The Dragon Griaule (40 page)

Dusk blended the shapes of the leaves and branches, but the skull appeared to gain sharpness and detail and vitality, standing out from an indistinct backdrop, gray and granitic in the halflight, as if it were the only real thing in the picture. I envisioned the muscles of the face and jaw reforming over the bone, the packed masonry of green and gold scales reassembling, and I could have sworn that I glimpsed movement in the oily shadows filling its eye sockets, the flickering of a membrane, a glint of reflected light, evidence of life harbored within, still potent after centuries of dormancy. I felt its shadow heartbeat on my skin like the reverberations of a gong. My susceptibility to suggestion, I thought. Yet I couldn’t rid myself of the suspicion that the skull was the source of danger and a catastrophe was about to occur, that a more terrible visage would surface explosively from beneath that illusion of bone and fungus, and the dragon would shrug off its vegetable shroud and move against the city, mistaking Temalagua for Teocinte, the city where it had been imprisoned for millennia . . . or perhaps any city would serve as an apt target for his vengeance. This was nonsense, sheer fantasy, but the idea had fastened onto me and I stared at the skull for such a long time, I became convinced that my watchfulness was all that prevented the transformation. When fatigue caused my concentration to falter I worried that the change had begun without my notice. Infinitesimal changes. Fluctuations on the
sub-atomic level. Subtle shifts that we would not register until too late and a shattering conclusion was already upon us.

From that day forward I more-or-less accepted that some fragment of the dragon’s anima clung to the skull and what skepticism I retained derived from my feelings for Yara, feelings that had magnified in intensity and scope over the weeks. I knew I was falling in love with her and love was something I had hoped to avoid – she wasn’t the sort of girl you gave your heart to unless you were looking to get it back FDA approved and sliced into patties. In many ways she was the female version of me, efficient in her cruelty where I was casual. More political and less cynical, but no less a manipulator, not someone in whom you would place your faith. I tried to equate loving her with my revamped attitude toward the skull, countenancing them both to be symptoms of mental defect, of weakness induced by exposure to a spiritually toxic environment. She was still the child-woman I had met in Barrio Villareal – I knew more about her than I had, but nothing that would alter the basic picture, and yet her flaws had diminished in my eyes and her strengths had become pre-eminent. This idealization, I told myself, was patently a distortion, a by-product of love’s madness, but I couldn’t so easily label and dismiss my emotional and physical responses to her. And, further, while I had my doubts about Yara’s sanity, her honesty, I didn’t really want those doubts to prosper.

Often I would pass an hour or two in the early evening sitting in the eye socket (the one not overgrown by vines), where I would pretend that my presence counterfeited the dragon’s missing pupil and was staring out over his kingdom, as it were. At full dark the clearing was a black field picked out by a scatter of dull, redly-glowing patches, like embers left over from a great burning whose smoky smell infused the air, with here and there the backlit, lumpy shapes of huts and tents, and silhouetted figures moving along sluggishly, appearing to struggle with their footing, as if walking in thick ash. Despite this infernal vista, my thoughts tended to be upbeat, consisting of flash visions of Yara, pieces of memory, a look, a cunning smile, a touch. One
humid night she joined me there, kept vigil with me, and after a silence said, ‘This place was so much different when I arrived.’

‘Oh?’ I said.

‘There were only eight or nine people and most of them were crazy. Homeless guys. A couple of old women. The clearing was very small. Not even a quarter of what it is now.’

She left a pause and I did not try to fill it. This was the first time she had spoken in a nostalgic tone and I was afraid of spoiling the moment, hoping for a revelation. Birds rustled the foliage overhead, a last flurry before sleep.

‘It’s strange,’ she said at last. ‘I never thought any of this would happen. When I came here I was miserable, full of anger. All I wanted was to die . . . and to injure people by my death. I still have anger inside me, but now that seems irrelevant.’

She fell silent again and I felt the need to prompt her.

‘Some of your adherents tell me . . .’

‘They’re not
my
adherents,’ she said sharply.

‘The people down below tell me they’re here to help with the dragon’s rebirth.’

‘Did you laugh at them?’

Two people appeared to be dancing down below, silhouetted by a campfire, but I could hear no music. I felt Yara’s eyes on me and said carefully, ‘I’m less inclined to laugh than once I was.’

