The House of Discarded Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page A

in a dream, with slow cloying molasses weighing her eyelids and her lips, as she whispered that she was sorry and that she loved them.
    “Vimbai, are you all right?” her mother said. “You always sound so tired. Are you getting enough sleep? Are you staying up late?”
    “No,” Vimbai said, and then, “yes.”
    “Vimbai…”
    “I am getting enough sleep. I’m not staying up late. I just miss you.”
    Her mother remained quiet for a while. “You can always come back home,” she finally said.
    “I can’t. I have a lease.”
    “At least, you can visit. How’s Saturday for you? I’m making stew.”
    These words coaxed a smile—Vimbai was unreasonably attached to the bland beef stew and rice, the food so generic it could be hardly counted as traditional. “Okay,” she said. “I can make Saturday.”
    “Good,” Vimbai’s mother said. “It is decided then.”
    And then her voice faded, and the ghost in the wires spoke—clearly, for the first time.
    Vimbai was not sure how much time had passed—she slumped on the floor, her frozen feet forgotten, the receiver pressed hard to her ear, listening to the stumbling, simpering words that poured out. She did not dare to ask any questions for fear of the ghost in the phone falling silent, spooked away by the fleshy human voice. So she let it talk, clutching the receiver with desperate force, afraid to loosen her grip and let go of the mystery inside it.
    The ghost was not a ghost at all, or so it claimed—it claimed to be a psychic energy baby, birthed in some ethereal dimension, and pulled into the phone by the powerful magnetism of phone signals. It remembered with perfect clarity how it came to be—remembered coalescing from the reflecting membranous surface of the world, streaked with reflected light, humming with surface tension under the pressure of emptiness underneath. The Psychic Energy Baby found form among the emanations of people’s minds and the susurrus of their voices, it found flesh in the shapes their lips and eyes made, the surprise of ‘o’s and the sibilations of ‘s’s; its skin stretched taut like a soap bubble, forged from the wet sound of lips touching; its thoughts were the musky smells and the breath of fresh bread. Its fingers spread like ribcages, and its nerves twined around the transparent water balloons of the muscles like stems of toadflax, searching restlessly for every available crevice, stretching along cold rough surfaces. Its veins, tiny rivers, pumped heartbeats striking in unison, the dry dallying of billions of ventricular contractions. And it spoke, spoke endlessly, it spoke words that tasted of dark air and formic acid. It could speak long before it took its final shape.
    And when it happened, when all the sounds and smells and words in the world, when all the thoughts had aligned so that it could become—then it found itself pulled into the wires, surrounded by taut copper and green and red and yellow insulation; twined and quartered among the cables, rent open by millions of voices that shouted and whispered and pleaded and threatened, interspersed with the rasping of breaths and tearing laughter. It traveled through the crisscrossing of the wires so fast that it felt itself being pulled into a needle, head spearing into the future while its feet infinitely receded into the past, until it came into a dark quiet pool of the black rotary phone, where it could reassemble itself and take stock.
    When Maya woke up and came downstairs, she found Vimbai still sitting on the floor in her robe, the silent receiver in her hand, her face buried in her knees and her shoulders shaking with sobs—not grief-stricken but merely shaken and amazed beyond words.
    To Vimbai’s surprise and gratitude too deep for words, Maya was neither skeptical nor disbelieving when she heard the tale of the Psychic Energy Baby. “It happens,” she said. “Don’t you have classes to go to?” Maya’s shift at the casino’s bar did not start