The Dragon Keeper (15 page)

6 Days
after
Hatching

S
o you’ve got eleven hours of daylight with lows down to—what? Nineteen? No, come on. Nineteen?”

Ben said something like “Shelshus” through a mouthful of ramen and flipped the channel.

“Gus, you don’t even get snow.” Meg shifted the phone from one ear to the other, trying to juggle the papers littered over her lap while listening to Gus’s broken English.

Nothing made sense. Ben was home again after spending the last few days with Paco, watching his news lineup as if it were any other weeknight. Play along. She’d had no other choice but to roll out her diagrams of the new exhibit on the coffee table next to his notes, jot Xs on random spots, make busy noises, and breathe carefully, not too shallow or too deep. This was their routine. Ben would hunker down off the lip of the couch, making notes and eating dinner, while she curled into the far corner and read a magazine or a trade journal. It was either this or tell him the truth—and this play-it-normal option was oddly surreal, as if she’d broken into two selves. One Meg followed the routine in which everything was fine, and that Meg knew when certain things would happen: 1. The channel changed; 2. Ben spilled broth on his shirt and wiped at it with a sleeve; 3. Paco called, and Ben’s phone vibrated around the coffee table, ignored; 4. Ben called Paco back during the next commercial break as he flipped the channel; 5. “No, I hate that place. The fuck do I wanna go there for?”

She made notes, murmurs, whatever came next. It was a game, a show that the other Meg, the one who’d been sucked inside some deep recess of her mind, watched like a keeper who was taking bets on just how long this stupid animal could last.

After twenty minutes of mindless scribbling, Gus had popped into her head. Thank you, Gus. He worked at the Wildlife Refuge in Jakarta, Jata’s first home, and had been her contact for the last five years about all things Komodo. Gus was the one who had first told her about the boy who died in Indonesia. Gus had been on Komodo Island at the time, doing some research when news of the attack came over from the village. If there was one person in the world who knew Komodos, for better or for worse, it was Gus. Meg had gotten used to running her ideas by him, and the new outdoor exhibit was a little risky, considering that Minnesota wasn’t exactly a tropical savannah, so she’d been meaning to check with him on minimum daylight lengths and temperatures. Now, though, the surrealism of her evening seeped into the phone, skewing Gus’s words, making her head pound in panicky jumps.

“Are you sure, Gus? Nineteen degrees?”

“Yes.” He spoke slowly into the static, the chirpy, bodiless voice that would have made her smile any other day. “Never below nineteen or twenty in the winter and up to thirty-three or so in summertime.”

“Thirty—oh, Celsius. Duh.”

“Shelshus,” Ben slurped again, nodding at her. She rolled her eyes and mimed a pistol at her own head.

“You can make the heat and light to work for the space. No problem, Meg.”

She sighed. “
Terima kasih
, Gus.”

“Sure, sure. Everything else okay?”

“The hatchlings are all doing great. Strong vitals. Fat appetites.”

He laughed. “Jata’s children. They hunger for the world.”

It was Gus who had named Jata, for some tribal goddess in Indonesia. According to the legend, Jata was an underworld serpent who teamed up with another goddess to create everything on the earth. When Meg first told Gus about the virgin birth, Gus had gotten really serious for a while and asked if there had been any birds in Jata’s exhibit lately. She tried to imagine giving that explanation to the news.
No, Jata hasn’t mated with another Komodo, but there was this bird …

After saying good-bye to Gus, she gave up trying to look busy and tossed the exhibit diagrams under the table. Shivering, she pulled her hands up into the sleeves of her sweatshirt and curled tighter into the cushions. The old house was drafty, full of windows that didn’t quite shut and doors that let cracks of streetlight slice across the hardwood floors. The radiators in each room belched out heat in short, unpredictable blasts, and every time Meg complained, her landlord reminded her about the single house thermostat and claimed he was roasting upstairs, wearing Speedos and chowing down popsicles in the winter so she wouldn’t freeze. On any other day, she would have just snuggled up next to Ben, who pumped out so much heat he practically had steam coming off him, but that was impossible now.

