Magonia (5 page)

What they want, inevitably, turns out to be things made of trying to be the same as everyone else. Once I saw a certain floppy-haired teenage singing idol in red leather pants shambling his way down the hallway to make someone’s wish come true. A while later, I saw him leave, looking brain-broken.

Classic mistake: he’d shown up convinced he’d make the blind see and the dying live. It doesn’t work that way. Famous people aren’t magic. Despite their thoughts to the contrary.

A kid comes tearing around the corner, hairless and bleating like some kind of very hungry, quite large baby bird. He’s chasing a clown, though, not running from a doctor, so it’s not terrible.

The clown pauses in my exam room doorway and juggles her rainbow pom-poms. The three-year-old patient claps his hands wildly and looks at me with huge, excited eyes. Despite my bad mood, I end up smiling too.

Even though this is blatantly in violation of my rules against befriending fellow victims of the unimaginable, by the time my doctor arrives, I have the kid in my lap, and the clown is alternately blowing soap bubbles, and playing
Over the Rainbow
on a harmonica. Not a good song choice, in my opinion, but one I’ve regularly been exposed to over the years. Some people think it’s comforting to imagine being flung over a rainbow when you die, grabbed by your ankles by a bluebird, and swung into the void.

I mean, fine. There are obviously more upsetting possibilities. The kid’s humming happily along. Neither of us is the worst thing that could happen. We’re walking, talking, and coughing almost like regular humans.

Dr. Sidhu arrives and the clown carries the kid off into the labyrinth of hospital. My doctor begins her usual procedures of chest knocking and listening, as though she’s a neighbor trying to spy through some locked door.

Except that Dr. Sidhu is the kind of neighbor who can see through the walls. Her face doesn’t change expression. It’s the
not
changing that tells me something’s wrong.

“Huh,” she says.

“What do you mean, huh?” I ask.

I’ve known Dr. Sidhu my whole life. She never says “huh.” And this is my body we’re talking about. My organs are in strange places.

There’s a theory that things in my chest cavity got shifted during that early period of really, really not being able to breathe. One of my lungs, for example, is tilted far toward the center of my chest. My ribs are more flexible than they should be if I were anyone other than Aza carrying around a disease named Clive.

Clive the Jackass
makes me flat-chested, pointy-ribbed, and lung-tilted. Otherwise, I’m totally awesome.

“There’s an unusual sound. Stop talking.”

I don’t want to stop talking, but I do, because Dr. Sidhu looks up at me and makes a dangerous face. She has little patience for the likes of me, yammering on through my appointments. She lassos her stethoscope around, and considers my heart. (Heart. Also misplaced. It’s never had quite enough room. We deal with this shit, we deal, we do, but bless any intrepid doctor who ever tries to listen to my heart, beating where it isn’t. I’ve let some doctors try it, just to watch their faces when they think momentarily that I’m somehow walking and talking, heartless. Entertainment.) She takes me to X-ray, and disappears briefly to peer at the results.

“MRI,” she says.

Great. I can feel my dad, outside the door, dreading.

“I’m okay,” I tell him as I hit the waiting room, wheelchaired (it’s hospital policy). Into the MRI tunnel, where they give you earplugs but you still hear things popping and clicking and hissing and singing out as they ping along your insides.

Sometimes while I’m here, I pretend I’m a whale, deep down, listening to the singing and dinging of my whale family. Today I hear something more along the lines of:
Aza, Aza Ray.

It’s like I’m hearing something coming from outside again. Or is it inside? No matter what, I hate it.

“Hold your breath,” says the tech. “Try not to cough.”

I try not to cough. I pretend “giant squid” instead of “whale.” Lights flash. Things whistle and pop and extremely beep and make me feel as though I ought to be listening to something else. I read a thing once about deep ocean creatures and how the noises of earth are messing with their sonar. Whole lot of lost whales beaching themselves in cities—things like that. I read another one about sound-chaos, how nature is supposed to be harmonious, but human noises are screwing everything up and now people are going wacko due to atonal everything. Maybe I’m already wacko.

Aza, go outside.

I press the call button.

“Do you hear that?”

“Hear what? The obnoxious noise? You know what this sounds like, darling, you’ve been here a thousand times,” says the tech, Todd, who is a friendly person.

Todd always gives me an extra heating pad before I get rolled in here. I love him, because he moonlights in a laser hair-removal clinic, dealing death to follicles. He has some very happy stories involving vanquishing unwanted whiskers from women’s faces. The patients in the hair-removal
clinic are totally grateful all the time. Here, people tend to grumble. No one really likes getting an MRI, and everyone’s sick. “We’re almost done. Are you okay?”

So not, it turns out, because the moment I say I’m fine, and the whistling begins again? I hear:
Azalistenlistenazaazaazalistencomeoutside.

I clench my teeth, don’t cough, and stand it. It is not easy to stand it.

When I get out of the thing, everyone’s looking at me, like
What the hell?
That isn’t the usual look that people give you when you come out of an MRI. Todd sighs, and pats me on the shoulder.

“You can’t say I said, but basically, there’s a feather in your left lung.”

“As in, I grew a feather?”

Of course
I’m not growing feathers. But it’s the first thing I think.

Todd clarifies. “As in, we think you aspirated a feather. Which would explain the coughing.”

Except, no. It’s the sort of thing you’d notice. If you snorted in some air, and with that air came a feather big enough to show up on this scan? You’d so, sO, SOOOO know.

They give in and show me, and yes. A feather the size of my little finger. This feather can only have come from a pillow, and feather pillows aren’t allowed in my room. Whoever put a feather pillow on my bed is in trouble. (Eli, obviously. My dad is as appalled as I am.)

I don’t think about the voices I’ve been hearing.

I don’t think about the sky.

