Magonia(19)

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.










3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798 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.’”