Dragon In the Desert

This is a story about a dragon. Who followed Seth the Hero to Las Vegas after their meeting in San Francisco. (We’re backing up a bit.)

Of course, you know that by “meeting”, I mean battle. “Meeting” can mean get-together, it can mean negotiation, it can mean sporting event (as in, “Mr. McEnroe trounced him at their last meeting”), or, as in this case, it can mean knock-down, bloody, life or death battle.

Quite a lot for one simple word. English is like that. Some words work much harder than others, carry much more baggage. It isn’t fair. If there were a trade union for words, that would be the first issue they’d tackle. That, and the to, too, and two debacle, but let’s not open that can of worms. Let’s just say, these would, undoubtedly, be the subjects of the word union’s first meeting.

But back to our story. Dragons generally don’t follow heroes, unless they’re intending to eat them. Heroes don’t really follow dragons, either, unless they’re stalking. So stalking would make sense. Hunting. Tracking. Either way.

This wasn’t stalking. This was following.

Which was odd. But what else do dragons have to do with their time, anyway? They live long lives. They don’t have careers. So it followed him. Out of curiosity.

They were well-matched, too, Seth and this dragon. Just not in the usual way. Not according to the classic hero/dragon fairy tale paradigm of strong hero/preeminent monster. The meeting of opposites, perfectly balanced adversaries.

Well, this isn’t much of a fairy tale.

So therefore: the dragon had followed Seth away from San Francisco, along the coast, turned, with him, its back on the ocean, arrived in Las Vegas and taken up residence in a neon sign.

Not really residence. After all, it didn’t know how long it would be staying. That depended on its hero. It didn’t move its things in, send out change-of-address forms, and call the cable company to turn on its tv. It just came to rest gently on a flat surface and grabbed an edge with one claw. And then it folded its wings and there it was– in residence.

And this was not your ordinary neon sign, you realize. Not anything small and forgettable like you might see in front of a bar in Iowa or anywhere. This was one of those Vegas Strip behemoths, those monolithic structures that tower over the street, one in front of each huge hotel. I’ve called it “neon” but actually they’re full of neon and light bulbs and sign boards and bells and whistles and sometimes year-round fireworks. There are whole buildings that require less design and engineering than these signs. The Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge put together might not have incorporated their complexity. They are simultaneous advertisement, news relay, and Mardi Gras float. They are meant to be inescapable. They are intended to lure you inside with the wonders they present and promise. And they obviously work, they do indeed lure people in to their respective hotels, or Las Vegas wouldn’t exist.

They are also, quite literally, the size of a house. An actual house. Not a particularly small one, either. Picture a four bedroom two-story perched up on a telephone pole and decorated to within an inch of its life for Christmas, New Year’s, Halloween, the Fourth of July, and every other holiday you’ve ever heard of all at once– decorated with a budget in the millions and access to every cutting-edge lighting and display effect out there. And now erase any hint of taste or subtlety. Got it?

So the dragon chose well, and once he’d alighted he curled up in his neon sign and relaxed, content with the knobbiness and the metal and the warmth of it all around him. It was good, for a dragon. If Freud had been a dragon, or if there were dragon Freudians, there might be suggestions of womb-like-ness to the sign. Luckily for all of us, no dragon ever born has had time for Freud.

So the sign was good, for the dragon. That was all it needed. It was a good lair, a good residence. For as long as Seth stayed in Las Vegas.

But two days later, as Seth was still caught up in adventures in the city (all above-board and respectable, I hasten to promise. He may have been in Sin City but he was still a hero, with all the nobility, high morals, and propriety which that word carries.) And after forty-eight hours of unrelieved reposing, our dragon got bored. Curling up in a nice, huge, hot sign is all well and good, of course, and very pleasant if you’re fond of heat and quiet and solitude, which are exactly in a dragon’s line, but eventually even the most sedentary winged creature needs to soar a little. (Birds fly, you understand. Flapping and squawking. Dragons soar.) So it decided to explore some. To stretch its wings. To find a bit of distraction. And then to curl up here again in its nice hot, knobby sign.

