The Second Story

This is a story about a hero and his travels. Our Hero Seth went to Egypt, which is a strange place for a hero to go. Egypt is not known for heroes, unless you count Moses, who is really of a different category. Altogether. Then again, Seth didn’t really go to Egypt, he went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, to the Egyptian wing. The Metropolitan Museum has a wonderful Egyptian wing. It is one of my favorite places. But it is not really, itself, any part of Egypt. However, there is, undeniably, a little part of Egypt, some little part, there inside the Metropolitan Museum among the careful lighting and the information plaques. Some little part of history, pulled out and brought over land and sea and reverenced, and of course the ironic thing is that the particular part of Egypt that the Met does contain and hold up for everybody’s reverence and edification is particularly that part which goes against heroism altogether. You know-- the museum halls are full of parts of mummies and great big statues. In other words, monumental remembrances. Anti-heroical. Divine, not human things.

But anyway, Seth went to New York, and then Seth went to the Met. You remember he was carrying a book in San Francisco? Well, he finished it, and traded it for another one, and then he finished that one and traded it for another one, too, and so on till he got to New York, at which point he traded in a John LeCarre novel for a guidebook. Because, having finished with John LeCarre for the moment, he felt he needed something a little more practical. Seth had never been to New York before. One needs a guidebook on one’s first trip to New York.

(Suffice it to say, for the moment at least, that the journey was long from San Francisco, and Seth had lots of time to read and lots of time to seek out other adventures that we’re not going to talk about here and now.)

By rights, if he had been in a proper fairy tale, Seth should have arrived at his destination on the back of a dragon, or at the very least on horseback chasing a dragon and with a lance in his hand. He was a hero, wasn’t he? Had he no sense of decorum? Has this story none? But he didn’t arrive any of those ways. He arrived on a bus, which had brought him from a plane.

There was a dragon in evidence, or one that had been in evidence during the interim, but not to Seth, himself. It had flown high, over him, looking down from time to time. Far, far up above his head. More about the dragon later. Seth had traveled in a series of cars, trains, and an airplane, although to be true to the form it should be chariots, cavalcades, and flying behemoths. On the other hand, a modern airplane is quite as unlikely as anything out of Grimm or the Arabian Nights. Consider: something the size of an office building sailing casually through the upper atmosphere (and before you say that an airplane isn’t the size of an office building, just go stand next to a 747 on the runway and let it hulk over you for five minutes) and then banking down over buildings and back yards to trundle gracelessly to a “gate” which is more like a doorway to empty air, lined up with dozens of other planes just like it as if they were a bunch of big, dumb, flying cows all ready to be milked and fed. That is quite fantastical enough for me. But maybe I don’t have enough imagination.

Once in New York, by whatever means, Seth took his guidebook and went to the Metropolitan Museum, which is where we started before all the meandering. He went to the Egyptian section, because the book recommended it, and so do I. The Metropolitan Museum and its Egyptian Wing are world-famous and justly so. Not to be missed.

But back to our hero and his adventures. The thing is, by this point in the story, Seth knew he was looking for something. Not something Egyptian, particularly, although one never knows– the most unexpected things turn up there. Seth didn’t know what he was seeking. But that he was seeking, he knew. He wasn’t sure where to look, but he knew to look. He knew that “it”, his object, the goal of his search, existed. He knew that his mission had become to track “it” down. And that led to his other major realization of this period, which was the inescapable, uncomfortable knowledge that, as a hero, he was hardly fulfilling his responsibilities. He was not living up to the job description, as it were. He was, in fact, less of a hero at this moment and more of a questor. Now, a questor is someone looking for something, and that job description Seth was fulfilling admirably. He was excelling, even. Heroes just look at things in order to do something about them. Seth had started out doing things– he’d done all sorts of things, including battling a dragon, which is pretty much the capstone on a lot of heroes’ careers– but at the ultimate moment of that battle, the time when he could really have made a name for himself in the hero world by battling the dragon to the death– someone’s death, his or its, it hardly mattered– he’d walked away. Not exactly what’s expected. Heroes work by instinct, by bloodlust, by determination linked to a preformed agenda. Reevaluating and walking away in the middle of something is just about diametrically opposed to a hero’s entire ethos, his accepted modus operandi.

