The First Story

This is the story of a boy and a dragon. Of a young man, that is, and the dragon he fought. Because young men battle dragons. Boys only play at it. Old men tell about it. So, this is the story of a young man and a dragon— a hero, a heroic story.

His name was Seth, because I like that name. And we're changing tack here, in case you hadn't noticed. This is a new story. No showgirls allowed. Yet.

Seth was the third son of Adam and Eve. The one who missed all that ugliness with Cain and Abel. The one who made a life for himself. A respectable life. Without murders or Marks or too much divine involvement, from all reports. And Seth battled his dragon foe in San Francisco. Well, why not? Some cities are appropriate venues for fairy tales, even now. Parts of New York are good: Soho probably has unicorns and griffins breeding like crazy in every historic loft apartment, and Brooklyn seems like it has something going on somewhere, doesn’t it? But then again, New Jersey holds nothing more mysterious than . . . well, nothing much mysterious. But London has ghosts and spirits, and France has bad-tempered ghosts and spirits— overindulged clerics or resentful, blue-blooded guillotine victims from the Revolution, most likely. Or maybe both.

There is time travel in St. Petersburg and New Orleans, magic in St. Louis, absolutely nothing whatsoever in Pittsburgh. Washington D.C. has dragons, but they are fat and lazy and uninteresting in the end. But they look good, curled up with the monuments. And San Francisco, with its hills and silly steep streets, where the light is infused with salt spray and the air seems to tingle in front of you, hosts many fairy tales. Why not? Why can’t it do that?

So Seth made his way through the roads across the hills of San Francisco like a hero and a champion, which is to say, interestingly. On the lookout for fantastical things, because San Francisco is the kind of place where fantastical things occur and appear. Something interesting may always be coming around the next-to-nearest corner there: a nun on roller skates, and sporting a beard. A girl pinioned with more metal than clothing. People of all ages sprouting electronic gear and tie-dyed hair and wheels and skateboards and dresses and feathers. And while these may not sound like fairy tale characters to you, I beg to differ. If Rapunzel or King Arthur saw one of those nuns, or someone with those earphones stuck in their head, wouldn’t they think they had seen something otherworldly? It’s really all a matter of context. And for the record, how many people in the wilds of, say, Kansas, have actually seen a drag queen nun in broad daylight? Probably not many more than have seen a unicorn. So it’s relative, isn’t it?

And so Seth made his way interestingly. Unafraid, undaunted. Hero-like. He had a book with him.

Not a magical book. It’s not that sort of story. Just a reading book. Not even a Great Work, necessarily. Maybe E. M. Forster. Maybe Stephen King— just something to read as he went. Not magical, not special, not a meaningful plot twist or a clue in the story— Seth’s book was whatever he’d picked up most recently to pass the slow moments. You realize that even adventures have slow moments. Sure, you get to step into magical sailing ships and sail across the whole ocean in a night and a day in order to rescue a lady fair, but we’re still talking a night and a day, folks. Twelve to eighteen hours aboard with no one to talk to— and the middle of the ocean is a mighty boring place, even from the decks of a magic sailing ship. Think of the magic sailing ship as sort of an ultimate Concorde— mostly fun in theory. Less fun to do than to boast that you have done-- better as a story, that is, than as an experience. The smart hero brings a book along.

Now, on to those hills he was walking through. They’re interesting, too, the hills of a good fairy-tale city like San Francisco. A hill is just a hill, more or less, but in a good collection of them each one becomes a personality. The one you just climbed might be demanding, the one in front of you might be inviting. There might be a dim place to one side, where elves might be hiding, or there might be a tiny desert on another’s flank, beating back the sun into the sky. Hills are like people— multi-faceted. They’re like interesting people, that is, not the boring ones you pass by and don’t want to speak to.

