The Dragon Griaule

by Lucius Shepard

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Your time with the mommies must have taught you to be aware of a woman’s desires, because you knew what I wanted and when I wanted it. And I’m certain I knew what you wanted . . . which is unusual. I’ve never been adept at reading men.’

  ‘Give me an example.’

  ‘You remember what happened.’

  ‘Refresh my memory.’

  ‘You just want to hear me talk dirty.’

  I smiled. ‘If you don’t mind.’

  ‘All right. At the end, when you were battering away at me, I knew you were close and I wanted you to finish in my mouth. And you did, without my having to tell you.’

  ‘It seemed like the thing to do.’

  She peered at me. ‘Am I embarrassing you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I am, aren’t I? You’re embarrassed!’

  ‘No, really. I’m not. I just think it’s weird, talking like this.’

  ‘Why is it weird?’

  ‘People tend to be gentle with each other after they hook up. They whisper sweet nothings. They say stuff like, “When did you know?” and “The first time I saw you I was rocked.” Or they tease one another, they’re playful. They don’t start breaking shit down.’

  ‘That kind of talk is generally insincere on some level.’

  ‘Not always.’

  ‘No, not always.’

  The wind had grown stronger. Wheezy flutings came with increasing frequency over the bone channels of the skull, like an old calliope giving up the ghost.

  ‘It’s good to get all this out in the open,’ Yara said. ‘It’ll rid us of unnecessary baggage.’

  ‘You think? It’s making me more self-conscious.’

  ‘Probably that’s how it’ll be at first, it’ll help in the long run.’

  The notion that we might have a long run started me thinking about Ex. I saw her in the entryway of our house, taking off the old army coat she wore in winter, smiling at me over her shoulder, her glossy hair braided into a thick rope.

  ‘You know, until recently I’ve been living with someone,’ I said.

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘We’ve been together on and off for almost four years. I’m not sure it’s over.’

  ‘She won’t have anything to do with how things work out for us.’

  ‘That’s an arrogant thing to say.’

  ‘It’s not arrogance if you’re certain about something, and I’m certain about this.’

  Yara dozed awhile, lying on her stomach, but I lay awake, highlights from the previous hour or so flaring up in my head. Bored, I propped myself on an elbow and kissed her shoulder, ran a hand along the slope of her back, and studied her tattoo. She stirred and made a pleased noise. I touched the middle scale of the diamond pattern and was astonished to find that it was hard and had a distinct convexity. Before I could examine it further, she swatted my hand away and sat up.

  ‘Don’t!’ she said angrily.

  ‘What is that? Some kind of implant?’

  ‘Yes, an implant. Leave it alone.’

  ‘How did they do it? I didn’t think it was possible to do something like this.’

  I stretched out a hand and again she knocked it away from the tattoo, saying, ‘I don’t want you to touch me there!’

  I laughed.

  ‘It’s not funny!’ She swung her legs off the bed, as if preparing to bolt. ‘I mean it!’

  ‘I’ve heard women say that before, but they were referring to another part of their bodies.’

  She picked up a flimsy robe from the floor and put it on. I asked what she was doing and she said she was going to eat.

  ‘It’ll be cold,’ I said.

  ‘It’s good cold.’

  She sat at the table and dug in, forking up a bite, chewing, swallowing, forking up another bite, making of the meal an act of mechanical ferocity.

  After a minute I stood and stepped into my boxers. Yara continued chowing down, not sparing me a glance. Despite the breeze I felt hot, my thoughts stale and repetitious. The unbroken eggshell-smooth surfaces of the chamber oppressed me.

  ‘This place could stand a window or two,’ I said.

  I sleep too deeply and wake too abruptly to remember my dreams, but during the week that followed, though I retained nothing of their substance, I woke with a sense that my dreams had been disturbing, and not in the customary sense, not due to anxiety or stress. I had the feeling that something had been picking at the shell of my consciousness, trying to insinuate itself into a crack, to find a way in. When this feeling persisted I mentioned it to Yara. She said it was a common reaction.

