Magonia Read online

  Things like what happened in that ambulance. Things like: I saw that medic cut Aza open.

  Things like: We called for a medevac. The medic from our ambulance jumped out to try to wave the copter down. I heard the helicopter coming, toward the storm cloud above the ambulance. Then there was an impact. The clouds caught on fire. Four people died that day, the pilot and the medic on the copter, and also one of the medics with us, who was out trying to signal for the helicopter when it exploded. I only have grief enough for one. I am barely holding it together.

  Things like—I can’t even—

  We waited on the highway for an hour, and then the ice got covered enough with snow that we could keep going, Aza’s dad driving. By then it was way too late.

  I rode in the back with her.

  All I want to do since then is press my head against a wall and feel it on my forehead.

  If I were in the living room right now, with my moms, they’d sit me down and have a sympathetic and nervous discussion with me about how she’s “gone.” Turns out, I hate that word. Also “we lost her.”

  In the last few days, I’ve lost lots of things, just to check and see how losing feels. For example, I keep losing it.

  I hit my head into the wall and bruise my forehead. I smash a window, with my fist wrapped in a T-shirt. Some kind of movie plan for fixing pain. Did not help.

  People keep saying infuriating things about fate and chance and bad luck and how she had an amazing life despite it being only fifteen years, eleven months, and twenty-five days long. I don’t feel like this is amazing. I feel very, very unamazed.

  I stay up at night staring at screens.

  Since Aza, I kept looking for some analogy, something to explain this, some version of lost that made sense, but nothing was right. Then on a middle-of-the-night internet wander, I found something from 475 BC, a Greek cosmologist called Anaxagoras. At that point, math hadn’t thought up the concept of nothing. There was no zero. Anaxagoras hence had extensive ideas about the thing that was missing, the something that wasn’t.

  This is what Anaxagoras said about lost: “What is cannot not be. Coming-to-be and perishing are customarily believed in incorrectly by the Greeks, since nothing comes-to-be or perishes, but rather it is mingled together out of things that are, and is separated again. Thus they would be correct to call coming-to-be ‘being mingled together’ and perishing ‘being separated.’”

  That was the first time something felt accurate. I tried to explain to Carol and Eve, but it created concerns that I might be planning to perish.

  “Suicidal ideation,” said Carol, “is what that sounds like.” I could feel her dialing a therapist in her head. She wasn’t wrong. It did sound that way.

  “Straight up, kiddo, are you thinking of offing yourself?” asked Eve, clearly using unserious words to ease her way into talking about something serious.

  “I’m fine,” I said. She looked at me, her eyebrow up.

  “You don’t have to be fine. If you were fine, that’d mean you had no human feelings. I’m not fine. Neither is Carol. We loved Aza. But know that if you ever thought it’d be a plan to kill yourself, we’d come and find you and kill you all over again. Just so you know. So do NOT. If you’re thinking about it, come to us. We’ll figure out a better choice.”

  “No,” I said. “This isn’t about suicide. This is about philosophy.”

  They looked at me, with no intention of believing anything was about philosophy. Which, okay, I was touch and go. I’m still touch and go.

  “Pills?” said Carol. “I notice you’re looking a little—”

  “A little what?”

  “A little pi,” says Eve.

  I try not to make eye contact with her. A little pi. How does she know? I’ve been quiet.

  “Yes,” I told her. “I’m taking them.” Antianxiety. Which do not work. Anything working right now would be a miracle.

  Carol’s been trying to get me to see a therapist. Eve’s been trying to send me to yoga, the practice of which has semi-calmed her wrath about the state of the universe. I got her to desist by doing a brief, not-too-shabby, I-already-know-about-yoga crane pose. Aza made fun of yoga. It drove her crazy when I did that pose. That was the main reason I learned to do it—to crack her up.

  FYI, that shit is as hard as it looks.

  “I don’t blame you for that,” Eve said, looking at how I was all twisted around my own arms. “I’m mad about things I can’t fix too. Yoga doesn’t fix anything. It only dulls the aggravation. Ice caps, Burmese pythons, and floodplains are still a mess . . .”

  And she was off. I briefly, briefly felt a little bit better.

