Life to Dragons

Alexei Raymond

“Love the animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Don’t trouble it, don’t harass them, don’t deprive them of their happiness, don’t work against God’s intent.”

– Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

 

Valentin comes alive at the shrill sound of the bell signaling the day’s end. He slides his books into the backpack and takes pride in his movements; he considers them especially elegant. He’s in bloom and hurry because Noa’s classroom was dismissed an hour earlier, and chiefly in his mind lies the image of her pale, nude body in a darkened room, sweating after a heated afternoon. They are each other’s first, and so it enhances and dominates the new daily.

Once he’s gathered himself, he navigates through classmates—swerving, avoiding—past other eleventh-graders on the ground floor of the school, until he is warmed by the steady sun. Before continuing, he pauses in a corner, and interfaces with his phone.

I’m on my way now, he texts.
My mom just left, she replies.
I’ll be there in 15 mins, he assures.

The phone goes back into a pocket, and he rejoins the flow of escaping students. While in the crowd, he can’t help but nurse his sense of wounded superiority—he believes most others dislike him, though they can’t be rid of their reluctant appreciation of him. He then separates from the general flow and walks in the direction of the back gate, to which he has a secret key—a result of some inattentive teacher’s loss—when an unusual cacophony turns his attention to the front gate. Girlish yelps and boyish hoots stand out from the usual after-school chatter and make him slowly gravitate toward the commotion. It’s not possible to quickly understand the cause of the scene—others coalesce around it, add to the noise, obstruct it. Then some pointed voice calls out; check it, check it! It’s fuckin’ huge! Stomp it! It’s running!

            And Valentin is broken out of his apprehension. He abandons the tentative approach out of an affinity for those smaller, for life in the lower reaches—the wretches. He rushes until the scene is clear and its main participants are seen. Loathsome fellow students he resists calling tormentors lest it feel like an admission of his status in relation to them, and some attending girls, all in a haphazard, agitated circle before the gate. Skipping around, focused downward. And there, inexplicably, a tan, thorned lizard lies on the brick path.

            Without so much as a thought, Valentin rushes in until the lizard’s strange, sharp edges are pressing against his palms. With it in hand, he can’t rightly focus on anyone or anything or any sound around until he realizes he’s already walking all alone beside a lazy road, in the direction of Noa’s home. He slows his pace and attempts to gather his impressions of the lizard—no, the dragon—in his hands. And if a dragon is a dragon, then I am a—he restrains himself and doesn’t finish the thought.

He sees that the dragon’s tan appearance was the sun’s insistence; greenish scales declare its true color. Thorned, horned, and sharpened regally every which way. He gently tests its form, beginning to worry about how passively it lies in his hands; mouth slightly agape, tongue partly exposed, clawed digits loose and unresponsive. And there, Valentin realizes the dragon is not unharmed—the whisking away came too late. The spiked, rugged tail appears to be bruised and bloodied, as if soon to be crushed off. He stops completely and places his thumb against the dragon’s abdomen. His breath is held and sensation amplified to check gravely for breath, for beat. He feels it then—some soft, feeble expansion against his thumb. The dragon yet lives.

            Valentin resumes his walk, slowly, haltingly. His phone buzzes and he checks it while holding the wounded dragon with one hand.
Are you coming? Noa questions.
Yeah, I’m on my way, he answers. Look, I saved a dino—photo attached.

She calls him immediately, but he ends the call quickly because he insists he needs both hands, and he will be there soon and don’t worry. He listens to how she acquiesces with worry despite his imperative, and the call is ended.

            With the unusual situation established, he allows himself to walk slower, with his eyes mostly examining the dragon’s blank, black eyes. He thinks of how it’s far from his first time holding one such as this, and his mood curdles from concerned awe to self-conscious shame. Shame? Performed for whom? He is a pretender, no better than the guys—no, bullies—who aimed to kill the dragon in amused, mean thrill. No rescue operation, but a surge of envy and the desire to have the creature all to himself. Why else is he still holding it, taking photos, walking with it further and further from its point of strange origin? Would that it’d been a rescue, surely he’d simply release the dragon at the first encountered bush. How many did he pass already? There, another verdant sanctuary for it, and yet the dragon isn’t relinquished. And that unthinking dash to pick it up; the instinct of a saviour, or an abuser? Unthinking, unthinking… Isn’t thought faster than events? So, then, which thought is too uncomfortable to mask with unthinking? And if some events are faster, then an underlying thought, at the ready—always: they are mine, I understand them, I have experience. If by anyone’s hand, then by mine. To capture at any opportunity, anywhere, overriding all: shame shy and decorum.

