“You should be careful with the man-fish,” the ghost said. “He is cunning—more cunning than you can imagine.”
Felix stopped his pacing. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe he took Peb’s tongue so that Peb couldn’t tell us something.”
“Like what?” Vimbai asked, still sniffling. So small, so ethereal. So helpless. Impossible, and yet alive, and yet mutilated. The conglomeration of wrongness was so great that Vimbai felt like crying again.
“I don’t know,” Felix said. “But Peb, he floats everywhere. He babbles . . . babbled about all sorts of abstract stuff, but he notices things. Right, Peb?”
Peb nodded, his forehead brushing against Vimbai’s shoulder, light like sleeping breath of a real infant—or at least, that was how Vimbai imagined it.
She hugged Peb closer to her, and he felt like an air-filled balloon in her arms, smooth and light and real. “What have you seen?” she asked. “Who did this to you?”
Still sobbing, Peb pressed his face into her shoulder.
“Are you afraid to tell us?”
Another brush against her shoulder signified another nod.
“Don’t worry,” Vimbai said. “We’ll protect you. You tell us when you’re ready.”
Peb wailed a little.
“He can’t talk,” Felix said.
“I know. He can still point whoever did this out, or answer yes or no questions.”
The vadzimu patted Vimbai’s shoulder reassuringly. “When he’s ready,” she said. “When we all are ready.”
Vimbai fled to the small tropical grove that currently separated her and Felix’s rooms. She left Peb, still distraught but quiet, with her grandmother’s ghost, and sought solitude and time to think. She felt exposed and betrayed, as if a dream she was enjoying had taken a sudden and unwarranted turn toward nightmare. She wished Maya was here so that Vimbai could ask her what she thought now, now that Peb’s tongue had been stolen, about having their own domain and being wild queens of the dream realm she suspected was Africa of the spirit. What she thought now, when the man-fish was stalking them from its lake and paying no attention to all the great names for rivers and mountain ridges and furniture deposits they had come up with.
She wandered among the thick trunks, flared at the bases like trombones, covered in green ribbons of moss and twisting ropes of vines. She craned her neck to see interweaving branches hundreds of feet above her, right under the painted fiberboard sky. Orchids and bromeliads cascaded from the branches, and Vimbai squinted at the bright red and yellow flowers.
She grabbed onto an especially sturdy vine and yanked it a few times. The vine held, and Vimbai pulled herself up, her toes finding footholds in deep fissures in the bark. She had been a good tree climber when she was younger, and now the skills still remained. The whole thing about tree climbing was not being afraid to fall, and having faith that the next foothold or a branch would be there when one needed it; and Vimbai had this faith. As she climbed, the bark opened in accommodating cracks and the branches offered themselves to her reaching fingers, until she settled in the intersection of several sturdy branches that offered a perch and a canopy. Her back resting against the trunk and her gaze settling on the idyll of a basket fern housing a white and pink orchid among its feathery leaves, she felt alone and at peace; and most of all, she felt secure from the catfish, so far away in his lake.
Vimbai wished she could stay up in this tree forever, without ever having to go down and to deal with the man-fish or Peb’s missing tongue. She wished she could stay here until they safely touched ground in New Jersey, and there she would go home. Her mother must be worrying herself sick about her by now, and her father was probably quiet and reassuring at home, but at work he would spend his breaks phoning morgues and hospitals; he would pull favors with both Camden cops and Camden drug dealers, both of which he had been patching up for years now. He would look for information and come home late after stopping by every morgue and looking at every dead black girl between sixteen and thirty, each body a simultaneous stab in the heart and a sigh of guilty relief.
Vimbai regretted that she had been so focused on her mother and she on Vimbai that they both pushed her father to the sidelines, his relationship with them uncomplicated, reduced to the function of arbitrator and peacemaker. Her father who only lost his cool when either Mugabe or Rhodesia was mentioned. Her father with a secret political past that barred him from ever visiting home, and his vague and undefined fears Vimbai wished she asked about.
