The House of Discarded Dreams

“I did not,” Vimbai objected weakly and without much conviction. “In any case, we did not protect him. But the crab souls are back, and maybe we should hide them somewhere where neither the wazimamoto nor the man-fish would find them.”

“Good idea,” Maya said. “Where?”

Before the word left her lips, they both knew the answer. The safest place there was—a tall hollow tower, glass and concrete, the lone platform on top where there was a coffin with an old woman, and blankets and empty candy wrappers betrayed Maya’s secret nest. “Will you take them there?” Vimbai asked. “The dogs can carry them, and no one will get to them there.”

Maya nodded. “It’s okay, I suppose, as long as it’s temporary.” She breathed a short laugh. “That’s a silly thing to say. I guess everything is temporary, especially here, right?”

“Right,” Vimbai said. “Just make sure you keep an eye out for Balshazaar.”

“I don’t think he would ever bother us again,” Maya said. “I mean, he got what he wanted, right? Felix’s universe is destroyed and he would never have to be locked up in there.”

“Maybe.” Vimbai thought about Balshazaar’s parchment skin and sunken eyes, the grotesque phantom limb fused to the withered remnant of his neck, and sighed. “I just don’t think we can trust him.”

“Of course we can’t.” Maya smiled. “We just have enough shit to worry about without him, so I’m saying don’t worry about him unless he pops up.”

“Sounds good.” Vimbai momentarily envied Maya this clarity, this ability to separate the essential from the secondary. Vimbai lacked that skill, doomed to forever swim in the soup of relative values and conjectures, where everything was conditional and everything seemed to have equal importance, always competing for her attention. It was good to have Maya around.

“Okay then,” Maya said. “I’ll go take care of the crabs. What about you?”

“I’ll try to figure out what the deal with my scars is,” Vimbai said. “I’ll check on Felix, and then I’ll figure out how to get Peb’s tongue back.”

Chapter 16

Vimbai sat by Felix’s bed, with Peb bobbing nearby like an obedient and grotesque fishing float. Felix slept, or possibly descended into a deeper and more disturbed state—his eyes flickered back and forth under the closed eyelids, like quick little mice in the grass.

Vimbai put her hand onto his forehead—smooth and cool, not a sign of fever —and considered whether she should keep it there for a while longer, to offer comfort, until he moaned and thrashed, twisting from under her hand as if it were too heavy or burned his skin.

Vimbai sighed and withdrew, under Peb’s silent and, she imagined, accusing stare. To avoid it, she studied the bare walls of Felix’s room, just slightly covered with lacy lichen and peppered moths camouflaged between the lichen patches, only their black eyes and long, twitchy antennae betraying that they were still alive. She leaned closer to one of the moths, to take a closer look at its small furry body and the delicately powdered white and gray wings. The moth fluttered, and Vimbai could hear the high-pitched squeal of the scales rubbing together and the soft whispering of the body hairs brushing against each other.

The chipoko stood on the threshold—Vimbai only noticed her when she looked up from the trembling velvety moth, and her gaze stumbled over her grandmother’s. She seemed as troubled and as silently accusing as Peb. I didn’t do anything wrong, Vimbai wanted to say, but the burning on the insides of her arms belied her innocence. Somehow, she had managed to do it to herself, Elizabeth Rosenzweig or no.

Oh, Vimbai remembered her face so well, the curve of the soft cheek fuzzed with tiny hairs only visible under direct sunlight, light and dear like the crosshatching of a peach. Same color, and, Vimbai imagined, same taste—would it be that a girl with such a sweet blush, such soft creamy cheeks was not so different from a piece of fruit, not animal but plantlike in her innocence and sugary sweetness? Bees should be following her around, attracted by the invisible dripping of soul nectar; birds should be building nests in the dark thickets of these eyelashes, long and tangled like the branches of sagebrush.

The memory ached, and the ache resonated in the curves of her inner arms, doubled and tripled and twined around her elbows as the scars puckered and reopened, rivers of gray ash shot through with some residual sparks, playing and skittering across the surface. Now it seemed that just a memory of Elizabeth was enough to bring these formerly dormant charms to life; so Vimbai decided to remember.

