The problem with being a magician is
that you can’t hide behind the truth. Of all the things being a
magician takes from a person, often the loss of easy certainties are
the hardest to deal with. Jay starts the morning by bouncing – he
insists it is boinging – out of the other bed in the motel room,
burbling about new adventures and what we might find at a speed that
makes me glad I’ve never tried to have him drink coffee. He’s
quick, sure, and if you didn’t know what to look for, you might
think he could see despite his dark glasses and white cane.
Jay is impossibly good at sensing and
altering bindings, to an extent I’ve never run across before or
since. Add that to the fact that he is the only creature from Outside
the universe I know that can fool magicians into thinking he is
entirely human and it’s almost easy to forget he can’t see
sometimes. Until he asks about a colour, or pauses in doing something
as he adjusts to bindings around us when we’re in a hurry to get
things done. He’s trying to hide it, because I’m the reason he
can’t see and he knows I blame myself for that.
It was why I left him and Charlie to
wander on my own for a time. Left Charlie to deal with Jay’s loss
of vision without help. Left her to deal with Jay missing me, which
was a worse thing by far. I forget that, sometimes, perhaps because
humans have to. Jay bound himself into my service on entering the
universe. To him, we are friends,
Jay and ‘Honcho’ as best buddies – to the point that he keeps
calling me honcho instead of magician even though he no longer has a
lisp to confuse that word.
And to
Jay, this friendship is immutable. I
have used him, have abused his own power – for the greater good, as
all ugly necessities often are – and I have damaged him, and
altered him, and he doesn’t have it in himself to blame me at all.
To get mad at me for going away, yes, but to blame me for hurting him
– not now, and not ever. Eventually I will die and he will remain,
and he won’t even blame that on me. I get coffee as Jay chats about
dinosaurs as if I haven’t see Jurassic World with him a dozen times
in the last week.
Jay
liked travelling with Charlie, but even he admits – squirming and
reluctant – that he’d rather be with me. Because of different
kinds of adventures, is how he explains it, but it’s more about
what binds us together. And
that, he wouldn’t have been able to hide from Charlie for all his
trying. I doubt he understands how much that might have hurt her: he
is good at sensing bindings, but we can’t sense what we don’t
know how to sense, and to Jay it was simply a pure truth so it
shouldn’t hurt anyone.
“Kiddo,
I’ve been thinking.”
“Uh
huh?” he says, drinking his hot chocolate. “Is it about how the
dinosaurs died out, because there is a theory about volcanoes that
–.”
“No,
no it’s not. I’ve been thinking that perhaps Dana and I shouldn’t
find a way to restore your sight.”
Jay
stops dead at that in surprise, twists his head to stare up toward
me. “Honcho?”
There
is nothing but confusion in the question. “Given how often you’ve
already seem a lot of movies with dinosaurs when you can’t see, you
might seem them far too often again when you can and I believe there
is only so many times other people might want to see them with you?”
“Charlie
said that once, but she was all kidding,” Jay says firmly, then
grins, bright and huge. “But you’re right! It would be like
seeing them all again and you’re being all kinds of mean with that
joke.”
“And
if I’m not joking?”
He
pokes me with his cane, surprising me. “Then I’ll get all kinds
of sad-face and be really sad
about it, and maybe even mad too!”
“Maybe?”
I repeat.
“Being
mad at you would be wrong,” he says, as if that was also an
immutable law. “And if you can’t fix it – like really can’t?
– I’m totally okay with that, Honcho. I can do lots of things
without seeing, and I’ve even been to school and made new friends
and helped people with stuff and I’m still me so it would be all
kinds of okay!”
And,
being Jay, he means every word. “You do know you ruined the joke,”
I say, trying to sound as stern as I can.
Jay
just giggles at that. “Sometimes being Jaysome means being even
better than jokesome,” he says, as if that that makes any kind of
sense at all. “What kind of adventures are we having today?”
“We’re
looking for Charlie,” I say. “To apologize, to see if she wants
to travel with us again, and to look for answers.”
“Answers?”
“An
ex-magician almost murdered Dana last year; healing that fae cost you
your sight. I think we need to know the why of all that before Dana
and I can heal it, and the only person I can think to ask is then
oldest magician in the world.”
“Oh,”
Jay says. I don’t mention Mary-Lee by name, he doesn’t either.
“That part of the adventure might not be fun at all?”
“It
might not.”
“But
the rest will be okay,” he says happily, and says that Charlie left
before she could see all the Land Before Time
movies after number eleven with him, so we can all do that too when
we meet up.
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