So through this cocktail party of geography goes our hero, in search of dragons. One dragon, anyway. Only one is needed, of course. One at a time. But to be most truthful that is not really what he was thinking of. He was really only thinking of his journey. Because journeys are demanding things— they demand thought and attention. A voyage goes over water, a trip is something you do with your parents, probably against your will and involving a station wagon (or a minivan or an SUV— it’s generational. The vehicles change, but the fundamental nature of traveling with your family does not.) But a journey is travel with purpose. A purposeful movement. And that is what Seth was doing. Moving purposefully through the fantastically peopled hills and flanks of San Francisco, seeing blue-haired roller bladers, finding scenes of greatness and teasing views of the Bay far below. Seeking out the adventures that awaited.

Let’s talk about the dragon now. Where do dragons come from? Well, eggs, presumably, but where does the species originate? Somewhere like the plains of Africa, perhaps— somewhere big and full of life and inexorably slow-moving; somewhere too large and too primitive for human beings to really grasp and pin down. Too subtle.

Or: somewhere like the mountains of Greece or the fjords of Norway, too remote and inaccessible to catalogue completely, where there is always one last crevice or cave that the explorers have missed, and maybe that one is where the dragons come from.

Or maybe they come from storybooks, or maybe they come from Tarot cards. Maybe from our unconsciousness, which is a lot like the Plains of Africa, in a Jungian way— the collective unconscious. Dragons are very Jungian creatures, aren’t they?

Never mind– dragons might come from a number of places.

This dragon, whatever its origin or the origin of its kind (which it probably didn’t care about— it’s humans who worry these issues like dogs with fleas), was hiding in a low niche between hills in Golden Gate Park, on the oceanfront side of the city. “Hiding” because it lay coiled tightly in a shadow, back deep in a fissure. Not really hiding, in other words, but hidden, if you weren’t looking carefully, if you were just bashing along through the wilderness, wandering off from the cultivated lawns of the Park and crashing into someplace wilder where the rangers don’t weed every day. And one says “hiding” because what else would a dragon do? Dragons are Dark Things, and Dark Things hide from us, don’t they? Where would the horror industry be otherwise?

For its part, the dragon was just concerned with being, not hiding. With being a dragon, with being a dark thing. With being a dark thing, with continuing to be one for a long, long time. This dragon had no interest in fairy-tales, which are short things, or with heroics or heroes, which do not last that much longer. It thought of long things, of long lives and a seeming endless existence lying in its niche, feeling sun or rain or whatever, seeing ocean, seeing distant forms of people passing. It preferred just to be its own dark self, uninvolved, remaining separate. To live a quiet life. To be a dark thing. To simply be, without having to prove or defend itself.

It knew, of course, that there were heroes. That they would come hunting it and it would have to defend itself, and maybe eat them. But it didn’t seek the battles, and it didn’t find any titillation in licking its wounds (or the hero’s bones) and gloating over its victories after a battle. It judged such things stupid, and the one or two or three times it had had to have a battle, it preferred not to dwell on. It preferred to leave those things, to leave them in the past from the very moment they were over. To stay a dark thing.

To return to being again.

It was an acceptable life, for this dragon.

But on this particular day, of course, Seth was out searching for it. He didn’t know he was searching, he only knew that, as a hero, he was expected and required to make his way to and through fantastical places and to slay the dragons or overcome the other Dark Things that he came upon. Heroes, dragons— they’re drawn together. Like moths and flames, or lemmings and cliffs. And so up one hill and down another; through the Park and past some happy families; past a few girls who looked at and watched him, and past a few boys who did the same; around the trees and the buffalo (did you know there were buffalo in Golden Gate Park? There are, and they are truly fairy-tale creatures. Great and massive and imbued with some sort of wisdom— the philosophers of the cow family, it seems. They’re amazingly peaceful. And Seth went past them, and nodded his respect to them as he walked.) And so to the dragon waiting, lurking, curling and not exactly hiding on the other side, facing out to the ocean.

