It was a humid day, the air heavy with the smell of rain. Smoke from the campfires lay close to the ground, thickening the usual haze to a roiling smog, so that people who were not close at hand acquired a ghostly aspect, their indefinite figures fading in from the murk and then dematerializing. Tired of listening to Yara mold her constituency, I staked myself out on a makeshift bench near the ashes of a fire and began sketching in my notebook, adding brief written descriptions of each subject. I’d been at it for perhaps twenty minutes when someone cleared his throat in an attention-getting way and I glanced up to find General de Lugo standing beside me, leaning on a cane, partially blocking my view of the skull. Seeing this emblem of death’s human expression superimposed against that vast iconic figure unsettled me, but de Lugo smiled – not the most assuring of sights – and indicated that he wished to sit down. I made room and he lowered himself onto the bench, groaning as he completed this arduous process.
I looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to speak. His hair was exceptionally silky and his clothes reeked of mildew. The flesh beneath his eyes looked bruised – from lack of sleep, I assumed. ‘Go on,’ he said, pointing at the notebook. ‘I will watch.’
He beamed at me again, a beacon of his approval, but when I continued to sketch he tsk-tsked and grunted as in apparent pain, as if displeased by my work. I sketched a pink umbrella tree at the edge of the clearing, a shriek of color like an exposed vein, a more vital territory laid bare behind the smoky green vegetation, and he snorted impatiently. I asked if I was doing something wrong.
‘You draw trees, shadows, people.’ De Lugo gestured at the skull – it towered above us some sixty or seventy feet away. ‘But not the dragon. Why? It is the only thing worth drawing.’
‘You want me to draw the skull? You got it.’
After a couple of false starts, using a pen with a fine point, I managed to get going on a miniature of the skull protruding from its cover, focusing to such a degree that once I finished I was startled to discover that three other people had joined us and were sitting on the ground about the dead fire. A young couple, student types, the guy’s hair longer than his girlfriend’s, and a middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper beard, wearing shorts and a worn, dirty dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves. De Lugo took the notebook from me, studied it a moment before passing it to the girl. She shared it with the two men and they murmured their appreciation.
‘Very good.’ De Lugo patted my arm – I could not help but flinch. ‘Perfect! You have captured him.’
Ignoring his personification of the skull, I asked him and his friends what had drawn them to the camp.
The girl – rather plain, with a complexion the color of adobe brick, she appeared to have lost a great deal of weight recently – introduced herself as Adalia and asked in a dusty contralto if I knew why I was there.
‘I’m with Yara,’ I said.
‘I am with Timo.’ She leaned into her boyfriend’s shoulder. ‘But that’s not why I am here.’
‘You tell me, then. Why are you here?’
The middle-aged man, a lawyer, Gonsalvo by name, said, ‘We are the ingredients.’
‘The ingredients for what?’ I asked.
‘A miracle,’ said Adalia.
I repeated her words quizzically and she added, ‘A miracle that will change the world.’
The others nodded and Timo, putting an arm around Adalia’s shoulders, said, ‘He will perfect us.’
They had bought into Yara’s craziness, perceiving her to be the key to a numinous mystery, and I doubted they knew any more than I.
‘You expect him to do all this?’ I asked, waving a hand at the skull.
‘With Yara’s help,’ Timo said. ‘Yes.’
‘Are you familiar with his history?’ Adalia asked.
‘All that crap about being paralyzed in a mystical battle, his mental powers becoming godlike? Sure, everybody’s heard that fairy tale.’
‘You do not give him his due,’ Gonsalvo said solemnly. ‘For thousands of years he lay on the plain at Teocinte. His mind grew to be a cloud that enveloped the planet, controlling every facet of our lives.’
‘Well, he’s dead meat now,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t control jack.’
‘Jack?’ Gonsalvo said. ‘Who is Jack?’
Adalia explained it to him.
A silence rolled out over our little group and I became aware of two people stepping past, a snatch of soft talk, a man coughing. Gonsalvo intoned some tendentious garbage about how the dragon, having survived death, had been reduced to a shade with a fraction of his former prodigious power and now he required our assistance in order to be reborn and restored to primacy.
‘How’re you going to work that?’ I asked. ‘CPR? Give him a heart massage? No, wait! His heart’s in Minsk, Shanghai, Las Vegas, all over the place . . . in a zillion fucking pieces.’
‘We will contribute our energies,’ de Lugo said grandly.
I tried to resist the impulse toward further sarcasm, but failed. ‘How does that work? When the moment’s right you chant? You think pure thoughts in his direction?’