That is not how things happened for it, of course. What kind of boring story would that be?

The dragon opened its wings and took off, floated soundlessly, moved its wings once ever-so-negligently to climb, and rose like a stealth bomber to the air high above Las Vegas. Very apt, its shape, its movement. The real stealth bombers flew near Las Vegas while the design was in development, although from the ground they look less like dragons than like big black kites from Hell, or like flying barn doors.

The dragon angled and moved out over the desert. Kited over the Strip and let the lights fall behind it a bit. And so it came quite quickly to the desert, to the place that Las Vegas hides and covers.

It can be amazing how close “the desert” is in Las Vegas. Even to the center of Las Vegas. Everywhere, it encroaches. In other places, one doesn’t think of the outer environment as “encroaching”. But in Southern Nevada the land is an adversary, something alien to life and human things and human places. The desert encroaches on Las Vegas to remind us that we don’t belong there. That we are unwelcome. It’s like aphids trying to make a living on the underside of a plastic plant leaf. They might do it, for awhile, but the next time the plant gets cleaned– sprayed with ammonia or glass cleaner or whatever one sprays plastic plant leaves with to clean them– bye-bye aphids. A dead herd of aphids, all in one fell swoop. Over. Done with.

It’s like that in Las Vegas. One day the wind and weather will overcome all those facades, and the neon and the palm trees and the pretty lawns in front of the eighty billion tract houses, and everything will disappear, and then Las Vegas will become a legend and human life will move to other places.

Do you know where all the enormous, Ancient-Egypt-style sets for the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton version of Cleopatra are to this day? Well, neither does anyone else. They were built somewhere out in the Mojave, and after the film crews left they sat there in the middle of nowhere, and the wind and weather came and now no one can find them. There’s got to be something left of some of them, even after all this time, and there are movie buffs and rabid Elizabeth Taylor fans who would sell their souls for the tiniest souvenir from their plywood remains. But they’re gone, lost like your great-grandmother’s youth. And they’ll stay lost until some small-time archeologist who can’t get the grants necessary to go dig anywhere overseas for real ancient wonders stumbles on them and Hollywood archivists the world over rejoice.

Las Vegas will be like that– the hotels and mega-resorts are barely more than movie-sets, anyway. The gigantic signs are much more stable and solid than the buildings, and that’s just because they have to hold up all those light bulbs. Maybe if the city were abandoned for a decade the hotels would disappear and just the signs would remain, which might be interesting in a surreal and spooky way.

And then they’d disappear, too, and pretty quickly, because most of them are top-heavy and cantilevered and ungainly and just generally unlikely, and Nature doesn’t like those things unless she, herself, creates them, so she’d have it in for those signs, I can promise you. And then there would be nothing but another patch of empty desert, which is exactly what would make Nature happy.

Do you suppose this would spawn a latter-day Atlantis myth? Something about the highly developed desert dwellers who displeased heaven and so were swallowed up by the sands and will return someday? Do you supposed Las Vegas and Las Vegans could pass into our cultural memory as “highly evolved”?

On the other hand, do you suppose that in actuality Atlantis was nothing more than a big resort, a big pleasure dome, and that its sinking is in fact the only thing that gave it its aura of wonder?

It’s something to think about.

The dragon had thought at first it might find a sheep or two (what else are dragons supposed to eat, besides maybe heroes or virgins? Or virgin heroes– two for the price of one, so to speak. Sort of like a chocolate cupcake that also gives you lots of vitamins.) So it kept an eye out for a herd of sheep.

But have you ever seen the Mojave Desert? What sheep do eek out their existence in it live on tiny farms at the very edges, where the foothills provide some shade and shelter, if not much sustenance. Around Las Vegas, which is not exactly renowned for farms, remember, the land supports very little larger than a rabbit.