It struck her as profound, that she could see her parents’ grief with such clarity. It was not an eternal childish they’ll-be-sorry-when-I’m-dead mantra but rather her intimate knowledge of how they were, how they functioned in the world, their responses as predetermined and predictable to her as her own. Perhaps even more so. She wished she could go home now, to reassure them and to stay with them so they would never have to worry again.
She wondered about Maya then, about how she managed to survive in the world and to function without such supporting love, invisible and strong, even if it was far away and only imagined. No wonder she clung to her dogs.
As if answering her thoughts, short thin barks reached her from below, and she peered down between the branches. Ruddy backs and fluffy tail tips appeared in the greenery and disappeared again, hidden by the lush vegetation. And there was Maya, her unruly black hair and yellow t-shirt as unmistakable as her half-foxes half-possums.
“Maya,” Vimbai called.
Maya stopped and looked around, puzzled.
“Up here.” Vimbai waved with both arms when Maya looked up.
“What are you doing in this tree? Have you heard about Peb?”
“Thinking,” Vimbai answered. “Yes, I saw him. Terrible, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Maya yelled, craning her neck. “Felix thinks it’s the catfish in the lake. Did you see him?”
“Come up here, and I’ll tell you.”
Maya shook her head. “My dogs can’t climb, and they’ll go nuts if I leave them down here by themselves. You come down.”
Vimbai sighed but obeyed. Climbing down was always harder for her. On her way up, she could just keep her gaze on the sky above; coming down, she had to look at the ground, aware how far away it still was. When she finally stood next to Maya, panting, she smiled. “You have to climb with me one day. It’s really gorgeous up there. And the flowers!”
“Maybe,” Maya said. “What happened with the fish?”
Vimbai recounted her adventure and her conversation with the catfish. When she mentioned Balshazaar, Maya frowned. “You don’t think he could be mixed up in it, do you?”
“Why would he be?” Vimbai said.
Maya shrugged and looked around. “I don’t know. He just creeps me out, that’s all.”
“All he knows is Felix.”
“Precisely. Maybe he wanted to make some new friends, friends of his own.”
Vimbai looked around too, watching for the glistening of parchment skin in the underbrush. A shrunken dome hopping around on its single non-existing leg like it owned the place. “You’re a bit quick to jump to the conclusions.”
“Who else then?” Maya said. “Not Felix and not the ghost. Not you, not me. Who else is here?”
“The wazimamoto,” Vimbai said. “The men in medical trucks. In my dream, they were with the man-fish—in cahoots with him, I mean.”
“I haven’t seen any of them around,” Maya said.
“This place is huge,” Vimbai said, and felt a chill. “There could be anything hiding in here somewhere and we wouldn’t even know it.”
Maya seemed worried for a second. “If they came to Peb, they know where we all are.”
“Of course. There’s always someone in the kitchen. Or the living room, at least.”
“We need to find another place to hide out, in case of emergency,” Maya said. “I think I know one.”
“From your dreams?” Vimbai guessed.
Maya nodded. “Come along. I’ll show you my secret, and I’ll explain on the way.”
Vimbai followed Maya, and the dogs barked and bounded ahead, as if they knew the way very well.
Chapter 11
Vimbai was pleased to have earned enough of Maya’s trust for her to talk to Vimbai so openly; yet the story Maya told her left her worried and upset. It just didn’t seem either normal or fair, to seek refuge in one’s own nightmares. And Maya was a nightmare factory.
When Maya was younger, she used to live in Northern Jersey. Not in the projects as such, she said, but pretty damn close. In Newark there just aren’t too many what one would consider ‘good’ neighborhoods, and she learned early on what gunshots sounded like, and what ‘alley apple’ meant.
Still, it wasn’t all bad, she told Vimbai. As a teenager, Maya carried a switchblade, as a kind of bravado rather than against any real danger. The neighborhood she lived in, while not exactly wealthy, was not unsafe—there were flowerboxes on the windowsills, and geraniums bloomed in them. Late night in August, people sat on their porches, having long and slow conversations, waiting for the heat of the day to let up enough to allow sleep.