The Dragon Documentaries

by J. D. Camacho

  I never hated her. She gave me no reason to do so. Instead, I missed her – not in the sense that I missed her care or missed her advice. Rather, I missed my chance to get to know her. I never did, never really tried. And while I could try now, I feared that it wouldn’t be the same. I missed my chance to have a close relationship with the only parent who stayed with me.

  And there it was, the only other strong feeling I had still inside me: regret. I regretted the missed relationship with my mother, and I resented the aborted one with my father. One feeling gave me hope to improve someday, the other gave me hate to wallow in. The two feelings clashed inside my head, made it pound again. I didn’t know what would happen if I lost one of these strong feelings. They were all I had left.

  PART SEVEN

  GUARDIANS

  Twenty-One

  This looked impossible to me. I had already hauled myself most of the way up The Mount since sunrise. Now, I saw the last section before the summit. The goal was near, but I might as well have been at the bottom again instead of hanging around at this place. This spot lacked ice and contained two horizontal cracks, spaced too wide to span with my pickaxes. The spot sat at the lip of The Mount, and The Mount laughed at my misfortune.

  And that’s when I heard him: the storm dragon. I hadn’t seen him since The Lake, but from the base of The Mount he now gnashed his teeth at me. I glanced down, and he spread his mud-colored wings and kicked up the whiteness at his feet. The storm dragon stared in my direction.

  I tried to center myself, looked back to the wall, analyzed my predicament. I said questions aloud into my collar mic, itself attached to my voice recorder in my jacket. How do I proceed? What do I do? I asked myself twice because I was trying to ignore the storm dragon beneath me. My heart pulsed in time with the thrashing of his wings.

  Now I looked up and saw shimmering rainbow scales underneath a colossal neck. The golden eyes of the rainbow dragon looked past me, through me, below me to the gnashing storm dragon. The dragons growled in unison until their growls turned to roars.

  I gripped my tools, stiffened in my boots, attempted to block everything out again. But I couldn’t.

  The rainbow dragon took flight and dived from above me to beneath me. I listened to the storm dragon roar again and launch himself and I felt the wind from their wings bat my back and press me against the wall. The wall and I became background; the dragons took center frame in the shadow of The Mount.

  I didn’t see them behind me, but I heard them. They snapped their mouths and beat their wings and thumped into each other and flapped away and hissed, as if they were two taunting bullies circling in the schoolyard. They snapped and thumped and flapped and hissed all around me.

  I tried to focus once more. My problem was the same: two cracks too far apart. I hammered my tool into the lower one and began to pull myself up and rock myself sideways, like a child climbing a tabletop. I clacked my spiked boot against the crack and brought the other one around the corner. My arms burned.

  The dragons now thrummed and whooshed and crackled with flame. They spit and sizzled between their flaps and hisses, and I began to sweat.

  I was rekindled somehow. My arms straightened and my other leg swung up and hooked the corner again. At this point, I felt as if I was about to stand on my hands. I grated wildly with my pickax on the wall above me, hunting for a hold, begging for a catch, chasing a break, desperate for some good fortune. But I didn’t find any yet.

  After a moment, I scratched along the wall and finally, blindly took a stab, hoping for the ax to catch. It did; it held me. I lifted myself up and unbent my legs. I looked at the lip, focused on it, moved up one final time.

  At the top at last, my body sprawled out. The whole of me suffered – my head pulsed, my chest stung, my limbs were on fire. I wanted to rest on this high earth, but I couldn’t ignore what was happening in the sky beside me. I took off my collar mic, removed my voice recorder, tried to speak into it directly. But I was weak and the ground shifted and shook and wobbled and the recorder fell to the ground.

  I looked out and watched the dragons attack. Now I became transfixed; the rainbow colors spiraled around the mud and orange, like bright paint on dark plywood. They gnawed at each other’s necks, grasped at each other’s talons. The rainbow dragon grabbed the storm dragon’s hind legs with her own and spun around and around to show her dominance and power. The rainbow dragon let go and the storm dragon fell and he tumbled and turned and spewed a stream of flame up into the sky and toward the other. The rainbow dragon dodged the sparkling death and came back around and tossed fireballs of her own at her opponent. The storm dragon flapped and glided and rolled and evaded in a brilliant zigzag of dirty orange blurs.

  I didn’t look away, couldn’t look away. My ears heard the chattering stones, the shifting snow, the vibrating rock. I focused on these two soaring in the sky even as I felt farther and farther away.

