Magonia

“The bishop goes to a public meeting where these four are in the stocks—”

  I interrupt.

  “Do not tell me you’re doing the universal hand gesture for ‘in the stocks,’ because that doesn’t exist, no matter how hard you just tried to make it a thing.”

  He has the grace to blush and remove his hands (and the precariously tilting bowl of éclair filling) from “dude trapped in the stocks” position.

  “—and getting screamed at for being crop thieves. They’ve been dumb enough to claim they’ve been stealing crops from earth using little sky-launch boats. The people in the town agree with the idea that they’re crop thieves, because, duh, they’re having harvest problems anyway.”

  I am so annoyed at the randomness of Jason Kerwin. He’s a mutant memorizer. He has no apologies for that, and never has.

  “MAGONIA, they say—all of them. We fell out of Magonia. People in town start to freak out.”

  Jason whisks the filling so hard some of it splatters on the fridge.

  “Then what?” I ask.

  “Yeah, so I can’t remember if the Magonians ultimately got hanged for being witches, or if they got run out of town, but I doubt it was a fantastic outcome for them, given that they’d already said they didn’t belong on earth and wanted to go home with all the village’s corn.”

  “Jason,” I say eventually. “You are Not Relevant.”

  “All I’m saying is, if you’re hallucinating, you’re hallucinating in an old tradition,” he says. “Congratulations on the quality of your visions. Want more Magonia?”

  “Nope,” I say. “I want chocolate.”

  I can’t believe I didn’t know everything about this Magonia stuff already. It’s totally my kind of thing.

  “Maganwetar. That’s Old High German for ‘whirlwind.’”

  “Jason,” I say.

  “Calm down. I don’t speak Old High German,” he says.

  “You’d better not,” I tell him. “Because that would be a big lie. The secret learning of Old High German without me.”

  There’s no shaming him.

  “Some people think that’s where the word Magonia comes from. If you’re from Magonia, then, you live in a whirlwind. That’s what Jacob Grimm says, the same guy who wrote the fairy tales. He also says that it might refer to magicians, like magoi, Greek, hence Magonia would mean ‘Land of Magicians.’ I prefer whirlwind. Plus, a land of magicians would be boring, because the whole point of magic is that not everyone can do it. Otherwise it’s just normal life. It’d be, basically, Land of Mechanics.”

  I’m head down in my phone. There. Some archbishop named Agobard grumbling about how the people in his town believed hail and lightning were made by storm-makers in the sky.

  “But we have seen and heard of many people overcome with so much foolishness, made crazy by so much stupidity, that they believe and say that there is a certain region, which is called Magonia, from which ships come in the clouds. In these ships the crops that fell because of hail and were lost in storms are carried back into that region; evidently these aerial sailors make a payment to the storm-makers, and take the grain and other crops. Among those so blinded with profound stupidity that they believe these things could happen we have seen many people in a kind of meeting, exhibiting four captives, three men and one woman, as if they had fallen from these very ships. As I have said, they exhibited these four, who had been chained up for some days, with such a meeting finally assembling in our presence, as if these captives ought to be stoned. . . .”

  I look up from my phone. “So Magonians are crop thieves?”

  Jason is smug. “I don’t care about crop circles, but you know how the UFO people are. Are you at Gervase of Tilbury yet?”

  No. I’m scrolling through reams of Irish history. Things about anchors being thrown from cloud ships.

  “I’m in Annals of Ulster now,” I say and sigh, because of course he doesn’t have just one reference. Even his text messages come with footnotes.

  “Gervase tells a story about how a whole bunch of people come out of church one day. They see an anchor drop out of the clouds and get stuck in a rock in front of the church. A moment later, a sailor comes swimming through the air, and down the anchor rope, trying to untangle it. How awesome, please, is that?”

  I’m Googling. “This happened when?”

  “Twelve hundreds. The townspeople cut the rope and kept the anchor. Made it part of the church door.”

