It’s like I’m hearing something coming from outside again. Or is it inside? No matter what, I hate it.
“Hold your breath,” says the tech. “Try not to cough.”
I try not to cough. I pretend “giant squid” instead of “whale.” Lights flash. Things whistle and pop and extremely beep and make me feel as though I ought to be listening to something else. I read a thing once about deep ocean creatures and how the noises of earth are messing with their sonar. Whole lot of lost whales beaching themselves in cities—things like that. I read another one about sound-chaos, how nature is supposed to be harmonious, but human noises are screwing everything up and now people are going wacko due to atonal everything. Maybe I’m already wacko.
Aza, go outside.
I press the call button.
“Do you hear that?”
“Hear what? The obnoxious noise? You know what this sounds like, darling, you’ve been here a thousand times,” says the tech, Todd, who is a friendly person.
Todd always gives me an extra heating pad before I get rolled in here. I love him, because he moonlights in a laser hair-removal clinic, dealing death to follicles. He has some very happy stories involving vanquishing unwanted whiskers from women’s faces. The patients in the hair-removal clinic are totally grateful all the time. Here, people tend to grumble. No one really likes getting an MRI, and everyone’s sick. “We’re almost done. Are you okay?”
So not, it turns out, because the moment I say I’m fine, and the whistling begins again? I hear: Azalistenlistenazaazaazalistencomeoutside.
I clench my teeth, don’t cough, and stand it. It is not easy to stand it.
When I get out of the thing, everyone’s looking at me, like What the hell? That isn’t the usual look that people give you when you come out of an MRI. Todd sighs, and pats me on the shoulder.
“You can’t say I said, but basically, there’s a feather in your left lung.”
“As in, I grew a feather?”
Of course I’m not growing feathers. But it’s the first thing I think.
Todd clarifies. “As in, we think you aspirated a feather. Which would explain the coughing.”
Except, no. It’s the sort of thing you’d notice. If you snorted in some air, and with that air came a feather big enough to show up on this scan? You’d so, sO, SOOOO know.
They give in and show me, and yes. A feather the size of my little finger. This feather can only have come from a pillow, and feather pillows aren’t allowed in my room. Whoever put a feather pillow on my bed is in trouble. (Eli, obviously. My dad is as appalled as I am.)
I don’t think about the voices I’ve been hearing.
I don’t think about the sky.
I don’t think about how everything feels apocalyptic all over my life. Apocalypse, we all know, is a sign of brain betrayal, and my brain’s the only part of me that’s ever been okay.
“Is there any explanation?” my dad asks, but the techs have nothing for him.
“Doctor Sidhu will call you in for a follow-up,” says Todd. “Seriously, don’t tell her you saw this.”
I have, of course, seen scan results for years. Everyone shows me everything. It’s that way when you’re a lifetime patient. I’ve been interpreting MRIs longer than Todd has. That does not mean this doesn’t totally freak me out.
Todd’s freaked out too. I can tell. He’s whistling under his breath, in a way that’s meant to make me feel more comfortable but actually makes me panic.
His whistling, of course, does not have any sort of words or patterns of words hidden under it. It doesn’t, except that I’m hearing words in every whistle. Everything sounds sentient to me now, and I can’t help myself. The squeaks of the floor. The creaks of the doors.
I put my clothes and various metal things back on. Earrings. Necklace. Unnecessary bra.
Aza, come outside.
The fact that I hear that combined with some kind of birdsong?
Is not relevant to any of my fears, any of my bad dreams, any of the things I’ve been worrying about.
It’s meaningless.
It’s nothing at all.
It’s amazing that we’re allowed to leave the hospital, but we are. Back tomorrow for little pinchers down my windpipe. I’ve had worse. At least it’s not a full-on surgery. I try not to think about the fact that it’s a feather, not a swab; the fact that everything is wrong; the fact that my birthday is only five days away.
I don’t think about the center of my chest, where my ribs come together, and how that might look, opened up wide: French doors into someone’s poisonous overgrown garden.
That’s not how surgeons get into the lungs anyway. But something about this seems not-just-lungs. My ribs rattle like a birdcage. There’s nothing in there that’s not supposed to be in there. I swear it to myself as we walk across the parking lot.
The sky is full of huge storm clouds, which I very emphatically don’t look at. I have no urge to see any more ships. That’s where this wrongness started, and I want it un-wronged. I shiver, even though I’m bundled up.
“Alright. I’m the one you tell,” my dad says. “Give it up, Az. Have you been smoking?”
I give him a look.
“This is serious, Henry. You act like it’s not serious.”
“I’m Henry, now? No, you can keep right on calling me Dad. Cigarettes? Pot? Hookahs?”
Hookahs. He really asks that. As though we are, where? There are hookahs in the world, yes. I’ve seen the parlors in the university district, people in there, smoking and looking kind of queasy and too excited, but really? The only place I can imagine anyone actually smoking a hookah is in The Thousand and One Nights.