  The storm dragon appeared to have advantages. He looked larger, older, more bred for combat. The storm dragon flew by the cliffside and I saw scars on his snout and zeal in his gaze. When I peeked into the honeyed eyes of his counterpart, I saw a confusion tinged with a genuine curiosity surging through her. Was I right about the eyes, though? Could they really say so much?

  But I remembered the rainbow dragon’s gaze and how she radiated helpfulness. I saw her for what she was: a beautiful creature, a powerful creature, but one I never asked for help. Maybe I should have.

  And now a sound like a hundred shotguns went off some miles away and I felt the earth move and saw the sky split and watched ash spill into the air. I felt minutes pass too quickly. My tongue tasted like cigarettes; I found it hard to breathe. Above me, the dragons fought amid this ashen backdrop.

  The storm dragon took command. He spewed his fiery spit all around the rainbow dragon and the soot and the darkened heavens above. He forced the rainbow dragon to dodge and got her to pause and he grabbed her legs with his hind talons just as she had done to him and he spun as they had done before and, this time, the storm dragon controlled. He twisted the two together until their colors mixed and their cries merged and their sizes melded, like two kids locking arms on a playground. And they sped up until he let her go and she whirred in my direction.

  The floor started to cave and the crags began to collapse and the rainbow dragon toppled toward me and into the shattering pinnacle of The Mount. She disappeared inside the falling rocks.

  I clutched my chest and fell to my knees as The Mount crashed apart around me. I wanted to apologize, needed to apologize, but now only the storm dragon remained. He flapped toward me through the ash, stared me in the face, cried as loud as anything I have ever heard, like an elephant’s call but slowed down to a shattering roar. My eardrums throbbed. I teared up, cursed to myself. I felt heavy; I felt it to my core.

  Still on my knees, I spotted my recorder. I picked it up, rose, looked into the eyes of the storm. I held the recorder close to my lips and said, “The dragon. The ledge.” The recorder fell back to the ground.

  I approached the cliffside toward the storm dragon’s face, saw boulders strike him and cause him to dip slightly down from the edge. He clenched the wall and glared up at me and cried once more in my direction. I noticed his opal eyes again, and my heart plummeted.

  This horrible storm stared me in the face. I choked from the ash and from myself. I was strung up, suspended, left with few options. In fact, I knew of only one.

  And so, after closing my eyes, after stepping to the edge, after listening to the monster’s snapping maw – after surviving all that had come before, I dived off into the darkness of forever.

  PART EIGHT

  ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF

  Twenty-Two

  Magazine Issue 1064, October: Elmo Scrubb stood at five feet nine inches and carried an active but unassuming build, resembling more a day laborer than a bodybuilder. He had hazel eyes hidden underneath a black shag of hair, and he looked at ho
me in cold-weather gear. He marched with the confidence of a survivor, but he spoke with the self-consciousness of a writer. Elmo described things he loved; he hid things he lacked.

  Elmo read books, questioned stories, learned writing. He explored the outdoors. He honed self-reliance at a young age; he often adventured alone. He spoke sometimes as if he was searching for the answer, as if he was working out his thoughts in real time. Elmo had a family, and then he didn’t. He earned a postgraduate degree, ventured into the wilderness, and recorded his thoughts on his trip. And at the end, Elmo committed suicide by leaping off a mountain. He was twenty-three.

  Suicides demand explanations. Since the perpetrators no longer live, suicides are natural mysteries. They suggest deep depression or, more regularly, a chemical imbalance. Suicides demand such explanations because they lay bare human mortality; they lay bare the power of choice. In the medical study of suicide, individual choice leads to a focus on psychological causes. But that isn’t the only realm of explanation.

  “The social aspect of suicide is often downplayed,” a sociologist told this reporter. He spoke with a shrug of disgust at the topic, as if he hoped his research would help prevent suicide but doubted whether it actually could. “One of the greatest factors [for suicide] is in a person’s social relationships and how those relationships make them feel. Do they make them feel like they fit in? Like they’re a real person? Or do they make them feel like a role player who can’t handle the role they’re given? Like they’re without purpose? You see this most often with middle-aged men, but we don’t really care about them. A forty-year-old guy without a family who shoots himself doesn’t inspire a whole lot of sympathy. Nobody cares. Now, the death of an imbalanced young man? At the risk of sounding crass, that’s the more interesting, more romantic example when people think of suicide. But really, it’s all awful.”

