The House of Discarded Dreams

The crabs chittered back, excited. Soon, they agreed. We know that we are close—we recognize the signs, the sandbars. We feel the scent of the familiar water, we recognize the manky stench of river silt flowing into the ocean. We know these salt marshes, we know the screeching of terns and gulls overhead. We are close, so close.

Vimbai smiled and moved to straighten—her face had grown numb under water, and the vadzimu’s eyes felt indistinguishable from hers, a sure sign that she had spent too much time with her grandmother’s ghost inside her, and that the two of them were at risk of confusing self with other. But before Vimbai’s face had breached the surface, she felt a blinding pain in her side and stomach, as if from a kick strong enough to knock the wind out of her, and her arms and knees buckled under her, sending her toppling sideways into the cold, cold water, where nothing but the undead crabs waited for her.

The vadzimu’s presence saved Vimbai—because of the ghost, she had grown more impervious to cold, and her breathing underwater, while labored, was still reasonably comfortable. She grasped the rope that linked the house above to the crabs beneath, and hovered in the thickness of water, next to the clusters of dormant crabs. Her chest and stomach still hurt, and she could feel an ugly bruise spreading under her shirt, tracking its progress with a sensation of intense heat. That would be not even a bruise but a hematoma, Vimbai thought. Of course, there was also a question of who it was that kicked her under.

Balshazaar, her own and her grandmother’s voices whispered in unison. Who else but that conniving, shriveled old man? What other appendage was capable of such a swift and decisive kick if not a phantom limb they had voluntarily given him?

She considered getting out of the water, but decided against it—surely, Balshazaar was waiting for her on the porch, waiting for her to surface and to betray that she was still alive, still presented a danger or, at the very least, an obstacle. In the water, she would be vulnerable to him—apparently, her scars did not protect from any desiccated heads (or, as far as she could tell, from anything but the wazimamoto, which made some twisted sense—African magic deterred African phenomena.) He could drown her or hurt her while she trod water, helpless. It would be better to wait him out, to let him think that she was gone and drowned, so that he could tell the man-fish and they both could regret that her soul fell to the horseshoe crabs instead of the wily catfish. Then, it would be safe for her to come out.

Even though she had not seen her assailant, she felt sure that it was not the wazimamoto—they could not come into the house. Her Kenyan babysitter was quite clear on that—she insisted that they left people in their houses alone, and only drained blood of those who were destitute enough to sleep in the streets. Poor people, migrant workers, prostitutes, homeless children—they were the preferred wazimamoto targets.

And then there were her scars, her protection. She wondered if the wazimamoto were so scared of them because they did not expect muti but if they would find a way to work around them. She found thinking easier in this thick green water, bobbing halfway between the bottom and the surface, a perfectly balanced float, her hand holding the rope that dragged the house home. Maybe she could stay here for all time, she thought—it wasn’t bad, and she would be perfectly positioned to study her favorite crabs, with her mind and her grandmother’s special vision and the ghostly ability to breathe underwater.

Then she worried that she would spend too much time with the ancestral spirit inside her, and that their souls would get entangled somehow, would become one. Vimbai certainly did not want to become her grandmother: even though she liked her better now than before, she still did not want the old woman’s superstition or the conviction that muti, the mutilation magic, was somehow good for her children. She did not want her laments of the old days and the insistence that things used to be better when the British were in charge, just like she did not want her death, her endless stories that went nowhere, her narrow-minded ways.

A memory niggled at the edges of her mind, a half-forgotten fact from a botany lecture. She remembered the delicate, steady crosshatching of her drawings, the smiley faces of monocot vascular bundles and the perforated plates of the sieve tubes. The branching of the leaf’s veins, and the delicate internal structures of the anthers and pistils. And then there was something, something else—she remembered tracing the thin fibers snaking in-between the tissues of a vine’s stem, almost invisible filaments that penetrated the plant’s food and moisture supply, coiled into every cell and narrow space between vessels.

