The House of Discarded Dreams

“You would’ve seen him, wouldn’t you?”

“Unless I was sleeping.” Felix sighed and slammed the fridge door closed. He stood in front of Vimbai and bent down dutifully, letting her inspect his hair.

She pressed her face forward, cautious of what could be waiting for her inside. It could be a trap within a trap within a trap—she was not convinced that the house was safe, let alone Felix’s hair. It took her a while to adjust to the darkness inside, and the sleeping movement and inarticulate mumbling of Peb in her lap were disorienting.

She squinted, looking at the familiar dusty-gray landscape. Balshazaar was not there, and she felt relieved for a moment—until she realized another, more troubling emptiness. The empty spaces were gray like the rest of the contents of Felix’s head, and it took her a while to realize what it was she was not seeing, what it was that reminded her of her promises with its nagging absence.

The horseshoe crabs’ souls were gone—not a carapace, not an errant leg or a tail spike remained. They had disappeared, and for a moment Vimbai’s eyes looked back and forth, searching for what could not be found. The souls her crabs had entrusted her with were gone. She had failed them, and—she suspected—she had failed her own hope of ever returning home, her parents, so sick with worry, and Maya; if they never got home, there would be nothing left for Maya but to play with her dogs and to sleep by the coffin, until she grew weaker and weaker, until the terrible men in the medical trucks came for her—came for all of them, to drain their blood and to toss their weak, not quite alive bodies into the lake, where the man-fish would make short work of their souls, consuming them like he had undoubtedly consumed those of the horseshoe crabs.

Vimbai freed her face from Felix’s hair. Her eyes met his, and she frowned. “Oh Felix,” she said. “We’re in so much trouble right now.”

Felix swallowed hard. “I see. What do we do?”

Vimbai drew a breath and petted Peb absent-mindedly, like one would a sleeping cat. “We have to go and find the man-fish and the men in the medical trucks. And we have to get Peb’s tongue and horseshoe crabs’ souls back.”

Chapter 13

“Enough is enough,” Vimbai said. She had sent Peb to retrieve Maya, and as soon as she and her dogs showed up, she swung into action. As little as it appealed to her, Vimbai decided that now was the time to take serious action. It was her failure that the horseshoe crabs’ souls were stolen. It was her job to set it right.

She made everyone assemble in the kitchen, which she thought of as her command post. She also suspected that here they were protected by the benign magic of the stove and the refrigerator, guarded from the eavesdropping of the man-fish and other entities she was not yet sure about. She had decided that Balshazaar was an enemy—after all, who but him knew where the horseshoe crabs kept their souls?—as well as the men in the medical trucks. And she especially did not want the horseshoe crabs to overhear her and to learn about her failure.

She looked at the chipoko and Peb in her arms, at the intense, open-mouthed Maya’s face, who looked at Vimbai as if she had just met her, and was expecting something profound or interesting. Vimbai noticed Felix standing by the window overgrown with flat hairy leaves, his shoulders hunched over and his hands buried in the black hole surrounding his head with an equal measure of despair and concern—he seemed to be constantly checking for things going in or out, if anything was being stolen away.

“So this is what we’re going to do,” Vimbai said. “We’ll go to the man-fish, and we tell him to give the crabs their souls back. And I bet he would know how to get us home.”

“Or how we got here in the first place,” Maya interjected.

“Maybe that.” Vimbai considered banging her hand on the kitchen counter, but decided against it. “But now we need to take care of business.”

“How do we do that?” Felix asked.

“We’ll talk to him,” Vimbai said. “He’s a fish. Maybe we can threaten him or something.”

“How do you threaten an eater of souls?” the vadzimu asked.

“Surely there’s something he needs,” Maya said. “Or is afraid of. I’m with you, Vimbai—let’s go.”

“Felix and Peb should come too,” Vimbai said. “We need Peb—he can point out whoever hurt him.”