She could sit here and watch the news and make conversation and eat dinner, but that was all. She couldn’t touch him as if she’d done nothing wrong. She couldn’t take comfort in his body after she’d betrayed it so carelessly. Some animals could sense when their mates had been with different partners; they could smell it, as if the mate’s pheromone signature was chemically altered by the encounter. Could Ben smell Antonio on her, three days later?

“What the hell?” Ben set his empty bowl down, wiping broth off his chin, and rewound the newscast he’d been scanning in fast forward. Meg saw a picture of a Komodo flash on the screen and then a poof of sleek red hair—Nicole Roberts. Her stomach dropped even as she jumped to grab the remote from Ben.

“Wait, I got it.” He found where the story began and hit play. Both of them sat on the edge of the couch, frozen, waiting.

“—have shown some footage a few days ago of the new Komodo dragons at the Zoo of America, but these seemingly harmless babies have a much darker reputation than most of us realize.”

The screen cut to the hatchlings and then to Nicole Roberts interviewing a pale, bearded man Meg didn’t recognize.

“Mr. Anderson, you’re a skilled amateur diver, and I understand you recently traveled to Komodo Island to swim the reefs there?”

“That’s right, Nicole. We were there for a week and decided to take a hike in the park one day to see the Komodos.”

Nicole held up a camcorder and twisted her face into horrified concern. “And this is what you saw?”

“Yes.”

“We’re unable to show the tape on the air due to the graphic nature of the material, but it will be posted on our website. Parents are strongly cautioned to review this shocking footage before determining whether their children should be allowed to see it.”

Ben was already pulling his laptop onto the coffee table and booting up the site. They watched both screens as the interview continued.

“Tell us in your own words what you experienced that day.”

“We hiked for an hour or so until we came upon a water buffalo that had fallen down the hill and was tangled up in a patch of mud. The poor thing couldn’t get up, but we didn’t realize why until our guide pointed out the chunk that was missing from the buffalo’s rear flank. It was hard to see the blood at first, against the black fur and dark mud, but the animal had clearly been attacked.

“Then three huge Komodo dragons crept down the embankment and circled the water buffalo. The biggest one lunged first, diving into the water buffalo’s belly, followed by the other two at the back and hindquarters. We couldn’t do anything to help. The buffalo was still alive and bleating while the three dragons tore him apart. One of my friends threw up; the smell was so putrid. The guide tried to hurry us along. Later we learned that more Komodos would be drawn by the smell, and he didn’t want to run into any dragons in the midst of a feeding frenzy. As we left, nearly ten minutes later, the water buffalo was still twitching. I hoped to God the poor thing was dead.”

The guy narrated exactly what the choppy video had captured. Meg and Ben watched it in silence until the footage ended.

“Was there any point when you were afraid for your life?” Nicole asked.

“I don’t know how you could be human and not be afraid.”

Meg snorted, lunged up from the couch, and jabbed the TV off.

“They’re alpha predators!” She paced in front of the coffee table. “What did she think they ate for breakfast, tea and scones?”

Ben let her fume for a minute without saying anything. She made another couple rounds and gave the TV stand a passing kick.

“Afraid for his life,” she muttered. “They should post some footage of a slaughterhouse and see who the scariest predator is then.”

“It was the five o’clock news,” Ben said.

“So?”

“So they’re gearing this toward the baby boomers and what’s left of the greatest generation.”

“What does that matter?” Her voice kept rising, as if she had no control over it.

Ben drew her back over to the couch and sat her down, as patient as a kindergarten teacher.

“It matters because that’s not your core visitor, is it? Your stroller moms are still running after their kids at five o’clock, right?”

She shrugged.