  Right now, it’s three a.m., and Eve comes into my room. The moms are on watch.

  She puts a mug of hot milk down on my desk. I look at it, minorly tempted. Hot milk is one of the lesser evils, but it’s still an evil.

  “Honey,” she says.

  “I’m busy,” I say. “I promise I’m not falling apart.”

  “You seem like you are,” she says. “And even if you’re not right now, if you don’t start sleeping, you will be soon.”

  “What if Carol died?” I say. “How would you sleep?” I regret it the moment I say it.

  Eve looks stricken. “I’d be awake,” she says. “For years.”

  “Well,” I say. “It’s the same thing.”

  “Yeah, but you can’t be awake for years,” she says.

  “Even though you just said you would be.”

  “Even though.” She’s whispering.

  “I can be awake for three days, and I slept before that. I slept for four hours on each of the days after it happened,” I say. “I’ll sleep after tomorrow. I’m on it. I’m working.”

  What I’m working on: I’m planning Aza’s funeral.

  After a while, Eve goes. I feel mean. I send her a text telling her I’m sorry. I hear her phone buzz down the hall. After a second, I get a message back from her.

  Don’t die, she says. Dying won’t help.

  Sometimes Eve is exactly the right mom. There’s no “pass away” or “lose” in that.

  She sends another text. This time, a guilty one.

  And if you *really* don’t want to fall asleep, I wouldn’t drink the milk. Carol made it.

  Carol loves me, is worried about me, and is a doctor with access to sleeping pills. I move the milk off the desk. I’m not done thinking, but I turn off the overhead light for a minute.

  Aza must have done what she did to my ceiling a week or so before she died. It doesn’t show during the day. Pretty sure the moms don’t know about it. I didn’t either until I turned out the lights for the first time, two nights after she died. Glow paint.

  AZA RAY WAS HERE.

  Except that the last E got smudged due to Aza apparently falling off my headboard or something. So, it actually reads AZA RAY WAS HER.

  I look at that for a minute, trying to get myself together. I’m a fucking mess of rattling pi and things I never said.

  I spent the last ten years talking. Why I couldn’t say any of the right words, I don’t know.

  I want to install a better version of all the things that happened right before she died. All the crazy stuff, beginning with the skyship, right through the feather in Aza’s lung. The storm when we were in the basement—the whole town should have been rain, and lightning, and it was only Aza’s block.

  Yes. I know people die. I know that when people die, the people they leave behind always think something insane happened, because death, by its nature, feels insane. It’s part of how humans have always dealt with dying, as though it’s somehow special, as though every person who dies is a hero. We want to die spectacularly, not just “perish.”

  I keep trying to make it make sense.

  In the ambulance, the medic cut into her like she wasn’t even a person. Aza made a choking noise. Her back arched. Her heart stopped again. The medic used the crash pads to start it. Twice.

  And I heard a soun
d from her chest, this song. A bird, whistling, shrieking.

  I’m not crazy.

  There wasn’t even really a feather in her lungs. The coroner didn’t find anything in the autopsy.

  There was an autopsy, yeah. I haven’t seen any results yet. But I’ll get them. I need to see them, and make sure—okay, I know Aza died. It felt like she took off running without me. Her fingers clenched on mine. Then they relaxed, like she’d lost all her bones.

  When the driver called for the life flight, I was already sure she was dead. Which makes it even worse what happened to the helicopter.

  The thing about Aza and me is that we’ve spent every day since the day we met knowing she was going to die, and pushing that knowledge over to one side. No one knew what was wrong with her, not really, so a few years ago I decided I’d be the hero who figured it out.

  Aza didn’t know. I went through a ton of medical journals. It’s amazing what you can learn to make decent sense of with the right motivation. I’ve got articles going back to the 1600s. If you want me to diagram a lung, I could do that for you. I could maybe even do it blindfolded.

  But whatever I was doing, I didn’t do it fast enough. I’m not a miracle worker. I’m not even a scientist. Some days I’m just sixteen, and sixteen isn’t what I want to be.

  Aza’s mom had the same idea as me, a lot earlier than I did. She’s been trying to figure this out for almost fifteen years, since Aza started having trouble breathing, but the meds she’s been trying to get testing cycles for keep getting rejected.

