The Dragon Documentaries

by J. D. Camacho

  Inside, you see many items alongside Yvette: boxes of toy dragons, piles of candy, rows of appliances, stacks of clothes, aisles of food. You see everything a person needs. But do you? You look into this all-consuming maw of consumerism, a maw gritting and polishing its teeth in the direction of its food. It’s aisles of food preying on the food of you. Now you consider whether you’re overthinking it. You gather yourself and want Yvette to tell you if she has any coworkers.

  “No, it’s just me,” she says. “I rent my office. I keep my own clients and my own schedule. I was very busy earlier this week, but I only had that new client meeting today. I can afford to run some errands.”

  What else does she have to do today besides go to Walmart?

  “Well, I have to talk to you.”

  You both arrive at the photo center. Yvette requests her blown-up photographs, and the worker tells her to wait a moment.

  The worker turns around, and Yvette places her fingers on the cool glass counter. She looks away from you. Do you see an opening? You don’t want to be rude, but you can’t help yourself; you need to know. You ask about her children again.

  Yvette looks back at you. She appears to ignore your lack of tact. “Olympia was a lot like her father,” she says. “She always did well in school, but you’d never know it if you talked to her.” Yvette stops herself. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make it sound like she came off as stupid, but Oly was a tough kid. She wanted to be that way. I remember when Oly started driving, and even before she got her driver’s permit, she wanted to give it a try. So I took Oly out to a big parking lot; I think I took her out to this parking lot, actually. I took her there so she couldn’t hurt anybody – so she couldn’t hurt us! – and I let her loose. And she almost ran into all the lampposts and shopping carts.” She grins. “But she thought she could do it. Oly wanted to be independent so badly. So she did her own thing; I did my own thing. That’s the way it is now, too. But back then, it was nice to see my children every day.”

  How often does she see Olympia now?

  “Not enough.”

  The worker comes back and says the photos are not under their proper number. He wants Yvette to wait a little longer. The worker returns to the drawers of photos and away from you. You ask Yvette about Elmo specifically.

  Yvette hunches over more. She turtles. “I can’t talk about it,” she says finally. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Why does she want the interview then?

  “Because I woke up one day to a voice that told me that this story – our family – could tell other people what not to do,” she says. She shakes her head disapprovingly at the floor. “I wanted people to learn from our mistakes.”

  You want to know what mistakes.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know. I’ve seen so many broken families over the years. But I don’t know about my own family. I try to be pragmatic, but I’m also obsessive-compulsive. I don’t like disorder. I want things to work right, the way they should. Our family didn’t work that way. And maybe I don’t understand why. Maybe I thought that a person like you could make sense of it all, by talking to Buddy and Oly and me and by listening to those tapes. My family – we don’t keep in touch. They do their own thing. Even with what happened, with Elmo, we still don’t talk.”

  Can’t she just reach out to them?

  “You have to understand: we’ve said mean things to each other, nasty things over the years,” she says. “And we were never the type of family who would have meals together and talk on the phone, things like that. They have their own lives. It’s not my business.”

  You wonder if her answer makes sense. You consider whether you should press further. But before you say anything more, her photos arrive. The photos show Yvette on a cruise ship with a pair of identical boys. Both look like they’re in middle school to you. You want to know who they are.

  “These two? They’re my twin sons.”

  Seventeen

  You struggle to understand what these two mean. Who are they? Are they hers by blood? Do they have a father figure? Do they know of Elmo? They puzzle you. You try to follow up with Yvette, but she tells you to wait until she gets back to the car.

  On your way out of Walmart, you pass by your fellow customers. They look united in their indifference to each other. They each dress as if they don’t care how they appear in public – mismatched colors, ill-fitted pants, visible undergarments, soft-looking sleepwear. Some let their ass hang out or their belly hang loose; they scratch themselves and grunt. Yet they look at ease to you. You imagine that they’re all here to shop, not to socialize. Does this desire for privacy feel pained or practical to you? You guess the latter and figure that none of these people read your magazine. But you realize that you don’t really know what they read. You don’t know them. You’ve never met them. You don’t even know about Yvette’s other sons. Then you think you’re thinking too much again.

