whim of creatures we have no hope to understand or tame. Did you ever read Guns, Germs, and Dragons? The hypothesis is that the rise of the West was largely due to the good fortune of the presence of fire-breathing dragons in Europe. East Asia fell behind in the Industrial Revolution because their dragons breathed cold mist and water, not fire. It wasn’t until Long Ruyuan of Tianjin, inspired by the work of Robert Stirling, invented the yin-yang engine, powered by both fireand mist-breathing dragons, that the shift of the power to Europe stopped. And even today, the prevalence of city-states and small countries has to do more with our dependence on dragons than culture or politics.
(A deep sigh.)
I want to free us from this addiction to cheap energy from dragons. We celebrated when the Warsaw Pact fell as their dragons decided to depart en masse, but how do we know that dragons won’t do the same to us here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and Maine one day? We forget history at our peril.
For my troubles, people call me a crank, a fool.
ZOE
[There’s a fresh lightness of spirit in her—not quite joy, but perhaps a tentative step toward it. She’s still shy and speaks haltingly, but she’s talking a lot more than before.]
The pictures? (Laughs nervously.) No, I don’t think so. Just childish scribbles. I’ve no idea if they’re even around; I didn’t save them.
I want to talk about real dragons.
Some complain about the noise and smell, the droppings everywhere. Some rant about the danger of dragons rampaging through the streets. The first week, there were like twenty accidents over on Route 17, next to the state park, and they had to block off the whole road. Then they had to evacuate and close Astrov Elementary School because all the dragons roosting on the grounds made parents nervous. Just now, on the way here, I saw a dozen lawyer types around the parking lot of the town center, like a cloud of flies around a heap of dragon dung. I don’t know who they’re planning on suing. Dragons aren’t afraid of lawyers.
I hear the gripes. “Mannaport isn’t Boston. We don’t have the infrastructure to handle them!” I guess they mean things like walls and fencing. They want the General Court to declare a state of emergency and maybe send in the minutemen to chase the dragons out.
I’ve been reading up on the history of dragon-rushes … Here’s a summary from Memexpedia: “Most modern dragoncities are at least semi-planned: Boston focused on libraries and universities, attracting dragons with scholarship; the California Republic went with a dual strategy of invention and art, and Silicon Valley and Hollywood are now the two biggest dragon centers in all of North America. Down in New York, they stuck with a most old-fashioned technique: hoarding gold and treasure on Wall Street until the Old World dragons of Europe left their havens in the Bahamas and the British Virgin Islands to settle in Manhattan, curling their bodies around the vaults for weeks at a time before stints in the giant power plants on Long Island.” Oh, that last bit has a “citation needed” question mark.
But the example that spoke to me the most is Titusville, Appalachia. Back in 1859, a spontaneous gathering of dragons descended on the small settlement out of nowhere. Everyone rushed in, trying to make a profit, and the very fortunately named Edwin Drake managed to build the first dragon derrick, harnessing a fifty-foot obsidian scale that powered the cable railway between Lake Erie and Baltimore. For a while, the dragon-boom made Titusville the wealthiest town in the world. The people became addicted to the dragon money and built more cooling ponds, more dragon derricks, more power plants—until the day the dragons suddenly got up and left.
Edwin Drake is my great-great-great-grandfather, on my mother’s side. And my mother—
I’m not ready to talk about that.
Ever since I was little, people would tell me that I have an old soul. I like to read and be by myself. Crowds making speeches make me nervous, but I make it a point to go to the town meetings. To find out what the adults are planning.
They argue about eminent domain and Commonwealth aid, property values and tax credits, isolation walls and safety zones. They want the town manager to make the best deals with the big corporations to guarantee jobs and get every resident a share of the dragon revenues.
But no one seems to be thinking about the meaning of dragons coming here, or how to stop Mannaport from becoming another Titusville.
Mannaport has no natural wonders, no great universities, no money, no art. We’re like a lot of other small towns in the Commonwealth: clean and peaceful on the outside, but full of pain and desolation behind the walls. My high school feels big and empty because people leave, if they can, and don’t come back. Good jobs are hard to find if you want to stick around—all you can look forward to are “gigs.” Drugs are a problem, and late at night, sometimes you hear pop-pop in the distance. I used to think it was drunk teenagers setting off fireworks, until the day I saw the flashing lights of the police cars hurtling down Route 17 and read about the dead body they found.
[We’re on a hill, overlooking a park below. Dragons are slithering, crawling, shambling, gliding, as colorful as the wildflowers dotting the grass. From a distance, they resemble butterflies, birds, bits of living paint swirling to find a shape.]
Worth the climb, isn’t it? I come up here almost every day just for the view. The police tell us to stay away, but I can’t imagine them hurting anyone. They sure look better tempered than the turkeys that clog the streets every fall. When I’m up here, I don’t worry about the SRATs, school gossip, Dad’s nagging, Grandma’s lawn that needs mowing—it’s just nice knowing that there are these beautiful creatures in the world whose concerns we’ll never understand and who’ll never care about our troubles. The universe feels just a little bit bigger, you know?
I ask myself: Why have the dragons come here? Why?
But seeing that view, it almost doesn’t matter.
JUNE
INGRID
[Children are playing in a field.
The focus of the lens changes to be on a towering tupelo in the background. There’s something odd about the branches: they seem too bent, too laden with foliage.]
The mood in town has definitely shifted. Not nearly so many are talking about all the money we’ll make from selling land to the developers, and also not nearly so many are scared about all the changes. I’d say we are getting used to the dragons.
[A baseball crashes into the tupelo tree, and the scene explodes. What but a moment earlier had seemed to be mere clumps of leaves transforms into shimmering scales, unwinding limbs, unfolding wings, unfurling whiskers, snapping nictitating membranes. The camouflaging green gives way to reds, golds, brilliant swatches of blue and indigo as a cloud of dragons, disturbed from their chameleon-like rest, take to the air. The flock is a mix of North American elk-horns, Siberian zmeys, Mesoamerican feathered serpents, wingless East Asian loongs, flare-tailed South Asian nagas, European gossamer-wings, and other species. None of them are bigger than a peacock, and most are much smaller.
For a moment, the children admire the aerial display, but soon lose interest. A girl runs up to the foot of the tree and gingerly steps among the droppings until she recovers the ball. The children resume their game. One by one, the disturbed dragons land back on the tree, settle in, and take on their camouflage.]
They are cute, aren’t they? Some people are disappointed; most are relieved. These dragons are nothing like the giants in Widener Library that power Boston or even the smaller ones that drive the jumbo jets crossing the Atlantic and the continent.
Oh, I don’t mean to sound like a dragon expert. I didn’t see a dragon in person until I was eighteen, the day I showed up at Wellesley, a wide-eyed first-year.
[Archival photos of Wellesley College, presented