  ‘Reaction to what?’ I asked.

  ‘To being here,’ she said, and headed off to the tiny chamber set forward of the brain box, where she commonly passed an hour or two each morning.

  I spent a portion of the following day exploring the skull, negotiating channels that often led to other channels, but occasionally to small chambers, all so scrupulously clean that I suspected someone must have snuck in and done the sweeping. Nothing was out of the ordinary about the majority of the chambers (aside from the extraordinary fact of their existence), but the chamber to which Yara went each morning had a soporific effect on me, making me drowsy whenever I entered it. I would have asked Yara about this had she given me reason to anticipate a straight answer – as things stood, after determining that the drowsiness was not the product of my imagination, I marked it down as an anomaly, a minor mystery in the midst of a greater one.

  My initial impression of the adherents had been that they were timid, sullen, and ignorant, dimwitted in some instances, and that they represented the disenfranchised, their lives ruled by poverty and informed by delusion. Yet though they lived rough, and though I continued to believe that the foundations of their community were based upon a significant delusion, I came to acknowledge that I had mistaken distraction for temerity, self-absorption for sullenness, and that a majority of the approximately five hundred people dwelling beneath the canopy were upper middle class: educators, doctors, artists, researchers, and professionals of various types. Of course there were also a good many laborers and shop clerks, and a number of ex-derelicts, reformed drunks and addicts, but these were counterbalanced somewhat by the presence of people like Major General Amadis de Lugo, who inhabited a shack close by the skull. A smallish man in his seventies, with a time-ravaged yet still handsome face, ragged white hair, and an untrimmed beard, customarily dressed in fatigue pants and a white T-shirt, he was nonetheless an imposing figure, at least to me. When I first arrived in Temalagua he had been the titular head of Department 46, the country’s notorious internal security unit, and thus had been responsible for the deaths of several of Ex’s colleagues at the university, not to mention thousands more deemed politically untrustworthy by the government. I was shocked to see him (I recognized him from newspaper photos), astonished that he could survive in the community. Someone in the camp must have lost a friend or relative to de Lugo’s death squads – I presumed that they would seek to exact vengeance, but the cult made a point of ignoring all sins committed before joining, even those of a villain like de Lugo, and the policy had not thus far been contravened.

  Four days after I moved in with Yara, she spent the morning sequestered in her little bone chamber and in mid-afternoon she went about the encampment, conversing with the adherents. They were less conversations than counseling sessions – she did the lion’s share of the talking and the adherents were limited to nods and affirmations. I tagged along behind her and from what I could hear she appeared to be offering advice designed to shore up their commitment to some nebulous goal, generic hogwash of the kind that enraptures the fans of asswipes like Tony Robbins and Dr Phil. She had a ways to go before she perfected her spiel, but she had Tony and Phil beat all to hell in the looks department and I thought with proper management and a team of make-up people and hair stylists, she could be coached up into a serious money maker. She had a terrific back story: the a
bused street urchin who had learned life’s secrets from the rain forest swamis and was engaged in hauling herself up from society’s rat-infested basement to become every loser’s dream of success, a Rolex-wearing, couturier-clad, self-help diva striving to reach a platform that would enable her to sell the world some perfumed brand of bullshit. I imagined myself her advisor and complicitor. I’d warm up the audiences, an Armani-wearing stooge delivering a well-rehearsed message of non-denominational love, toothless liberalism, and capitalist greed, yielding the stage to Yara in order to seal the deal with a double shot of the same rendered in her charmingly accented English, all the more charming for having been polished so as to achieve a desired effect.