  You return to the sedan, buckle your smooth seatbelt, wait for Yvette to start the car. Its engine revs once more, as if signaling to you that it’s time to begin again. At last, you ask about her twins.

  “I had them after Buddy and I divorced,” she says. “I was going through a lot at the time. I had Elmo, who was still very young. Oly was away at school. And I met this guy at a bar. He was an officer in the military. He said the nicest things to me, and that was when no one seemed to care. My mother was gone already, my father was back home, 6500 miles away. And I had clients here and practiced here; I couldn’t leave. We went on a few dates, and he sounded like he understood me. And why wouldn’t I listen to him? When no one is there for you, when you’re struggling as a single mother – why wouldn’t I listen? And then I got pregnant, and he left. It was a mess.”

  You notice that the rain has gotten heavier since you arrived at the Walmart. As you leave, the water now plops rather than pitter-pats across the windshield.

  “I went after him, though,” Yvette continues. “I had to dig through the trash to find a DNA sample. I had no one helping me. And then I had to hire an investigator to find him, and he tracked him down and I dragged him to court. And I remember bringing my little twins with me, and when the judge asked me for evidence, I held them both up and said, ‘Your Honor, this is my evidence.’ The judge didn’t like that too much.”

  Where are they now?

  “Now? They’re in class. It’s a school day.”

  You want to slap yourself for your dumb question. You move forward and ask whether they had a relationship with Elmo.

  “No, I wouldn’t say so,” she says. “Elmo was very nice to them, but he was very adventurous. He always wanted to go places, places his younger brothers couldn’t go and places I didn’t have time to go. And if I thought it was hard with one child as a single mother, three children was a terrible burden.” She winces. “I’m sorry, I know that sounds harsh. I don’t want to sound like a bad mother. And I’ve made some choices along the way. But I raised Elmo right. He never wanted for anything; I worked hard to make sure of that. He grew up and graduated and got another degree. He never caused me any trouble. He never needed any drugs. He was a healthy, smart, caring boy. I made sure he had nice things. And I bought him his books! He always thanked me for that, and then he’d go off and read them by himself which, honestly, worked out for me because I could focus on the younger boys, who were a handful.”

  And how is her relationship with her other sons?

  “Very good,” Yvette says. She appears to brighten a little. “They’re great kids. They don’t cause me any trouble either. When they were younger, I’d have them in the office with me. We had toys and everything. Some clients might not have liked it, but I think some of them, for some of them they could see that I was just like them in a way. That I had my struggles, too, and that I really wanted to help them. So I got to spend a lot of time with my little guys. And I took them places on weekends, to the zoo and to train expos. They used to really like trains. And when they go
t a little older, I took martial arts classes with them. I’d spend as much time with them as I could.”

  You see the pallid flatness of Kansas zoom by like an old film reel. You ask whether their father ever came back.

  “The father of my twins? No, he never did,” she says. “And I didn’t want him to, because he was a bad person. I used my time to help them, and he didn’t.”

  And does she remember if she spent time with Elmo?

  Yvette crinkles her nose. She looks like she’s listening to the downpour outside. “I didn’t,” she says through tears. “I didn’t. And now I can’t anymore.”

  You want to stop, but you steel yourself. You ask her if she regrets anything.

  “Yes, I do,” Yvette says. She wipes the flood from her eyes, drowns in her words. “I’m sorry, this is hard to talk about. I want to give my kids everything, and I give my two boys everything. It’s all about them. But I didn’t spend enough time with Elmo. I provided for him, but, because my choices led to my twins, and I didn’t, I just couldn’t…” For a moment, she gags like she’s suffocating. “And now…now I don’t have a chance anymore. All I have are those recordings he took, and I can’t even get through them all.”

