‘I gathered the adherents in front of the skull and brought them into a trance state. The dragon’s mind and my own were in perfect unity, interpenetrating. His thoughts were mine, and mine his. What was about to happen might be seen as horrific, an event to rival Jonestown, as you had said, but all I saw was the perfection of Griaule’s design and I felt exalted to be part of it. The air grew warm, uncomfortably warm. Several people fainted – I remember fretting about them, but my main worry was whether they needed to be conscious for the miracle to take place. And then my clarity went away, my mind clouded over. When I regained my senses I discovered that I was wandering in the jungle, far from the skull. It was still hot and seconds later a burst of heat boiled through the trees, like the heat from an explosion, knocking me off my feet. I made my way to the clearing as rapidly as I could manage. The shelters had been flattened and the adherents were gone. The skull, too, was gone, yet the trees and the bushes were virtually undamaged, and there was no sign of scorching or charring. I was distraught. The deaths of hundreds of people, no matter I had anticipated this outcome . . . how could I feel otherwise? But my feelings may have been due less to grief than to the fact that I had not witnessed the miracle. All those years laboring to create it, and I had missed it! Where was the result? Had nothing happened apart from a mass disappearance? I looked around the clearing, hoping to find some evidence as to what had taken place. I think I was on the verge of losing my mind. I stumbled about, going first one direction and then another, beating aside the brush, becoming frantic, until at last I spotted Jefe. He lay curled up on a patch of emerald moss, close to where the jawbone had rested. A beautiful little man, naked and perfect. I had believed the dragon would be reborn in his original form, but I knew him at once. The sight was so serene and lovely, it was like a balm to me. It had the quality of myth. His milky skin against the oval of vivid moss, his fists clenched like a newborn infant’s. I went to him and cradled him in my arms. He woke to my touch and gazed about in confusion, unable to speak, clinging to me. Once he was able to stand I helped him out to the road. Shortly thereafter the PVO showed up and brought us to Tres Santos.’
Yara drew a deep breath and released it slowly.
‘In the years since,’ she continued, ‘he’s made unbelievable progress. He’s learned to speak and perform as a human. It wasn’t learning, really, I don’t think. I’d teach him one thing and within a day or two he’d display a complete spectrum of behaviors. As if we’d given him a key and he unlocked a door behind which a store of knowledge was hidden. Yet his instincts are different from ours and he doesn’t understand us very well. He assists the PVO with their schemes – he has an amazing grasp of politics and is a brilliant tactician. He has no memory of his life prior to his rebirth, yet he does recall the plan for political dominance he developed and he knows something is not as it should be. He talks about a recurring dream, a vision in which he stands in an arena before thousands of people and says that when that dream becomes reality he will undergo a change – from what I gather he’s referring to a second alchemical act, a more radical transformation, one that will enable him to regain his original form and fly as once he did, without the need for mechanical aids.’ She laughed merrily, a laugh that seemed misplaced to Snow. ‘He’d spend all his time flying if I let him. Neither the PVO nor I have been in a hurry to illuminate him about his past. Rushing the process would damage him, I believe, and their concern is fueled by a desire to keep him ignorant and under their control. They think that once he’s done his duty for them, they’ll get rid of him. They haven’t accepted the fact that their control is limited . . . if it exists at all.’
Yara winced as she adjusted her posture. ‘That’s the story in brief. It sounds mad, I know, but . . .’ She shrugged.
It did sound mad, classically delusional, and Snow would have liked to pass it off as madness, but sufficient evidence existed to suggest that it was not and he believed to a certainty that he was in imminent danger. He had only half-listened to much of her account, consumed by worries about his future, but one sentence in particular had attracted his notice: ‘He’d spend all his time flying if I let him.’ From this he deduced that Yara was capable of influencing Jefe.
‘So your position here is . . . what?’ he asked. ‘Surrogate mother?’
‘In the beginning, yes, that would have been an accurate description of my function. But as he’s matured I’ve become more of a nurse, a servant. He turns to me for advice now and then, and he trusts me. I doubt that’ll change.’
‘Isn’t there anything you can tell me that’ll help with my situation? You must know some way of playing him. What buttons to push.’
