Chapter 17
timeline: fights with boyfriend, dishonesty at work, debauchery in mind and on beach, all these stones skipping easily, predictably
to my sinking. It was simple cause and effect and while the effects were of a great magnitude (unemployment, unlovability),
I never looked back on them with bewilderment. I was never really surprised. I was never shocked.
There was only one moment when that calm turned slightly on its heel and the grief of reality slipped in.
It was early in my dog walking endeavor, before the overstuffed wolf pack, back when I only took one or two dogs at a time.
I was at Greenwich Park watching the sunset over the skyline.
It was early summer. Frisbees and green clouds of parakeets swam through the air.
I was sitting in the grass with a black Lab and a terrier sufficiently exhausted on either side of me, my body telling me this was the most satisfying day of work I’d ever had despite my mind feeling otherwise.
Suddenly the Lab’s tail began to wag and he perked up.
He stood, whimpered, and nervously skipped over to another dog walking across the field.
I did the usual smile and nod to the owner and we let the dogs sniff each other and play for a few minutes.
Something in them had clicked in that unspoken way of animals and they were instantly giddy together, no hesitancy or fear, only quick yips of excitement, a whine and a wiggle of the hips, a game of chase performed like a well-rehearsed ballet, like they knew each other from long ago.
And I remember a distinct, painful longing opened up in my heart as I watched them, an ache that swelled throughout my whole body, that almost made me cry aloud: I wish I could have that.
The thought was as simple as that, and it caused me so much pain.
1301. In the end, it was only me who remained, no other living thing—and I doubted that even of myself. I stayed with the
dragon long after the shores of lava had hardened and my clothes had burned away and blisters had risen in welts across my
skin. I smelled burning hair and burning men but found nothing organic, only phones and tablets, plastic bottles, forever
chemicals, car parts, and metal beams, chains, buckets, nails—all this undigested dragon kibble etched into bricks of charcoal—not
a hand in sight to grab, not a face, no one crying “George!” and no one to whom I could cry “Simon!” This, now, was real silence,
punctuated only by weeping and a hacking cough, my calls to no one eking out of me as whispers and strains, the throat in
my mouth a cave inside a cave.
Fire lapped up the dragon’s skin and chewed through muscle right down to white bone.
His coiled head remained mostly whole, coated in ash.
His mouth was left open, as if it were permanently aghast at me peering inside—in fact I walked back inside it, standing and sitting and curling up and waiting with a feeble hope Simon would crawl out from some hidden bowel, walk magically through the forest of teeth.
Under the dragon’s tongue there’d be a portal I could step through into whatever world Simon had disappeared into and I’d come out the other end and see him there in jeans and a T-shirt, nice trainers, phone charged, ironic and mawkish about how easily he had embraced the twenty-first century, or twenty-second, thirty-seventh, eighty-fifth, who knows, and it would look good on him, better than it had ever looked on me, and he’d smile, pick me up, clean me up—we’d shower together like we used to share a tub together but there’d be limitless water, limitless soap and towels and perfumes and red cheeks—and I wouldn’t even have to say I’m sorry—because I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry, Simon, I really am. I don’t know what came over me back there.
I had thought to say that in the moment—words of denial had crossed my mind almost as if in parody.
“It’s not what it looks like!” as if he had caught me and the dragon in an unseemly tryst. I was an embarrassment and a cliché right up to the moment of vanishment, right to the very end.
I looked out from the jaws of the dragon, saw the gray, decimated world, and cried.
Tremors drove through me and all I could do was collapse and weep, unable to breathe.
I stayed in the mouth of the dragon for a long time.
It was comforting in a strange way to be in hell, to be at the very bottom and know that there was nothing farther below me.
Ashes coated my body and all my surroundings, creating a new silence I had never experienced before.
The silence from when I first time traveled had been surreal and almost a body-horror, but this new silence was exactly what it was: it was silent.
I heard nothing. I felt nothing. There was no ringing sensation in my ears, no alien croaks from deep within my body.
There was only absence, complete void. The empty, secluded glade of a zero.
Then One.
“Sir?”
A child’s hand touched my shoulder. A child’s, I guessed, only because it felt small and weak. In all other ways it was older
than would be considered humane, dead almost and brittle, coated in cuts, blisters, and ash, dirty fingernails, actually,
missing fingernails.
“Sir George?”
I rolled over and my dry eyes stung, blinked, coated themselves in acid tears, blinked again, saw a form, saw a visage of
gray, the form of a child—the child, the kid from dinner. My god. The kid, my excuse. I yelped like a lunatic. I grabbed the kid and clutched him to me.
“You killed the dragon,” he said.
Words failed. I could only cry. I stood up and stepped away, coughed and spit, tried to compose myself but that only made
my vision clearer, so I could better see the shell-shocked kid and how one of his ears was blown off, foot pointing the wrong
way, his new tremor and dried blood, the rocks embedded under skin.
As clear as when I had first arrived in this world, I called for God.
I watched the six-year-old pick at his wounds, pick at mine, wince with every movement and I waited for God to step in and say something.
Here, God, look—here’s another casualty of this thing that’s slipped through the netting of time and threatened to ruin it all, nullify this whole grand experiment in earthing, do you mind?
Do you care? Don’t you want to step in and say something?
If I leave this kid here, will you mind?
If I take him with me only for him to run off and die in some other battle, will you be fine?
I sat with the child in the mouth of the dragon while we sutured our bleeding, wrapped sprains and breaks in what cloth was
still salvageable. No angel appeared. No voice from heaven. No eyeball of God, blinking once for yes, twice for no. Again
just that silence.
I sighed—no, I smiled, actually. It was the physical reaction to the buoying of my cheeks against a sudden lightness, nay, a sudden emptiness, but it was a smile nonetheless and this was enough of a hydraulic to keep me upright, to stand and move and climb.
We left the dragon and clambered over rocks, scampered up cliffs.
Half the well had landslided itself into more of a modest slope, so this wasn’t pure mountaineering, but it was arduous.
I carried the child on my back—the child whose name I never bothered to learn, who I’m sure is dead by now from sepsis or tetanus or maybe he never even had a name, just a cattle-prodded serf, purpose-built for rote tasks dressed up in the temptation of bravery.
I was going to put him on a horse and send him off to the king with news of the dragon’s demise, which reminded me—“Fuck!” I said it like forgetting my keys, the last gasp of my own modernity.
We were still in the crater, but out of the well.
A bright gray sky was above us. “Stay here,” I said to the kid.
He stared straight ahead, only bones and gristle.
I ran back down into the crater. I tripped and fell three times but what did it matter at this point.
I grabbed my sword and went to the dragon’s head one last time.
With the sword as a saw, I extracted the smallest tooth from its mouth, rubbery gums still succulent, great big nerve endings floppy and alien.
It took even longer to climb out of the well with the tooth strapped to my back, but I made it.
I found a horse. I loaded it with the child and the tooth—its knick-knock legs buckled slightly. Then I said goodbye.
I did not accompany them to Scarborough. The mammoth tusk of a tooth would speak louder than anything I’d be able to say.
I didn’t even bother going back to the smallholding. I left Yorkshire. In a way it was like I left England completely, left
the entire United Kingdom, which wasn’t a kingdom yet and had far from any semblance of unity. A year ago, time had removed
me from itself, and so now, this time, I took the clear, decisive action to remove it from myself. I went away and embraced
my end.