There were houses with tricycles on the lawns and plastic toys, large and bright and terrible in their garish innocence, strewn across driveways. There was asphalt and red dirt, and the signs for streets one would find in Zimbabwe mixed together with the ones from New Jersey. There were underpasses too steely and desperately industrial to be properly connected to a place, steel and concrete and humming of wires—the same in Zimbabwe as they were in northern Jersey and everywhere else in the world. Vimbai thought that humanity always managed to dream these not-quite-places everywhere—structures and interiors that remained the same from one continent to the next, airports and highways and hospitals, the dining rooms of franchise restaurants, prison cells. Even if the small details differed (and they rarely did), the overall sense of alienation remained the same, marking them as similar to each other and separate from the rest of the world, from the vibrant life that flowed and smelled differently in different cities, that made them all unique and recognizable—even in dreams.
Vimbai stopped as soon as she saw the sign. It winked at her from afar, its sideway neon grin fractured by the dark outlines of tree branches. “Hospital” the sign read. Of course, Vimbai thought, and pointed out the sign to Maya. “This is where they are.”
“You’re taking the medical truck literally, huh,” Maya observed, but moved closer to Vimbai, ever so casually.
Vimbai smiled—she did not begrudge others their fear. “Yeah. Plus, if they collect blood, they would have to keep it somewhere, right?”
“If it’s a dream, they can keep it in an old hat,” Maya said. “But I do see your point.”
The two of them walked toward the hospital, the slash of its sign disfiguring the night like a scar. The hospital seemed familiar, and with a squeezing of her heart Vimbai recognized it as Cooper, the University hospital where her father worked—the same tower of glass and steel and painted concrete, the looping driveway and the parking lot, and the parking garage—a towering structure alongside with the hospital proper, the path inside it winding endlessly, corkscrewing into the sky.
Vimbai motioned for Maya to be careful, and the two of them bent low, holding hands, moving in short dashes between the wrought iron gates and a small copse of trees and shrubs surrounding a couple of bird baths and benches—a handkerchief-sized piece of nature, wedged mercilessly among all the death and artifice of the towering stone.
Maya’s dogs waited for them by the bird baths, and only signaled their joy at Maya’s appearance by drumming their tails on the ground.
“Good dogs,” Maya whispered.
“I think we better go through the garage,” Vimbai said. “I’ve been at this hospital before.”
“You know where the blood bank is?”
Vimbai shook her head. “No, but I know how we can get to the offices and the patients’ rooms and the nurses’ stations without disturbing anyone.”
“Okay,” Maya whispered. “Lead the way.”
Sneaking by the turnstile that dispensed tickets and let the cars through was not a problem, and they tiptoed under the white dead light of halogen lamps that lit rows upon rows of rusted cars on cinderblocks, cars that would never drive anywhere—not even in this dream made substance. The pavement between the rows of cars had cracked, letting through thin, anemic stems of grass. Large chunks of asphalt had been cleaved off, as if by the stomping feet of giants, but Vimbai knew that it was grass and the young saplings that pushed upward among the cars that did it. Young trees, jacaranda and cherries, apple trees and maples reaching eagerly toward the fluorescent lights. They did not know any better, and mistook their artifice for the real sun.
They walked to the floor marked ‘D’, and Vimbai judged that they were sufficiently high above the ground. Maya’s dogs stayed subdued and pensive, and clustered around Maya’s ankles like a rust-colored, clumped and very scared rug. Vimbai calculated that they were somewhere on the fourth floor, and it suited her—she figured that if the wazimamoto expected them, they would watch the ground floor and the security checkpoints with vigilance. A quiet entry through the service corridor linking the parking garage to the hospital was a stroke of brilliance, Vimbai thought.
The emergency exit linking the parking garage with the main building was closed, and Maya heaved a sigh. “I suppose we have to go back down now, and risk the main entrance.”
“Not yet,” Vimbai said. “Let me try something.” She patted her pockets and smiled when she found her wallet—habit was stronger than reason in her, and even though she had not anticipated a need for an ID when she left the house this morning, she still stuck her wallet into the back pocket of her jeans.
“You’ll set off the alarm.”