  Should you stop? You can see how taxing this must be.

  Yvette arrives at her home and parks next to your rental car. “I’m sorry, you seem like a nice person,” she says. “I still want our story told, but I can’t give you any more. I know I’m cutting it short. Use what little you already have, but I can’t keep talking to you. I just can’t.”

  You tell her you understand as well as you can. You thank her for her time, step out of the sedan, walk back to your car in the rain. The cold water splashes on your scalp and shoulders. You open your car and get inside.

  And then you hear my voice that has told you what to do so far. Whose story do you have? Do you even have a story? You’re not sure. You’ll know once you finish the recordings.

  PART SIX

  RAINBOWS

  Eighteen

  It was very late morning, and what did I need? I needed to rest, so I decided to pause for the day. Before I left The Lake, I had gathered food from my remaining deadfall traps, traps that had survived the rainfall and had captured enough food to last me the rest of my journey. I took out some of my recently cooked wild jerky and sat on a rock in the heart of an ice cave. The cave was in a glacier field, past The Lake and among low-rising mountains, on my way to my goal. I needed strength for the coming climb.

  The cave intrigued me. Its glacial walls gleamed a bright blue. Earlier, they hadn’t melted at all when my ungloved hand glided across them; they had remained solid and slippery against my dry fingers. The walls had felt like pure, embodied coldness to me. Now I saw morning light shine through and engulf the oval entrance, a white eye framed by a glimmering blue brow. I heard the crunch of a frozen stream underneath my spiked boots. My face began to warm; the air felt hotter in here somehow. I started to rest, relax.

  My mind went over the last few years. I thought about my MFA program. Why did I care about the program? Well, I had graduated not too long ago, and no one came to the ceremony. I thought about it because it was fresh in my mind.

  The program catered to aspiring writers, and I applied gleefully. I knew a Master of Fine Arts program carried no guarantee of becoming a great novelist, or even a paid novelist, but I didn’t care about that. I had no such aspirations. Rather, I wanted to learn. I was ready for the costs. And I was young enough to do this and still have a career elsewhere.

  Unfortunately, the other students didn’t share my views. Did all MFA programs resemble mine? I didn’t know, but there at the program, I saw the most arrogant, bloated, and full-bearded people in thick-rimmed glasses I had ever met. When we would workshop stories together, they were insufferable. These beanie-wearing chain-smokers all wrote about the same capital-T topics: Despair. Ennui. Drugs. Trains. Coffee. Always coffee. Without fail, their characters would contemplate existential crises while swirling around a cup of the black stuff.

  These people avoided genre works, never tried science fiction or fantasy beyond what they read when they were younger. Or rather, they never tried genre fiction again if it wasn’t written by Proust or Kafka or Vonnegut. Of course, those authors deserved to be read – but they weren’t all there was.

  I didn’t mean to condemn MFA programs. Others had to be different from mine. But I spent hours in close proximity with these people. I got to know them through their comments, their stories. I swam around in their heads. And I didn’t like what little I saw.

  Was I similar to these people? I didn’t look like them, dress like them, talk like them. But maybe I shared some of their headspace. After all, here I was, a twenty-something writer in the wilderness, seeking perspective on my life. If I replaced “wilderness” with “Brooklyn,” I’d be just like them. I’d know better once I scaled The Mount.

  My back started to ache as I sat on the hard rock. I shifted, readjusted. My head began to hurt again, as if a ram was repeatedly butting the inside of my skull.

  Then I felt a presence. My eyes saw shadows, my ears heard cries. I shuddered, but not from the cold. I spotted a stretch of skin dotted with rainbow scales moving past the entrance, skin stretched long like the neck of some dinosaur, skin like I had never seen before. And I saw the skin bend and crane around until a golden eye peered at me through the bright entrance, the white eye around the golden one, its lids contracting ever so slightly. I finally came face to face with a dragon, and I felt a connection instantly. But I felt far away, too, as far away as I had always felt.