‘They have dozens of theories,’ she said. ‘I don’t subscribe to any of them.’

‘What theory
do
you subscribe to?’

‘I have no theory.’

‘But you advise them, you’re their guide, their mentor.’

Her sigh seemed to ignite a chorus of cicadas. ‘Each morning I go into that little chamber . . . you know the one.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll have a nap. When I wake I go to the clearing. I’ll see someone . . . not the first person I see, but a specific person. I’ll be moved to speak to them. I realize I have something to say, but I don’t have any idea of what it will be. The message comes to me as I speak. Usually it’s a positive message – you’ve heard me. At other times I’ll give them a chore to do.’

She reached back and gathered her hair into ponytail, held that pose for a beat, as if trying to think of something else to say.

‘That’s it?’ I said. ‘That’s all you got?’

‘I know the idea of a renewal is involved. An alchemical change, a marriage of souls. And I know Griaule is behind it. I’ve been here so long I can feel him. Like how you feel when someone’s behind you, watching what you do.’

I thought she would have a complex rap explaining the great good news coming from beyond the sky. This sketchy recital didn’t mesh with my assumptions.

‘He compels me to do things I don’t understand,’ she went on. ‘The money, for example. There’s so much of it, more than we could ever use, and I keep on collecting more. He has me meet people in the city and give them money. It frustrates me, not being able to understand everything.’

‘Who are they, the people you give the money to?’

‘Young men, mostly. Some are military, I think. I tell them things, but I don’t have any recollection of what was said, just blank spots in my memory.’

I stopped short of asking how much money she had collected and said, ‘He must have big plans for you.’

‘For me? Maybe.’

She lay back and plucked at my arm, urging me down onto the cool bone surface beside her.

‘Why’d you wait so long to tell me this?’ I asked.

‘I don’t want to talk anymore,’ she said, fiddling with the top button of my jeans.

I pushed her hand away. ‘Was it the dragon? Did it feel like a message, as if he wanted you to tell me now?’

‘Un-uh. Don’t you want to fuck?’

‘One more question. Say you’re right about everything, about the dragon. How can you trust him? A beast, a giant lizard that has a
really
good reason to hate us. How can you think any change he brings will have a good effect?’

Even as I asked the question I suspected her answer would be the same that I had received from Ex when we argued about the value of revolution some months earlier:

‘You’ve been here how long? Four years? Five? Long enough to realize that any change is welcome in Temalagua. Any chance that things will improve, however slight, is welcome. You can’t impose your American logic on us. You people are smothered by the media, by lies, by silk sheets and fatty foods. Most of you don’t notice how fucked you are. Here the government doesn’t bother to hide things from us. Savagery, poverty, and injustice are shoved in our faces every day. We’re fucking desperate! If change makes things worse . . . so what?’

Yara’s answer was more succinct, yet no less to the point. Once she had spoken she pressed her body against mine and said, ‘Come on! I don’t want to talk.’ She kissed my neck, my mouth and eyes, and though I had further questions I allowed myself to be converted from inquisitor to lover.

That night was as close as I came to complete intimacy with her. I put my lips to her ear and told her I loved her, yet I didn’t whisper the words, I merely shaped them with my mouth. For one thing I was leery about what saying the words out loud would portend, but I suspect more devious motives were in play. By this inaudible, irresolute declaration I may have been hoping to convince myself that I wasn’t just a victim of sexual infatuation, but a real boy capable of real love, and so I pretended to be afraid that if she heard me, she might react badly, she might throw me out or something of the sort . . . because I had no clue, really, as to how she felt about me or about love or any of it. Then again, I may have been daring her to hear me, making said declaration so close to the range of the audible that she might hear the slight popping of my lips and deduce from this that I had spoken and conclude that ‘I love you’ was the most likely message, thereby leaving it up to her aural acuity and emotional state as to whether or not we would go to the next level. Someone once wrote that love is the drink that does not kill thirst, meaning that one’s thirst for love is inexhaustible, or that love is an addiction that demands more and more of it in order to satisfy the lover, and yet, like an opiate, has less and less effect, so that in the end demand outstrips supply. While these interpretations are congruent and both undoubtedly true, in the case of Yara and myself love became a perverse psychological
competition, a power struggle wherein we used our attitudes and our principles (such as they were) to deconstruct the very thing we desired before it could disappoint us, because we knew the game was fixed.