So, it turns out, then, that heroes and questors are about as different from each other as it’s possible to be and still be a man of youthful age and adventurous personality in a fairy tale (or any close approximation-- let’s not get too technical.) Seth retained all those attributes-- he was definitively young and adventurous, and arguably ensconced in something like a fairy tale, wasn’t he?– but it appeared that his focus had switched. And so he found himself looking at things now, looking at things as a way of looking for things, looking at things as a way of seeing if they happened to be the things he was looking for. In a manner of speaking. Get it? Looking for, looking for what to look for. It’s a quest, isn’t it? It’s the eternal quest, the human race’s quest.

Well, what he found was a dragon. Gee, a dragon, you say? That’s not exactly surprising, you say. Not exactly new. Well, of course it isn’t. Why should it be? This is literature, after all, and these major elements turn up again, they recur. They may have different meanings for different moments, because it’s all a play of symbols, an interaction, and the game is to see how much they affect each other as they go. How much of each other they take on, how much and in what ways they change and where they end up when it’s over. And how they end up, both in your mind and each other’s. That’s the fun of it. That’s a story. So, yes-- he found a dragon.

Not just any dragon, mind you. It wouldn’t be, would it? Seth found “his” dragon, the one he’d battled, the one who had followed him. He couldn’t find any other. New York isn’t known for its dragons the way San Francisco is. There isn’t room for very many there. The few dragons who are resident in Manhattan have all the good skyscraper roofs already staked out. There’s hardly anywhere for a dragon new to town to go. New York is more hospitable to smaller mythical creatures, like griffins and unicorns. Things that fit in elevators, really.

So where was this particular dragon, if there aren’t many places for one and it had just arrived along with Seth? On the roof of the Metropolitan Museum, perhaps? Well, no, although there is a charming sculpture garden up there and so Seth might have wandered up and found it if it had been. But then, that roof is prime territory, with excellent views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline, so one assumes it already had a few mythical residents. No, Seth found his dragon compatriot in the Egyptian wing (otherwise, why all the exposition about Egypt? This narrative wanders, but not that much.) He found it in Gallery 12 pretending to be a monumental statue of Hatshepsut. Not really pretending, of course, just sort of blending in with the actual monumental statues of Hatshepsut. (Hatshepsut, for those of you with an educational bent– those of you who care, in other words– was a woman pharaoh. Not the first woman to rule Egypt, but the first to claim legitimacy for her rule just as the men who came before and after her did. The first to present herself as divine and divinely ordained, as sole successor to the previous pharaoh. Hatshepsut was a woman who changed the rule, in a manner of speaking.) The dragon was still rather obviously a dragon, to anyone who actually looked at it. But it’s amazing how that pebbly dragon skin can look like granite, and a curled-up dragon, with its tail and its wings folded in so its shape is rather square than long and sinuous, looks nothing like a dragon to the casual eye. It looks not much like an ancient Egyptian woman, either, of course, pharaonic or otherwise. But a non-fire breathing, non-battling dragon can remain amazingly still for amazingly long periods of time, so it’s not altogether ridiculous that it got away with not being noticed for an entire morning in the midst of all those other amazingly still, amazingly strange and unfamiliar monumental objects.

Seth, when he saw it, took several seconds to recognize it. He knew right away it wasn’t Hatshepsut, but he took a second to see what it was. One just doesn’t expect to find a dragon in Gallery 12 of the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum, after all. And then when he did recognize it, when it came into focus, so to speak, he wasn’t sure how to react at first.

“Oh,” said Seth sort of explosively. He was expressing two different types of surprise. Two different types of recognition leading to surprise, to be pedantic. The first was that the thing he was staring at was a dragon, the second was that it was his dragon, the one he’d battled. His “oh” served to verbalize both realizations.

