Up in her room, Maya used to listen to the drawl of voices outside, as she lay on top of her blue and yellow quilt, her forehead beading with sweat. She listened to the TV in the apartment downstairs, to the sounds of traffic on East Kinney Street. Through the window by her bed, the streetlamps looked like ghostly white globes through the haze rising off the heated pavement, only snatching glimpses of the peeling siding and the wide brick porch of the house across the street. She could not see the porch of her own house, but she knew that her grandmother was there, sitting on the steps with her feet in black shoes planted firmly on the sidewalk, her knitting in the wide hammock of her dress stretched taut between the knobby old knees.
It was too hot to sleep, and Maya tossed from side to side, willing the white curtains to flutter, to bring a breath of fresh wind, any movement of the sticky humid air. Only in retrospect did she realize how happy she had been back then. How sad it was when you left your happiest days behind when you were fourteen.
She was eager to reassure Vimbai that really, it wasn’t so bad—so many had it much worse, and Maya was lucky in many ways. She would not call it a hard life; it was just that shit happened with alarming frequency—to everyone, so why not her? She was not too special not to catch some shit every now and again.
Statistically speaking, being raised by one’s grandparents put one at a certain disadvantage—life expectancy was a bitch, as Maya’s grandmother was fond of saying. Well, maybe not in those very words, but the meaning was the same. This is why she made sure that Maya studied hard and did not slack off at school; this is why when she found the switchblade she chased her down the street, swinging a long leather belt she must’ve acquired for that very purpose—at least, she never wore trousers, and the belt clearly had no fashion-related application. Even if Maya wanted to grow up ghetto (and she had toyed with the idea), she never had a chance—not while her grandmother was alive, and not after she passed away. Even in death, she threatened Maya’s conscience with the leather belt, forever branded into her imagination.
Maya’s grandmother threatened to die so frequently that when she actually did, in December of Maya’s sixteenth year, Maya felt betrayed and puzzled—she hadn’t done anything wrong, and therefore did not warrant this most severe of all punishments, the kind that was supposed to exist only as a threat but never to be carried out. Especially not when Maya was doing so well in school, taking AP lit and biology, and acing her practice SAT tests.
So it was not surprising that Maya’s nightmares centered around the simple pine coffin, with a small old lady (and she was small, despite Maya’s early memories when her grandmother towered over her, gigantic like God) dressed in black shoes and black dress, a pillbox hat, and a pair of white gloves clutching her knitting needles—she was quite clear on requesting her outfit and her knitting in her last will she dictated to Maya just two weeks before her failing heart had finally given out.
Maya remembered the shining organ pipes in the church and the coffin, but not much else. Maybe this is why her dreams placed the coffin into the building she could never forget, no matter how much she tried.
It was a multistoried monstrosity just a few blocks to the north from Maya’s house, and the epicenter of the gunshots that reached their relatively peaceful enclave of the working poor. The building itself seemed the very cause of the violence and other improprieties—at least, this is what Maya’s grandmother said. “They stuff people into these egg cartons,” she would say, frowning, “and it’s so big that no one knows who their neighbors are, and they never have to look them in the face. So they break and steal and put their graffiti on the walls, because only God can see them, and he ain’t saying anything. And here, on this street, we know our neighbors, and this is why everyone behaves—shame keeps people decent.”
The city authorities were apparently of the same mind, and in their continuing quest for gentrification, they decided to demolish the projects and build a center with shops and coffee bars instead, where people would come to spend money rather than kill each other and sell drugs. Maya’s neighbors weren’t fond of the projects, but they were even less fond of shopping malls that were designed to drive housing prices even higher, and people who lived there away. Maya and a few of her friends visited the gutted building just before it was razed, to pay their ambivalent respects.