  It was a humid day, the air heavy with the smell of rain. Smoke from the campfires lay close to the ground, thickening the usual haze to a roiling smog, so that people who were not close at hand acquired a ghostly aspect, their indefinite figures fading in from the murk and then dematerializing. Tired of listening to Yara mold her constituency, I staked myself out on a makeshift bench near the ashes of a fire and began sketching in my notebook, adding brief written descriptions of each subject. I’d been at it for perhaps twenty minutes when someone cleared his throat in an attention-getting way and I glanced up to find General de Lugo standing beside me, leaning on a cane, partially blocking my view of the skull. Seeing this emblem of death’s human expression superimposed against that vast iconic figure unsettled me, but de Lugo smiled – not the most assuring of sights – and indicated that he wished to sit down. I made room and he lowered himself onto the bench, groaning as he completed this arduous process.

  I looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to speak. His hair was exceptionally silky and his clothes reeked of mildew. The flesh beneath his eyes looked bruised – from lack of sleep, I assumed. ‘Go on,’ he said, pointing at the notebook. ‘I will watch.’

  He beamed at me again, a beacon of his approval, but when I continued to sketch he tsk-tsked and grunted as in apparent pain, as if displeased by my work. I sketched a pink umbrella tree at the edge of the clearing, a shriek of color like an exposed vein, a more vital territory laid bare behind the smoky green vegetation, and he snorted impatiently. I asked if I was doing something wrong.

  ‘You draw trees, shadows, people.’ De Lugo gestured at the skull – it towered above us some sixty or seventy feet away. ‘But not the dragon. Why? It is the only thing worth drawing.’

  ‘You want me to draw the skull? You got it.’

  After a couple of false starts, using a pen with a fine point, I managed to get going on a miniature of the skull protruding from its cover, focusing to such a degree that once I finished I was startled to discover that three other people had joined us and were sitting on the ground about the dead fire. A young couple, student types, the guy’s hair longer than his girlfriend’s, and a middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper beard, wearing shorts and a worn, dirty dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves. De Lugo took the notebook from me, studied it a moment before passing it to the girl. She shared it with the two men and they murmured their appreciation.

  ‘Very good.’ De Lugo patted my arm – I could not help but flinch. ‘Perfect! You have captured him.’

  Ignoring his personification of the skull, I asked him and his friends what had drawn them to the camp.

  The girl – rather plain, with a complexion the color of adobe brick, she appeared to have lost a great deal of weight recently – introduced herself as Adalia and asked in a dusty contralto if I knew why I was there.

  ‘I’m with Yara,’ I said.

  ‘I am with Timo.’ She leaned into her boyfriend’s shoulder. ‘But that’s not why I am here.’

  ‘You tell me, then. Why are you here?’

  The middle-aged man, a lawyer, Gonsalvo by name, said, ‘We are the ingredients.’

  ‘The ingredients for what?’ I asked.

  ‘A miracle,’ said Adalia.

  I repeated her words quizzically and she added, ‘A miracle that will change the world.’

  The others nodded and Timo, putting an arm around Adalia’s shoulders, said, ‘He will perfect us.’

  They had bought into Yara’s craziness, perceiving her to be the key to a numinous mystery, and I doubted they knew any more than I.

  ‘You expect him to do all this?’ I asked, waving a hand at the skull.

  ‘With Yara’s help,’ Timo said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you familiar with his history?’ Adalia asked.

  ‘All that crap about being paralyzed in a mystical battle, his mental powers becoming godlike? Sure, everybody’s heard that fairy tale.’

  ‘You do not give him his due,’ Gonsalvo said solemnly. ‘For thousands of years he lay on the plain at Teocinte. His mind grew to be a cloud that enveloped the planet, controlling every facet of our lives.’

  ‘Well, he’s dead meat now,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t control jack.’

  ‘Jack?’ Gonsalvo said. ‘Who is Jack?’

  Adalia explained it to him.

  A silence rolled out over our little group and I became aware of two people stepping past, a snatch of soft talk, a man coughing. Gonsalvo intoned some tendentious garbage about how the dragon, having survived death, had been reduced to a shade with a fraction of his former prodigious power and now he required our assistance in order to be reborn and restored to primacy.

  ‘How’re you going to work that?’ I asked. ‘CPR? Give him a heart massage? No, wait! His heart’s in Minsk, Shanghai, Las Vegas, all over the place . . . in a zillion fucking pieces.’

