The House of Discarded Dreams

The medical men consulted among themselves, their surgical masks rising and falling, rising and falling, and one of them approached her cautiously, to untie the restraints on her right hand, and then quickly jumped back to join the others.

Vimbai used her free hand to free the other one, and sat up, rubbing her wrists. The scars on her arms flared, glorious tattoos of fire that burned but did not consume, and Vimbai jumped off the table, protected by their halo. She untied Maya, and smiled at her. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” Maya looked at her with a new expression, of deep respect and surprise. “Boy, did I ever underestimate you.”

“Get the dogs,” Vimbai said. “I’ll tend to Felix. And the crabs.” She turned to briefly glare at the wazimamoto and to show them her fist, just in case they forgot that they were afraid of her. No one had ever been afraid of her, and Vimbai found the new experience not altogether unpleasant—she suspected she would’ve enjoyed it more if she were not so shell-shocked by the experience, if indifference did not seem like the best coping mechanism available to her.

Felix remained on his slab, his head a defenseless egg, so unfamiliar and strange that Vimbai felt like weeping every time she looked at it. Her eyes met Felix’s tormented gaze—for once, his eyes seemed to be pointing on the same direction. “Felix,” she whispered. “Can this be fixed?”

He shook his head and cringed as the newly exposed skin touched the cold steel. “No,” he whispered back. “I think this is it—I hope there wasn’t anything valuable in there.” The loss of his private tiny universe had not seemed to reach him yet.

Vimbai unfastened the archaic leather belts that affixed his wrists and ankles to the table. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get going.”

Felix made no attempt to move, listless and disoriented like a cat without whiskers.

Vimbai grabbed his hands and pulled him off the table. He let her, inert, and stood, swaying slightly, making no attempt to walk or even flinch away from the medical men who clumped tightly together, watching them with the blind eyeless depressions on their featureless faces.

“I think we’ll have to lead him,” Vimbai said to Maya, who had finished freeing her foxes. “Help me to pick up the crabs.”

Maya nodded and motioned to her dogs—they seemed the least affected, and growled at the apparitions in green scrubs as they scuttled about the Bone Clinic, picking up the ghosts of the horseshoe crabs in their red mouths.

Vimbai and Maya stuffed the remaining crabs in their pockets and down their t-shirts, and Vimbai linked her arm with Felix’s. The glowing sigil on hers crossed over to his skin, and he shuddered a little, as if waking up. “Come on,” Vimbai urged. “Come quick.”

She felt uneasy now—the medical men seemed to have come to some decision, and even though they made no attempt to stop Vimbai and her roommates from leaving, there was a new sense of purposefulness about them, as if they just waited for them to leave the room to spring into action. Vimbai was also uneasy about the man-fish and Balshazaar, free and roaming the depths of the house somewhere.

Vimbai took a deep breath and pushed open the door, Felix hanging limply on the crook of her arm, and took a step into the silent and bright corridor of Cooper Hospital, inexplicably thrust into the center of her dream Harare.

They found Peb where they had left him—he bobbed up and down in the tree branches, seemingly content. Vimbai wondered if he experienced time in the same way they did, if he ever worried or became bored or counted to sixty to gauge how long did a minute take.

“Come with us,” Vimbai told him. “I can’t carry you now.”

Peb sulked but bobbed along, silent and obedient. Vimbai felt her stomach churn—she had forgotten all about his tongue. “I don’t have it,” she said out loud. “But we know where the wazimamoto are, and I can probably make them give your tongue back to me, but I need to talk to my grandmother first.”

