Wings of Fire

by Jonathan Strahan

  There is a locked door deep inside my flesh

  A dam against bewilderment and fear;

  You too have such a portion of yourself;

  Divide it in a thousand pieces;

  Make soup;

  Then shall we all be free.

  But I wasn’t even listening, so sure was I that all was lost. For all my life I had been defined by others—my father, now Bob, now the dragon, even, briefly, by Linda Horovitz. I was a series of half-women, never a whole. Frustrated beyond repair, I flagellated the dragon’s lips with that scroll, shrieking like a pre-menstrual fishwife: “Why can’t I have a life like other people?” I’d seen the American girls with their casual ways, their cars, speaking of men as though they were hunks of meat; and the Thai girls, arrogant, plotting lovers’ trysts on their cellular phones as they breezed through the spanking-new shopping mall of their lives. Why was I the one who was trapped, chained up, enslaved? But I had used up the three questions.

  I slammed the scroll so hard against the stucco that it began to tear.

  “Watch out!” Bob cried. “You’ll lose your power over him!”

  “Don’t speak to me of empowerment,” I shouted bitterly, and the parchment ripped all at once, split into a million itty-bitty pieces that danced like shooting stars in the brilliant moonlight.

  That was it, then. I had cut off the family’s only source of income, too. I was going to have to marry Mr. Hong after all.

  Then the dragon’s eyes lit up, and his jaws began slowly to open, and his breath, heady, bitter, and pungent, poured into the humid night air. “My God,” Bob said, “there is some life to him after all.”

  My life, the dragon whispered, is but a few brief bittersweet moments of imagined freedom; for is not life itself enslavement to the wheel of sansara? Yet you, man and woman, base clay though you are, have been the means of my deliverance. I thank you.

  The dragon’s mouth gaped wide. Within, an abyss of thickest blackness; but when I stared long and hard at it, I could see flashes of oh, such wondrous things… far planets, twisted forests, chaotic cities…

  “Shall we go in?” said Bob.

  “Do you want to?”

  “Yes,” Bob said, “but I can’t, not without you; dying, he’s still your dragon, no one else’s; you know how it is; you kill your dragon, I kill mine.”

  “Okay,” I said, realizing that now, finally, had come the moment for me to seize my personhood in my hands, “but come with me, for old times’ sake; after all, you did give me a pretty thorough tour of your dying dragon…”

  “Ah yes; the City of Angels Etc. But that’s not dying for a few millennia yet.”

  I took Bob by the hand and ran up the steps into the dragon’s mouth. He followed me. Inside the antechamber, the dragon’s palate glistened with crystallized drool. Strings of baroque pearls hung from the ceiling, and the dragon’s tongue was coated with clusters of calcite. Further down, the abyss of many colors yawned.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “What do you think he meant,” Bob said, “when he said you should slice off little pieces of yourself, make them into soup, and that would set us all free?”

  “I think,” I said, “that it’s the centuries of being nibbled away by little parasites…” But I was no longer that interested in the dragon’s oracular pronouncements. I mean, for the first time in my life, since my long imprisonment in my family compound and the confines of the Rainbow Cafe’s kitchen, since my three years of rollercoastering through the alien wharves of Santa Cruz, I was in territory that I instinctively recognized as my own. Past the bronze uvula that depended from the cavern ceiling like a soundless bell, we came to a mother-of-pearl staircase that led ever downward. “This must be the way to the oesophagus,” I said. “Yeah.” There came a gurgling sound. A dull, foul water sloshed about our ankles. “Maybe there’s a boat,” I said. We turned and saw it moored to the banister, a golden barque with a silken sail blazoned with the ideograph Lim.

  Bob laughed. “You’re a sort of goddess in this kingdom, a creatrix, an earth-mother. But I’m the one with the waistline for earth-mothering.”

  “Perhaps we could somehow meld together and be one.” After all, his mothering instinct was a lot stronger than mine.

  “Cosmic!” he said, and laughed again.

  “Like the character Lim itself,” I told him, “two trees straining to be one.”

