Vimbai winced at the pain in her feet the moment she shifted her weight, and she hobbled inside, trying to remember how long it took for frostbite to develop. “Not clever,” she mumbled, “not clever at all.”
She decided to call her parents, just to tell them that she remembered what was important to them, and that she cared. Her roommates still slept, given to late hours and disorganized lifestyle; Vimbai would have disapproved if it didn’t mean that in the morning she had the house all to herself. She walked in slow mincing steps, letting the sensation and accompanying pain revitalize her toes, to the phone—an almost extinct rotary affair, gleaming with slick black curves and the soft creamy ivory of the rotating disk. She picked up the receiver and listened for a while; she was puzzled by the static that inhabited the wires of the phone—it seemed haunted, like the rest of the house, alive with blurred disembodied whispers, and Vimbai thought that if only she listened carefully enough, she would be able to discern the words and the sobbing laments of the little ghost.
The static ceased just as she hovered on the brink of understanding, and the phone beeped and inquired whether she needed assistance from the operator. She sighed and dialed the number.
And once again it was as 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 until eight p.m., and she left the house late.
Vimbai shrugged. “Who cares,” she said. “There’s that thing in our phone. I think it wants to get out.”
“Of course it does,” Maya said, her rich voice acquiring a soothing tone as if speaking to a cranky child. “Don’t worry, we’ll get it out. Just as soon as Felix wakes up. Come on, I’ll make coffee.”
Vimbai sat at the kitchen table as Maya went through the ritual of brewing coffee. They didn’t bother with grinding whole beans, and Vimbai was getting used to the taste of coffee that came out of the can or a more fancy bagged variety—when it was Vimbai’s turn to shop, she went for shade-grown and fair trade, more out of habit than any conscious choice. This is what her mother always bought. The clinking of the carafe and hissing of steam, the smell of coffee felt comforting, and with every passing minute Vimbai was more and more willing to believe that the Psychic Energy Baby was just a product of fatigue, cold, and bad reception.
The coffee bubbled and poured in a fragrant stream, and Maya sat down. “This ought to wake Felix up,” she said. “He’ll get that baby out of those wires. Poor thing.”
“How?” Vimbai said. “What is Felix going to do?”
“What he always does,” Maya answered. “You don’t think he earns rent money by sitting around all day, do you?”
“I don’t know what he does,” Vimbai answered, and poured herself a cup. It warmed her hands and instilled a sense of serenity.
“Well, I’ll tell you. He’s a freelancer. Only what he does, no one else can. He separates things.”
“Oh?”
Maya laughed and drank her coffee. “Things you can’t see, like that baby in the phone. Felix says, they sometimes contaminate the things you can see, or the other way around.”
“People pay him for it?”
Maya nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“Like exorcisms?”
“Not those, the Catholics do them. Felix does more simple stuff. Like junkies with invisible insects under their skin, or amputees with phantom limbs.”
“He amputates phantom limbs?”
“I suppose he does. In any case, we’ll see what he can do, huh?”
Vimbai nodded. Somehow, the fact that Felix had an unusual occupation was easy to accept, and once accepted, any strange occupation seemed as reasonable as the next one. So if Felix made a living untangling the invisible babies out of the phone wires, what business it was of Vimbai’s? Who was she to judge? She felt only intense curiosity, and the weakest pang of guilt for missing her classes.
Chapter 3
Felix stumbled downstairs just before noon. His terrible eyes were mercifully closed, and his hair hung into his face in tangled clumps. Vimbai gasped—the long strands didn’t just obscure parts of his forehead, but rather seemed to consume them entirely. His face seemed streaked by darkness, fractured like a tiger hidden in shadows. Her encounter with the Psychic Energy Baby had jolted her enough to realize that what she assumed was hair—had no other option, really, but to assume that—was a conglomeration of darkness, of absence of light; a black hole, emptiness of outer space, a jagged nothingness. It spilled over Felix’s face, threatening to consume it and retreating when he tossed his head and smiled at Maya.
“Can I have some coffee?” he said.
“Of course,” Maya said. “Help yourself.”
Felix raked his insane hair out of his eyes, and his hands disappeared in blackness up to their wrists; he extricated them somewhat hastily, and his left eye rolled to look upward with a troubled expression.
Vimbai tried to think of a question to ask, but came short. She could only round her eyes and shrug at Maya.
“Felix,” Maya said the moment Felix took his seat by the table. “Vimbai found a ghost in the phone wires, think you can get it out?”
“It depends,” Felix said and winced at the too-hot coffee. “Does it want to come out?”