  “That’s a fairy tale.” Something occurs to me. “What does he say happened to the sailor?”

  Jason looks at me.

  “The sailor drowned,” he says.

  I meet his eyes.

  “In the air. He drowned in the air. So, keep telling me about the ‘not-relevant’ situation. You haven’t been drowning for sixteen years in air or anything.”

  I feel shivery. There’s something stressfully specific about that anchor story.

  “Actually, I’m pretty sure what I saw outside Mr. Grimm’s window was a helicopter.”

  “Right. That’s why you freaked out. It’s not like you don’t have personal experience of helicopters. You definitely never got life-flighted out of a field trip in fifth grade, because you stopped breathing at the fake safari theme park.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,” Jason Kerwin says, at which point he’s busted for Trite.

  “Hamlet. Really?” I say. “I’m not Horatio. This is med side effects, feather in lungs, early death.”

  “Hamlet’s all about hallucinations and meltdowns and early death. Not that you’re dying. Because you’re not.”

  He spins around and stirs some more.

  I’m now even grouchier than I was. I feel shaky, like a dog wanting to whirl and get loose of water. My skin feels like Spanx. I don’t really know how Spanx feel, but my mom has a pair, and she tells me they’re torture devices specifically designed to cause women to lose circulation all over their bodies. My skin? Feels exactly that way.

  “I don’t get it,” I say finally, after I bite the insides of my cheeks for a while. I don’t quite know what I’m upset about, but I feel inclined toward slapping and also toward collapsing. “Are you saying you think I’m hallucinating?”

  Jason just considers me.

  “Or are you saying there’s actually a ship in the sky looking for me? From this, this—Magonia place?”

  I test that out by mumbling it.

  “I’m saying you must have read some of this stuff somewhere, and it’s been rattling around in your brain, and now it’s showing up. You saw a cloud formation, and your brain filled in the gaps.” He pauses. “A ship in the sky isn’t the worst hallucination you could have,” he says. “You could be hallucinating everything on earth being on fire. That happens to some people. After the drugs kick in.”

  “Please tell me more about drug side effects,” I say. “I know nothing about drug side effects.” I can’t shame him. He doesn’t believe me. I don’t believe me either. Why don’t I want to be hallucinating? Hallucinating isn’t horrible. It’s absolutely a more palatable idea than ships in the sky yelling your name.

  “Sometimes people hallucinate even worse than that,” he goes on. “You—the stuff you’re hallucinating? It’s like, a Disney movie. It’s some kind of Peter Pan plus E.T. hybrid.”

  I’m disgusted by the implication that I’m having a children’s hospital hallucination.

  “So you think this is brain melt,” I say to Jason. “Fine. Whatever.” I say something mean. “You’re one to talk about brain melt.”

  “I am,” he says, so calmly I feel instantly bad. “I know about what brains do when they get screwed up.”

  “How do you even know about Magonia?” I wish I didn’t sound whimpery. “You didn’t read the Annals of Ulster for fun.”

  “Remember when I was building the UFO? Magonia’s an early version of UFO stuff.”

  “Your moms would have hated that UFO.”
br />   Jason’s mom Eve is a biologist who used to be an ecoterrorist. She would say anti-ecoterrorist, because she thinks people who ignore the damage they do to the environment are the terrorists. But regardless, she was once a person who chained herself to trees and in at least one case, for which she was arrested, seriously damaged a bulldozer, using a wrench. You wouldn’t think this looking at her. She looks like a mom. I guess that’s how it works.

  She now writes academic articles about farming practices, and the way we’re messing the world up in order to make an economy out of food-buying. An essay she wrote about the irresponsible farming of bananas actually made it so I don’t eat bananas anymore.

  “The UFO would have been made of recycled materials,” Jason says. “They wouldn’t have minded that. Taste this.”

  The éclair’s full of hot air, and it burns my tongue. I’m staring at Jason with a bit more wide-eyes than I’d prefer. He’s pleased with himself.