  Elmo Scrubb didn’t live to middle age. He barely lived into his twenties. But where did he fit? Was he imbalanced? Purposeless? Or something else?

  Elmo grew up the youngest of two children born to Buddy Scrubb and Yvette Scrubb. His father was in the navy; his mother was an attorney. Elmo didn’t follow either of their career choices. Instead, he chose to write. He read the Harry Potter series as a gateway to literature and, when he became educated, he defended its merits vigorously.

  He had a limited relationship with his divorced parents. With his mother, he never wanted much more than some attention. “He never wanted for anything; I worked hard to make sure of that,” said Yvette, who had custody. With his father, Elmo never got much of anything at all. “He was gonna do just fine [without me],” said Buddy. With his parents apart, Elmo retreated into himself.

  He did once have an ally in his sister Olympia. “I’m nine years older than him, but we were pretty close,” she recalled. “We talked often. I mean, we did before our parents divorced. I didn’t see him much after that.”

  His family insisted that Elmo had a nonexistent relationship with drugs. They claimed that he was clean his entire life. To their credit, Elmo never had any medical record of prescription drug use, and no one this reporter spoke to had ever seen Elmo take drugs of any sort.

  So if it wasn’t a chemical imbalance, was it a lack of purpose instead?

  Elmo didn’t act like a stay-at-home introvert, but he did like to be on his own. He camped and hiked often in his teenage years and even learned how to climb. Elmo mixed in bushcraft guides with his fiction reading. He was smart, educated, experienced, resourceful. But he was also affable. “He was very stable, very happy,” his sister said. “Very friendly.”

  However, Elmo appeared increasingly paranoid as the recordings went on. He complained about his family, about his lack of connections. At times, he revealed an uncertainty in his recordings – a shakiness here, a pause there. He sounded as if he was hiding a fear he had the deeper he went into the wilderness. But Elmo never said what it was.

  The last recording is largely inaudible due to loud cracks and constant distortion. What does come through, though, sounds odd and disturbing. At one point, a noise like a gunshot pierces the static.

  To this reporter’s surprise, the gunshot sound likely came from a nearby eruption. A long-dormant volcano had exploded a few miles from where explorers found Elmo’s equipment and had blanketed the area with ash. The eruption had caused a chain reaction in the neighboring mountain range and forced several elevations to collapse into calderas when the magma pockets beneath them emptied. Elmo might have been standing on the edge of one of these mountains when the eruption occurred.

  But the final words on the final recording were clear enough. Through the noise, only two words can be heard, said only once: “The dragon. The ledge.” Explorers found Elmo’s voice recorder on the lip of a caldera. While much of his equipment was salvaged, Elmo’s body was never found.

  “Sometimes, stressful events can trigger these sorts of things,” the sociologist said. “We’re not just talking about traumatic events. We’re also talking about getting fired or failing a crucial exam or whatever. Those types of events can compound what’s going on inside a person. It might combine with a realization of a breakdown in a relationship or with an inability to manage overwhelming feelings. Sometimes it has to do with the loss of some secure sense of masculinity. These things can make the person feel like they have no other choice, no other say in the matter. And they justify their decision in their head. But remember: it’s not just the stressful event. It’s the combination of things, and oftentimes it starts with an inability to form close attachments with other people. That stuff has to be there first. And sometimes, that’s all it takes.”

  Of Elmo’s family, only his mother Yvette felt guilt for what had happened. She regretted not having a better relationship with her son. “I didn’t [spend enough time with him],” she cried. “I didn’t. And now I can’t anymore.” For her part, the lesson was clear: work hard to bridge the gaps with your family because, sometimes, that’s all that’s keeping you tethered to this world. She has recently reconnected with her estranged daughter and ex-husband.

  But Elmo’s family must live now with his choice, regardless of whether their relationships forced him into making it. “It was midnight, and what did I need?” Elmo said in his second-to-last recording. “I needed perspective; I’m almost there. What did I want? I wanted to climb The Mount; I’m relaxed and ready now. And what did I have? I have a growing confusion, a pair of pains that are barely holding me together. It was midnight, and I was sure I’d make sense of it tomorrow, when I was at the top, when I was all alone. I…I was sure of it.”

  J.D. Camacho is an author and attorney living in Virginia. He is an avid boxing fan and a member of the International Boxing Research Organization. He used to spar regularly at a boxing gym until a trainer put his head through a wall. No, that’s not a metaphor.

  The author can be reached at jdcamacho.write@gmail.com.

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