The Dragons by Dean Williams
itself from the dragons. Except for a few independent journalists, the parks became reporter- and TV camera-free zones. This meant that the public was free to develop its relationship with the dragons slowly and naturally, without any interference. And that was to make all the difference in the world.
4
So we all went on with our lives. Once it had been determined that our diminutive visitors were not going to shoot laser beams with their eyes, hypnotize world leaders into launching missiles on each other, or do much of anything at all, we rather quickly adjusted to their presence. It would be going too far to say that we became used to them; they were too exotic, too strange, for that to happen. But for the moment people continued to go to work, hang out with friends, and spend their time in the same ways they always had.
But we did have a spirited debate over where they had come from, and why they were here. Oh the theories, the speculations, the conjectures and just plain crackpot ideas we came up with! They were aliens. They were the mutant progeny of a genomics experiment gone horribly awry. They were part of an incredibly sophisticated advertising campaign for a movie or product that was yet to be revealed. They were state-of-the-art robots designed by our corporatist state for surveillance of an increasingly restive population. They were the bio-weapon shock troops of a foreign enemy. They were some kind of huge practical joke, a hoax being perpetrated by some reclusive billionaire genius who just wanted to watch us squirm. They were instruments of vengeance, sent down by a wrathful God to punish us. They were hallucinations, figments of the collective unconscious of a media- and thrill-addled public. No one knew.
Had we been able to catch one, our questions might have been answered, but we couldn’t. All of our amazing, advanced technology proved unequal to the seemingly simple task of capturing one of those little grey beasts. Nets closed over empty air or bewildered pigeons; tranquilizer darts or thrown objects like stones went just shy. The dragons were mainly found in the center of our most populated areas, so bombs, missiles, or other powerful weapons such as lasers were out of the question. We stopped short of shooting them, which is in itself an enduring mystery. It is true that government at all levels had at various stages ordered, warned, and pleaded with people to not use firearms against the dragons until their provenance and capabilities had been fully ascertained, but such official admonitions had never proven particularly effective in the past. Throughout history, vigilantism, mob behavior, or just the primeval male propensity for violence had overwhelmed any frail edicts by the authorities against “taking the law into your own hands”. Yet it is a fact that no case was ever recorded of any person in any place, whether alone, in a group, drunk, sober, habitually peaceful or pugnacious, ever using a firearm of any kind against a dragon. As those first months wore on, we continued to throng into parks to ogle them, we photographed and sketched them, we occasionally even threatened them or threw stones or other small objects at them, but we never shot at them.
Later, once our relationship to the dragons had changed, harming them in any way became of course unthinkable. Indeed, any individual then foolhardy enough to hurt a dragon, or even speak disrespectfully of one, would have swiftly suffered the violent end at the hands of an enraged mob that one would have earlier predicted the dragons themselves would experience.
The Dragon’s Eye effect possibly had something to do with our inexplicable reluctance to use lethal force against the creatures. As was noted, staring at them for extended periods of time had a mild hallucinatory effect. Sometimes a group of men or youths would (often with the aid of some ‘liquid courage’) psych themselves up to go “catch one of those crazy creatures once and for all!” and head off, full of fire, to the nearest park. But when actually in close proximity to that indifferent, slender figure which seemed never to stop curving around itself, those piercing blue eyes which were following your every move even as the dragon itself remained motionless—well, it was the rare group of would-be gallants which didn’t finally decide to follow more pacific pursuits. Most of the time the men wound up on the grass or a bench, staring bemusedly at the beasts, just like all the others caught in the Dragon’s Eye.
In the beginning, their invulnerability to all our human wiles was certainly humbling. Why, hadn’t we read it a thousand times, imbibed it with our mother’s milk? That comforting tale about how homo sapiens’ superior intellect had allowed our species to outwit every fierce and powerful beast on land or in the sea. Outwit, domesticate, consume, control. And along with this triumphalist account of our rise to dominance over every non-microbial life form on the planet had come a natural pride in our mastery, as well as a certain disdain towards the snarling leopard and gasping tuna, which had let themselves be conquered so easily.
But we couldn't catch the dragons. To this day, no human has ever put their hands on one. And that has made all the difference. Had even one dragon been captured, put in a cage, displayed for all to see like the wild creatures which had had the misfortune to come within our grasp, then at once we could have categorized them. Then we would have briskly assigned them a place in one of the coldly analytical taxonomical schemes which our kind formerly found so necessary to construct. They would have inevitably been reduced to the level of object—a bit odd, even unique, but classifiable nonetheless. But the uncapturable dragons were able to maintain their quiet, seemingly harmless mystery.