  “Yep,” he says. “Not much I don’t know about UFOs.” He pauses, then takes pity on me. “Also, when you got busted in Mr. Grimm’s class yesterday, swearing about ships in the sky, I Googled ‘ships in the sky.’”

  I swear again. This time at him. With relief.

  “Basic search. On my phone. You’d have done it if you weren’t quote side-effecting unquote to no clear purpose. You don’t usually invent things out of nowhere, Az. I tend to believe you when you say you’re seeing a ship sailing through the clouds.” He’s not looking at me. “So, yeah, I think you saw . . . something.”

  I’m flooded with relief again, a lot more of it. And something that I guess must be gratitude.

  “You didn’t see it, did you?” I ask, a just-in-case plea. “No sails? No masts? Or hear it?”

  He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll figure it out, Az.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Jason spoons filling into the éclairs, pours chocolate over their tops, and is done.

  “Yeah. Happy birthday.” He sticks a candle messily into the top of one of the éclairs and lights it.

  “It isn’t my birthday yet,” I say.

  “So what? Your wish is here early,” he says. “If you don’t blow out that candle, I’m doing it.”

  I look at the candle some more. It’s dripless.

  “I’ll take your wish and wish it myself,” Jason warns. “You don’t want what I’m going to wish for.”

  “Which is?”

  “You’ll end up in an alligator suit,” he says. “Roller-skating. Trust me. I could make that happen.”

  I smile in spite of myself. I close my eyes.

  “Wish,” Jason says, like I’m going to forget to wish.

  I wish. I blow. I look at Jason.

  Jason looks at me. He’s chewing on his bottom lip.

  “I have a present thing for you,” he says.

  “Give,” I say, and I’m suddenly filled with hope, because this hadn’t even occurred to me. Maybe this whole ship vision thing was something he did. “Did you hire projectors or something? It’s a hoax, right?”

  He just looks at me. This is not his usual. Normally he’d shove something across the table, grinning wildly. Last year, he gave me a terrarium containing a flea circus. He’d bought them from some sad guy who’d spent his life training batch after batch of them. They died pretty soon after, as fleas do, but before they did, they did a lot of crazy amazing backflips.

  “What is it?” I ask him. “Where is it?”

  I poke his shirt pocket. Nothing there. It suddenly feels deeply weird to be prodding his chest and I snatch my hand back like I’ve just burned it. I try to pretend I have a cramp in my fingers. I can feel his body against my hand still, solid and warm and oh no, no, very no.

  “I’ll give it to you while we watch the squid video,” he finally says.

  I’m taken aback. I’d totally forgotten about the squid footage, but Jason’s bringing out his laptop.

  “Dark,” he says. “This demands dark.”

  “Basement,” I say.

  Usually, this would be super normal. We spend most of our time in the basement or in the garage.

  But he’s looking at me in a way that makes me wonder if he’s invented the whole giant squid footage thing completely, and he’s actually going to do something weird—

  pour water on my head when I walk through the basement door, or present me with immortality ointment. I don’t think about any other kind of thing he might be wanting to do with me, because he’s Jason, and I’m me.

  We plant ourselves on the couch, almost as though we’re regular teenage creatures and not two people about to watch stolen raw footage of cephalopods illegally downloaded through back channels.

  Jason sets up the laptop and cues the video, and then pulls out his notebook, scribbles something, and folds up the paper. He hesitates, and then passes it across the couch to me.

  I open it, and see what he’s written inside.

  I { } you more than [[[{{{(( ))}}}]]].

  Just parentheses and brackets with nothing in them. I look up at him. He looks away.

  “Okay. So. That’s my list,” he says. “In case there ever needs to be a list. Which there doesn’t.” He pauses. “Right, so that’s settled.”

  He lifts his fist and bumps mine. But then he lets his hand stay there. I feel his knuckles. I feel myself turning red. With my bluish skin, that probably makes me lavender.

  For a long time, we’re watching a black screen. We can see a little bit of something glowing—squid bait.