  I know things Aza didn’t know about what her mom’s been doing for her. A few months ago, I ran across some really promising data that had come out of the lab Aza’s mom works in, and so I asked her about it. Her mom was on an asthma project at the time, on mouse trials. When Aza came down with this, by whatever freakish coincidence, the mouse stuff was almost to human testing, and then it got turned back, because it didn’t actually work on asthma without major side effects. It wasn’t useful for anything. Except, apparently, for Aza.

  “I had a little bit of serum in the house, for severe asthma. I don’t know why it works even a little bit, but she was dying, so I gave it to her,” Greta told me.

  Whatever Aza’s mom used was the X factor. Aza kept getting sicker, but it slowed down. According to all medical opinions, lungs that could barely send oxygen into her bloodstream should have killed her, but whatever Greta did probably saved her. It’s been part of her daily meds ever since. Despite the fact that it is completely illegal.

  This is pretty much the only big secret I’ve ever kept from Aza. Her mom begged me not to tell her. She wanted to keep working on it, she said, and if people knew, she’d get yanked. It felt all wrong to know something Aza didn’t know.

  She died anyway.

  I look at the ceiling and try to imagine what happens to someone when they die. Perished = Being Separated. All the things that were you and all the things that were her, flying apart, an explosion. Dispersed into everyone else.

  Morning. Funeral. Sunglasses. Suit.

  Carol supervised, and it makes me feel like I’m a scarecrow. The sleeves are strangely loose, which I guess means it fits. I’m used to my grandfather’s jacket, which I wear over everything. It came from my dad’s side and even though I didn’t know my dad, don’t even know who he was, my moms gave it to me. It has about a thousand random pockets. Every pocket has a tiny embroidered label to say what it should contain. There are pockets labeled “opals,” “pitch pipe,” and “bullets.” My grandfather was either James Bond or a traveling salesman.

  I’d never wear a suit to Aza’s funeral, unless it was that suit, and I’m not allowed to wear that, so.

  I’m not calm. I’m not ready. But I’m getting in my car, bagful of things seat-belted into the passenger seat. Her seat.

  I change clothes in the bathroom at school. I walk into Mr. Grimm’s class, past the first period warning bell, and sit down.

  Everyone looks at me. The whole room is dressed in parent-picks, black dresses, black tights, black suits, and ironed shirts and ties.

  Keep looking, I want to tell them. I’m not finished.

  “Mr. Kerwin,” says Mr. Grimm. I look at him. He looks at me. His face softens.

  “I can’t say that I blame you. Take the top part off and you can stay in the room, but I can’t teach you like that.”

  I put the top on the empty desk beside me. It has graffiti on it. Aza Ray Was Here it says, in silver nail polish. Mr. Grimm kept saying he was going to make her clean it off, but he didn’t.

  I never thought this would happen.

  I thought this would probably happen.

  I knew this was coming.

  I didn’t see this coming.

  How can anyone keep reciting an endless number when you can’t see the next digit? But I keep going. 673518857527248912279381830119491298336733624406566430860213949463952247371907021798609437027705392171762931767523846748184676694051320 0056812714526356 08277857713427577896.

  At noon, the bell rings, the special one that says Here we go to do something completely terrible, and I walk out. The flag’s half-mast. It’s not the school’s doing; they didn’t even think of it. It went down this morning at around three a.m. I know the janitors.

  Kids start pouring out of the building behind me. A lot of them are crying, which makes me both pleased and angry. I think having a dying kid in a school means, in people’s brains, that no one else will die. That slot’s taken. Everyone’s crying over her anyway, even though, to them, she was only the Dying Girl, not glow-painting, hoax-making, squid-watching Aza.

  Looping. Some days are so dark I can’t see anything but a miserable fog of number after number, word after word, clouds of verbs and nouns and none of them the ones that will make time go backward.

  Some of us, I name no names, haven’t actually cried since the night Aza died. I can feel it wanting to happen, but if I do it, all of me will drain out. So I don’t.

  since feeling is first

  who pays any attention

  to the syntax of things

  will never wholly kiss you . . .

