Chapter 14
“What is George going to do now?” I heard it said in a thousand voices as I ran from the crater. I had to scramble up the
slope to get out of there but it felt like everything was downhill, like I was fleeing some almighty mountaintop, banished
from on high, legs flipping over each other, hips out of socket with the speed and momentum of divine terror. There were a
thousand questions I should have asked the dragon—asked the dragon! the idea was absurd—questions that bordered on pure admin for this insanity—about diet, time management, environmental factors,
where the hell does a dragon actually come from?—but nothing was enough to distract from the throbbing pain in my stomach,
the nausea tinged with an immense sadness that had opened up with the dragon’s offer.
“What is George going to do?” I heard it in my mother’s voice, digitized and pockmarked with bad reception.
“Everyone’s wondering what’s George going to do.
” This is the story of how one man lost everything, then still managed to find some more things to lose.
Job gone. Boyfriend gone. Gone like ribbons of sand across the shower floor, gone like the sands of time itself. And now a dragon, a snake.
“You’re saying he just up and left in the middle of the night?” Mum said. I hadn’t called and told her this in tears. We were
only talking because of a letter she had received from a debt collection agency trying to contact me. “You guys didn’t have
a fight or something? You don’t have to tell me.” Everyone wants to know. No one wants to know.
I remember rolling my eyes. “We’re always having fights,” I said. “I guess we fought on our trip to Sitges one night, but
that was a while ago.” We hadn’t actually. That was the one night when we should have had a fight, but we didn’t. Why does
a person leave?
“You don’t have to tell me.” That was how she did it—situate the lever just right, pry enough to lift, but stop, look away, don’t tell me what’s underneath. Spiders or snakes or dragons, you don’t have to tell me. You look under there
alone.
Now I was alone, clambering up the slope of the crater in darkness, a wretched bouquet of decisions behind and before me.
I was too afraid to put them into words.
I remember the helplessness of that night in Sitges, of washing and only finding more sand, more layers of sun cream, my body
a sandcastle lapped up by the tide, crumbling down the drain, and wishing I could do that too, break down and slip away. Or
just drown.
Fuck stripper on beach. It was as if it had been scheduled on our itinerary.
Tick. My boyfriend’s reaction was not the end of our relationship, but the beginning of the downward spiral that ended with me coming face-to-face with the dragon, the devil himself.
He (my boyfriend, not the dragon, but then again, who knows) made no show of things, even giggling along with all the other boys back at the beach house, watching a video of me and the stripper fucking in plain view.
“Wait, pause it,” I remember saying, so I could admire myself.
I couldn’t tell where the stripper ended and I began, an oatmeal of pixels and grime.
I forced the guy who had filmed it to delete it, then forced him to delete it from his Recently Deleted folder, seeing it in a lineup of bad selfies, bad food pics, bad sunsets.
We all felt the proverbial thump on the shoulders of it being gone, and the shame of having almost said out loud, “Can you send it to me first?”
What were we living for?
I wished my boyfriend had been angry or cold or even fascinated, anything. Instead he acted completely normal—not even acting
like nothing had happened, but accepting what had happened as casual fact, an occurrence, like weather changing. He was in bed on his
phone, scrolling through regular things. Mindlessness. We talked about tomorrow’s flight home, remember to check in, where
should we eat, what was the weather back in London; so afraid of sin that we had excluded ourselves from any narrative form
and become these magnetized bobblehead ah-hyuck-hyucks. I almost said, “So that was a crazy night,” to get some kind of closure
at least, but I knew that doing so would only claw back all the airy words we had used to blow ourselves so far away from
each other. And part of me was afraid of what he would say in response: not anger, not sadness, but something worse. “Yeah,
that was pretty crazy, George. G’night.”
What is George going to do you don’t have to tell me. All in the same fucking breath.
I craved reality, I craved punishment. I wanted to believe in the universe’s counterbalances and that the vicious gluttony of having sex with a stranger on a beach had a calculable heft to it that eventually would swing back into me; something deeply human inside me had cried out for this, and look, finally, it took seven hundred years of time travel and a five-hundred-and-fifty-fucking-whatever-year-old dragon but I finally had it.