  “Erotic!”

  And I too laughed as we set sail down the gullet of the dying dragon. The waters were sluggish at first. But they started to deepen. Soon we were having the flume ride of our lives, careening down the bronze-lined walls that boomed with the echo of our laughter… the bronze was dark for a long long time till it started to shine with a light that rose from the heat of our bodies, the first warmth to invade the dragon’s innards in a thousand years… and then, in the mirror surface of the walls, we began to see visions. Yes! there was the dragon himself, youthful, pissing the monsoon as he soared above the South China Sea. Look, look, my multi-great-great-uncle bearing the urn of his severed genitals as he marched from the gates of the Forbidden City, setting sail for Siam! Look, look, now multi-great-uncle in the Chinese Quarter of the great metropolis of Ayutthaya, constraining the dragon as it breached the raging waters of the Chao Phraya! Look, look, another great-great-uncle panning for gold, his queue bobbing up and down in the California sun! Look, look, another uncle, marching alongside the great Chinese General Taksin, who wrested Siam back from the Burmese and was in turn put to an ignominious death! And look, look closer now, the soldier raping my grandmother in the doorway of the family compound… look, look, my grandfather standing by, his anger curbed by an intolerable terror… look, look, even that was there… and me… yielding to the stately Linda Horovitz in the back seat of rusty Toyota… me, stirring the vat of dragon’s fin soup… me, talking back to my father for the first time, getting slapped in the face, me, smashing the scroll of power into smithereens.

  And Bob? Bob saw other things. He heard the music of the spheres. He saw the Sistine Chapel in its pristine beauty. He speed-read his way through Joyce and Proust and Tolstoy, unexpurgated and unedited. And you know, it was turning him on.

  And me, too. I don’t know quite when we started making love. Perhaps it was when we hit what felt like terminal velocity, and I could feel the friction and the body heat begin to ignite his shirt and my cheongsam. Blue flame embraced our bodies, fire that was water, heat that was cold. The flame was burning up my past, racing through the dirt roads of the ancestral village; the fire was engulfing Chinatown, the rollercoasters of Santa Cruz were blazing gold and ruddy against the setting sun, and even the Forbidden City was on fire, even the great portrait of Chairman Mao and the Great Wall and the Great Inextinguishable Middle Kingdom itself, all burning, burning, burning, all cold, all turned to stone, and all because I was discovering new continents of pleasure in the folds of Bob Halliday’s flesh, so rich and convoluted that it was like making love to three hundred pounds of brain; and you know, he was considerate in ways I’d never dreamed; that mothering instinct I supposed, that empathy; when I popped, he made me feel like the apple that received the arrowhead of William Tell and with it freedom from oppression; oh, God, I’m straining aren’t I, but you know, those things are so so hard to describe; we’re plummeting headlong through the mist and foam and flame and spray and surge and swell and brine and ice and hell and incandescence and then:

  In the eye of the storm:

  A deep gash opening and:

  Naked, we’re falling into the vat beneath the dragon’s flanks as the ginsu- wielding Ah Quoc is hacking away at the disintegrating flesh and:

  “No!” my father shouted. “Hold the sulphuric acid!”

  We were bobbing up and down in a tub of bile and semen and lubricious fluids, and Aunt Ling-ling was frantically snatching away the flask of concentrated H2SO4 from the kvetching Jasmine.

  “Mr. Elephant, la!” cried Ah Quoc. “What you do Miss J
anice? No can! No can!”

  “You’ve gone and killed the dragon!” shrieked my father. “Now what are we going to do for a living?”

  And he was right. Once harder than titanium carbide, the coil of flesh was dissipating into the kitchen’s musty air; the scales were becoming circlets of rainbow light in the steam from the bamboo cha shu bao containers; as archetypes are wont to do, the dragon was returning to the realm of myth.

  “Oh, Papa, don’t make such a fuss,” I said, and was surprised to see him back off right away. “We’re still going to make soup today.”