Heroes, again, just seem to end up near dragons. And dragons can smell young men. You understand that Seth did not in any way sneak up, and the dragon did not in any way ambush him. They met, with a mutual recognition, as if their date had been planned by secretaries and scheduled weeks in advance. (How else could there ever be a story? Isn’t that what one expects? The thing that happens?)

“I’m ready,” Seth said to himself as he attacked the dragon.

What did he mean by that? It might have been unconscious, just a reminder, from his brain to his muscles of all the time they’d spent in training, preparing for this moment. It might have been a pep talk, an attempt to energize his spirits as he threw himself into the fray.

It might have been hopeful, a kind of whistling in the dark to quell his fear. It might even have been a warning, an announcement to the world and the monster that this hero was formidable. It might have been all of these, or something different, but when dealing with heroes, one must expect slogans. A hero muttering “I’m ready” as he points his sword (or lance or sub-machine gun or some impromptu missile he’s created on the spot from his tennis shoe and three old wads of gum) is giving the movie marketers a tag line, asserting his place in history, offering some good last words in case he doesn’t, in fact, get another chance to talk. Heroes have to think of these things. This is their responsibility. It is, again, the thing that happens.

And what next? Well of course, the battle. It was swift and it was terrible, as such battles usually are. And it was breathy, as in heaving, wrenching gasps, and it was endless, as in the sun seeming to stand still while it glinted on the armor and the colorful scales. And for the most part, nothing much was learned by either side. They retired now and then, pulling back to breathe more heavily and to sop up some blood with something— Seth’s various bandages grew redder as the day went on, and the rocks around the dragon got wetter and slicker. But after each break they just went back at it and lost their breaths again and received even more bloody wounds from each other, so what was the point?

Seth tired first, of course. No surprise there— men are smaller and weaker than scaly lizards eight times their size, what else could have happened? Battles in which the dragon loses generally involve either trickery or else a lot of men against one dragon. And eventually, during one of those momentary time-outs, Seth wiped off his forehead and hesitated before going at it one more time. There had been more than a dozen “one more time”s by then, and he was beginning to doubt whether one more one more time would really make a difference.

“I am not accomplishing very much,” he muttered. He didn’t take the time to realize what bad last words those were. He just said them, and then headed toward the dragon again, to engage it and continue battling.

One more time.

And then, after that time, when Seth found himself once again looking at the dragon from a distance and wondering what it was he was supposed to be doing, he got caught staring at the dragon staring at him, and so the two of them spent some time like that, staring and staring back, without movements or words or anything else very productive.

A note on the eyes of dragons. They can be very unnerving. It’s important for the scene that you understand this— they’re downright uncanny. They don’t waver in their focus, and what’s worse is, they blink independently. It is unnerving to be glared at by a creature that never ever loses sight of you even for a split-second, even to blink.

Seth blinked. Then he did it again, over-exaggerating. Defying the dragon.

No reaction. A wink. Another wink. Yellow glare occluded by a rubbery green dragon eyelid. One rubbery green, one yellow glare. Then the other. Independent.

“This is frustrating,” Seth said to himself, and he sighed.

The dragon blinked at him. Coiled a little tighter back into its niche.

It had blinked. Not winked. Did you catch that? Both eyes together. Closing at the same time. Not winking. Not independent.

Seth looked harder. It winked again, with one eye only. Then the other. But Seth kept looking.

A long moment passed. Some breathing. Some individual winks.

Our hero sighed. He wiped his forehead. He had no idea what to make of this. Was the dragon telling him something? Or was it only waiting, and had the blinking incident been a mistake, maybe even an hallucination? Did the monster want to eat him? Did it even care?

He realized that he was wishing for a good excuse to quit this fight, to go and get something to eat and a bed. An excuse, any excuse.

The dragon snorted soundlessly— a puff of black smoke slithering upward.

A young man, and a dragon. They had battled, they had done their duty. Hadn’t they? Had they?

Hm.

“Oh, the hell with it,” Seth said aloud, and he turned and walked away.

NEXT POST: THE MYSTERIES OF MAGNOLIA (Monday 8/24)