The Dragon Griaule

‘The Feelys,’ he said. ‘We . . . uh . . . we won’t hurt them?’

‘I told you . . . not unless it’s necessary.’

‘That’s good, that’s good.’ He crossed the room to the curtains drawn across the entrance. ‘Of course it’s not my field, but . . .’

‘John?’

He peered out at the colony through the gap in the curtains, the skin on his forehead washing from gold to dark. ‘Uh-huh.’

‘What’s not your field?’

After a long pause he said, ‘It’s not . . . nothing.’

‘You were talking about the Feelys.’

‘They’re very interesting,’ he said distractedly. He swayed, then moved sluggishly toward her, collapsed on the pile of furs where she was sitting. He turned his face to her, looked at her with a morose expression. ‘It’ll be better,’ he said. ‘Once we’re out of here, I’ll . . . I know I haven’t been . . . strong. I haven’t been . . .’

‘It’s all right,’ she said, stroking his hair.

‘No, it’s not, it’s not.’ Agitated, he struggled to sit up, but she restrained him, telling him not to be upset, and soon he lay still. ‘How can you love me?’ he asked after a long silence.

‘I don’t have any choice in the matter.’ She bent to him, pushing back her hair so it wouldn’t hang in his face, kissed his cheek, his eyes.

He started to say something, then laughed weakly, and she asked him what he found amusing.

‘I was thinking about free will,’ he said. ‘How improbable a concept that’s become. Here. Where it’s so obviously not an option.’

She settled down beside him, weary of trying to boost his spirits. She remembered how he’d been after his arrival: eager, alive, and full of curiosity despite his injuries. Now his moments of greatest vitality – like this one – were spent in sardonic rejection of happy possibility. She was tired of arguing with him, of making the point that everything in life could be reduced by negative logic to a sort of pitiful reflex, if that was the way you wanted to see it. His voice grew stronger, this prompted – she knew – by a rush of the stimulant within his system.

‘It’s Griaule,’ he said. ‘Everything here belongs to him, even to the most fleeting of hopes and wishes. What we feel, what we think. When I was a student and first heard about Griaule, about his method of dominion, the omnipotent functioning of his will, I thought it was foolishness pure and simple. But I was an optimist, then. And optimists are only fools without experience. Of course I didn’t think of myself as an optimist. I saw myself as a realist. I had a romantic notion that I was alone, responsible for my actions, and I perceived that as being a noble beauty, a refinement of the tragic . . . that state of utter and forlorn independence. I thought how cozy and unrealistic it was for people to depend on gods and demons to define their roles in life. I didn’t know how terrible it would be to realize that nothing you thought or did had any individual importance, that everything – love, hate, your petty likes and dislikes – was part of some unfathomable scheme. I couldn’t comprehend how worthless that knowledge would make you feel.’

He went on in this vein for some time, his words weighing on her, filling her with despair, pushing hope aside. Then, as if this monologue had aroused some bitter sexuality, he began to make love to her. She felt removed from the act, imprisoned within walls erected by his dour sentences; but she responded with desperate enthusiasm, her own arousal funded by a desolate prurience. She watched his spread-fingered hands knead and cup her breasts, actions that seemed to her as devoid of emotional value as those of a starfish gripping a rock; and yet because of this desolation, because she wanted to deny it and also because of the voyeuristic thrill she derived from watching herself being taken, used, her body reacted with unusual fervor. The sweaty film between them was like a silken cloth, and their movements seemed more accomplished and supple than ever before; each jolt of pleasure brought her to new and dizzying heights. But afterward she felt devastated and defeated, not loved, and lying there with him, listening to the muted gabble of the Feelys from without, bathed in their rich stench, she knew she had come to the nadir of her life, that she had finally united with the Feelys in their enactment of a perturbed and animalistic rhythm.