There is an ostrich farm, of course. It is owned by an ex-showgirl, a retired dancer, a displayer of feathers, herself. Her name is Linda Spinks, and Spinks raises ostriches and sells the feathers to small-time producers who dye them and use them to decorate their own dancers in shows in places like Aruba and Orlando, Florida. Spinks has quite a nice life, quite a successful one. For a woman who made her living topless till she turned forty-two, which is quite an advanced age for showgirls and therefore something of an achievement in itself. Most ex-showgirls seem to retire into real estate, or as doctors’ wives, or into teaching ballet, if they’re British. No other showgirl that I’ve ever heard of raises ostriches.

But our dragon didn’t even see the ostriches, because Spinks’ farm was on the other side of town from where it flew, and it didn’t eat anything else because a jack rabbit would hardly be worth the effort for a great big dragon, and the quail just weren’t appetizing and it didn’t see anything else that was. This not eating wasn’t really a problem for the dragon– dragons don’t eat very often. They are the original biological conservationists. They can go months without eating, and a good thing, too, or the whole world would have run out of virgins and heroes and sheep a long time ago. Or maybe of people altogether, since virgins grow up to become mothers, and thus produce more babies, including baby heroes and more baby virgins. But if the mothers are eaten when they’re still virgins, themselves, before they’ve had a chance to contribute to that next generation, then things could become very sparse very quickly, populationally speaking. So it is probably no accident, evolutionarily, that dragons don’t have big appetites.

Anyway, it wasn’t that the dragon was hungry. It was only that the thought had occurred to it. The mood for food had crossed its mind, as something to consider and look for. Not eating was annoying, now, but not a problem.

And this particular dragon didn’t think annoyance or any other unhappy emotion was worth spending very much time over, so it didn’t. It just soared some more, and went higher.

The high desert air was both still and moving at the same time– like a deep pool of water in a broader river. Still, quiet, removed from the tumult all around and yet also swirling, recirculating, not cut off, but at its own pace, separated from the rushing going on above and below. The dragon rode the peace and calm of it, soared over desert.

“Who are you?”

Voices can carry over deserts. Just like over water. Just one of the many ways, another one of the many ways, that desert and water can be compared. Like that 60s song about nameless horses, where sands turn to seas.

Never mind that last bit. Forget you heard it. No more pop-song references.

Voices carry over water, voices carry over sand. Desert and sea, water and sand. Distances. They can be deceiving.

The dragon pulled up higher, kited around again. It did not answer.

“Who are you?”

A whisper, a growl. A voice from the sands, themselves. A sound from the ground: grainy, rough. Quiet. Yet it carried.

“Who are you?”

“Faraway,” the dragon breathed. A growl from the air, a sound from the upper atmosphere.

Soft, long, slow: “Far away.”

The dragon sank lower. Allowed itself to sink. Lowered as a swimmer into deeper water.

“Who are you?” it returned.

A sigh. A sound like pebbles skittering.

Don’t let this get too poetic-seeming for you. It was a dark night. The air was clear and full of dry white moonlight. The breeze was steady, busy carrying stray sounds here and there.

It was another ordinary Mojave night, in other words. Perfectly normal. All this whispering, moaning– even the simplest sounds, the most ordinary moments, can seem foreign, can seem exotic in a desert night. It doesn’t make them so. It makes them seem so.

Romantic. Extraordinary. But that doesn’t mean they’re anything special.

“Who are you?” Faraway said it again, and this time came an answer.

“My mother was called Stealth.” Which didn’t exactly answer the question.

“Who are you?”

“She flew this sky over the desert. She soared high, till she became less than a shadow against the sunlight, and when she returned her wings had become coated with white ice.”

“That is called frost,” the dragon, our dragon, Faraway, said. Living near humans for a long time, he had become more concerned with words, particularly human words. He had become knowledgeable about them. Most dragons wouldn’t be.

It’s not that other beings, dragons or whatever, don’t pay attention to the human words for things, or the human concern for having a right word for everything. It may be that those distinctions– what is the right word for the white accumulation of frozen water vapor– are not important to other beings. Not that they don’t care. Just that they don’t see it.

