Magonia(5)

Mutant, I scribbled on the notepad they’d given me in case of complaint.
The surgeon looked at me, and then laughed. “No,” he said. “You’re a special young lady. I’ve never seen vocal cords like yours before. You could be a singer.”
If I could breathe, I wrote, and he had the grace to look mortified.
In solidarity, Jason didn’t watch the squid footage without me, though he attempted to convince them to put it on in the ER. He couldn’t get permission from the nurses. They’re hard core in there.

Speaking of ocean and big fish in it. This is the first footage of a giant squid ever taken in which the squid is swimming around in its own environment. Imagine this sea-monstery unbelievable thing with eyeballs the size of a person’s head, and a body and tentacles twenty-five feet long. As long as a school bus. Now, realize that no one’s ever seen one moving around down there before. It’s a pretty huge miracle, and if this exists, maybe there are things in Loch Ness too. Maybe there are things everywhere, all over the place. Maybe there is . . . hope?
Because every time someone finds a new animal, or a new amazing thing on earth, it means we haven’t broken everything yet.
Up till now there’s only been video of really dead or really sick giant squid, but a scientist went down in a submersible and found one and filmed it.
Someone Jason knows has a hack on Woods Hole, the oceanographers in Massachusetts, and he caught wind of expedition communications. He snatched the video from a server four days ago, and hasn’t stopped crowing since.
I look over at Jason to smile at him, but he’s deep in his book. I lower my head to get down to the quiz, when out the classroom window, over the top of the iguana terrarium, I see something in the sky.
It’s only for a second but it’s weirdly familiar, something I dreamed, or saw in a picture, maybe.
A mast. And a sail.
More than one sail—two, three. Tall-ship style. Big, white, flapping. And out of the storm comes the prow of a ship.
Which . . .
I’ve hallucinated before, but nothing in this category. I read something recently about mirages in the sky, fata morgana, that’s what they’re called.
Someone once saw Edinburgh hanging in the sky over Liverpool for half an hour. But what’s this—this boat reflecting from? We’re inland. Deep inland.
I reach out and tug Mr. Grimm’s sleeve. He looks at me, irritated. I point.
He looks, and for a moment, he doesn’t move, staring hard out the window. Then he takes off his glasses and glances again.
“Shit,” he says.
“What?” I say. “You see it? Do you see it?”
He shakes his head.
“Storm,” he says, and yanks at the blinds.
As the blinds clang to the bottom of the sill and the room goes back to just being a room, I hear a whistle, long and high. Not exactly a whistle. More than a whistle.
Let me correct that. Much more than a whistle.
Aza, it says, the whistle. Aza, are you out there?








None of this is real, Aza Ray Boyle, it is not real.
That’s what I’m muttering to myself.
This is a new one, this kind of bad. The kind having to do with my brain.
My mom looks at me over the kitchen table, rumpling up her blond-gray ponytail and wrinkling her forehead.
“Are you sure you’re okay? You don’t sound okay. Remember last time you hallucinated? You had a fever.”
Once she looks at you, you’re done. There’s no room for fake around my mother. She’s spent all day in her lab. She’s an immunologist, and most nights she’s out late and involved with mice.
Today, she’s home relatively early, eleven thirty. Her experiments have been miserable of late. She has no tolerance for the thing she refers to as “flimflam,” in this case, me telling her I’m fine and don’t need to go to the doctor.
“Greta,” I say. “I’m as fine as I ever am.”
“Greta,” she says. “Is not what you call me, Aza Ray.”
“You don’t have to call me daughter,” I say. “You’re allowed to call me by my name.”
She doesn’t even dignify that, but starts calibrating dosages, then sticks a thermometer into my mouth.
“Okay, daughter,” she says, and smiles at me as though I deserve it. My mom has a smile that is simultaneously loving and blistering. The dominant emotion is just a matter of degrees.
So—I’m getting away with nothing in the realm of faking fine.
“You’re a hundred and two,” she announces. “So, there’s your skyship.”
I usually have a fever to some extent or another. I’m used to it. Clammy or boiling. Whatever. My mom wraps a blanket around my shoulders. I shed it as fast as I can. (Death-foreshadowing blanket? No, thank you.) I tug my particular million-pocketed hoodie on. The snick of the zipper is not allowed to remind me of a body bag.
“Take a breather, Aza,” says my mom.
I give her a look. “Breather? Really?”
“Take a breather on your freak-out, because freaking out helps nothing, and here’s a pill,” and even as she says it, the pill’s in my mouth, and I swear, I’m apparently a dog, because she gets it down my throat before I notice she’s literally pilling me. Other hand has a glass of water at the ready, so bam, I’m washing the pill down.
That’s Greta for you. She’s quick. What’s the point in resisting?
Besides, the pills seem to help.
They said, when I was two, that I’d be lucky to make it to six. When I was six, they said I’d be lucky to make it to ten. When I was ten, people were bewildered, and so they said sixteen.