“Yes, but there’s no such thing as ‘future’ in the way you’re thinking of it, George. You imagine a clock ticking by—I can think of no worse invention than a clock. In reality, time is its own living beast. It has a space which it occupies. Think of it like me—time has a head, time has a tail, time has appendages that branch out from its body and grow, it’s always growing, always moving forward.” The dragon extended an arm and flexed his claws. One clench of his fist could pulverize me.
“And you’re able to travel across this body of time,” I said. “You can travel to a place that’s more forward in time than here. And what do you do there? You go and eat their rubbish, then come spit it out here? You’re some kind of bin collector for the future?”
“I have my feedings and I have my expulsions, yes. They create a system of balances across time for all parties. I fulfill a need that the world would be missing otherwise.”
I shook my head, unbelieving in this practicality. “You took out a whole hillside the other day. The people here are finding bits of trash from the future—the king knows about you. Doesn’t that cause problems? Where I came from there’s no such thing as dragons, but I’d imagine if you keep doing what you’re doing it would cause some kind of reaction.” I was drunk on a delirium I had never felt before, words just slipping out of me. The threat of very immediate danger—the dragon’s tree-trunk fangs, its rocky hide and slithering tail—couldn’t be disguised by the trickery of his more humanlike personality.
The dragon furrowed his brow. Large reptilian platelets folded upward and he shook his head. “No, no, no, that’s not how it works, George, because there is no future. That’s what I’m trying to explain without causing you too much distress. What we’re in right now, this is called thepast. While your survival out here is commendable, it’s slightly misguided because you’re only an echo. Time has a head and a tail, and this is the tail. Imagine a shooting star hurtling through space: there exists, at only one point and time, the present. This world, even the world you came from, it’s all just the afterburn image of the present. The present is all there is. That’s where it’s all happening.”
I had the sudden remembrance of stale coffee, dry cleaning, and industrial air-conditioning. “You came from the future?” I asked. “How does a dragon—”
“I came from where I came from.” The dragon smiled a devilish, fanged smile. “I’m also half a millennium old. Time itself is where I’m from. You’re wondering how a dragon could exist in the modern world—well what, George, is a modern world? I could ask the same of you. Why would a man willingly send himself even further from the present?”
“Well, it wasn’t willingly,” I said. “And I think what’s considered present is pretty subjective. This is the world I’m living in and I’m very much alive.”
“I think you’d be surprised by all the ways you’re not,” said the dragon. He winked. The wink failed at being “knowing”—a pinkish, translucent membrane slipped horizontally across his eye, under the main eyelid, reminding me just how much of an animal he was. My cheeks flushed with warmth as blood rushed through me in different ways. I felt dumbstruck and without any words to say. Well, I did have words to say—I wanted to ask, “So you’re saying nothing in the past matters?” but the words felt too unreal to utter. The crisp modernity of the dragon’s speech had struck something inside me, knocking me off-balance. His mere existence seemed to denigrate everything I had built in the past year. Everything was up in flames.
“So tell me,” the dragon said, “I can’t wait any longer. What year have you come from? I want to see if I’ve guessed correctly.”
I actually had to think for a second. I shook all weariness from my head, how clouded I was with disbelief and exhaustion, and then I said it: “2026.” My voice cracked. The number sounded like an epithet.
“How queer.” The dragon—the enormity of him—smirked. “And what a shame. Right on the cusp of the entropic zone.” He moved toward me. The bluntness of his pointed snout, the sharpness of his jagged teeth, his snake eyes, all of it made me back up, but his tail was in the way. A wall of leathery skin hedged me in on every side.
“What’s the entropic zone?” I asked.
“I think you already know,” the dragon said. His eyes did theopposite of twinkle. “And I think you’d better get back to your smallholding.”
Suddenly I was lifted up. Ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred feet in the air. I was taken upward in the fastest lift in the world, even though the dragon must have been moving comically slow in comparison, carrying me with both hands as you would a prized piece of glassware. With his tail he broke a hole in the weakened roof of the cave, and the sun, for once, was not shining. The horizon was awash with dwindling pink. Simon would be worrying about me, and I thought to myself almost as if in the voice of the dragon,how pedestrian of a thing to do.
