Magonia (9 page)

Inside my chest, I hear the whistling of a little bird, something singing me to sleep.

The ambulance is stopped, lights and sirens still on, ice beneath our tires, and the EMT in the back with us radios for a helicopter, her voice panicky, “Emergency . . .”

The red-haired medic runs out and looks up at the sky. “Signaling,” he shouts. He goes into the white, and all around him is a halo of snow.

I’m an ocean with a giant squid inside it. There’s a bird buffeting, flying around and banging hard against my ribs.

“Pneumonia,” the paramedic says.

“Aza, don’t,” my dad says, an order. “DO NOT DO THIS.”

I want to listen.

I look at my dad. I’m looking at myself, and what I was is starting not to matter to me at all.

Where am I going?

Readyreadyready
says the bird in me. And someone outside answers
Readyreadyready
.

Something hits my chest, hard, and then it’s gone. My chest? Is it even mine? Then, no, I see, it’s the medic using crash pads on my heart.

Jason says, “You don’t have to die.”

Eli’s talking fast into her cell phone.

“Mommy-you-have-to-get-here-now-right-now-hurry-I-don’t-know-I-don’t-know-what-happened-it’s-really-bad—”

I hear my mom through the phone, telling Eli it’ll be okay, and she sounds so certain that I almost think it will be, that there’s something I don’t know, but then Eli says, wailing,

“But it’s already not okay!”

Readyreadyready

The crash pads hit me again, hard, at chest level. Eli’s put her phone to my ear.

I can hear my mom.

I hear her take a deep breath. I hear her pushing words out, and I can almost see her, for a second, the look on her face, her hand pressed to her own heart, the other in a fist.

“You can go if you have to go,” my mom says, and her voice shakes, but she’s solid. She says it again, so I’ll know. “You can go if you have to go, okay, baby? Don’t wait for me. I love you, you’re mine, you’ll always be mine, and this is going to be okay, you’re safe, baby, you’re safe—”

I’m hearing my mom talking, feeling her in my ear and not in my ear at the same time.

There’s a blast of cold air and the redheaded medic comes back in.

“Chopper’s coming,” he mutters to the other paramedic, and pushes himself into the space beside me. “Get the girl’s family to move back.”

He pushes the other medic away, too hard. She winces. His hands are working on me in ways that make no sense.

I feel something slide into my skin, near my left lung. It’s a cut, but it’s different from any cut I’ve ever felt before. Pain or release? I feel myself dividing, right where my tilted lungs are, right where my ribs have always been wrong.

“What are you doing?” I hear my dad say.

“Sir, you’re getting in the way of an emergency procedure. We’re trying to keep her breathing. Stay back.”

“Calm down,” the female medic says. “It’s okay, it’s going to be okay.”

She’s trying to keep my dad from looking at what’s happening, but I catch a glimpse of his face, his eyes.

I have no voice. I’m trying to say no.

The man’s tying a rope to me, I can feel it, around my chest, but I can’t see it.

“I’m making an incision for her to breathe. Please, sir, move back
now
,” the medic says.

“This isn’t it,” Jason says urgently. “This isn’t happening. Don’t let it, Aza. They’re going to find a way to— Oh my god.”

He sobs. The paramedic’s looking down at me and I’m looking up at him. He’s has his hand in my shirt pocket, and he’s taking something out of it. The note—

There’s pressure on my neck and there’s still no pain. There’s a splitting, something falling off, and that feeling of a rope around my chest, and my body is halfway on the gurney and halfway with me, standing up, watching.

“I’ll find you,” Jason says, and I hear him. I hear him. I trust him.

The lights flicker. I hear a giant impact up in the sky, and there’s an explosion, fire, the smell of smoke and ozone. Something snags me and pulls hard, out the ambulance doors, outside, and my dad is swearing, and Jason’s still telling the girl on the gurney he’s not letting her go, and Eli’s screaming, and then

the

s

i

r

e

n

s

S T O P.

And after that? There’s nothing.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510
582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798 214808651328230. One day, two days, three days, four days, five
days later.

This is what I want to do: I want to pick up my phone and call Aza. I want to hear her voice.

“Why are you calling me?” she’ll say. “I hate the phone. Text or show up. How long is this gonna take? Are you here yet? Get here.”

But this is what Aza’s new number is like: 66470938446095505822317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091456485669234603486104543266482133936072602491. Onward infinitely, no answer. Dial, dial, dial.

I’m back to old habits. Recite, recite, recite. Not so that anyone can hear.

This is an old thing, and supposedly conquered.

Not conquered, turns out.

41273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609433057270365759591953092186117381932611793105118548 0744623799627495.

I know more pi than that. She knows even more than I do. But at some point in the memorization of pi I’m definitely going to pass the point she stopped at. It’ll be the same as driving past her on a road, not seeing her hitchhiking. Which is about as crap as anything I can think of, in a universe of, at this point, unimaginable crap.

I’m not sleeping. I’m not fine. There are things I’m never going to want to talk about.

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.