They set out to the lake. Vimbai gritted her teeth and felt altogether grim: she felt her forehead furrowing with long horizontal lines, and her jaws and fists clenching, as if in a movie. She thought that it was the first time in her life she felt such resolve, such simple realization that she had to do something, and there was nothing that could stop her from doing it.

She missed her mother then—her mother who went to work every day with the same clenched fists and jaws, the same stern faith spilling out of her eyes. It had been easy for Vimbai partially because she had a mother like that, a mother who could march into the office of a department chair or school principal, and put forth her demands. She would not be swayed by the appearance of reason, by the soothing voices and sober explanations of why her demands could not be met. She would cross her arms and wait in silence, until they either caved or asked her to leave, thus granting her a moral victory at the very least. Vimbai wished she could be like this.

Then again, her mother had the dubious advantage of having to fight for everything, and most of these fights Vimbai was not privy to. She only caught tail ends of arguments and meaningful exchanges of glances between her parents, or occasional phone conversations with other faculty members in Africana Studies. Of talks over tea, of complaints about white people setting the Africana agenda, and how unfairly colonial it was.

Vimbai felt embarrassed of her ignorant indifference toward these battles, of her dismissal of things that had anything at all to do with Africana Studies or African politics or Africa anything. She was an American, she used to tell herself, and it had nothing to do with her, the only person in her family who spoke English without an accent. It was her parents that carried Africa within them, who could not let it go and kept obsessing over it years and years after it became irrelevant to them—and after they became irrelevant to it, immigrants, deserters, people who left their country and were in turn left behind, as it moved on without them.

“Everything had changed so much,” Vimbai’s mother kept repeating with quiet wonder as they walked through the streets of Harare, and she insisted that she knew these streets like the back of her hand but kept taking wrong turns and getting lost anyway. At night, she cried about it when she thought Vimbai could not hear her.

But if it was not Vimbai’s, this burden, this memory, why did she have an ancestral spirit following her and telling her stories, filling Vimbai’s eyes with her sad visions—jacaranda trees in bloom—despite everything? Why did she have her own Harare here, in this dune house from South Jersey? Why did the man-fish and the fairy tales, the wazimamoto of her Kenyan babysitter, follow her and refuse to let go? She could not shake them like she could not shake her parents and their sins and memories. Tied to them by the tenuous bond of blood, and through them, tied to the continent she neither knew nor particularly liked. She wondered if Maya felt this ancestral bond too, through the intervening generations and the accumulated twin heartbreaks of colonialism and slavery.

They approached the lake that stretched, deceptively peaceful and smooth, before them. The surface remained undisturbed, like a pane of green glass, and Vimbai decided that it meant that the man-fish was at the very least cautious, and possibly, she hoped, concerned. “You should be concerned, you bastard,” she muttered through her teeth. “You better fucking worry.”

Maya, who stopped at the lakeshore just ahead of Vimbai, looked over her shoulder. “Whom are you talking to?” she asked Vimbai. “And why are you swearing?”

“The man-fish,” Vimbai answered. “And sorry about the swearing.”

“I don’t care.” Maya laughed and turned back to stare at the lake. “In fact, you don’t swear nearly enough.”

Normally, Vimbai would’ve felt resentful: she hated it when people told her how she should talk or what she should act like, especially if they accused her of acting white—oh, how it turned her stomach. She suspected that Maya never said things like that because she had had the same words thrown in her face too. “I just never picked it up, I guess.”

Felix nudged Vimbai’s side. “What if it . . . the catfish. What if it doesn’t come out?”

“He always does,” Vimbai said. “Let’s just wait a little.”

The water remained still, and Vimbai picked up Peb who hovered by her elbow, as if having accepted her authority and the hope of help. She cradled him, his grotesque hands and feet brushing against her cheek like soft strands of seaweed. “It’ll be all right,” she whispered. “Don’t be afraid, little Peb. We’ll get your tongue back from the bad fish.”

Peb moaned and shook his head.

“What? It wasn’t him?”

Peb nodded, wailing for emphasis. It tugged Vimbai’s hair and pointed with seven or eight of its limbs, at something behind Vimbai.