De Lugo nailed me with a stare that would have weakened my knees at another time and place. Timo scowled and Adalia said, ‘You haven’t answered my question. Why are you here? Be truthful.’
‘Curiosity,’ I said. ‘And chance. I’m a leaf blown to your door.’
‘And Yara? What of her?’
‘I enjoy fucking her, but she’s a little young for me.’ I tapped my forehead. ‘Too young in here, you understand.’
‘He doesn’t know,’ said de Lugo.
Adalia leaned back into the crook of Timo’s shoulder. ‘Perhaps that’s all he is, a leaf. One day soon the wind will take him.’
Irritated, I said, ‘The least you can do is wait until I’ve gone to talk behind my back.’
They gazed at me with the placidity of stoners, impervious to amazement, as though we were guests of the Mad Hatter and they were waiting patiently for me to turn into a camel.
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ I asked. ‘What don’t I know?’
‘Why you’re here.’ De Lugo prodded the ashes of the dead fire with his stick. ‘Please don’t take offense. It’s something all of us wonder about now and then . . . with regard to ourselves as well as others.’
Still vexed, I asked why he was here and he replied that of all the ‘ingredients’ gathered beneath the canopy, he might well be the most essential.
‘Griaule will require ruthlessness to achieve what he must,’ he said. ‘And, God help me, I have been ruthless in my day.’
Adalia put a hand on his knee to comfort him. Gonsalvo offered consoling platitudes. I thought they might burst into a chorus of ‘Kumbaya.’ De Lugo’s ‘day’ was scarcely a year in the past, an incident wherein seven priests had been found with their brains cut out, excavated from their skulls in a side chapel of the National Cathedral, following which he been forced to relinquish his post. I wasn’t about to buy his penitent act and withdrew from the conversation, paying it marginal attention, and sketched their faces, their physical attitudes, anything else that caught my eye. Not until they left me, de Lugo being the last to go, patting my shoulder in an avuncular fashion . . . not until then did I think about the questions they had raised. Why was I there? Was I, too, an element essential to the dragon’s rebirth? Had I been drawn to the community not by the Yara woman, but by the dragon’s proxy? And what had they meant by their use of the word ‘ingredient’? The word had an ominous sound in context, implying the surrender of one’s individuality to a grim purpose.
Dusk blended the shapes of the leaves and branches, but the skull appeared to gain sharpness and detail and vitality, standing out from an indistinct backdrop, gray and granitic in the halflight, as if it were the only real thing in the picture. I envisioned the muscles of the face and jaw reforming over the bone, the packed masonry of green and gold scales reassembling, and I could have sworn that I glimpsed movement in the oily shadows filling its eye sockets, the flickering of a membrane, a glint of reflected light, evidence of life harbored within, still potent after centuries of dormancy. I felt its shadow heartbeat on my skin like the reverberations of a gong. My susceptibility to suggestion, I thought. Yet I couldn’t rid myself of the suspicion that the skull was the source of danger and a catastrophe was about to occur, that a more terrible visage would surface explosively from beneath that illusion of bone and fungus, and the dragon would shrug off its vegetable shroud and move against the city, mistaking Temalagua for Teocinte, the city where it had been imprisoned for millennia . . . or perhaps any city would serve as an apt target for his vengeance. This was nonsense, sheer fantasy, but the idea had fastened onto me and I stared at the skull for such a long time, I became convinced that my watchfulness was all that prevented the transformation. When fatigue caused my concentration to falter I worried that the change had begun without my notice. Infinitesimal changes. Fluctuations on the sub-atomic level. Subtle shifts that we would not register until too late and a shattering conclusion was already upon us.