I don’t think about how everything feels apocalyptic all over my life. Apocalypse, we all know, is a sign of brain betrayal, and my brain’s the only part of me that’s ever been okay.

“Is there any explanation?” my dad asks, but the techs have nothing for him.

“Doctor Sidhu will call you in for a follow-up,” says Todd. “Seriously, don’t tell her you saw this.”

I have, of course, seen scan results for years. Everyone shows me everything. It’s that way when you’re a lifetime patient. I’ve been interpreting MRIs longer than Todd has. That does not mean this doesn’t totally freak me out.

Todd’s freaked out too. I can tell. He’s whistling under his breath, in a way that’s meant to make me feel more comfortable but actually makes me panic.

His whistling, of course, does not have any sort of words or patterns of words hidden under it. It doesn’t, except that I’m hearing words in
every
whistle.
Everything
sounds sentient to me now, and I can’t help myself. The squeaks of the floor. The creaks of the doors.

I put my clothes and various metal things back on. Earrings. Necklace. Unnecessary bra.

Aza, come outside.

The fact that I hear that combined with some kind of birdsong?

Is not relevant to any of my fears, any of my bad dreams, any of the things I’ve been worrying about.

It’s meaningless.

It’s nothing at all.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

It’s amazing that we’re allowed to leave the hospital, but we
are. Back tomorrow for little pinchers down my windpipe. I’ve had worse. At least it’s not a full-on surgery. I try not to think about the fact that it’s a feather, not a swab; the fact that everything is wrong; the fact that my birthday is only five days away.

I don’t think about the center of my chest, where my ribs come together, and how that might look, opened up wide: French doors into someone’s poisonous overgrown garden.

That’s not how surgeons get into the lungs anyway. But something about this seems not-just-lungs. My ribs rattle like a birdcage. There’s nothing in there that’s not supposed to be in there. I swear it to myself as we walk across the parking lot.

The sky is full of huge storm clouds, which I very emphatically don’t look at. I have no urge to see any more ships. That’s where this wrongness started, and I want it un-wronged. I shiver, even though I’m bundled up.

“Alright. I’m the one you tell,” my dad says. “Give it up, Az. Have you been smoking?”

I give him a look.

“This is serious, Henry. You act like it’s not serious.”

“I’m Henry, now? No, you can keep right on calling me Dad. Cigarettes? Pot? Hookahs?”

Hookahs. He really asks that. As though we are, where? There are hookahs in the world, yes. I’ve seen the parlors in the university district, people in there, smoking and looking kind of queasy and too excited, but really? The only place I can imagine anyone
actually
smoking a hookah is in
The Thousand and One Nights
.

“I don’t have a thousand and one nights left to smoke in, even if I wanted to, which I don’t, because no one smokes hookahs unless they’re in a story, and unless they’re completely not me,” I tell him.

“You
do
have a thousand and one nights,” my dad says, sounding sure. “You have two thousand and one. You have three thousand and one. You have thirty thousand and one.”

He’s smiling like he’s telling me the truth.

When I was ten, my dad carried me up onto our neighbor’s trampoline, and we jumped and jumped together. This was supremely not allowed, but he did it anyway, against doctor’s advice,
against my mom’s rules. We jumped. And when we were done, he put me down, did a backflip, and bowed for me. He looked as though maybe he’d pulled something crucial, but he was grinning.

“Right,” my dad said then. “That was someone who shouldn’t flip upside down flipping upside down. In case you were wondering how that’d look.”

“Don’t worry about the feather,” he tells me now. “I can see you worrying. We’ll get through this. I’m a master fighter. If it turns out Big Bird’s hanging out in your bedroom, I’ll slay that bird.”

This is actually weirdly comforting for someone who’s pretty sure that she’s about to die. Having a dad who’s willing to declare war against an institution as deeply rooted as Big Bird is not nothing.

“Even if the bird goes Hitchcock?” I ask him.

For a moment, my dad and I sit in silence in the car, imagining
The Big Birds
, a sky horrifically full of big, yellow, leggy birds, dive-bombing us. At first, it’s funny, but then, more worrying than you’d think.

“I don’t care. I’d still fight them for you,” he says. “I’d pluck them into oblivion.”

I’m actually semi-laughing as we pull up to the house.

Jason Kerwin’s waiting for me on our front steps. It’s only two o’clock, which means Jason isn’t where he’s supposed to be, namely, school. My dad notices this at the same time I do and sighs.

“Do you need me to call attendance?” my dad asks him.

“Seriously?” says Jason. “What do you take me for? It’s covered. I’m at a dentist appointment. Routine cleaning that’ll turn into a small gum surgery, with a couple of days of recovery time.” He turns to me. “I’m coming with you to the hospital tomorrow.”

How he knew anything about me going to the hospital tomorrow is anyone’s guess.

Jason has long been a collector of information. He’s also an entrepreneur with three patents, one of them for a chemical compound that can be sprayed on clothes, dry-cleaning them in seconds. It comes in a tiny can the size of a battery, and can be hung from a key chain. He invented it for people who don’t want their parents to know they smoke. Jason doesn’t smoke, because you don’t smoke if your best friend has a mortal-terror lung disease named after her, but he saw a market.

He has another patent for a small piece of plastic that attaches to hotel—or hospital—fitted sheets, kind of like a shoehorn, and enables people to make beds in half the time it previously took. These bits of plastic are manufactured in a small place known as the Kerwin Factory, in New Delhi. Jason runs the whole thing from his cell phone. We’ve had discussions about labor and questionable policy regarding outsourcing, but I haven’t won. There are parts of Jason that are more OCD than even I can penetrate. His vision of a factory trumped my utopian idea of handcrafted things made primarily of wood. So, he’s not perfect. He sometimes does things just because he can—and not the way he necessarily should.