Magonia(76)

And there—my house is there. In front of me, itself. Yellow front door. Blue car in the driveway. Dented side.
It’s the dent that starts me crying. Maybe none of this happened. Maybe I’m just coming home after school, getting out of Jason’s car, probably gasping a little. Normal. Except that I have Jason beside me holding my hand, and that would never have happened before all this. There was no official version of Jason and me before.
There’s a rip in the neckline of his shirt, and he has a smudge on his face. I want to laugh, because a smudge? After everything? Only a smudge?
The world isn’t over, though, and here we are. Like humans. Some more like humans than others.
I look up at Jason. I can feel the sides of his fingers against mine. I can feel his heart beating through his thumb.
“What do you think?” he asks me, as though he doesn’t know already.
“My parents are home,” I say.
“You ready?”
“Not even.”
“Maybe we should jump off the garage,” he says.
“Maybe we should fly in,” I say, which almost makes me sob, because. Obvious reasons. There are losses to this. Big ones.
I don’t have a plan. Where else in the world would I go but here? Home. Not home. Home.
I turn around and start walking in the opposite direction of my house. Nope. I can’t see my parents, not this way. Look at me. I’m not me—
“Do you know,” Jason says, his voice tense as mine, talking fast, a definite sign of barely hidden anxiety. “Do you know about the Ganzfeld Effect?”
“No,” I say. I’m listening, but I’m not stopping. He’s not going to seduce me with factoids. I walk faster.
“It’s the brain amplifying neural noise in order to look for missing signals. For example, if you look at a clear blue sky without context, you start to hallucinate. Look at snow too long, and you’ll see cities.”
“That’s not what Magonia is,” I interrupt, irritated that he can even remotely say this after all he’s just seen.
“The students of Pythagoras used to go into dark caves and stay there in order to bring it on. Wisdom out of nothing. Astronauts say they see the same thing. And Arctic explorers.”
I feel his fingers lace through mine. He keeps talking without stopping. He’s not letting me get away.
“Prisoners in solitary. There’s a term for that version. Prisoners’ cinema. Colors at the edge of night, figures and forms. Some people think the cave paintings in Lascaux were done in the dark, someone painting the things they saw when there was nothing else to see. Hands out, dipping fingers in pigment and painting in pitch-black, from visions. You could only see them if you stayed there long enough, looking.”
I stare up at Jason. He’s looking at me too now.
“No one knows, really, why the brain makes these visions. It wants to see something. All these beautiful things came out of the blue,” he says. “And out of the black. The same way you did. Your country in the sky is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I believe you. I saw it. I see it now, little bits.” He points up. There’s a small sailing vessel, no threat, moving fast across the sky.

“Even people who’ve never seen a miracle can believe in miracles, Aza. Even people who’ve never seen the light, people who’ve been kept in the dark, people who’ve gone snow-blind, or sky-blind? Even those people can imagine fantastic things. I believe you. Your family’s going to believe you too.”
“But I’m not me,” I tell him.
“You ARE you.” We pause. “Also, Aza, I’m scared too.”
“You are?” This makes me feel weirdly better.
“Yeah,” he says. “But at least we’re not scared of each other.”
I look at him.
“Are you sure?”
He hesitates for a little too long. “Nope. I mean, I’m not unscary. Maybe you’re scared of me.”
I smile at him. “I am deeply, deeply scared of you.”
We go up the walk to my house.
I think about the day I don’t remember, the day I came here fifteen years ago, newborn and no one, tucked into a bed not mine, in a body not mine, meant to die, and living because of these people who kept me safe without even knowing what I was. Who worked so hard to keep something broken going. Who loved me.
I think about my mom, apparently coming into my bedroom with a needle full of her serum, or so Jason tells me, and what was she then? Scared, and clueless. She thought I was human. She thought I was dying of something no one would understand. So she taught herself to understand it. She made me medicine. She put it into my bloodstream and hoped. When no one else could help me, she gave me everything she had.
Because of her, I’m here.
I can feel my chest rattling.
Being home is better than breathing, I tell myself.
I ring the doorbell. And they’re coming down the hall. I can hear them, my dad, footsteps, shoes on even though they shouldn’t be, my mom murmuring to him.
Jason’s kind of bouncing in place, like he might take off running, like we’re some other kind of couple on the way to the prom.
I suddenly think nothing bad can ever happen again, which is not smart, Aza, not smart, but I don’t care.
The door opens.
It’s my parents. Them. Really.
I have to fight really hard not to freak them out by crying, this stranger bursting into tears. But I sure as hell make some kind of noise. And they’re {???} and I’m {&,&,&} and they look at me like they don’t know me, which makes sense but feels like everything wrong ever and so I say “Mom?”