The dragon breathed. Not an unimportant action after sitting immobile as an ancient statue for several hours. I mean to say, at that moment it took a breath, it breathed in. It was like a reaction, like a lizard response to Seth’s exclamatory syllable.

A syllable, a breath. It seems like a reasonable trade-off, doesn’t it?

“Why--” Seth exclaimed. Why are you here? might have been the most reasonable question. Or, Why are you following me? or possibly even, Why are you in Gallery 12 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City pretending to be a monumental statue of Queen Hatshepsut? Any of these might have been a reasonable thing to ask, even an expected, obvious thing to ask, but Seth posed none of them fully. Quite possibly, he meant to pose all of them, and some other ones, too, but couldn’t quite narrow the possibilities and so got no farther than “why.” At least, we can assume that those questions reflect some of the things he was thinking, relate to some of the feelings or confusions running through and around his head at that moment.

On the other hand, it’s possible he wasn’t thinking any of those things, and was only starting to say something stupid, like, “Why look, it’s the dragon I met in San Francisco. How are you?” But we’ll take the leap of faith and give him greater credit than that. We’ll assume he was going to say something intelligent, or, if not outstandingly intelligent, at least useful.

“To watch you,” the dragon breathed, and it was making the same assumption we are about what Seth meant to ask, or it wouldn’t have responded so. Its voice was like a rumble, like a distant peel of thunder, like a sound that sooty black smoke would make if it made a sound. Like a nearby earthquake, without the shaking. Very fairy tale-like, very ominous. A little threatening, to tell the truth.

And what does it mean when a dragon is watching you? What does it mean that a dragon finds you interesting, spy-worthy? Why would it bother?

“Why?” Seth said again, and this time I think we can agree that there was very little else that he could appropriately say.

“It is my name,” the dragon breathed again. Next to it, one of the legitimate, actually-ancient statues of Hatshepsut seemed to shake a little. Seth glanced at it nervously. Although of the two objects facing him, the dragon was surely a greater potential threat than the statue, don’t you think?

“Your name?” This was a mystery. An unknown, an enigma. What would anybody’s name have to do with anything? Seth felt he had a chance to plumb some of the secrets of Dark Things (like dragons), to shed some light on the world-view of dragons and their ilk, here at the Met this afternoon. Not that he spent a long time thinking that. It just occurred to him, and so he followed up on it. Very hero-like. Ask the question. Wait for the response. React– take action on the answer.

“My name is Faraway.”

Which didn’t seem to clear things up much, or to shed any particular light on any Greater Issues Relating to Dark Things in General, either. Seth frowned.

“Your name is Faraway so you followed me?” he prompted. He spread his hands to indicate his lack of understanding. It was a little like talking to a small and unclear child, he was thinking. One didn’t quite know where to probe for meaning.

“To learn the meaning of my name,” the dragon breathed. “To learn my death.”

A pause for consideration. Consideration on Seth’s part, at least. Who knew what the dragon had to consider? Or what you have to consider, either? You, at least, can always re-read. Seth was nodding very slightly-- not because he’d unraveled anything, but just as a way of thinking through what he’d been told. To indicate he was thinking, possibly.

And what was he thinking? What are you thinking? Talking dragons. The Metropolitan Museum, where dragons don’t in any way belong. In one of the Egyptian exhibits, behind the mini-pyramid. A female pharaoh, most of whose statues make her look like a man.

There were never dragons in Egypt at all, you know. They’re Far Eastern and Baltic, not Mediterranean.

Seth felt very confused by all this, even the parts he hadn’t thought of. “I am very confused,” he said. He’d stopped nodding at some point.

The dragon breathed a puff of sooty, smoky breath. It bobbed up on its way to the ceiling. The ceiling of Gallery 12, Seth reflected, was going to need to be cleaned soon, after this visitation.

“So am I,” the dragon breathed.

NEXT POST: QUEENS OF THE ROAD (Monday 10/5/09)