She was not particularly good at love—never had been, too awkward and easily discouraged, too self-conscious and ungainly. It had always been easier to back away and cry quietly after dark, so that her parents would not hear, so that her hot tears soaked into her hair and the cool cotton of the pillowcase, so that they burned her eyes like coals. It was easier to treat love as something imaginary, as something one indulged in in one’s head, guiltily yet zestily, like daydreaming. Loving Elizabeth Rosenzweig from a distance was a snap—it was even easier when they went to different colleges and never even talked anymore, since Vimbai was too preoccupied with love to have bothered to develop a friendship or even a casual bond.

The scars, she realized now, were just like those daydreams—not action but a symbol, a substitute for doing. Neither cutting nor daydreaming accomplished anything but they offered a refuge, an escape from otherwise painful thoughts—painful enough, she realized, to have possibly pushed her into action as long as she didn’t let herself become distracted. And yet, her longing was potent enough—important enough, she told herself—to imbue her scars with some protective magic. She made them to protect herself from having to go out there and declare her affection, and probably being rejected—to protect her from a broken heart. Who could have imagined that they actually worked?

“Enough staring, grandma,” Vimbai said. “I’m not a witch, and you know that. You should be grateful—you should be happy I have this magic, or I would’ve been dead otherwise.”

“I realize, granddaughter,” the vadzimu answered. “Would you like to see the crabs?”

“Yes, please.” Vimbai smiled—she missed the sight of her silent underwater army working so hard—their legs so brittle and segmented!—to get them home, despite the cold and the season and the cruelty of the man-fish. They were entirely too good, Vimbai thought, and she promised to herself to dedicate her life to making sure that horseshoe crabs were no longer chopped up for eel bait or bled into near-oblivion by the faceless monstrosities that holed up in the Cooper Hospital of the Harare of her dreams.

The weather had grown milder—the wind outside died down, and the smell of the ocean did not seem as sharp. It had grown almost spicy, heated by the tremulous and pale sun that reminded Vimbai of spring rather than fall. Could it be? No, she chased the thought away as ridiculous. No, just a slightly warmer-than-usual day, common enough at any time of the year. She waited for the vadzimu to enter her, to occupy the same Vimbai-shaped amount of space as she herself occupied, and pressed her face underwater.

“You are safe,” Vimbai reassured them. “Your souls are safe, waiting for you in the tallest tower where neither fish nor truck can get to them.”

The horseshoe crabs mumbled and whispered their thanks, reassured, and their legs worked faster—Vimbai watched the shadow of the house, a square small outline that did not at all match the bounty of space and landscape within, crawl and flicker over the long narrow sandbars, glide like a manta ray over the deeper trenches where small fish played in silver schools. The horseshoe crabs picked up the pace—they almost flew now, their cracking undead legs working so fast that Vimbai feared that they would suffer a final break and fall apart, splinter and disintegrate like termite-infested wood.

Vimbai was no longer terrified of the crabs’ unnatural undead state but rather felt profound pity and anxiety, now that the crabs’ souls were back and protected by the death magic of Maya’s grandmother. Vimbai did not know whether the wazimamoto had any ways of finding out information except for what Balshazaar and the man-fish told them. What if they had some hidden sense, the way villains always know everything in horror movies? What if even now they and their medical truck were on their way to intercept Maya and her dogs, to steal the crab souls back, to be drained and dissected, and quartered afterwards to be stuffed into eel traps, fish bait, useless in death as they were in life?

She chased these thoughts away as she watched the bubbles of her breath rising to the surface. They stretched and danced, their surface radiant, as they multiplied and shimmered and burst as soon as they reached the surface. There were none coming out of the crabs, which wasn’t surprising, but Vimbai wished she did not know that the gills—delicate feathers she had studied under the microscope so many times—remained unmoving and useless inside their chitinous shells.

“It’s okay, little crabs,” she said. “We’re going to make it home soon, and it’ll be warm and nice, and you will all come ashore and lay your eggs—there will be plenty for the birds and still there will be thousands of new crabs hatching and playing in the waves. And I’ll keep your souls safe for you.”