III

Snow’s narrative continues for another 156 pages, many treating of the tedious day-to-day life in the camp, an almost equivalent number constituting a disquisition on the nature of love, also tedious and overly analytic (as the preceding paragraph foreshadows), and some few detailing and explaining (‘justifying’ might be more precise a word, for he appears to have borne a heavy burden of guilt) the circumstances under which, four months after initiating a relationship with Yara, he sneaked away from the clearing, intending never to return. He cites as the root cause of his abandonment the ominous atmosphere that accumulated about the place and goes on to describe the event that precipitated his escape.

‘One morning,’ Snow writes, ‘Yara went to stand in the mouth of the skull, at the point of the jaw, and there she stayed for several hours, saying nothing, motionless as in a fugue. Over a span of fifteen minutes the adherents gathered beneath her. They were perplexed at first, calling out to her and conferring among themselves, but then they grew as silent and still as their queen . . . as their god. They remained standing in a loose assembly for nearly four hours, rapt as though compelled by unheard voices. The air grew warmer – substantially warmer, it seemed to me – as if this act of devotion, of pathological immersion, were somehow increasing the spin of their constituent atoms and generating heat . . . though it’s probable my anxiety led me to misapprehend a slight elevation of air temperature. Throughout the episode I was close to panic. The gloomy space under the canopy, the rundown camp, the zombie-like connection between the adherents and their queen: it was an eerie spectacle that evoked images of Jonestown. That I had
been excluded from the group, cast in the role of onlooker or tourist, someone unworthy of participating in the experience, amplified my sense of alienation. I didn’t belong here, I told myself. I was a leaf blown by chance to their door and not party to this insanity. If I were I would be as mindless and mute as they, as the creatures of the jungle (they, too, had gone silent), receiving instruction from a woman who channeled the wishes and whims of a gigantic reptilian skull.

‘When Yara turned away from the assembly, the jungle erupted into a clamor of croaks and screams, and the adherents shambled off, resuming their normal activities. Yara claimed to have no memory of what had transpired, yet she was not in the least disconcerted to learn of it, and this as much as anything convinced me that the disaster I feared was days if not hours away. I begged her to put some distance between herself and the skull, but when I told her the scene in the clearing had reminded me of Jonestown, she flew off the handle and accused me of subverting her work and otherwise distracting her.

‘That night I lay in bed wondering what to do, feeling wrecked, staring at yet not focused upon Yara’s naked back, pinpricks of actinic brilliance popping and fading before my eyes like miniature flashbulbs. And then I observed that the skin bordering her implant was inflamed, a distinct redness suffusing the colors of the surrounding tattoo. The implant itself appeared less regular in shape, its convexity more extreme, and I thought perhaps her body was rejecting it. I gently pressed my forefinger against the skin at the edge of the implant and her hips began to roll and jerk, a slow, grinding torsion, as if she were having sex with an invisible lover. I snatched my hand away, startled by her reaction, and the movements subsided. Lately she had encouraged me to touch the implant while we made love, but I had been too intent on my own pleasure to notice whether there had been a marked increase in hers . . . though it seemed then, in the unreliable archives of memory, that she displayed a measure of reaction. “Yara!” I said, and repeated her name, but she was out like a light. I pushed down on the implant with the heel of my hand – her hips thrashed as if she were on the verge of an orgasm. Once again I tried to wake her, shouting at and even
shaking her, all to no avail. Horrified by her comatose state, by her erotic reflex, I was too rattled to think, yet a portion of my brain must have been functioning, a batch of neurons excited by dread must have sparked and transmitted a warning, for as the sky grayed I concluded that I needed to save myself.’