‘Flattery,’ she said. ‘He responds to flattery, but he’s so mercurial, so volatile . . . it may prolong things, but sooner or later he’ll turn on you.’
‘Then I guess my best bet is to run.’
‘Don’t!’ She stretched out a hand as if to hold him back, and then seemed flustered by her show of concern. ‘When someone tries to escape him, he’s spectacularly cruel. They, the PVO . . . they set snipers in the hills to watch him. He found out and chased them down and tore them limb from limb.’
‘You saw this?’
‘I saw what he did to the man who gave the snipers their orders. Two other PVO officials witnessed the murder as well. And yet they still believe they can control him.’
‘Can he be? Controlled?’
‘You’re asking if I can control him? I don’t want to. He’s the only chance we’ve got.’
The old political argument again – any change is good, whatever the risk. It was proof against logic, but nonetheless Snow said, ‘What about the cost? He’s already slaughtered the men in the village and who knows how many more. Next he . . .’
‘What do you know about costs? I’ve got more than eight hundred souls on my conscience, and many of them friends. I’ve known for years that I’m damned. I want him to go through another transformation, even if thousands are killed in the process. He has no real depth of interest in us. Once he’s able to fly he’ll go his own way and leave us to sort things out. The PVO won’t survive his absence – they’re incompetent. I know this for a fact because I helped to recruit their leadership. The country will explode, the army will be in chaos, without direction, and we’ll have the opportunity for reform in Temalagua.’
‘If things are as you say . . .’
‘They are!’
‘It’s a shaky goddamn premise. What if you’re wrong? What if he doesn’t go his own way, or if this second transformation is a fantasy? You’ll be handing over your country to a fucking monster.’
‘We’ve had worse.’ Her voice became less strident and a note of tenderness crept in. ‘You don’t know him like I do. He doesn’t care about any human thing, about revenge or politics. They’re a means to an end, that’s all. Admittedly it’s an end he can’t yet see, because he’s in the dark about his past. He doesn’t remember the centuries he spent paralyzed on a plain, or much of anything before that morning when he woke in the jungle – but he’s obeying his instincts, acting out the behaviors he learned when he was a dragon. All he really wants to do is fly about and fuck female dragons. You of all people should understand that.’
Ignoring the dig, Snow said, ‘He’s going to be pretty pissed off when he discovers there aren’t any female dragons.’
‘You don’t know that there aren’t.’
‘You’re talking about those old wives tales? The ones that claim dragons are still living in Argentina?’ He made a derisive sound, expelling a jet of air between his lips. ‘Or maybe Oz.’
‘You see? This is what you always do. We can’t have a conversation without you ridiculing me. You’re right! I don’t have all the answers and I may be proved wrong in the end. But I’ve been right so far, haven’t I?’
The mechanical noise overhead rose in pitch and they sat for half a minute without speaking.
‘You could help me if you wanted,’ said
Snow churlishly.
Yara sighed impatiently and said, ‘What did you do after you left me?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Humor me. Where did you go after you left Temalagua?’
‘Home.’
‘And what did you do there?’
‘I got a job. Wrote a little.’
‘I imagine there were quite a few women in your life. And drugs.’
‘Yeah, you know. But mainly I thought about you. I realized . . .’
‘So you had a job, probably something that just allowed you to get by. You wrote some things no one ever saw . . .’
‘I published some stuff!’
‘And you fucked around. You lived the same kind of life in Idaho you lived here. That’s the man you expect me to sacrifice everything for? If I could help you, which I can’t, that’s the man I should give up . . .’
‘That’s not fair!’
‘No? You just admitted it.’
‘Superficially, yeah. That’s how it was. I was accustomed to that kind of life. But there were other things going on with me.’
‘You’ve got hidden depths? Is that what you’re telling me? You’ve grown a soul? Who cares? You expect me to toss aside the one chance we have of getting rid of the real villains? And I should do this because of the way you once made me feel?’ She waved her hand about as if dispersing a swarm of gnats. ‘Fuck it! Enough! I have to wash your clothes!’
