What I saw, though, was not any of the things he wants to make it. I feel bitey. He should believe me. He’s the person who always believes me. I count on him to be my primary enabler of Vivid Imagination.
“You looking it up? Pissed off with me for not swallowing your story without questioning anything? Well, how about spooklights,” he says. He turns around and grins at me, which disgruntles. “UFOs, black helicopters, phantom dirigibles. All those things.”
Then he says one more word and for some reason, it stops me dead.
“Magonia.”
“Magonia?” I repeat, feeling twitchy.
The word isn’t unfamiliar. I try to joke it out.
“Is that a disease? A kind of architecture? A poisonous plant? If it’s a disease, I don’t want to know, I warn you right now. I’m not in a disease textbook mood—”
“We’re not talking about diseases. We’re talking about mirages. Check the Annals of Ulster,” Jason says, and sighs his long-patented Sufferer’s Sigh.
“Ulster. Like blisters crossed with ulcers? Leprosy of some kind?” I blather to disguise the fact that the word immediately haunts me. I feel a memory of this lurking somewhere in the black holes of my brain. Maybe I read about it somewhere. After all, everything I know, I read about.
Jason snorts.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t read the Annals.”
“I’ve read them.” I lie, because maybe I have, maybe I haven’t. I cough, part fake. I don’t know why I’d even try to lie to Jason. When someone hangs out with you every day since you were five, they pretty much know what you’ve read, and they definitely know when you’re emergency-skimming internet synopses beneath the kitchen table.
The Annals of Ulster are Irish histories, according to the wikis.
“No one’s read the Annals of Ulster. But I studied the relevant sections today. Mass hallucinations. About seven forty-eight AD, there’s this: ‘Ships with their crews were seen in the air.’ Does that ring any bells? Anything at all?”
Nope, nothing. He goes into his favorite mode, fast-talking, clipped words, robot boy.
“Basics. Not the Annals, but part of the same story. Eight thirty or so AD. France.” He grand-gesture sketches out the date and place in the air with his hand, subtitling his documentary. “This Archbishop of Lyons reports four messed-up people in his town, three guys, one woman, insisting they fell out of the sky. Fell from ships. In. The. Sky. Are you hearing me?”
I’m hearing him. So hearing. I pretend I’m not.
“The bishop goes to a public meeting where these four are in the stocks—”
I interrupt.
“Do not tell me you’re doing the universal hand gesture for ‘in the stocks,’ because that doesn’t exist, no matter how hard you just tried to make it a thing.”
He has the grace to blush and remove his hands (and the precariously tilting bowl of éclair filling) from “dude trapped in the stocks” position.
“—and getting screamed at for being crop thieves. They’ve been dumb enough to claim they’ve been stealing crops from earth using little sky-launch boats. The people in the town agree with the idea that they’re crop thieves, because, duh, they’re having harvest problems anyway.”
I am so annoyed at the randomness of Jason Kerwin. He’s a mutant memorizer. He has no apologies for that, and never has.
“MAGONIA, they say—all of them. We fell out of Magonia. People in town start to freak out.”
Jason whisks the filling so hard some of it splatters on the fridge.
“Then what?” I ask.
“Yeah, so I can’t remember if the Magonians ultimately got hanged for being witches, or if they got run out of town, but I doubt it was a fantastic outcome for them, given that they’d already said they didn’t belong on earth and wanted to go home with all the village’s corn.”
“Jason,” I say eventually. “You are Not Relevant.”
“All I’m saying is, if you’re hallucinating, you’re hallucinating in an old tradition,” he says. “Congratulations on the quality of your visions. Want more Magonia?”
“Nope,” I say. “I want chocolate.”
I can’t believe I didn’t know everything about this Magonia stuff already. It’s totally my kind of thing.
“Maganwetar. That’s Old High German for ‘whirlwind.’”
“Jason,” I say.
“Calm down. I don’t speak Old High German,” he says.
“You’d better not,” I tell him. “Because that would be a big lie. The secret learning of Old High German without me.”
There’s no shaming him.
“Some people think that’s where the word Magonia comes from. If you’re from Magonia, then, you live in a whirlwind. That’s what Jacob Grimm says, the same guy who wrote the fairy tales. He also says that it might refer to magicians, like magoi, Greek, hence Magonia would mean ‘Land of Magicians.’ I prefer whirlwind. Plus, a land of magicians would be boring, because the whole point of magic is that not everyone can do it. Otherwise it’s just normal life. It’d be, basically, Land of Mechanics.”
I’m head down in my phone. There. Some archbishop named Agobard grumbling about how the people in his town believed hail and lightning were made by storm-makers in the sky.
“But we have seen and heard of many people overcome with so much foolishness, made crazy by so much stupidity, that they believe and say that there is a certain region, which is called Magonia, from which ships come in the clouds. In these ships the crops that fell because of hail and were lost in storms are carried back into that region; evidently these aerial sailors make a payment to the storm-makers, and take the grain and other crops. Among those so blinded with profound stupidity that they believe these things could happen we have seen many people in a kind of meeting, exhibiting four captives, three men and one woman, as if they had fallen from these very ships. As I have said, they exhibited these four, who had been chained up for some days, with such a meeting finally assembling in our presence, as if these captives ought to be stoned. . . .”