“And this is regional news, babe. It won’t even touch the markets where the tourists are coming from.”

He got up and went to the kitchen while she stared at the blank TV, feeling the story seep into houses all over the city and brand Jata with its ugliness. Even if what Ben said was true, it was still on the Internet. It could be halfway around the world already.

A beer can popped open in the hallway, and Ben reappeared, sipping a Leinies. “So? What do you think? Is this guy just some pansy-ass liberal who couldn’t kill a chicken for his own dinner?”

He sat back down and threw an arm over the back of the couch, resting his hand on her shoulder. She tried to will her muscles to relax and force a smile. They always went round and round about the merits of vegetarianism, but she didn’t take the bait this time.

“Probably.”

Ben motioned toward the TV with his beer can. “And that shit about the buffalo? Come on. There’s no way it would have still been alive.”

“No.” The words were smaller and smaller on her tongue, shrinking underneath the weight of the story. “No, the buffalo shouldn’t have survived that long. There was no hope for him from the beginning.”

“It’s unbelievable what some networks will air. Making your Komodos look like monsters, just to get a few market share points.”

“My Komodos? They’re all mine now?”

“I think anyone who has an evolutionary tree of a species drawn on their bathroom wall gets to become the unofficial guardian for that species.”

He laughed, and she felt her mouth changing, melting into a tiny warm place in her cold body. The Meg who was watching the whole conversation shuddered and drew further into her shame. No right, she thought. No decency. The other Meg, the one covering Ben’s hand with her own and smiling back at his laughing, boyish face, moved closer to the warmth he radiated. It would be strange if she didn’t touch him. He might know; he might smell something if she pulled too far away and left too much air between them.

Later, after he finished jotting his notes about the day’s news and drank his beer, he pulled her into his arms and rocked her back and forth, down into the belly of the couch. He pulled her earlobes lazily between his teeth, and they peeled off clothing, rolling over each other in groans and sighs, but no matter how much she tried to focus on Ben, all she saw was a mud pit beneath them. She couldn’t remember why it mattered that Ben was lazy and childish or that he’d acted so relieved when she’d gotten the abortion. Would he even care that she’d cheated on him? Did it even occur to him that she’d never really let him into her life? The mud pit sucked them down, swallowing their bodies into a black place where it was impossible to know where the water buffalo ended and the Komodo began.

10 Days
after
Hatching

B
ob the Gila monster was having a bad day. Stretched out flat on his back and spread-eagle—or as spread-eagle as a Gila could be—he wore a choke collar chaining his lolling head to the operating table. Sure, Bob was poisonous, but he’d been knocked out cold fewer than thirty minutes ago, and the thickness of the chain seemed a little excessive, especially when combined with the intern that hovered around Antonio’s shoulder as if Godzilla were in the room, his eyes rolling over his surgical mask toward Bob’s head about once every ten seconds. From nose to tail, Bob measured one foot and ten inches. Scary stuff. True, his claws and teeth were both wickedly curved, razor-sharp miniature scythes, but the shy lizard only used them when he was forced into a corner or—probably—when he woke up in an operating room surrounded by three blue humans with knives.

“He’s out cold. Vitals are low and completely stable.” Meg glanced at the computer where Bob’s SAMs were displayed, the graphs and charts blipping out new data points in a steady line with no significant variation. She pumped the oxygen mask at an even pace, making sure air was getting in. A lot of reptiles stopped breathing when they were under anesthesia. On the other side of the operating table, Antonio positioned Bob’s foreleg open and revealed the inch-wide bubble that Meg had noticed growing in his armpit.

“Solid.” Antonio tested it with a gloved finger. “Feel that?”

The intern patted a finger against the scaly bubble, depressing it down into Bob’s body.

“A liquid deposit would feel spongy,” Antonio said. “Even underneath the thickest osteoderms you can generally tell the difference. This is either fatty tissue or a mass, so we can do an incisional biopsy.”