  “Well, I’d like to know how. Do you know you were gone for three weeks? It’s Wednesday again, and the line for dragon’s fin soup is stretching all the way to Chicken Alley! There’s some kind of weird rumor going around that the soup today is especially heng, and I’m not about to go back out there and tell them I’m going to be handing out rain checks.”

  “Speaking of rain—” said Aunt Ling-ling.

  Rain indeed. We could hear it, cascading across the corrugated iron rooftops, sluicing down the awnings, splashing the dead-end canals, running in the streets.

  “Papa,” I said, “we shall make soup. It will be the last and finest soupmaking of the Clan of Lim.”

  And then—for Bob Halliday and I were still entwined in each other’s arms, and his flesh was still throbbing inside my flesh, bursting with pleasure as the thunderclouds above—we rose up, he and I, he with his left arm stretched to one side, I with my right arm to the other, and together we spelled out the two trees melding into one in the calligraphy of carnal desire—and, basically, what happened next was that I released into the effervescing soup stock the swift sleek segment of my soul, the sly secretion from my scales, and, last but not least, the locked door deep inside my flesh; and these things (as the two trees broke apart) did indeed divide into a thousand pieces, and so we made our soup; not from a concrete dragon, time-frozen in its moment of dying, but from an insubstantial spirit-dragon that was woman, me, alive.

  “Well, well,” said Bob Halliday, “I’m not sure I’ll be able to write this up for the Post.”

  Now this is what transpired next, in the heart of Bangkok’s Chinatown, in the district known as Yaowaraj, in a restaurant called the Rainbow Cafe, on a Wednesday lunchtime in the mid-monsoon season:

  There wasn’t very much soup, but the more we ladled out, the more there seemed to be left. We had thought to eke it out with black mushrooms and bok choi and a little sliced chicken, but even those extra ingredients multiplied miraculously. It wasn’t quite the feeding of the five thousand, but, unlike the evangelist, we didn’t find it necessary to count.

  After a few moments, the effects were clearly visible. At one table, a group of politicians began removing their clothes. They leaped up onto the lazy susan and began to spin around, chanting “Freedom! Freedom!” at the top of their lungs. At the next table, three transvestites from the drag show down the street began to make mad passionate love to a platter of duck. An young man in a pinstripe suit draped himself in the printout from his cellular fax and danced the hula with a shrivelled crone. Children somersaulted from table to table like monkeys.

  And Bob Halliday, my father and I?

  My father, drinking deeply, said, “I really don’t give a shit who you marry.”

  And I said, “I guess it’s about time I told you this, but there’s a strapping Jewish tomboy from Milwaukee that I want you to meet. Oh, but maybe I will marry Mr. Hong—why not?—some men aren’t as self-centered and domineering as you might think. If you’d stop sitting around trying to be Chinese all the time—”

  “I guess it’s about time I told you this,” said my father, “but I stopped caring about this baggage from the past a long time ago. I was only keeping it up so you wouldn’t think I was some kind of bloodless half-breed.”

  “I guess it’s about time I told you this,” I said, “but I like living in Thailand. It’s wild, it’s maddening, it’s obscenely beautiful, and it’s very, very, very un-American.”

  “I guess it’s about time I told you this,” my father said, “but I’ve bought me a one-way ticket to Californ’, and I’m going to close up the restaurant and get a new wife and buy myself a little self-respect.”

  “I guess it’s about time I told you this,” I said, “I love you.”

  That stopped him cold. He whistled softly to himself, then sucked up the remaining dregs of soup with a slurp like a farting buffalo. Then he flung the bowl against the peeling wall and cried out, “And I love you too.”

  And that was the first and only time we were ever to exchange those words.

  But you know, there were no such revelations from Bob Halliday. He drank deeply and reverently; he didn’t slurp; he savored; of all the dramatis personae of this tale, it was he alone he seemed, for a moment, to have cut himself free from the wheel of sansara to gaze, however briefly, on nirvana.

  As I have said, there was a limitless supply of soup. We gulped it down till our sides ached. We laughed so hard we were sitting ankle-deep in our tears.

  But do you know what?

  An hour later we were hungry again.