I had wished for a world of consequence and raw humanity and I was given one: beat, imprisoned, living in shit and met with life’s limits in a land where morality was a tangible, foreseeable element that interlaced all things.
When I moved, Simon moved. When I moved, a dragon appeared.
This wasn’t God-fearing obsessive compulsion, this was gravity and evolution.
Love, commitment, consecration—these are mechanisms with more command over the world than anything else, and when I had reached a point where I had so exempted myself from their reach for so long, they had pulled me rapturously through time itself.
I deserved everything that was happening to me and more.
I looked back at the crater and saw the dragon’s whole frame emerged from the earth now and I threw up. A ceramicist’s gray
splattered the ground. It felt incredible actually—a euphoric mixture of endorphins and adrenaline slid up and down my spine
and I felt mania, crying until I was laughing, laughing until I was crying, here on the border between hell and home.
Did I want to go home?
And which one was that?
In the distance, the dragon stretched its magnificent wings, a silent, blackened moth.
It stretched out its body, shook out its hind legs, laid its neck out long, and yawned—but it held its mouth open, it didn’t close it.
I held back and watched, waiting for fire or something, but there was nothing.
He held his mouth open while resting it on the ground.
Then I saw something. A figure ran across the crater’s open plain, running toward the dragon.
I squinted—it was a person, a man. He was dressed all in white and he wore a helmet, a round, circular helmet, not like a helmet from here because it wasn’t metal, it was glass—and there was a light.
An electric light. I gasped at the sight.
The figure was unnaturally lit up with brilliant white against the dark blue dusk.
For the first time in a year, I was seeing an artificial light.
Inside the man’s glass helmet, a ring of light illuminated his way forward as he ran toward the dragon, which was still holding its mouth wide open.
When the man finally reached the dragon, he went—what? —yes, he went inside.
The man ran inside the dragon’s mouth.
The dragon closed its mouth.
And then the dragon took flight. The largest bird on planet Earth flapped its wings. It hardly needed to run for takeoff,
only needing to catch the slightest breeze with its sturdy sails. As soon as it was fully airborne, it reached a speed I couldn’t
make sense of, like it was both sprinting in place and zooming forward. Its body both stretched out and magnified itself.
There was a blur and a contraction as it shot across the sky, and then it was gone. It disappeared like a fine loose thread
pulled free.
“What is George going to do?” asked Mum, third-person, saving all parties from direct confrontation. I hung up.
Twilight bloomed around me in the forest, all manner of green things had turned blue, spreading coolness and leafy sighs.
Oak trees towered over me—I had never seen oak trees this tall in modern England.
Perfectly vertical lines of thick timber went straight up to the moon, where they exploded in a symphony of branches, squiggling in the sky, going every which way.
Wood creaked and leaves fluttered and shook.
And down this corridor of trees, appearing in flashes and spurts at first, was a torch.
Light approaching. My man. What had I done?
I cursed. I wiped my tears and cleaned my face but this triggered a new wave of upset, a horrific self-pity and shame, and
I had to wipe that away as well. I walked toward the light, steady but completely unsure. I walked toward Simon, but just
seeing him made me cry again, made me run to him. I crashed into him, we embraced. In a perfect world we would have both reached
the same apologetic conclusion, but I’m afraid mine was . . . I’m afraid . . . I’m just afraid.
“I’m sorry,” I said. All I could do was say it over and over again, speak over the fear of the idea that roamed on the very
edge of my mind. I wanted both of us to fall through the earth, no explanations, just meld and melt away. “I’m sorry, I’m
sorry, I’m sorry.” My heart snapped like a magnet to all the different ways it could betray Simon at the same time as I nuzzled
my face into his chest.
But Simon was in tears as well. “No, I’m sorry,” he said, and the pain of it twisted inside me. “You’re right, we have to
get out of here. Let’s leave. Let’s go to Scarborough or back to London or York. Let’s run away and start over.”