The parasitic plant, Vimbai remembered, the thing that hid inside another plant and only became apparent when it bloomed with its horrible febrile flowers—gigantic, three feet across, red and warty white. A gruesome flower that looked like slabs of meat and stank of rotting flesh; Rafflesia it was called, she remembered. Still, it took her a while of silent bobbing and being dragged through the numbing cold water to realize what the flower reminded her of—she recognized in its quiet creeping the same deceiving calm and even tenderness that she had felt as the vadzimu’s memories blended with hers, seamlessly twining between the threads of Vimbai’s life. She recognized the imperceptible shifts and subtle rearrangements of what made Vimbai the girl that she was, she felt the memories of her first love (Elizabeth, Elizabeth, her memories and dreams sang in unison) being pushed to the side to give just a hair’s breadth more space to the memories of red soil and dry summer months, of the red dust that hung relentless in the vegetable garden, the squash and the yams ailing in the heat. Her mother’s face shifted and flowed in her memory—from a stern woman with sharp cheekbones to a soft-faced girl and back again, the marks on her face changing from fresh cuts to almost invisible scars.

Vimbai resented herself for thinking of her dead grandmother as a parasite—everything else aside, the vadzimu was the reason Vimbai was still alive in the freezing ocean, breathing underwater. Her memories offered Vimbai a glimpse of a life so different from her own that really, she should be grateful for the opportunity. Her mother always told Vimbai that she was too sheltered, too ignorant of how the rest of the world lived—and yet, Vimbai thought, she was the one doing all the sheltering. Just think about what it took for Vimbai to move out of her protective fierce embrace—it took a house that was filled with landscapes and contained the entirety of Vimbai’s idea of Africa, and two very strange roommates.

Vimbai thought of the jacaranda trees and the horseshoe crabs, their fine delicate claws combing the white sand of the bottom with the speedy mechanical motion of a small windmill; her memories of her children intertwined with her memories of her parents, and for a few dizzying moments she could not tell which was which. Her eyes filled with tears of either childhood helplessness or sadness of old age, useless underwater and superfluous in the ocean already filled with salt, and unknown hard words filled her mouth—Shona words she had neither used nor remembered since she was little, too little for kindergarten; it was kindergarten where she stopped talking Shona, she remembered now. Before, Shona and English were inseparable and the same, one become the other in her mouth as easily as in the mouths of her parents—they did not discriminate, and the languages switched in a joyful leapfrog of words not bound by rules. When Vimbai was little, she found the words that best filled the void, be they Shona or English; she had lost this ability on the first day of kindergarten, when she answered her teacher’s question in Shona and everyone in the class laughed. Her parents still spoke a mix of languages at home, and how she envied them! She wished she could forget the laughter of the kids and just speak the way she had been doing before.

And now Shona forced its way back into her throat, just like the memories of Harare forced themselves back into her mind, and Vimbai closed her eyes, her warm tears flowing into the cold ocean and disappearing there without a trace, leaving no imprint. She had to go back now, she thought, back to the surface, into the warm embrace of the house and its smells of dank domesticity and over-boiling coffee, where she could disentangle herself from her dead grandmother and be herself; she just wanted to catch her breath and examine what was and wasn’t her anymore.

But the feat of returning proved more difficult than she had hoped; it always was, after all, the impossibility of the act implied in so many language clichés and morality tales. She kicked her way to the surface only to discover that the surface as such had disappeared—instead, there was a thin layer of oily and impenetrable darkness, as if some mythological version of Exxon Valdez had suffered an accident and spilled whatever mysterious substance it carried and that could poison an imaginary ocean.

Not Exxon Valdez, Vimbai realized when her face touched the murky substance and entered it as one enters a summer night, clammy and humid and warm, from the crisp chill of an air-conditioned house—the too-warm, too-humid air wrapped around her skin and beaded it with sweat. There was darkness and nothing at all to see, and there was neither sky nor the house anywhere in view.

Shocked, Vimbai sank again, back into the comforting and familiar chill of the ocean. Her thoughts raced and her heart thumped harder against the delicate cage of her ribs—she could feel every contraction, every pump resonate through every bone in her body with a hollow echo. She looked around her, at the newly vivid green of the water and the white of sand, studded with black and blue bivalves, twined in the yellow and brown and green of seaweed. She could not comprehend what had happened to the surface, but there was no doubt in her mind that it was the work of Balshazaar and the wazimamoto.