dragons,” I’d plead. “Surely there’s some way to make that work?”
“The only places where that’s economical are kibbutzim and big, dense metropolises where the rich might want to show off,” they’d say. “Remember, dragons like to stay where they are, or migrate between fixed points they pick themselves.”
“But the dragons may start migrating.”
“Who wants to go to Mannaport unless you already live there?”
Then they stopped taking my calls altogether.
I’m not giving up, though. Someone told me that over in Japan, they’ve made big strides in miniaturization that we can only dream of. There has to be a way to make a profit from our tiny dragons. Has to be.
ALEXANDER
I tell people to stay as far away as possible. The dragons look cute and harmless, but I know the truth.
Joey was the smart one in the family. Went to an exam school. He had the grades and test scores to get out of Mannaport, to be anything he wanted.
But the only thing my brother wanted was to be a dragon-whisperer, to work with the dragons up close, not just to “bask in the glory of the fruits of their labor from afar”—yep, that was how he talked, like an old novel they made you read in school. Used to make me want to punch him. Talk properly, you doofus!
“Lawyers, bankers, coders—they’re all parasites, mere leeches,” he used to say. “What do they do except manipulate symbols to generate more symbols? But a whisperer is someone who coaxes the breath of life out of the dragon, who makes civilization possible.”
He left home for the DRACOGRID plant in Boston Harbor the day he turned eighteen. They pay dragon-whisperers well, but that’s because the job is so dangerous, and so few have the talent for it.
Joey told me that you cannot force a dragon to work; you have to beguile it. He told me how a czarina in Saint Petersburg once built a whole room in her palace out of amber in order to tempt the dragons into breathing fire—I think she was imitating some hero in Alexandria?—and she got badly burned. That gave me nightmares as a kid.
Let’s see, my mother kept Joey’s scholarship essay around here somewhere … There it is. “Howard Hughes ended up in Las Vegas because he thought the bright lights and endless glamour would keep the flight of dragons that kept his aviation empire aloft entertained. During the Cold Race, NATO and GEAIA both secretly funded artists to try to entice the Warsaw Pact dragons to defect. But hundreds of years after Newcomen and Watt, dragon-whispering is still more art than science.
“I intend to become a great artist.”
Dragons are fickle, lazy, and easily bored. Even if you manage to lure them to settle in a city with treasure, books, or novelty, they’d rather nap near the hoard than work. That last bit, getting a dragon to breathe fire while remaining docile, is where they need the dragon-whisperer.
No one knows how dragon-whispering works. There’s a code of silence among the whisperers, a secretive guild passing their wisdom down the generations by word of mouth. When we were boys, Joey and I used to play games where I’d be the dragon, and he’d try to get me to do chores—usually by promising me time on the game console he built himself.
Maybe that really is how they do it. Didn’t old-time railroad engineers out west strap kaleidoscopes over their locomotive dragons? Wouldn’t surprise me if they now make dragons live in virtual reality headsets. On talk radio, Teddy Patriot said they make the whisperers in power plants stroke the dragons in a weird way, almost like sex, turning them on. I don’t know if I believe that. In school, they’re still teaching children that dragons enjoy music, literature, and art. Joey used to mock that one as the “Scheherazade theory of dragons.”
I’ll never know the real answer. Dragon-whisperers, if they aren’t torched to charcoal in the line of duty, retire only when their minds have been burned away, which is almost worse.
Joey came home at thirty, but he looked like a man twenty years older. He didn’t recognize me or Mom; he didn’t laugh or cry; he ate when food was held to his mouth, and wasted away when it wasn’t. His mind was like a sieve dipped in water. No matter how many times I showed him old family photos or Mom made his favorite dishes, his eyes remained blank and his speech a nonsensical babble. His heart stopped beating eight months after he got home, but he was really dead long before that.
I have no idea what horrors he had suffered; what he had seen and could not unsee.
There was a generous pension, of course, but no way to make the dragons or the company that sucked the life out of him pay what they really ought. The contract and the laws were impenetrable. Assumption of risk. Willing suspension of rights.
Attacking a dragon is a crime. And I won’t ever do anything illegal. But short of that?
JULY
ZOE
[The camera is on her as she walks, keeping pace. From time to time we see tourists gathered around some empty lot, necks craning, phones ready. Uniformed officers stand behind police tape to keep the crowd at a distance.]
The tourists want to see it happen again, up close. Now that we have a bona fide attraction in town, the selectmen are terrified. They want the President to send in the minutemen. (Shakes head.)
No, I still don’t know why the dragons have come to Mannaport.
But, I think I’ve made a new friend, or maybe two.
It started before Independence Day. The town manager and the selectmen, still trying to figure out a way to make some profit from our “useless” dragon infestation, had settled on tourism. They sent a photographer around to take pictures and hired a consulting company to brand the town as the “Dragon Garden on the Bay.” Tour buses came to town twice a day from Boston and Portland, and there was talk of partnering with the cruise ship companies too.
I didn’t like the idea. I was afraid that the tourists would scare the dragons. Most had settled around abandoned lots and foreclosed houses, living off insects and vegetation. Some of them had even learned to leave their dung in one place, where the sanitation company could cart it off in weekly rounds. I thought the dragons and the people of the town were figuring out how to live together in peace. I didn’t want that process interrupted.
But there was an even bigger threat than tourists.
An anti-dragon group had been organizing: parents worried about dragons rotting their children’s minds, bored people looking for something to do, property owners fed up with the mess. They called themselves the Knights of Mannaport and shared ideas online about how to drive the dragons out.
I lurked in their forum under a made-up name. When they decided to use the Fourth of July celebration for “Operation St. George,” I made plans of my own.
Near sunset, while many families were heading to Skerry Field for the fireworks display, the Knights got into pickup trucks and minivans. From all around town, they drove toward the abandoned lot on Hancock, home to one of the largest flocks of little dragons.
I got there just before sundown. The yard was covered in thick, lush grass as tall as my chest, while the house, half of its roof gone and gaping holes in three walls, sat quietly in solitary decay. Dozens of little dragons were already roosting in the ruin or the yard. While a few flapped their wings and opened their eyes, cooing at my approach, most remained asleep.
I ducked down among the grass, out of sight. The soil gave off an acrid odor, not unlike feral cat colonies. As the dusk faded, more bird-sized dragons returned from foraging. They found places to perch, tucked their heads under a wing or a clump of grass, and went to sleep.
I could hear the snores of those nearest me, a faint, even wheezing. A cool breeze whisked away the sweat on my forehead and brought some relief