  The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule

  Lucius Shepard

  Lucius Shepard was born in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1947 and published his first book, poetry Cantata of Death, Weakmind & Generation in 1967. He began to publish fiction of genre interest in 1983, with “The Taylorsville Reconstruction”, which was followed by such major stories as “A Spanish Lesson”, “R&R”, “Salvador”, and “The Jaguar Hunter”. The best of his early short fiction is collected in two World Fantasy Award winning volumes, The Jaguar Hunter and The Ends of the Earth. In 1995 The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction said of Shepard’s relationship to SF that “there is some sense that two ships may have passed in the night”. Two years later Shepard returned from what he has since described as a career “pause”, delivering a series of major short stories, starting with “Crocodile Rock” in 1999, followed by Hugo Award winner “Radiant Green Star” in 2000, and culminating in nearly 300,000 words of short fiction published in 2003. The best of his recent short fiction has been collected in Trujillo and Other Stories, Eternity and Other Stories, and Dagger Key and Other Stories. His novels include Green Eyes, Life During Wartime, Kalimantan, The Golden, Viator, and Softspoken. His most recent books are the collection The Best of Lucius Shepard, and Viator Plus. Upcoming is a new short novel, The Taborin Scale.

  “…Other than the Sichi Collection, Cattanay’s only surviving works are to be found in the Municipal Gallery at Regensburg, a group of eight oils-on-canvas, most notable among them being Woman With Oranges. These paintings constitute his portion of a student exhibition hung some weeks after he had left the city of his birth and travelled south to Teocinte, there to present his proposal to the city fathers; it is unlikely he ever learned of the disposition of his work, and even more unlikely that he was aware of the general critical indifference with which it was received. Perhaps the most interesting of the group to modern scholars, the most indicative as to Cattanay’s later preoccupations, is the Self Portrait, painted at the age of twenty-eight, a year before his departure.

  “The majority of the canvas is a richly varnished black in which the vague shapes of floorboards are presented, barely visible. Two irregular slashes of gold cross the blackness, and within these we can see a section of the artist’s thin features and the shoulder panel of his shirt. The perspective given is that we are looking down at the artist, perhaps through a tear in the roof, and that he is looking up at us, squinting into the light, his mouth distorted by a grimace born of intense concentration. On first viewing the painting, I was struck by the atmosphere of tension that radiated from it. It seemed I was spying upon a man imprisoned within a shadow having two golden bars, tormented by the possibilities of light beyond the walls. And though this may be the reaction of the art historian, not the less knowledgeable and therefore more trustworthy response of the gallery-g
oer, it also seemed that this imprisonment was self-imposed, that he could have easily escaped his confine; but that he had realized a feeling of stricture was an essential fuel to his ambition, and so had chained himself to this arduous and thoroughly unreasonable chore of perception…”

  —from Meric Cattany: The Politics of Conception by Reade Holland, Ph.D

  1

  In 1853, in a country far to the south in a world separated from this one by the thinnest margin of possibility, a dragon named Griaule dominated the region of the Carbonales Valley, a fertile area centring upon the town of Teocinte and renowned for its production of silver, mahogany and indigo. There were other dragons in those days, most dwelling on the rocky islands west of Patagonia—tiny, irascible creatures, the largest of them no bigger than a swallow. But Griaule was one of the great beasts who had ruled an age. Over the centuries he had grown to stand 750 feet high at the mid-back, and from the tip of his tail to his nose he was 6,000 feet long. (It should be noted here that the growth of dragons was due not to caloric intake, but to the absorption of energy derived from the passage of time.) Had it not been for a miscast spell, Griaule would have died millennia before. The wizard entrusted with the task of slaying him—knowing his own life would be forfeited as a result of the magical backwash—had experienced a last-second twinge of fear, and, diminished by this ounce of courage, the spell had flown a mortal inch awry. Though the wizard’s whereabouts were unknown, Griaule had remained alive. His heart had stopped, his breath stilled, but his mind continued to seethe, to send forth the gloomy vibrations that enslaved all who stayed for long within range of his influence.