She levered herself up from the chair, biting her lip, and stood, wobbly, trying to stabilize herself. He took hold of her elbow and, obeying an old reflex, she leaned into his shoulder. He slipped an arm about her waist – despite her infirmity it was supple as ever. She tensed, her breath quickened, and he found himself wondering how long it had been since she’d had a lover.
That evening Yara ushered Snow into a narrow corridor off the dining area ranged by a series of small bedrooms – like cells, really – each with plain concrete walls, a bath, and no lock on the door. She installed him in one of these and told him she was down the hall if he needed anything. He started to say that what he needed was her honesty, her help, but if her help were forthcoming, a direct approach was not the way to achieve it. Subtle pressure such as he had been applying ever since their initial conversation, reminding her of their golden moments years before, touching her as often as possible and sowing doubts about Jefe whenever he saw an opening, yet doing so slyly, indirectly – that was his best hope of influencing her. He knew he had made some progress, but how much longer could he afford to be subtle?
Lying in bed, he gave the situation a turn or two, but soon dozed off, waking some time later (an hour or two later, judging by his stupor) with the impression that someone else was in the room. He slit his eyes and saw a man standing beside the bed – just his trouser legs – and pretended to be asleep. The seconds slogged past. His circulatory system whined, his heart thudded and then he felt the man’s breath warm on his cheek. Recalling Yara’s talk about Jefe’s savagery, picturing him squatting beside the bed, sniffing out his fright and deliberating his fate, it was all he could do to refrain from shouting and scrambling away – yet he kept his eyes shut and his respiration normal until he heard the faint click of the door closing. Still terrified, he went over to the sink and splashed cold water onto his face. The mechanisms of his thought were gummed up, gears clotted with a sludge of fear. He pulled on his jeans and, after making certain the coast was clear, with no plan in mind, a frightened man making for the known, the familiar, he padded along the hall toward Yara’s room. Her door was open half an inch. He eased it wider.
She sat naked upon her bed, applying ointment to her pale skin, to the edges of what appeared in the dim yellow light of a reading lamp to be dark green slashes (not unlike a tiger’s stripes in form) that curved along her legs and torso and back. She was fleshier than she had been in her teens, her breasts larger and more pendulous, her pubic hair unruly, yet she was still beautiful, exquisitely proportioned, and thus after understanding that the dark green areas were some sort of growth, a hard, unyielding substance similar to the diamond-shaped convexity centering her tattoo, her tramp stamp, the likeness of a dragon’s scale, an implant she’d said . . . after understanding this he felt a mix of revulsion and sympathy and arousal. She set the tube of ointment on the bedside table among a phalanx of medicine bottles, opened a plastic container, and squeezed a dab of lotion into her palm. The diamond shape of the original scale (Snow now assumed it to be a scale) had lost its integrity and become a blotch occupying much of her lower back, the epicenter from which this apparent contagion had spread – as she reached behind her with the lotion, twisting her neck about so she could see to apply it, she caught sight of Snow. She gasped and fell onto her side, dropping the container and scrambling to cover herself. Snow entered the room and she said, ‘I don’t want you to see! Please!’ He perched on the side of the bed and laid a finger on her lips to mute her speech. Her eyes brightened with tears. ‘Please,’ she said again. He had questions, but knew what she needed from him. He picked up the plastic container and began to rub the lotion in, concentrating on places where the scale merged with the skin. She covered her face with her hands and sobbed, but he continued his ministrations, kneading the lotion into her skin, and felt stress draining from her body. Once he finished with her back, he turned her toward him and focused his attention on the stripes (he viewed them now as veins of a strange mineral) crossing her abdomen and fettering the slopes of her breasts, gripping and partly supporting them as would some cruel instrument of bondage. She searched his face, searching it (he suspected) for some twitch that would trigger her detectors, an aberrant expression conveying an excess of pity, a delight in the perverse, anything apart from an acceptable devotion. He maintained a calm, dutiful exterior, intent upon his task, and she surrendered herself, she closed her eyes and let him work. Before long, sighs escaped her lips, musical and daft, like the delicate sounds a contented infant might make. An urgency in her flesh manifested as a shudder, an arching of the back. Careful not to jostle her, he lay down and cupped her face in his hands and kissed her. Her mouth was slack, but soon she responded and when he broke from the kiss he saw that the lines of strain around her eyes and mouth were less deep, as if years had fallen away. He touched her belly, her nipples, the soft places between the stripes of her affliction – she caught his hand and whispered, ‘I want you, but you can’t come inside me. It’ll hurt me if you do.’ He was too riveted on her to explain that this act, born of empathy, had evolved into one of desire. His decade-long obsession had been given release and he was redeemed by her pleasure, he needed nothing else. He eased his fingers into the heated damp of her, eliciting a cry, but not one of pain. As he guided her through a prolonged and convulsive orgasm, he pressed his face close to hers and said, ‘I love you.’ He kept on repeating the words, a counterpoint to her moans, as if this inculcation were a proof of love, until her thighs clamped together, trapping his hand, and she lay with her head tight against his chest, trembling, enduring the final aftershocks.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
She nodded, but gave no further reply, her breath coming in shudders.
