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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.