Valentin concludes that perhaps it’s necessary to hold on for an overdue reckoning to occur. Yes, a reckoning; not simply more time spent in the company of a dragon, and neither to look for the best spot for its release.

            The walk begins to take on a grave tint. He is mindful of the pressure his hands exert. He carefully modulates strength—his delicate touch—to make as if the dragon is carried by mere cloud. In the conscious effort to cradle with softness, he recalls Noa’s impassioned instructions that he move his fingers this way, no, that way, gentler, slower, faster, until he finds the point of grace and pleases her. In the conscious withdrawal of strength, he thinks of the reverse, which occurs in the ring, when to drive home violence through a clenched, rubbery fist makes everything rattle viscerally, pleasingly. Close, too, and overriding all, are the memories of past transgressions, committed with these very hands, now so thrilled by new sensations—by the vibrant, unexpected tremor of all life. These transgressions are more pertinent to the dragon at hand.

            For before the dragon he now holds in who knows how much genuine empathy and concern—not he, not now, not yet—his hands once held various soft geckos: the true number of which he cannot estimate. Perhaps in fear, shame, some denial and a withholding of image-tarnishing confirmation. Or perhaps in a simple, banal I can’t remember. Similarly, he doesn’t remember how many of those captive geckos he allowed to go on with their lives, how many survived their encounter with him—if any. This despite fascinating trivia bestowed on him from early childhood by his father, of the geckos’ honest work, their extermination of pests, of tormenting mosquitoes. And despite, of course, his knowledge that killing is wrong. Valentin nonetheless chose to, again and again, inflict his deadly curiosity upon the bulbous-eyed, gravity-defying reptiles. Barely anyone knew then, or indeed now, and not Noa, no, certainly not her. He was free to do so in his loneliness, and it was simple to bring death to fragile life. Was it, even, curiosity? Alternatives test being articulated; they bubble. He knows not whether the answer is that simple. Is it ever?

            As he passes under the perforated shade of some sparse trees, his thoughts turn to the wounded dragon’s chances of survival. The doomed geckos of his past, even at Death’s door, struggled and writhed in agony. The dragon, though, seems to lie resigned. It barely moves a limb, and its abdomen remains the only reliable signal of the absence of Death. When he picked it up, didn’t it already lie motionless? His assumption was that the dragon was simply in shock to be so ruthlessly hunted in broad daylight. It must come to. These estimations lessen the urgency (what urgency?) to release the dragon. For if it is helpless, and likely doomed, then it can’t hurt to stay with it a while longer. Suddenly, as if accidentally puncturing his own bubble, he wonders why he feels no urge to rush it to a veterinarian, if he has indeed grown to become so merciful, so magnanimous. No answer comes to mind, can’t be bothered is dismissed as untrue, and the ego’s bubble is resealed.

            The imperfect shade has now become perfected due to an overlapping of fuller, taller trees, and Valentin notices he’s already in the park on the approach to Noa’s building. The proximity to her, to the rush of the normal, begins to flood his mind with sobering realism. He’s just an awkward guy who picked up a curious-looking lizard for whatever reason. It’s much too small and unimportant to rush anywhere, to worry about. Who, quite frankly, cares? What’s happened to it is unfortunate, certainly, but not worth more than a momentary sigh and a frown, which puts the past half an hour or so of carrying the lizard and overthinking in a downright humiliating light. Boys are mean and girls are disgusted. There is nothing more to it, and his exciting girlfriend is waiting on the eighth floor, to be kissed, touched, and loved. And so what if he killed some geckos in his ignorant childhood? To deem it dramatic is to indulge in self-importance, pretensions, and eye-rolling interiority. If other boys his age can uproariously, thoughtlessly stomp a lizard to death and go about their day, then why does he make a tortured show of it? So put the lizard down wherever. The moment’s passed. Stop looking down and go about your day.

            He stops by a row of dense, dark-green bushes with spark-like white flowers peeking here and there. And holds. He holds it gently, loosely, and he crouches down, attempting to look deep into the withering lizard’s opaque, reptilian eyes. Valentin swallows a lump in his throat, and tenses with agonized anticipation, willing something that that does not happen. But I love.

            Then, with an inkling of tears forced into the corners of his eyes by sheer frustration over meaning’s spurning of him—of their moment—he places the lizard on a patch of shaded, soft earth, and watches as it lies there unmoving.

The phone buzzes, and Valentin stands and regains the brisk pace he initially intended back at school. The phone buzzes, and he strains not to turn back, missing the lizard’s rustling escape. The phone buzzes, and he ascends via elevator, attempting to rid himself of all thought. The phone buzzes, and he knocks and a door opens and—
            “Valen—”

And her. Her he simply hugs.