It began to feel awkward, holding her that way and not speaking, and he asked if she wanted him to leave. Another nod. She must be, he decided, ashamed of what had happened, or confused by it, or both.
He got up and adjusted his belt. ‘Will I see you in the morning?’
An affirmative noise.
He started to tell her once again that he loved her, but thought she might not want to hear it. He went to the door, peeked out into the hall.
‘Craig.’
She had pulled the sheet up so that her head and shoulders were visible, and – separated by an expanse of the white cloth, appearing to be part of a separate body – her right leg from the knee down, marked by dark green striations.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘If not tomorrow, soon . . . he’ll bring the women
from the pink house.’
‘The prostitutes?’
‘Yes, and others. He’ll throw a party. The women will be dressed provocatively. Whatever you do, don’t flirt with them. Ignore them. Act as if you’re offended by their interest in you.’
‘All right.’
‘It’s a test, something he does in order to discover whether or not you’re interested in his women. If you don’t show interest, that will buy you some time.’
He expected her to say more, but when nothing was forthcoming he peered out into the hall again.
‘Craig.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I . . . never mind.’
‘What about you and me?’ He turned from the door. ‘Will that piss him off?’
Time became elastic, stretching out into a single un-demarcated moment. At long last she said, ‘I’m not his woman.’
*
Over the next days all Snow’s questions evaporated, those dating from years before as well as those arising from his encounter with Yara. It was obvious she had been correct in her belief that there was magic in the world, albeit of a dire sort. The striping of dark green scale that defiled her body could not be explained by any means other than her contact with the dragon. It had to be a physical consequence of their unnatural spiritual union, a punishment levied upon her for consorting with beasts, a curse she had accepted in order to achieve her ends. He was nearly persuaded to her opinion that Jefe might be a force for good and, left to his own devices, would allow Temalagua to determine its destiny – but the recognition that he would be long dead by the time such a future came to pass diminished his enthusiasm for the idea.
As Yara predicted, on the night following their encounter Jefe herded a group of approximately twenty attractive women into the dining room, all clad in lingerie. Judging by Luisa Bazan’s story, Snow accepted that her husband Enrique had purchased every scrap of silk and lace that adorned them, but that Luisa’s accusations of infidelity were without merit, or else (if he were to believe Yara) Enrique would be dead. Among the women was the girl from the cantina, Itzel. Jefe thrust her at him and, expressionless, she attempted to fondle his genitals. Snow, as instructed, rejected her. Before long the room was aflutter with drunken, chattering, underdressed women who came at him singly and in pairs, making much over him, cooing and caressing, while Jefe watched icily from a doorway. Snow was impervious to their tender assaults, affecting boredom, brushing them off, winding up alone in a corner and thinking that Griuale’s legendary subtlety must have gone glimmering along with his memories, because Jefe was nothing if not unsubtle. He felt he would have been able to see through this deception without Yara’s help, and he speculated that Griaule may never have been a subtle creature, that his reputed prowess in this regard had been exaggerated due to his bulk (even a gross manipulation would be perceived as a subtlety when the manipulator was roughly the size of a county in Rhode Island) and to the ease with which people could be manipulated, thanks in large part to their eagerness to absolve themselves of responsibility and shift blame for their behavior onto an outside influence, as if they were at the mercy of forces beyond their control.
The Dragon Griaule Page 43
