‘Is that right? We bicker constantly, we have sex infrequently, and we’re responsible for a child. That sounds like a marriage to me. Unlike a marriage, however, we can’t escape its context by having a night out. Whatever you were doing, pretending, not pretending, it might be helpful if you started doing it again. Neither of us is a trusting person, but we have to trust one another. We have no idea what’s going on and we may have to depend on each other more than we do now. We need to develop a bond. If we can’t, we have no chance of surviving.’
‘Are you finished?’
‘Yes, I suppose I am.’
‘Let me go.’
With a frustrated noise, he pushed her away and she rolled up to her knees. Curls and flecks of banana leaf were stuck to the sweat on her hip and thigh – they might have been the remnants of script, as if their lovemaking had written a green sentence on her flesh that their argument had mostly erased. He expected her to bolt without further word, but once she regained her footing she stood with her head down, hair hanging in her face, her fingers intertwined at her waist.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
She wiped her nose.
‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ he said. ‘I’m merely suggesting we’d be better off if we were honest with one another. If we make a sincere effort at establishing a relationship, a friendship, then who knows what may develop. If a spark is given sufficient tinder . . .’
‘Don’t you ever stop?’ She clasped both hands to her head as though to prevent it from exploding. ‘You get an idea and you go on and fucking on about it! You don’t care what anyone else is going through so long as you hear the sound of your voice.’ She sniffled, wiped her nose again, and squared her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry. I truly am.’
With that, she hurried off into the darkness, leaving George to contemplate the error of his ways, to puzzle over her apology, and to listen to the wind intoning its ceaseless consonant-less sentence, like a mantra invoking an idiot god.
Judging by the way their conversation ended, George did not expect a happy result; but the upshot of the encounter was that Sylvia began coming to him every few nights, and they would make love and discuss practical considerations, most having to do with Peony. They were, he reflected, becoming if not a traditional family, then a functional one. He suspected that Sylvia’s heart was not in the relationship, but her pretence pleased him, nourishing a longstanding fantasy and sustaining him against the two oppressive, unvarying presences that ruled over the plain: the heat and the dragon. At times he was unable to distinguish between them – the dragon patrolling overhead seemed emblematic of the terrible heat, and the heat seemed the enfeebling by-product of the dragon’s mystery and menace. Without Sylvia’s affections and his paternal regard for Peony, he might have succumbed to depression. The days played out with unrelenting sameness: too-bright mornings and oven-like noons giving way to skies with low gray clouds sliding past, their bellies dark with rain that never fell, and a damp closeness turning the air to soup – it was as if they were living in the humid mouth of a vast creature too large to apprehend, one of which they had only unpleasant and unreliable intimations. Of course the dragon was the most salient threat, the one for which there was neither explanation nor remedy. Though he had denigrated Edgar and Snelling for their lack of interest in the question, George soon realized that any attempted analysis relating to the dragon’s purposes would be pure speculation. The most sensible explanation he came up with was that the dragon was using the plain as storehouse for its food supply, but this raised other questions, notably why would Griaule bother to choose its human treats by so indirect a procedure (assuming the others had been transported to the plain by touching or rubbing immature dragon scales). He inquired of Peony again, asking what she knew of Griaule’s designs, but she spoke in generalities, repeating her original statement that he wanted them to witness something, adding to this that they were ‘the lucky ones.’ When he pressed her, she grew tearful and mumbled something about ‘fire.’