  I think of the note.

  I want to say me too.

  I want to say I know.

  I want to say I can read the gaps in your sentences. I can read the space between your letters. I know your language. It’s my language too.

  I want to say that.

  Instead, I stare at the screen, and say { } for a good minute and a half while Jason’s fingers and my fingers lace together like we’re not attached to them.

  The squid appears, a constellation coming into being out of a night that previously contained no stars at all. It unfolds, this silver, twirling thing, and it’s there. Swimming past the camera, alive and impossible and right there. Its eyes, its tentacles, its hugeness. It explodes into visibility, this thing we’ve only really seen dead or dying.

  Alive.

  We don’t look at each other.

  We’re both definitely crying.

  I can feel him next to me, his arm against mine, his knee in his jeans, right there next to my knee. I can smell the lemon peel he scrubs his hands with to get rid of most of whatever toxicities he’s been touching, the charcoal in the soap he uses to get rid of the rest, the smell of pencil shavings and graphite. All I’ve got is ( ).

  Jason’s fingers are running up and down my hand, and his other hand is petting my wrist and, and, and.

  &,&,&.

  !!!!

  I can’t look at him.

  Finally, in the silence of the giant squid footage, as it swims away, back to its own world, I manage to say, “Don’t you want to know what I wished for?”

  Like he doesn’t know. I think he wishes the same wish I do. Both of us are very good at pretending we aren’t superstitious about these things, but we so are.

  “I don’t need to know,” he says, looks at me, and grins a crooked grin that is in danger of not being a grin at all.

  “Aza,” says Jason, and leans in. I want to lean into him, too, I want to, and I start to, and I can’t breathe, and I’m me and he’s him and we’re best friends and what is this? Kiss the sick girl?

  No, no, this is Jason, an inch from me. He’s still crying, and so am I. I’m leaning in and he’s leaning in, and

  Lightning.

  White, sizzling, hair standing up all over our bodies, ozone. OMG, it’s striking in my backyard. Outside the basement windows. Right outside them. Ten feet away.

  We jump, instinctively, away from each other.

  AZA screams a whistling voice. AZA COM
E NOW.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  Rain starts to pour down the window, and then hailstones the size of Ping-Pong balls. Wind banging hard.

  Jason grabs me, and keeps me from falling off the couch.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “What? The thunder?” he says. “Yeah, that was close.”

  “No, THAT,” I say. “Like a million birds. Like a million birds screaming at me personally.”

  Jason has his arms around me. I am as stormed by that as anything.

  There’s another sonicboomjetenginethundercrash of a noise, and that noise screams, in a lot of different voices:

  AZA.

  I hear more than that. Individual voices, flickering across the wind, humming wire voices. Everyone—who?—is shouting, singing, shrieking my name.

  AZAAZAAZAAZAAZAAZAAZAAZAAZAAZAAZAAZA

  I grab Jason’s shirt, and stare at him. He listens for a second, then shakes his head.

  “Crazy,” he says.

  “Crazy what?”

  “Weather.”

  I pull back from him, adjust my shirt, fold up the paper he gave me, and put it in my pocket.

  “Maybe,” I say. I pretend my fingers aren’t shaking.

  Shit, shit, shit. I’m losing it. This is a whole new level of wrong.

  Jason’s staring at me. I try not to think about how one day I walked into my room and looked at the flea circus and all the fleas were just dead in their spangles.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  “Not so much,” I say.

  “Because of everything,” he says slowly, “or because I just screwed up?”

  I shake my head. That’s all I can do. “Give me a second,” I say at last.

  He looks hard at me, and then nods, folds up his laptop and its miracle squid, and goes upstairs. I sit on the couch in the dark, trying to hold myself together. I want to cry and laugh at once.

  We almost—

  But no.

  And—

  After a few minutes, my heart goes back to being a heart, and I head upstairs.

  “You okay?” He’s at the sink, doing the dishes. We are made of awkward.