This was the building Maya dreamed about, twisted and distorted by time and sleeping mind, and enough time had passed that she would not be able to say how accurate the dream version was, or even if it bore any semblance to reality. She dreamed of the central staircase ensconced in concrete slabs, spiraling through the center of the hollow, empty building—just the outer walls remained, with all the internal constructions, floors, partitions and doors completely gone. Just a giant echoey brick of space, with a staircase boring through its empty heart, and when Maya looked up it seemed to go on forever.
There were no banisters remaining, and Maya and two other kids, Phil and Janet, climbed the staircase, scared that they would get dizzy on its endless turns and plummet all the way down to the naked foundation, with nothing there to break their fall. And in her dreams, Maya still climbed this staircase, all the way to the top. It ended in a simple wooden platform that held a coffin with a small old lady inside, her gloves and hat and knitting needles just like Maya remembered them—the dead heart of a gutted monster building, useless and unbearably sad.
The monstrous high-rise stood on a sharp cliff that jutted out of a seemingly endless sea of old shoes and handbags. Vimbai decided not to contemplate the origin of them, but rather concentrate on the cliff itself. It appeared to be made of the same material as the climbing wall in the college gym, and Vimbai felt an acute pang of nostalgia for her classes and the campus and a sky that was not just painted on the ceiling.
There was a path leading to the top, steep but passable, and the dogs bounded ahead—they knew the way.
“Weird,” Vimbai said. “You have this place, and I have a Harare. It’s like each of us gets our own little fiefdom.”
“Or a queendom,” Maya said.
“The point is, who decides? Who gives us those things?”
“The house,” Maya said. “Our dreams. I don’t know; does it matter?”
“We keep saying that it doesn’t,” Vimbai said. “But we’re just saying that because we cannot find out, and it is terrible, living in a place you don’t understand. It has some laws we don’t know, and there’s someone . . . some thing that makes everything happen. Doesn’t it bother you?”
“A little,” Maya admitted. “Maybe it’s like one of those stories they tell children, like a morality tale. About kids who ask too many questions, or look when they’re not supposed to, and lose everything.”
Vimbai thought back to her spying on the horseshoe crabs—involuntary, drowning, and yet she broke an explicit agreement and felt guilty. “I know what you mean,” she said. “How much farther?”
The path had been turning and twisting, and Vimbai could not see the house on top of the cliff, only the rough rock face ahead, with the path growing precipitous enough for them to start using their hands. The rock offered convenient handholds, like the ones on the rock wall at the gym, made of metal and plastic. Like everything here, it seemed to hide artifice under the surface appearance of natural things, as if the house tried to disguise itself as a forest or a rock, and still its studs and dry walls and paint showed through the camouflage. She wondered if it was more successful pretending to be a different house.
The apartment building appeared before them as soon as they rounded the side of the hill, as if it decided to meet them halfway—Vimbai was quite certain that they were not yet at the top, and this was not where the building was first visible.
Maya shrugged as Vimbai’s puzzled look met hers. “It does that. I never know where it’s going to pop up.”
Inside was just like Maya had described—an empty shell of a building, so hollow that it was a miracle it did not collapse on itself, supported by nothing but four walls. The staircase, the concrete and iron rods and the steps winding round and round and up, was the only structure inside, and it made the building look even more vulnerable, as if they caught it in a second before the whole thing imploded; the second stretched, liable to end at any time, giving the place an air of simultaneous stillness and the impending catastrophic movement, inevitable tumbling down in a cloud of dust and grime and cement slabs.
Maya motioned for Vimbai to follow her, and the two of them ascended the staircase. Vimbai lost track of the floors signified only by turns of the staircase, and she lost all sense of direction, winding and winding around. The empty windows offered no other sights but the blind brick wall on all sides, as if the building was enclosed in another, larger one; Vimbai supposed that it was technically true, but it did not lessen the fear that was rising in her stomach. Round and round they went, as if trapped on some awful merry-go-round. “I don’t like it here,” Vimbai whispered, addressing herself more than anyone else.