Magonia(22)

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.
“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.
They’re still in love, as far as I can tell.
And so, me being irrational about Aza? I think my moms actually saw it as karma. They remembered how their parents felt when the two of them met, which was, basically, WHA?!
They looked at me, and Aza, and said the exact same thing. But they couldn’t tell me not to do it.
Other people watch TV. Aza read about cryptography and sailor’s knots. We had an ongoing competition over who could give the other the best “piece of weird” they’d never heard about before. There was a tally, and I was winning, but only by one point.