Vimbai shook her head. “My dad works here. I mean, in the real Cooper. He showed me how to do this.”
“You think it will work here?”
“It should. It is my Cooper, I think.” Vimbai pressed the edge of the credit card between the doorjamb and the dented edge of the door, where the underlying blue-gray aluminum showed under the chipping yellow paint. She wriggled the card until it clattered and caught something—a sense of solid metal transmitted to Vimbai’s fingers as she felt the tapered edge of the lock and pressed, pushing the door smoothly open.
“Wow,” Maya said. “You’re good.” She and her dogs followed Vimbai inside, into a short and blind corridor ending in a set of swinging double doors. Vimbai remembered those doors—they led through storage closets and sometimes surgery recovery rooms, the utility spaces filled with rolled up cables and wire to the actual corridors, wide and well-lit, which would take them to the patients’ rooms, and various doctor offices and the nurses’ stations.
Oh how little Vimbai loved them, those small islands of order and clean-smelling paper, tables and desks where the ragged doctors and interns could sit down to catch their breath or eat a meal or catch up on paperwork. So clean, so sane—and among this order in chaos, these islands in the stormy sea, was her father, like a king of his atolls and the captain of the ship, always calm and composed even when people hemorrhaged on the gurney while he fitted the IV bag, even when there were so few free beds they had to park the gurneys by the nurses’ station. He moved among them, elegant and dignified, like royalty in charge of morphine pumps and gauze packs, the lord of disposable syringes and enameled bedpans. With the same smooth motion, he slid a needle into a collapsed, pale vein and handed Vimbai a cup of hospital Jell-O, the taste of which was still one of her favorite things in the world. She was proud of him, and unlike her mother he never felt compelled to say more than was necessary, and thus largely avoided being embarrassing to her.
Now, she poked her head through the double doors, to survey empty corridors—not even the memories of patients’ shadows graced them, and even the nurses’ station—this forever source of light and comfort—remained silent and dimly lit.
“Where to now?” Maya whispered.
It was a good question, Vimbai thought, and the one she had no answer to, except peering into every room on this floor and then going to the next. How many floors? Ten? Fourteen? How long would it take them? “Can your dogs sniff him out?” she said.
Maya crouched down next to her dogs. “Come on,” she told them. “Go search. Search, okay?”
The dogs pummeled their tails on the ground and smiled, their open mouths and bright tongues colored scarlet-red. Finally, they stood as one, and walked tentatively toward the stairs on the other end of the hallway.
The dogs yelped a little until Maya hushed them, and started up the stairs. One floor, two, three—Vimbai was starting to lose count, and followed mechanically, barely noticing the turns of the stairs, reminded of the hollowed out building that had become Maya’s grandmother’s shrine—just as cold the stone, just as endless the stairs. Vimbai shivered and wished the morning would come.
The dogs led them to the top floor, and then into the hallway. Vimbai saw a sign for some medical department—a Bone Clinic? She did not remember one being there. She followed the dogs and Maya, her legs tense as if ready to take flight at the slightest provocation, into the reception area of the Bone Clinic and then into the office.
At first, she thought that she was looking at a row of chairs, and half a second later she realized that these were backs of the medical men, clad in green scrubs, all the same height and size as they crowded together, side by side, around a narrow surgical table. There were tubes conducting some black and foul liquid, and there was a pale body, translucent even—and Felix’s disjointed eyes looked at them (one at Maya, one at Vimbai) with raw suffering.
The wazimamoto turned to follow his gaze, and as they parted, Vimbai wanted to scream—Felix’s hair, his little cursed universe was gone, taken apart and slurping down the tubes. Then she heard Maya gasp and clutch her hand, and as she looked at the wazimamoto, she felt like gasping too. Their faces were concealed by gauze surgical masks and caps pushed low over their white brows beaded with sweat. But even these contrivances could not disguise the fact that the wazimamoto had neither noses nor eyebrows, neither lips nor chins; even their eyes were the barest hints, slight depressions in faces otherwise smooth as eggs. Vimbai only made a sound when she realized that, despite these limitations, the wazimamoto managed to smile at her somehow, with the invisible predatory smiles of nightmares.