Swansong (12 page)

I nod, swallowing a wave of nausea.

The tables are sand-colored, polished.  Empty, too.  I sit at one of them, collecting my thoughts.  I’m insane.  I’m not insane.  I don’t know how to reconcile these completely antithetical tenets.  I don’t know how, but they both seem true at the same time.

It isn’t long before Azel makes his way back to me.  He touches my shoulder.  I nearly jump.

“He says we should check the second floor,” he says.  “Wanna go?”

“Yeah.”  I smile briefly.  I stand up and follow him.

The second floor is carpeted, separated from the first by a railing.  Railing or not, I still entertain the thought that I might fall over the side.  I follow Azel down haphazard aisles, dizzied by the endless, neglected tomes sitting on the bookshelves.  I try and train my eyes on Azel’s back.  His schoolbag is plain, gray, not that I expected anything else.  The stitches in his white shirt seem a soothing comparison to the sea of abandoned books.  It’s sad, like all those books are just sitting here, waiting for someone to pick them up, to care for them, but that someone never comes.

This is why I tend to think I’m insane.

“Astral projection,” Azel murmurs.  “Right.  Guess we’d better start here…”

We scale the tiny, cramped aisle for pertinent books.  I scan the shelves as best as I can, but the words twist themselves around in front of my blurry eyes.  
How to Cleanse Your Chakras
, one book boasts. 
Past Life Regression
, promises another.  I look at the catalogue at the top of the shelf. 
New Age
, it reads.

“Azel…”

“Yeah?”  He rifles through a thick brown book.

“I think these books are kind of—”  I can’t find a reverent word.  “Bullshit,” I finish lamely.

And just a moment ago, I felt sorry for them.

Azel stuffs his book back on the shelf.  “You’re right,” he concludes.  “Librarians.  They’re no help…”

I lean back against the shelf behind me.  “Shouldn’t we be looking for science, or medicine?  Or car accidents,” I add.  “Or brain injuries.”  Okay, so that’s a bigger umbrella than I anticipated.

Azel mirrors my pose, only his arms are folded, his head tilted downward in thought.  “Brain chemistry.  I guess…neuroscience, right?”

“I guess,” I agree.  I’m starting to wonder whether Kory should have accompanied us after all.  I don’t know the first thing about biology.  Or is this chemistry?  Whatever it is, it’s headache material.  I rub my temples.  I don’t want another headache.  Not here.  Not now.

We trek back out of the aisle.  This time I train my eyes on Azel’s curls.  They’re tightly coiled, like helixes.  Brown and springy and held together in a rubberband.  I wonder whether long hair helps him balance while he’s dancing.  I wonder what he looks like when he’s dancing.  Like smoke, I bet.  Like water.

“Do you like it?” I blurt out, before I can stop myself.

“Like what?” Azel asks, sounding distracted.

“Dancing.  Is it fun?  Or do you do it because you have to?”

To my surprise, he stops walking.  He turns around to regard me, his mouth slightly parted.

“Sorry—” I begin.

“It feels like flying.”

The simplicity of Azel’s confession catches me off guard.  I’m glad to hear it.  I smile to hear it.

“Or,” Azel says.  “I’d imagine that’s what flying would feel like if we could actually…you know.  Do it.  Without airplanes.”  He adds, in a hushed voice, “Airplanes make me sick.”

“Like, physically?”

“The first time we flew from Oman to America, I puked for the whole plane trip.  I don’t understand how something so heavy stays in the air…”

The poor guy looks like he might throw up even now.  It’s terrible of me—I can’t help myself—I laugh.

“Stop that,” he says irritably.  There goes his face again, brown trading itself in for red.

“Don’t you know they make medicine for that, Azel?”

“You want me to put foreign substances in my body?  What are you, a drug pusher?”

“That’s the drug trade’s modus operandi these days.  They put a cute face in front of you, you buy some crack.”

Very quickly, Azel glances away.  I don’t understand why; I thought we were having fun.  Then it occurs to me:  My face isn’t cute.  An ugly burn took up residence on my left cheek.  My throat’s still got that white mark on it—I don’t know what it is or where it came from.  At least I’ve got some real hair on my head now, but nowhere near as much as I used to; I look like I fell out of the Roaring Twenties.

I clear my throat, smiling weakly.  “Neuroscience, right?”

“Right,” Azel says hastily.  “This way.”

The neuroscience aisle, if possible, looks more neglected than the rest of the library put together.  The spines of the books are all stiff, as if they’ve never been opened before.  Azel scours one shelf while I scour the other. 
Neuroscience for Neophytes
, one book reads. 
General Neuroscience.  Neurodevelopment.
  Neurodevelopment—that’s when the brain’s first forming, right?  I don’t think that’s what I want…

“
Delusions of Gender
,” Azel reads out loud.  “
The Female Brain.
”

“Sexist,” I dismiss.

“
Behavioral Neuroscience
?  That doesn’t cover out-of-body experiences, does it?”

“Doubt it…”  I pluck
Neuroscience for Neophytes
off the shelf.  I tuck it under my arm.

“Wait, this sounds good—
The Neurological Dictionary.
”

“Pick it up.
“  I whisk another book off the shelf: 
Brain Injury: The Facts
.

“
Unleashing Your Brain’s Potential
,” Azel reads.

“Okay, that one, too.”

“
Brain Damage, Brain Repair.
  That one makes your head sound like a computer file.”

“Ick…”

By the time we leave the neuroscience aisle, our arms are laden with musty-smelling texts.  We sit at a long table by the far back of the second floor, gray sunlight sifting through the unwashed window.  We set our schoolbags on the floor.  It’s sad how quiet it is in here.  Quiet and empty.  No murmurs or rustling pages, no little boys whimpering because their moms won’t let them borrow the second
Cold Hard Killer
book, the one that got made into a movie with Chase DeVreigh.  I don’t know if it’s true; but I feel as if humans are drifting farther and farther apart.