  ‘We will contribute our energies,’ de Lugo said grandly.

  I tried to resist the impulse toward further sarcasm, but failed. ‘How does that work? When the moment’s right you chant? You think pure thoughts in his direction?’

  De Lugo nailed me with a stare that would have weakened my knees at another time and place. Timo scowled and Adalia said, ‘You haven’t answered my question. Why are you here? Be truthful.’

  ‘Curiosity,’ I said. ‘And chance. I’m a leaf blown to your door.’

  ‘And Yara? What of her?’

  ‘I enjoy fucking her, but she’s a little young for me.’ I tapped my forehead. ‘Too young in here, you understand.’

  ‘He doesn’t know,’ said de Lugo.

  Adalia leaned back into the crook of Timo’s shoulder. ‘Perhaps that’s all he is, a leaf. One day soon the wind will take him.’

  Irritated, I said, ‘The least you can do is wait until I’ve gone to talk behind my back.’

  They gazed at me with the placidity of stoners, impervious to amazement, as though we were guests of the Mad Hatter and they were waiting patiently for me to turn into a camel.

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ I asked. ‘What don’t I know?’

  ‘Why you’re here.’ De Lugo prodded the ashes of the dead fire with his stick. ‘Please don’t take offense. It’s something all of us wonder about now and then . . . with regard to ourselves as well as others.’

  Still vexed, I asked why he was here and he replied that of all the ‘ingredients’ gathered beneath the canopy, he might well be the most essential.

  ‘Griaule will require ruthlessness to achieve what he must,’ he said. ‘And, God help me, I have been ruthless in my day.’

  Adalia put a hand on his knee to comfort him. Gonsalvo offered consoling platitudes. I thought they might burst into a chorus of ‘Kumbaya.’ De Lugo’s ‘day’ was scarcely a year in the past, an incident wherein seven priests had been found with their brains cut out, excavated from their skulls in a side chapel of the National Cathedral, following which he been forced to relinquish his post. I wasn’t about to buy his penitent act and withdrew from the conversation, paying it marginal attention, and sketched their faces, their physical attitudes, anything else that caught my eye. Not until they left me, de Lugo being the last to go, patting my shoulder in an avuncular fashion . . . not until then did I think about the questions they had raised. Why was I there? W
as I, too, an element essential to the dragon’s rebirth? Had I been drawn to the community not by the Yara woman, but by the dragon’s proxy? And what had they meant by their use of the word ‘ingredient’? The word had an ominous sound in context, implying the surrender of one’s individuality to a grim purpose.

  Dusk blended the shapes of the leaves and branches, but the skull appeared to gain sharpness and detail and vitality, standing out from an indistinct backdrop, gray and granitic in the halflight, as if it were the only real thing in the picture. I envisioned the muscles of the face and jaw reforming over the bone, the packed masonry of green and gold scales reassembling, and I could have sworn that I glimpsed movement in the oily shadows filling its eye sockets, the flickering of a membrane, a glint of reflected light, evidence of life harbored within, still potent after centuries of dormancy. I felt its shadow heartbeat on my skin like the reverberations of a gong. My susceptibility to suggestion, I thought. Yet I couldn’t rid myself of the suspicion that the skull was the source of danger and a catastrophe was about to occur, that a more terrible visage would surface explosively from beneath that illusion of bone and fungus, and the dragon would shrug off its vegetable shroud and move against the city, mistaking Temalagua for Teocinte, the city where it had been imprisoned for millennia . . . or perhaps any city would serve as an apt target for his vengeance. This was nonsense, sheer fantasy, but the idea had fastened onto me and I stared at the skull for such a long time, I became convinced that my watchfulness was all that prevented the transformation. When fatigue caused my concentration to falter I worried that the change had begun without my notice. Infinitesimal changes. Fluctuations on the sub-atomic level. Subtle shifts that we would not register until too late and a shattering conclusion was already upon us.