  I stood up and walked over.

  Nineteen

  It was just after midday, and what did I want? I wanted to get out of this ice cave, get a wider look around. But I saw the dragon blocking the entrance. I stood away from my seat, closer to the entrance, but I couldn’t pass because of her. The rainbow dragon pulled away and tried to move, jaw forward, into the entrance. She hid her teeth in her tank-like mouth, snorted out a scent like hot peppers. But she didn’t fit; she risked breaking the ice cave if she forced her way in. So the dragon pulled her snout away and brought her golden eye back around. She looked at me as a doctor might, checking my health, watching my condition. But she backed away soon after, and I stepped out of the cave to discover why.

  Then I saw what I didn’t expect: two smaller dragons snapping and soaring around the larger one. The rainbow dragon stood on her hind legs on the rocks near the ice. She spread her wings wide, curled her long neck around, switched her attention back and forth between the two sedan-sized creatures flying around her. When upright, she looked like a garish, metallic 747 balancing on its tail fin. Her wings had a scaly but feathery quality to them, fanned out over the ice as if shielding it from the torrid sun. Indeed, when the smaller ones landed beside her, she hid them underneath her wings.

  The smaller dragons didn’t have rainbow scales. In fact, they didn’t have many distinguishing features at all. They looked embryonic, half formed, like a salamander does, as if there should be more to them. There wasn’t, as far as I could tell. But I noticed how the rainbow dragon covered them, protected them, nuzzled them from time to time.

  I stood so transfixed that, at first, I failed to notice the sun myself. It bore down directly from above, with the glacier beneath my spiked feet, the cave behind me, and the dragon in front of me. I squinted in the light, crunched back on my feet as I covered my eyes with my hand. And now I watched the winged smaller ones rise up and take off to my right, off toward The Mount; I saw the rainbow dragon do the same. I wanted to take flight, wanted to pursue.

  But I knew that it was too late.

  Twenty

  It was late evening, and what did I have? I had lost the rainbow dragon and her kin, but I had found my way to The Mount. It stood now mere feet in front of me, and I looked up, like a toddler might to a scolding parent. It loomed over, as if daring me to climb and find what I was looking for. But what wa
s I looking for, again? Perspective, I told myself. No shit. And I believed – no, I knew – that once I got to the top, I’d see myself in a whole new way. I looked up even higher, arched my neck back to glance at the starry sky.

  My goal was so close, and I grew restless. I shook more from the excitement than from the cold – at least, that’s what I told myself. My feet shuffled on the snow at its base. I wanted to be beside its solitary majesty, to be atop its sole grandeur. I wanted to be.

  On several occasions I had climbed cliffs, but rarely alone, and never on anything like The Mount. My head turned over the challenge. I let my aching mind wander into the future. I quit seeing the grey crag in front of me, stopped gazing at the white cliffs above.

  I wanted to wait until morning to start the climb, so I had the rest of the night to calm myself, gather strength. Too bad I couldn’t read books in the dark, though. Books were a great way to pass the time for me. I loved to read. Have I mentioned that before? I probably have, but it was true.

  In some ways, books were a form of nostalgia. They reminded me of those really fun, rainy afternoons in Kansas I used to have as a kid. Back then, I just had a book and my own mind; I had built a kind of relationship with them. And I didn’t mean friendships with specific characters, though that happened from time to time. More than that, I created a relationship with reading itself; I felt more connected, less alone. And I knew I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

  But I discovered that my mother wasn’t one of them; she wasn’t a fellow reader. She bought me books, liked that I read. Yet she never read with me or talked to me about it. I remembered her buying me a stack of books, smiling, and walking to the other room to check on my half brothers. They were too young to read with me, but she wasn’t.

  I appreciated my mother; she raised me, protected me, stuck with me when others wouldn’t. And she gave me so many books to read. But I could never share those reading experiences with her; I couldn’t share much of anything with her. We barely spoke when I was young, and we spoke less as I got older.