The disaster anticipated by Snow did not occur, at least not within the time frame he expected, and when nothing had happened after a month he was tempted to revisit the clearing, but shame and fear combined to negate this impulse. For a time he moved back in with Ex, yet it quickly became evident that the relationship had gone sour, as had his relationship with Temalagua, and he returned home to Concrete, Idaho, where he lived for free in an apartment owned by his father and landed a job in a local bookstore. He had intended to regroup there, to earn a little money and go off again, perhaps to Thailand, but was seduced by the lazy, listless patterns of existence in Concrete and stayed for the next ten years, maintaining a desultory lifestyle dominated by affairs with unattainable women, either married or disinterested in him as other than a pastime. The one noteworthy achievement of those years was the publication of his partial memoir, which remains unfinished to this day. (This may not be ascribed to a lack of effort, to youthful lassitude, but to the fact that it is an immature work to which he had only a passing attachment.) His infatuation with Yara developed into a full-blown obsession and, though when called upon to do so he would describe love in terms that accorded with his previous statements on the subject, he grew to think of Yara in terms more consistent with a romantic ideal. He searched the Internet for news of her and, finding none, he scribbled in his notebooks, dredging up memories, striving to piece together a coherent narrative of his four months in the jungle. He had done nude studies of Yara, but in them her face was either turned away or partly hidden by her hair – he could not recall why he had posed her this way, if it had been her idea or his, but the sketches seemed emblematic of their inadequate commitment to the relationship. He tried drawing her face from memory and was able to create accurate renderings of her features, but they were devoid of vitality and character,
like better-than-average police sketches. He perceived this to be emblematic of what they had lost – an opportunity for emotional brilliance, for the transcendence of the ordinary. The conflation of time and an erratic memory presented him with the certainty of what he had heretofore merely imagined – that he had been in love with Yara and she with him, but they had not taken the final, necessary step to confirm those feelings.

One evening while netsurfing he chanced upon an article dated two years earlier about unexplained Central American mysteries that devoted a few sentences to a Temalaguan religious cult whose membership, some eight hundred strong, had recently vanished along with their object of veneration, a skull belonging to an immense specimen of the genus Megalania (this last assertion was without scholarly basis). The leader of the cult had been, the story said, ‘a charismatic young woman.’ And that was all. There was no mention whatsoever of the incident in the Temalaguan press at the time of the disappearance, a fact Snow found disturbing, and he could find no other online stories that referenced the event. Based on this sliver of information, however untrustworthy, he chucked his job, bought an airline ticket, and a week later arrived in Temalagua.

The city was more polluted and poverty-stricken than Snow remembered, though he wondered whether he had been too self-absorbed to notice how bad things were ten years before. Perhaps it had always been a smoky, slum-ridden slice of Mordor, Detroit with less industry, brighter colors, and hills crawling with the poor, the anonymous-as-roaches poor, some carrying their shelters on their backs. Beggars rushed at him in platoon-strength, displaying deformities, amputations, and open sores. Child prostitutes, some as young as eight or nine, called to him from alley mouths and doorways, and in piping, playground voices offered to perform the most deviant of perversions. Widows in black dresses and shawls sat on the curbs along Avenida Seis, their heads down, mere inches away from the stream of traffic, as if they had given up hope and were waiting for a car to swerve and put an end to their misery. Many of Snow’s old connections were dead or otherwise defunct. Ex had lost her taste for revolution and married the proprietor
of a department store who called her his little Commie and delighted in pinching her now substantial ass – she was pregnant with their fourth child and was reluctant to speak with Snow. The offices of Aurora House had been taken over by a travel agency, Pepe Salido had been murdered in a gambling dispute, and Snow’s colleagues in the charity had drifted away to parts unknown. Club Sexy hadn’t changed that much. They had put in track lighting above the bar and added a karaoke machine. Miraculously, the old man still played his rickety Beatle tunes against the same chintzy backdrop of silver glitter, moonglow, and palms. Expensively attired women thronged the tables – Snow failed to recognize any of them, yet they were of a type similar to those he did recall, and the fabulous Guillermo was still pouring drinks. Aside from the start of a double chin and a questionable goatee, he looked none the worse for wear. On seeing Snow he rushed out from behind the bar to embrace him.

‘You look wonderful! Fantastic!’ said Guillermo, pulling back. ‘How do you do it?’

‘You look pretty good yourself,’ said Snow.

‘Me? I’m an absolute disaster! But it doesn’t matter anymore. I have a husband now, I can let myself go to seed.’