“Might as well start with the dictionary,” Azel says.  He pulls the giant book across the table toward him.  ” ‘Out-of-body experience’…”

I open up
Neuroscience for Neophytes
.  My eyes glaze over. 
The human brain weighs three pounds
, the book begins. 
Eighty-six billion neurons give us the ability to see, move, think, cry…

The paragraphs blur in front of my eyes. 
Focus
, I tell myself, a touch angry.

“Damn it,” Azel says quietly.  ” ‘Out-of-body’ isn’t in here.”

“Maybe that’s a New Age term?  Try…uh…”

“The Sufis have a name for this,” Azel says.  “
Al-iskat al-najmy
.  I don’t know what you would call it in English.”

“Maybe we should be visiting an Omani library…”

“Fine, but you’re boarding the plane without me.”

“Ginger capsules, Azel.  Ginger capsules.”

I turn the page in my book.  Azel flips to the very front of his, a sound of agitation buried low in his throat.

I smile at him.  “If you’d rather not…”

“No,” he insists.  “I want to help you.”  He flips a few pages.  “There’s a guy in this book named Steiner, wonder if he’s related to our English teacher…”

I stare at a diagram of the human brain.  Looks mushy.

“Wait,” Azel says.

I sit up, my elbows on the table.

“
Autoscopy
,” Azel reads.  “
Autoscopy constitutes visual hallucinations in which one’s own body is replicated in extracorporeal space.
”

“That’s it!” I shout.  I clap my hand over my mouth before I remember:  The library’s empty.

“We’re lucky it’s in the A section.  We could have been here for hours…”

“What does it say?  I mean, about the cause?”

“
A variety of conditions are known to accompany autoscopy, including seizures, migraines—
”

Migraines.  The headaches.  That’s it.  I—oh.  Oh, I’m not insane.  Oh, I could cry with relief.

“
Physiologically
,” Azel goes on, “
autoscopy is accompanied by aberrant bioelectric activity in the brain’s temporal-parietal-occipital junction.
”

A chill passes through me.  “That’s,” I say.  I swallow, trying to clear my throat.  Why is it so dry?  “When I woke up—the physical therapist—he told me.  He told me that’s where all the damage is.  In the…”

“Temporal-parietal-occipital junction.”

“Yes.  That.”

Neither of us speaks.  Azel lays his hands on top of the dictionary.  I stare at his fingers, the white scar on his knuckles, trying to make sense of all this.

“So it’s normal,” I say.  “It’s a symptom.”

“I don’t know that I’d call it normal,” Azel says slowly.  “Just because it’s real doesn’t mean it’s normal.”

Normalcy is a spectrum, Judas told me.

“Autoscopy,” Azel murmurs.  “This book classifies it as a kind of hallucination.  But you saw that Swan Nebula.”

“I did…”

“And you’d never seen it before?”

“I swear, I hadn’t.”

“How can a hallucination show you something like that?”

“I don’t know.”  I don’t know anything, do I?

Azel frowns.  It’s almost apologetic.

“Can I see that?” I ask Azel.

He passes me the dictionary.  I browse the lengthy passage on autoscopy.  I force the letters to stay with me, black typeface swirling around on the page.

“I—”  I squint at the italicized text on the bottom.  “Who’s Steiner?”

“Steiner?” Azel repeats.  “Our English teacher.”

“No, that’s Reiner.  Rudolf Steiner?”

“Don’t know him.  Why?”

“Because this paragraph keeps quoting him.  The one about autoscopy.”

“Must be a neuroscientist, then.”

I flip through the pages to the back of the book.  I skim the citations. 
Rudolf Steiner
, reads one of them. 
Geisteswissenschaft
.

“German, I guess,” I mumble.

“German?  I know German.”

I give Azel a reluctant look.

“What?” he returns.  “There are a lot of German expats in Oman.  Especially around Haima.”

“Oh,” I say.  “Then what does Gei—Geistis—”

“
Geistes
?” he asks.

“No, it’s longer than that.
 
Geistesweiss
…”

“
Geisteswissenschaft
,” he guesses.

“What does that mean?”

“Spiritual Science,” Azel says.

We look at one another.  Azel’s face is comical when it twitches with disbelief.

“Spiritual,” I repeat.

“That’s—this is stupid.”

“Maybe we should leave.”

“Maybe so.”

We stand, Azel pushing his chair in.  I swing my schoolbag over my shoulder.  I gather all the neurology books in a pile.  Azel stops me before I can pick them up, his hand on my arm.

“Leave them on the table,” he says.  “The librarians get pissed if you put them back yourself.”

“Really?”  My head floats off my shoulders.  “Why?”  I’m not sure it matters why.  I just don’t want him moving his hand.

“I don’t know,” Azel says.  “I guess they figure we’ll put them back out of order.”

“Oh.  I don’t think we would.”

“Me, neither.”

Silence.  Neither one of us moves.  Neither one of us speaks.  The silence turns into apprehension on my part.  I pick up one of the neurology books at random, just to distract myself.

“I think I’ll check this one out,” I say.

“Okay.”  Azel stuffs his hands in his pockets.  He averts his eyes.

I hurry toward the staircase, a flustered mess.  Nobody ever told me boys were this complicated.

* * * * *

Azel walks me home.  The library book sits in my schoolbag with the rest of my school texts.  The schoolbag hangs from my shoulder.  My eyes hang carefully on the seamless sidewalk.