on the lower rail, hanging onto the top one, giving Vimbai an impression of children peeking over a split-rail fence. Large red crosses were painted on the cab doors.

Vimbai could not see what was in the open beds of the trucks, but she could hear a quiet and terrible slurping that filled her with quiet dread. It’s just a dream, she reminded herself. They cannot hurt you. And yet the trucks slurped and sluiced and thumped and moved closer, surrounding her in a ring.

The men in surgical scrubs, their faces hidden behind gauze that only left their tired, kind eyes and sweating white foreheads visible, jumped from the truck closest to her, and Vimbai saw a large flat cistern filled with pale blue blood. Several hoses snaked around its base, and one of the medical men grabbed a hose and motioned for his mates to hold Vimbai. Too late, she thrashed in their arms; too late she tried to will herself to wake up. But the hose got closer to her face, and now she could see a large needle glinting on the end of it. She struggled but the man’s gloved hands cradled her face, and the needle jabbed her neck. She felt her life draining away from her, her soul hanging by a thread, as the cistern got fuller. She did not struggle anymore, and the medical men let her arms dangle by her sides, her legs segmenting and treading the dry sand, her gills dry and desperate for the cool embrace of water.

“That’s a huge horseshoe crab,” one of the medical men said. “Toss it back.”

Vimbai wanted to scream and protest, she wanted to ask them to take her to the sea, to the life-giving salt water. But instead, they tossed her into the lake, where a hungry catfish waited for her, wise, smiling with its hard toothless mouth.

In the morning, Maya and Vimbai went for a walk in an aspen grove, which Maya recognized as her own. Her dogs tagged along, their fluffy-tipped tails swaying gracefully and their pointed possum faces grinning, bristling with white conical teeth. Their eyes gleamed brightly.

Vimbai kicked up the leaves littering the path, and they rustled and rose, and then fell back. Maya seemed pensive.

“I had a strange dream,” Vimbai informed, and told Maya about the men in medical trucks.

“That is a really messed up dream,” Maya said. “Jesus. Bad dreams are a hazard here, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know,” Vimbai said. “I thought the house had our old dreams . . . the ones we have discarded and forgotten about.”

“Maybe,” Maya answered. “I hope so.” She whistled to her dogs and they perked up: their tails wagged, and their tongues hung out. They crowded closer to Maya and stared at her expectantly, as if waiting for her to do something amazing or entertaining.

“They love you.” Vimbai sighed. “It’s really cool how they follow you.”

“Somebody has to,” Maya mumbled and bent down to scratch a few dog heads. When she straightened, she shot Vimbai a quick smile. “Don’t mind that, I’m just being silly.”

“It didn’t sound silly,” Vimbai said. “It sounded serious, actually.”

Maya shook her head. “So I whine a little every now and again. I’m allowed to.”

“I’m not saying you’re not,” Vimbai said. “Only you sounded so sad . . . is there anything I can do?”

“No,” Maya said. “There’s nothing, really. It’s just sometimes I think that all I have is these dogs and Felix and you.”

“No family?” Vimbai felt guilty that she had never thought of asking Maya such simple questions. Her own family occupied so much of her internal space that she assumed it was the same for Maya, unable to recognize a sucking emptiness in another’s soul.

Maya shook her head. “My grandmother died two years ago, and I never had anyone but her. But I’d rather not talk about it now. Maybe later.”

“Okay,” Vimbai said. “Fine. You want to go to the lake?”

“No.” Maya nodded at her dogs. “They are afraid of lakes—I think it’s the fish. The same fish you dreamed about.”

“This is what I wanted to see,” Vimbai said. “To make sure. Maybe it’s not even there anymore, or the lake is gone.”

“You’re not afraid?”

Vimbai considered her latest shameful flight from the catfish. “A little,” she admitted. “But if I don’t go in, I can’t drown, and it can’t take my soul. It can’t hurt real live people, can it?”

Maya shrugged. “I’m not about to find out. I don’t think you should either.”

Vimbai hesitated. It was so tempting, so sensible. But her promise to the horseshoe crabs beat in her heart, like ashes of Klaas. She promised not to let them die, and she had to make sure that the sinister catfish was not hatching any evil plans, like her dream seemed to suggest. “I must,” she told Maya.

Maya sighed. “At least, take someone with you. Felix or Peb or your grandmother.” There was a hint of struggle as she pronounced the last word, and Vimbai thought that Maya had to feel a little sore, that it was not her grandmother who showed up to look after them and to make them coffee. That the vadzimu was Vimbai’s, even though Vimbai had a full set of parents and did not really need a ghost. And Maya . . . Vimbai could not be sure, but she suspected that Maya would trade all of her dogs for a glimpse of her dead grandmother.

“The vadzimu? She doesn’t leave the kitchen—only to go to the porch. I don’t think she wants to be anywhere else.”