He steered Snow to a corner table and told the other barman, Canelo – a young black man with a light, freckly complexion, close-cropped reddish hair, and diamond piercings in his cheeks – to bring a bottle of tequila. Snow realized that he had forgotten to employ gayspeak and began to shade his inflections, subtly (he thought) re-acquiring his verbal disguise. Guillermo laid his hand atop Snow’s and said, ‘Please! There’s no need for that.’

Baffled, Snow asked what he meant.

‘Your act.’ Guillermo poured him a shot of tequila. ‘It never fooled anyone, you know. Some of us were angry – we thought you were mocking us. But when we realized you were using us to get close to the ladies, we understood and we laughed about it. Since you were a nice guy, we played along.’

‘I wasn’t a nice guy,’ said Snow. ‘I was a total asshole.’

‘Well, you looked nice, anyway. And you acted nice. That’s what counted most back then.’

They drank and reminisced for a while and then Snow asked about Yara.

Guillermo lowered his voice. ‘Did you hear about what happened to her?’

‘Only a little. I just read about it last week. I’m hoping to learn more. That’s why I came down.’

‘You must be careful who you talk to about this. Very careful.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘The PVO.’ Guillermo refilled their glasses. ‘The Party of Organized Violence.’ He knocked back his shot. ‘They showed up about fifteen years ago, but they didn’t make much of a splash and no one took them seriously until the elections last year when they gained a plurality in Congress. They’re thugs. Scary right-wing thugs. Extremely scary. If they win a majority in the next election, and everyone says they will . . .’ He affected a shudder. ‘They don’t like gays. Joselito, my husband . . . he thinks we should relocate to Costa Rica.’

‘What’s this have to do with Yara?’

‘After she vanished a reporter got into Chajul. You know, the village out near the skull? This one guy got in, but soon the PVO sealed off access to that area of the jungle with their militia.’

‘They have their own soldiers?’

‘Nobody fucks with them. They might as well be running things already. But like I was saying . . .’ Guillermo knocked back a shot – it looked as if it hurt going down. ‘I have a friend who knew the reporter. The guy said most of the villagers had already fled, but he talked to one woman who told him there was a big spill of heat from the jungle. Hot enough to make you cover your face, she said. Then rippling lights appeared over the treetops. All colors. She assumed it was a religious thing, Jesus was coming down on a rainbow carpet, so she went into her house to pray to the Virgin. She heard people in the street and swears they had come out of the jungle, but she didn’t see them – she was afraid and hid. That’s all she had time to say before the PVO turned up and carried her away. The reporter beat it out the back window.’

The ancient keyboard player announced he was taking a break – the sounds of the Casio were replaced by Latin pop.

‘Can I talk to him?’ Snow asked. ‘The reporter.’

‘He disappeared,’ said Guillermo, giving the word ‘disappeared’ a certain emphasis.

Snow covered his glass to prevent Guillermo from pouring him another shot. ‘I guess I don’t get it. Why were the PVO so interested in a screwball cult?’

‘You’d have to ask them . . . but that’s not something I would recommend. You don’t want to attract the attention of those guys.’

Guillermo was called away to settle some issue at the bar and Snow, glancing around the room, caught a thirty-ish brunette at another table checking him out. She wore an orange-and-yellow print frock with a tight bodice that accentuated her cleavage and she permitted herself a half-smile before saying something to her companion, a plump blonde. The blonde cast a quick look in his direction and the women shared a laugh. Snow had an impulse to make a move, to indulge in his old life again, if only for nostalgia’s sake. Guillermo rejoined him and nodded toward the brunette.

‘Stay away from that one, man,’ he said. ‘She’s Juan Mazariegos’ mistress.’

‘He’s a bad guy?’

‘The worst. He’s a bigshot in the PVO. Half the women here are PVO.’

Snow asked him whether it was safe to visit the encampment.

‘Yes, I think so,’ Guillermo said. ‘But there’s no point. You know how quickly the jungle comes back. It’s all overgrown in there. Nobody lives in Chajul nowadays and Yara . . .’ He made a gesture of finality. ‘She’s gone.’

Snow didn’t want to believe that and had nothing to say. With an inquiring look, Guillermo held up the bottle – Snow shook his head.