Sleeping with dragons is useful too — you know your brain waves change when you're asleep. You pick up dragon stuff when you're asleep that you can't when you're awake — well, I knew that, from that first time I spent with Lois at Dragon Central with probably every dragon there except Bud and Gulp (and Lois) wanting me somewhere else. But the wanting-me-out-of-there, and the mortal terror, made the subtler stuff hard to recognize. Especially through the Headache. And then in the early days of Farcamp when I was spending every minute I could get with the dragons it sometimes got to be a little too much — well, I mentioned it five years ago, about not wanting to wake up some day and discover I'd started growing spinal plates. But with Martha with me it was suddenly okay — it was good. I stopped losing being human, you know? No matter how far into the dragon labyrinth I went.
And it also makes sense, about brain waves, in a way that a lot of stuff about dragons does not. But this doesn't mean we're going to start having a human dormitory at Nearcamp, so don't bother asking. You'd never sleep through the headaches anyway.
Martha and I got married two and a half years ago. That's a really good time to remember. Back a little farther, to when I finished writing this book the last time, that isn't so good. Five years ago is about the start of the really rough year or so I had learning to let go of Lois — and her to let go of me. There's some of that starting to happen at the end of what I wrote back then.
It was sort of easier in a gruesomely traumatic sort of way than it might have been because as soon as the world found out about Lois — as soon as the tape loop with me prancing around on Bud's head started playing around the world — our lives changed so drastically that we didn't know which way was up and which way was down (although if I'd fallen off Bud's head ninety feet up I'm sure it would have hurt, ha ha). So I spent a lot of that first year after the World Found Out feeling torn apart anyway and "losing" Lois was . . . it was, as I think about it now, not even the most shocking thing, which made it worse, if you follow me, how could anything be more shocking than losing Lois? Even if all that was happening was that she was growing up and that was good?
But what happened to Smokehill — all that attention and all that money, suddenly, after we'd been this goofy fringy theme-park kind of thing — the theme being our endangered invisible but smelly dragons — counting every penny, and yeah, okay, paranoid from the beginning, but we had cause, didn't we? Whatever Eric says about what growing up as the center of the Smokehill universe did to me, it did to me what it did to me because that's how it was. And then Smokehill changed. Smokehill changed. Lois and I were just the detonator for the Big Bang and the new universe. It was not so surprising that we lost each other in the process . . . even if we were going to have to lose each other anyway. So that Lois could have the life she should have. And I could have a life at all.
Well, you don't need to know a lot about that, and if Eric's right, then I don't really want to tell you about what even I know isn't me at my best, but it's one of those things I feel I should mention, because it's a big thing.
So by the time Martha and I got married Lois was spending most of her time at Dragon Central, which meant she was spending at least a major minority of her time without me, and she'd had a growth about a year after we met Gulp so the idea of touring her died the death a lot more easily than it might have if she'd stayed little longer (although a couple times a year we still get some enterprising head case who wants to provide the specially designed airplane to carry a dragon, and take us around to all the football fields in America, but Dad gives 'em short shrift). And then Martha and I did get married and after that it was a whole lot more okay that Lois had her own dragon family and her own life without me.
We still don't know where Lois actually fits in the family, by the way. The weird thing is that as the new post-Big-Bang hierarchy settled down, Lois got kind of taken over by Gulp while Bud kind of took me over. Oh, Lois and I saw and see a lot of each other, a lot by anybody's standards but ours, and when I was with the dragons she turned up pretty fast and stuck pretty close, and sometimes at first she still came back to the human world with me for a little while.
Grace — and Eleanor — who rarely got out to Farcamp, were always really glad to see her, although "glad" is easier to identify with Grace. Eleanor tended to say things like, "The bigger you get the more you smell." Or, "Nobody's going to respect a pink dragon. I hope you're going to turn green or something soon." Although I think it wasn't only that I understood what the words meant that I was the one who got pissed off when Eleanor said stuff like this. Eleanor gets better at aggravating me as she gets older. And Lois isn't really pink anyway. Not pink pink. Also I tell myself that Eleanor is just developing useful skills by practicing on me and it'll all be worth it when she hits the campaign trail and makes hash of her opponents during the debates ("and furthermore you smell.").
But Lois came back to the Institute less and less once she hit her growth spurt. By the end of her third year she wouldn't fit through ordinary doorways any more and although she didn't have keeping-up problems with people on foot, she couldn't squeeze into the back of a jeep any more either, while her wings weren't anything like big enough yet for flying. She also began to lose interest in strange humans — every new human wasn't immediately her new best friend, the way she had been. She would still turn it on for a TV crew, but you — well, I — could begin to see that her heart wasn't in it. It was as if she was being polite. Where did she learn polite?
She was learning to be a dragon. Who are I swear genetically polite. Which was the thing I'd wanted most of all, Lois becoming a, you know, genuine, 100 percent dragon, and that did take a lot of the edge off the whole mom trauma. What stopped me from getting too comfy about it though was that she was also obviously sweating learning "dragon language" almost as badly as I was. Like maybe there's a developmental window for learning language in dragons the way there is in humans, and if you miss it, you've had it. And that made me feel really, really, really bad.
But there are a couple more things I think I know now that I didn't then — three or four years ago. Now pay attention because I'm not going to tell you twice. I'm getting out into woo-woo territory and I don't much like it out here. Or rather, I like it fine, while I'm out there, with Bud, or occasionally some of the others, it's coming back to human ground level with what he or they have given me I find kind of bad, looking at it as a human and wondering what the hell I do with it and how to explain it in any way another human — any human but Martha — is going to believe — or be able to make sense of. Yeah, everybody gives me lots of slack — make that lots of slack — because of Lois, but old habits die hard and nobody outside space opera and unicorns likes the "t" word either. Maybe especially when the only stuff I bring back that isn't bits and pieces is all woo-woo and nothing I can shake down into words and put in my dictionary. So don't ask me any questions, okay? Just listen.
One of the big questions has always been what Lois' mom was doing having her dragonlets so far away from the rest of the dragons — from anywhere dragons ever go in Smokehill — and especially from her mid wives. Okay, you think, maybe the dragons did it differently when they were in cages, and maybe what Old Pete saw wasn't like what they'd be doing on their own. But that's not it.