Language is a measure of what’s important to us. Take the myth that claims there are a hundred words for snow in Eskimo . It’s untrue– even Eskimos don’t think snow is that important (or maybe they just couldn’t think of a hundred different things to say about it.) On the other hand, it is probably true that no Eskimo language has a word for palm tree.

Again, Faraway asked, “Who are you?”

Some things are important. Finding out whom we’re talking to, for instance. Names. Getting our questions answered. The dragon didn’t mind repeating itself.

“I am called Sage.”

“Sage.”

A moment, while Faraway circled lower. Still flying, but closer to the ground. The action– soaring– hadn’t changed. Only the appearance. Smaller circles. Coming closer.

“Are you wise?”

“Sage. Wise.” A lighter tone. “I know this desert. I know it well. I am wise in desert ways.” Thoughtful. Amused. “A play on my name.”

Faraway circled even lower. If there had been trees, he would have been brushing their branches. “Let me find you. Tell me about this desert.”

“I am right here.” And so she was. She was underneath him, lying quiet among the sands. She had blended in with them completely till he’d suddenly seen her fully. Unexpected. Unpredicted. Another full-size dragon, the color of the Mojave Desert.

“Sage,” Faraway said, coming to rest. His heavy claws gripped sand and broken pieces of glass and sagebrush branches and whatever was lost, mixed into the desert. “Tell me.”

She blew her breath across the sand, causing a skittering of pebbles, a tiny horizontal avalanche.

“My mother was called Stealth,” she said. “She came to these deserts before any others. She flew the skies here, she spiraled up till she disappeared and I feared she was gone, I feared she had never existed. She returned days later, often. She soared higher and farther than any others knew or saw. She flew in secret, far above where other eyes had ever seen. When she was gone it was as if she had never been, as if she’d disappeared.

“I thought she was fine– fine. And I thought she had a fine and wonderful name.”

A pause. She breathed again. Another skitter.

“What was her death?”

“I thought she would die in secret, flying silent and secret. I thought she would die in the dark, no thing seeing her. I did not know that her name was a human thing, too. That it would tear her, that it would pierce her, rip her, fly through her, and leave her in pieces falling in the air. There were dark pieces on the sand, spread across the valley. There were dark things spread by the wind, and she had never screamed that her death was approaching. There was no scream in the air, only silence and shreds of her.”

“A dragon’s name is its death. It is always its death.”

There was a sigh. A pause.

“So I have made myself to look like sand and sagebrush. I have changed to be the desert. I always thought my name told death by desert. Death by sage, death among the desert things. But now you come and call me Sage and when you say it you mean wise. And so now I wonder. How will I die now? Will I be sage, or die by sage?”

“It is a beautiful name.”

“It is a beautiful name. All our names are beautiful. Yours is beautiful and confusing, mine is beautiful and double-meant, Stealth’s was beautiful and misleading. Are our deaths, then, beautiful deaths? Was my mother’s death a beautiful one?”

She had told it well. Told the story, told the memory well. Could that be beautiful? Could that make the thing itself beautiful?

“You are a sage of the desert,” Faraway told her.

“I fear that I am.”

And Faraway, after he had passed some time with Sage, flew back to the sign he had chosen, which was not the most famous of the Strip sign-behemoths (that honor belongs to the Stardust Hotel sign, which has been recognized, in studies, by everyone from Bolsheviks in Moscow to Aborigines in the Australian Outback. It sucks up more electricity each day than the entire country of Botswana, according to hotel brochures. The Stardust management seems to be proud of this.) Faraway’s chosen sign-hostel was particularly new and large, and he curled himself comfortably back into it.

On his way back to the sign and city he flew high, higher than before, and wheeled around the sky at elevations where the Strip looked like nothing more than a zipper of sparkles splitting the gown of the sand. And when he came lower he circumnavigated the whole city, and he took a different route back to his sign than the one he’d taken on his way out.

And he ate an ostrich along the way.

NEXT POST: WHEN GODS COLLIDE (Friday 10/23)