  That is Mr. E.E. Cummings. He gets that part right. And the last two lines too, which are:

  for life’s not a paragraph

  and death i think is no parenthesis

  People recite it at funerals, but it’s a non-optimistic poem about not getting what you want, not a good-feelings poem about death being no big deal. Aza liked Cummings. Hence, me liking him.

  I pull out of the lot and start honking my horn. Everyone follows me, first the whole school, and then, as I move onto the highway, the town. Or at least, that’s how it feels.

  Aza told me a long time ago what she did anytime she had an MRI. She’d imagine the beeps and clicks were whales.

  I’m doing my version. Our cars are whales talking to one another. In a kind of fake-o Morse code. (Yes, people who memorize all the facts about everything are also people who create fake codes, because we sometimes enjoy a little chaos. A little controlled chaos.) The cars are honking my list. Also, it’s fake Morse because I don’t need everyone to know what I want to say.

  The first time I saw Aza she was sitting on the floor playing with a piece of paper, snipping at it with a pair of (I later learned, stolen) scissors. I got up off my mat, but she had nothing to say to me. She only looked at me once, and bared her teeth.

  She was something found underneath lake ice after the spring melt. I know she hated how she looked, which. Oh. World, you are stupid.

  YOU LOOK LIKE NO ONE ELSE ON EARTH, I honk. The town honks it in echo.

  I felt like the doll belonging to Julie next door, the doll that, when you (um, experiment?) cut off a leg, had a hollow body. Aza stole that doll and stuffed it full of crickets. I glued the leg back on. Julie was fairly freaked out when her doll started to Jiminy.

  Aza wasn’t nice. She had a way of looking sideways at me and then solving me like a too-easy equation.

&
nbsp; “Give me something worse,” she’d periodically say. “Make it harder.” I didn’t succeed in bullshitting her very often.

  YOU HAVE SPIKES ALL OVER YOUR HEART, I honk.

  When she walked away that first day, I picked up what she’d been working on. A paper ship, masts and sails, tiny people climbing the rigging. A sea made of clouds, which she’d cut using little curls of paper, so that it tossed beneath the ship. An anchor chain made of paper loops, anchor weighted with her gum.

  Yeah, welcome to Aza, age five.

  Jason Kerwin: file under Done.

  Aza Ray Boyle: file under Everything.

  I chased after her, and recited the alphabet backward in a frenzy, but I never thought she’d listen. She’s the only person who’s ever made me feel so far behind.

  Again she looked at me, this time with maybe pity, so I tried the Greek alphabet. It wasn’t as though I could read Greek—I was little—but Carol had taught me the phonetic version, and I’d memorized the letters like I was memorizing a song. I thought I saw a spark of interest in her eyes, but she just sighed, tore another piece of paper out of her notebook, and started snipping.

  “I’m working,” she said, in the most judgmental tone.

  I looked down at her hands.

  Oh, just a model of the solar system. When she was done, I picked Saturn up off the floor and considered my problem.

  There was no way I could live another moment without Aza Ray knowing my name.

  Later that first day, Aza had a huge coughing attack and an ambulance came. I saw them loading her in. I tried to get myself loaded in too.

  Eve and Carol got summoned to the school, and I got in trouble for being overly intense. Overly intense = Kid Who Occasionally Has an Episode of Frustrated Head-Banging.

  So, I’m still the guy who chases the ambulance. This time, at least, I got to go into it with her. Let’s call that lucky.

  I’ve never understood why some hospitals won’t let the people you’re with in the door with you. It’s horrible. Twice, I’ve had to pretend to be Aza’s brother. My moms know I have a fake ID that has Ray as my last name.

  They don’t have room to judge me, really, if we’re talking obsession. My moms met because Eve lived in the top of a redwood for seven months, in a hammock. Carol was the doctor who had to do the distance assessment of Eve’s mental and physical well-being. Carol was on the ground, and via megaphone, she fell in love with Eve and Eve fell in love back. Neither of them has ever been able to explain it to me. I’ve seen pictures. Eve has braids and leaves and muck in her hair, and she’s tanned to the color of the tree. Carol looks like Carol. Back then, Carol ironed all her clothes, including her jeans, and she totally did not understand what Eve was doing living in a tree.