“It’s yours. I made it for—I want you to have it.” He opened his eyes and managed a weak smile. “Late birthday gift. Sorry I missed it.”
“ ’S okay.” Ryan stroked the dragon’s back. The beast was curled in around itself as if for sleep, wings folded back, forepaws demurely resting beneath the barbelled chin. The scaly hps were closed, except where the two most prominent fangs could not possibly be contained. But the eyes were open and saw all.
“Here we are!” Mom burst from the kitchen, triumphant, an assortment of steaming mugs on the tray she carried before her. She sandwiched Ryan in between herself and Uncle Graham, weaving her own spells of strength and militant normalcy from the clatter of teaspoons and the hush of sugar crystals cascading into tea. There were even some cookies on a plate.
“Mom, look what Uncle Graham gave me,” Ryan said, holding out the dragon for inspection. “He made it himself.”
“It’s wonderful, Graham,” Mom said sincerely. “Is this something new for you? Are you branching out from painting?”
“I am definitely making some changes,” Uncle Graham said. They drank their tea. That was the last time Ryan saw his uncle alive.
That year at Christmastime Uncle Graham didn’t come to visit. He never came to visit them again. There were no letters and no telephone calls, although once, on Ryan’s thirteenth birthday, a flat, oblong package arrived for him from New York City.
It was a book, a book enclosed between boards embossed with swirling gold and silver letters that eddied over depths of royal blue and green. “In the Realm of Dragons” he read aloud, wondering why his uncle had sent him a picture book clearly meant for httle kids. Then he saw the artist’s byline and understood: Uncle Graham had done the illustrations. He let the book fall open in his lap.
Page after page of dragons mounted the purple skies of evening, beating wings of gold and green and scarlet. (“The dragon is a nocturnal beast. He loves the hours of darkness.”) Youngling dragons peeped from shattered eggshells, stripling worms engaged in mock battles to establish territory and dominion. (“The dragon when it is grown chooses its company with care.”) Maidens wreathed with flowers were led forth from villages paved with mud and manure to be offered up to the magnificent beasts, only to be spurned, or simply overlooked. (“It is a false tale that claims dragons desire the flesh of fair maidens, for what mere mortal beauty could hope to equal their own?”)
And in the end, there were the pictures of knights—so proud, so arrogant in armor—swords bloodied with the lives of dragons. Here a warrior lurked like the meanest footpad to slay a dragon when it came to drink at a twilight stream. There the severed heads of many worms dangled as obscene trophies from the rafters of a great hall where lords and ladies swilled wine and grew brutish in revelry. The unseeing eyes of the dead were mirrors that hung in silent judgment over their supposed conquerors, each silvery globe giving back an image of man to make the skin crawl and the soul weep. (“Men slay dragons because they fear them, or do not understand them, or because other men tell them that this is what men do. And some destroy them because of how they see themselves captured in the dragon’s eyes.”)
The last page was an enchantment of art. A single dragon’s eye filled it, infusing mere paper with a silver splendor reflecting Ryan’s awestruck face. The boy reached out, fingers hovering a hairsbreadth above the sheen that pulled him heartfirst into the dragon’s all-knowing gaze.
That night he dreamed dragons.
He woke into dreams, rising naked from a pool of waters silvered by twin moons burning low in a verdant sky. Drops of water fell from his wingtips, trembled at the points of his claws. Far away, over the hills where golden grasses nodded and bent beneath the wind’s kiss, came the sound of hoarse voices mangling music.
He climbed the hills, his wings dragging the ground behind him. The air was sweet, heavy as honey. He shook away the last vestiges of human thought and opened his dragon mind to a universe unfolding its most secret mysteries. That was when he knew at last that he could fly.
The air was his realm; he laid claim to it with the first surge of his emerald-keeled breastbone against the sky. Its warmth bore him up from beneath with the steady love of his father’s hands. His great head swerved slowly from left to right, his breath glittering with frost in the higher atmospheres, showering the bosom of the land with diamonds.
Below him he saw them, the villagers with their mockery of musical instruments, their faces upturned like so many oxen startled by lightning. The maiden was among them. They had dressed her in white, though even from this height he could see the thin cloth of her gown dappled brown with mud at the hem. Her arms were smooth and bare, her golden hafr almost obscured by roses.
He felt hunger burn the pit of his cavernous belly. He stooped to the earth, wings artfully angled to ride the edges of only those air currents that would bring him spiraling down to his waiting prize. His mouth gaped, and licks of flame caressed his scaly cheeks like the kiss of mist off the sea.
And then air before him turned from native element and ally to enemy. The crystalline road solidified, a giant’s hands molding themselves from emptiness. He slammed into the immobile lattice of their interlaced fingers, and the impact exploded into a sheet of dazzling pain, an echoing wave of light that hurled him back down the sky, back into the waters of the lake, back into the shuddering boy’s body waking in its bed to the dark and loneliness and loss.
All that was left was a whisper: Not yet. I give you this power, but you must earn its reward.
Ryan hugged the sheet and blanket to his chest, cold with sweat, and asked the shadows for meaning. Then he became aware of something more than sweat making his pajamas chng to the skin between his legs. In silence, face burning, he stripped them off and stuffed them down the laundry chute, some part of his mind pretending that the gaping black slide into the basement would really send them falling into oblivion.
He did not like to think of the dream after that. He took the book from Uncle Graham and put it away in the attic.
The pulldown ladder to the attic’s trove of dust and willfully forgotten memory was springloaded tight. The dangling rope that raised and lowered the hatch, improperly released, closed with a bang to jerk Ryan awake in time to bark his shins against the packing-crate coffee table in a friend’s dorm room. He was waiting for someone. He had nothing to do while he waited. He glanced down at the table and picked up a magazine.
He didn’t notice that it was a gay men’s magazine at first. It was folded open to a beer ad. He picked it up out of boredom and thumbed through it out of curiosity. Uncle Graham’s name leaped to his eyes from a photo spread covering the most recent Gay Pride march in Manhattan.
It was not Uncle Graham. Not with that face paint, not with that gaunt, ferocious grin hke a wolf’s skull. He wore clothing that was ill-considered plumage, meant to startle. It only put Ryan in mind of how old whores were typed in older movies: spotty, papery, raddled skin beneath the monster’s pathetic mask of carnival. Uncle Graham marched with arms around two other men, one in amateurish drag, the other sheathed in neon pink hotpants and a T-shirt cropped to leave his midriff bare. Across his forehead he had painted the letters H.I.V.
When Ryan went home for Christmas, he told Mom about the photograph. All she said was, “I know.” She showed him the letters she’d written to her brother, every one returned unopened, refused. Only once had he sent her words back accompanied by his own, a piece of lined paper torn from a spiral-bound notebook and stuffed into a manila envelope with the rejected letter. You never liked cemeteries, Chessie, it said. Why hang on the gate pretending you understand the business of the dead? You need magic to look through my eyes, and you were born fettered to the world. But there is magic, Chessie. It lives and walks at our backs, beautiful and deadly, and when it gets hungry it takes its sacrifice. If one of us had to make that payment, to have our heart betrayed, I’m glad it was me. Leave it so.