The dragon set me on the ground. “I’ll be leaving for my next feeding now,” he said. “I’ll return to this place in a few days’ time and I’ll have to do my expulsions again, but after, if you catch me before I fall asleep, I can send you back to your own time. I’ll speak to my people and we’ll get it sorted. Twenty twenty-sixxxx—what a mouthful. Delicious.” Only his craggy, twisted head showed above the surface of the earth, like a smiling, eager crocodile.
“If I want to come, what do I need to do?” I asked.
“Come to this cave after I’ve finished with my expulsions. Come alone. It won’t work on anyone who’s never time traveled before.”
“But what do I do? What happens? We just disappear?”
A jet engine took off: “HAHAHA.” The dragon’s bellows stormed the sky, dashing pebbles and rocks away from us in pulses. “You’re too naive for a time traveler,” he said. “If only you could be so lucky as to simply disappear—no, that’s a luxury reserved for me. For you to be able to time travel, my new littlefriend, well... I eat you.” I flinched. The dragon’s forked tongue flitted in between its needle teeth. “I slurp you up like a noodle in a soup—like a noodle stuck in a—what do you call them? A straw? Like slurping through a straw. I gobble you up. I swallow you whole.”
14
“What is George going to do now?” I heard it said in a thousand voices as I ran from the crater. I had to scramble up the slope to get out of there but it felt like everything was downhill, like I was fleeing some almighty mountaintop, banished from on high, legs flipping over each other, hips out of socket with the speed and momentum of divine terror. There were a thousand questions I should have asked the dragon—asked the dragon!the idea was absurd—questions that bordered on pure admin for this insanity—about diet, time management, environmental factors, where the hell does a dragon actually come from?—but nothing was enough to distract from the throbbing pain in my stomach, the nausea tinged with an immense sadness that had opened up with the dragon’s offer.
“What is George going to do?” I heard it in my mother’s voice, digitized and pockmarked with bad reception. “Everyone’s wondering what’s George going to do.” This is the story of how one man lost everything, then still managed to find some morethings to lose. Job gone. Boyfriend gone. Gone like ribbons of sand across the shower floor, gone like the sands of time itself. And now a dragon, a snake.
“You’re saying he just up and left in the middle of the night?” Mum said. I hadn’t called and told her this in tears. We were only talking because of a letter she had received from a debt collection agency trying to contact me. “You guys didn’t have a fight or something? You don’t have to tell me.” Everyone wants to know. No one wants to know.
I remember rolling my eyes. “We’re always having fights,” I said. “I guess we fought on our trip to Sitges one night, but that was a while ago.” We hadn’t actually. That was the one night when we should have had a fight, but we didn’t. Why does a person leave?
“You don’t have to tell me.” That was how she did it—situate the lever just right, pry enough to lift, butstop, look away, don’t tell me what’s underneath. Spiders or snakes or dragons, you don’t have to tell me. You look under there alone.
Now I was alone, clambering up the slope of the crater in darkness, a wretched bouquet of decisions behind and before me. I was too afraid to put them into words.
I remember the helplessness of that night in Sitges, of washing and only finding more sand, more layers of sun cream, my body a sandcastle lapped up by the tide, crumbling down the drain, and wishing I could do that too, break down and slip away. Or just drown.
Fuck stripper on beach. It was as if it had been scheduled on our itinerary. Tick. My boyfriend’s reaction was not the end of our relationship, but the beginning of the downward spiral that ended with me coming face-to-face with the dragon, thedevil himself. He (my boyfriend, not the dragon, but then again, who knows) made no show of things, even giggling along with all the other boys back at the beach house, watching a video of me and the stripper fucking in plain view. “Wait, pause it,” I remember saying, so I could admire myself. I couldn’t tell where the stripper ended and I began, an oatmeal of pixels and grime. I forced the guy who had filmed it to delete it, then forced him to delete it from his Recently Deleted folder, seeing it in a lineup of bad selfies, bad food pics, bad sunsets. We all felt the proverbial thump on the shoulders of it being gone, and the shame of having almost said out loud, “Can you send it to me first?”
What were we living for?