It wasn’t exactly a lie—Vimbai did hope that the vadzimu would be able to shed some light on the mystery of the sudden burning signs appearing on her skin. Even though she probably didn’t know anything about the wazimamoto, she probably knew more about magic than Vimbai. Vimbai wished her mother was here too, because she was the one who wrote papers comparing voodoo with hoodoo, and correcting the many misconceptions she believed white Americans to have—it always puzzled Vimbai that those articles always seemed to be written for white people; possibly the ones who read those articles and became qualified to run Africana Studies departments. However, they still managed to focus primarily on the aspects of muti that used human organs cut out of living people, which annoyed Vimbai’s mother to no end. “It’s as if they only want to see the folk magic practitioners as savage mutilators,” she would say. Vimbai would then think of cousin Roger and nod in agreement; economics simply didn’t make for as compelling a monster as a dark-skinned medicine man in traditional garb. And mutilation certainly held a kind of grim fascination that always made the headlines.

They made it home when the sun was rising among the slanted ceiling beams of the main hallway, and they made it to the kitchen by midmorning. Vimbai’s dead grandmother had a coffee pot waiting for them, and apologized for the lack of sugar, even though it was certainly not her fault—the ghosts did not eat or drink a thing, and only cleaned excessively.

When the vadzimu saw the marks on Vimbai’s arms, she gasped and looked closer—even though the flames had died down somewhat, the patterns still glowed the angry red of molten iron. “These are muti marks,” she proclaimed. “And they protected you from danger—did your mother have them done?”

There was an intensity of hope on the grandmother’s voice that made Vimbai cringe. The ghost still waited for forgiveness, and seeing her daughter follow in her magical footsteps would be a certain sign that Vimbai’s mother was not angry with hers anymore. “No, grandma,” Vimbai said. “I made them myself—only I didn’t know then what they were.” (Protect me from a broken heart.)

The vadzimu shook her head. “One needs to be a n’anga to make those; one needs to practice Un’anga, the folk medicine. Or voodoo, like witches do.”

Vimbai wished she paid closer attention to her mother’s articles—she only remembered that Un’anga used both medicinal herbs and spiritual cures, and that most people frowned upon it nowadays. People had no use for spirits anymore, the ghost grandmother said, shaking her head from side to side. They even called the creator by a different name, just like they called their country by a wrong name. It was always the British missionaries, renaming things and demanding respect for their god, the same respect they were so unwilling to offer anyone else.

According to the vadzimu, the protection marks that glowed so brightly on the inside of her arms could not be made willy-nilly, by just anyone. One had to go to a n’anga for things like that, or to muroyi, the witches shrouded in mystery of such a malignant and disreputable nature that only the truly wicked and desperate dared to inquire into it. Of course, Vimbai had spent enough time with her mother to interpret it to mean that the witches were mostly unpopular with the white Christian missionaries and thoroughly vilified by same. Just another form of control, but right now it seemed of little use to her. She was more curious about the roots of the magic, the source of muti power.

On the other hand, she wondered at her ability to perform such magic—was it that the vadzimu was wrong and muti marks could be drawn by anyone with enough conviction? And really, how often did they get tested anyway, in the outside world so devoid of magic, be it in Harare or Atlantic City?

Or—and this is what gave Vimbai such a headache—could it be that she was special somehow, that in her genes there were little coils of African nucleotides that knew somehow about the muti and the scars, about protective and injurious magic alike? “This is such a stereotype,” she heard her mother’s voice in her mind, and smiled at the ridiculousness of it all. “Like being of African ancestry means that you automatically know voodoo—it’s such offensive nonsense.” Still, the thought lingered, even though she knew full well that revealing herself to be a conjure woman would be a political disaster in her mother’s eyes.

Maya and Vimbai had put Felix to bed, to let him recover from the awful draining he had just undergone and quite unsure of what else they could do for him. They convened in the kitchen by the coffee pot to survey their progress and plot further plans of action.

“It doesn’t look great,” Maya said and made a face at her black and bitter coffee. “Not terrible, but not great. Pluses: we got the crabs back, and Felix too. We know where they are. We know that your marks repel the medical men but not the fish.”

“And we still need to get Peb’s tongue back,” Vimbai said and sighed. “And I feel so bad about Felix—we should’ve protected him.”

“I’m not the queen of Felix,” Maya said, scoffing. “He took off all by himself, and we had other things to deal with, remember? Like you jumping straight into the catfish’s mouth.”