5
But at this point that didn’t mean we had given up on getting our hands on one of them. One of the last popular TV shows (How strange to write those words, stranger still that they are true!) was called Hangin’ with St. George’s Crew. The title of course referred to the dragon-slaying English saint. The program faithfully followed all the conventions of the reality-show genre. It relied on gobs of blaring narration and non-stop, flashily-cut, substance-free interviews. Themselves digitally captured in their native habitat of living room, back yard, or front stoop, the soon-to-be heroes would wax poetic about how their inimitable combination of brains, guts, group loyalty (“Der ain’t nothin’ I wouldn’t do for deez guys! Nothin’!”) and sheer can-do spirit was going to be the difference between their ‘crew’ and all those other losers. It was rawly hilarious, it was touching, it was classic man-on-the-street TV. Then there were more interviews with their [please select]: (long- suffering/ shrill/ affable/ dimwitted) spouses, and still more interviews with their offspring, who fell somewhere on that infinite scale which ranges from charming cherub to loathsome brat.
As was usually the case in that era, the content of the show, what was actually happening on the screen, didn’t matter very much. All that people cared about was that it hold off the boredom for a short while and help sate our apparently endless appetite for titillating details of other people’s lives. Oh, how mind-numbingly bored we were in those days, Brothers and Sisters! There was no form of entertainment too vacuous, no pastime too asinine or degrading for our over-sexed, over-stimulated, unspeakably weary souls. Stuck in jobs we usually hated and in relationships with people we didn’t really know, hooked on mindless, environment-ravaging consumption, strung out on endless hours of television and Internet ‘surfing’, (What a consequence-free, bubbly euphemism for the reality of our addict’s stagger across that dark, deceptive landscape!) we moved about in what one insightful observer called, “a state of continuous partial attention”. We were a lost people, adrift on a shallow, lonely sea. All of which helps explain the ensuing events.
The St. George show ended every week as all such popular fare did: in a chaotic, anti-climactic jumble. “The boys came, they saw, they were conquered,” summarized every episode, whether it was taped in Portland, Miami, or Kansas City. The boisterous group march to the park; a few minutes of farcical play-acting and pantomime as the men ‘demonstrated’ like male gorillas, pounding their chests and prowling dangerously about, far underneath the hunched, impassive figures of the dragons; the gradual falling-off of high spirits and tension; the sitting-down that signaled the end was near: th
is formed the inevitable arc of the story. A cultural critic presciently noted that we were following a script whose beginning was written by us, but whose conclusion was penned by the dragons. Most people agreed that the best part of the show was the very end, when the sheepish men were confronted with the video of themselves staring slack-jawed at their erstwhile foes, who had never for a moment halted their incessant preening. One poor gentleman in San Antonio, Texas, acquired the unenviable sobriquet of “Drooling Dave” after footage of him…well, drooling—went viral on the Web.
St. George had a brief afterlife in the guise of an international version (“This week: St. George in Rio! Watch the boys from the favela try to catch a dragon for the Carnaval!”) but the moment for such diversions had passed. After the Turning, time was simply not something to be wasted on sitting on a couch watching the foolish, programmed antics of strangers.
6
As the months passed, we began to incorporate the dragons into our routines. Many urbanites had always enjoyed eating their lunch outside or going for a stroll in a
4
So we all went on with our lives. Once it had been determined that our diminutive visitors were not going to shoot laser beams with their eyes, hypnotize world leaders into launching missiles on each other, or do much of anything at all, we rather quickly adjusted to their presence. It would be going too far to say that we became used to them; they were too exotic, too strange, for that to happen. But for the moment people continued to go to work, hang out with friends, and spend their time in the same ways they always had.
But we did have a spirited debate over where they had come from, and why they were here. Oh the theories, the speculations, the conjectures and just plain crackpot ideas we came up with! They were aliens. They were the mutant progeny of a genomics experiment gone horribly awry. They were part of an incredibly sophisticated advertising campaign for a movie or product that was yet to be revealed. They were state-of-the-art robots designed by our corporatist state for surveillance of an increasingly restive population. They were the bio-weapon shock troops of a foreign enemy. They were some kind of huge practical joke, a hoax being perpetrated by some reclusive billionaire genius who just wanted to watch us squirm. They were instruments of vengeance, sent down by a wrathful God to punish us. They were hallucinations, figments of the collective unconscious of a media- and thrill-addled public. No one knew.
Had we been able to catch one, our questions might have been answered, but we couldn’t. All of our amazing, advanced technology proved unequal to the seemingly simple task of capturing one of those little grey beasts. Nets closed over empty air or bewildered pigeons; tranquilizer darts or thrown objects like stones went just shy. The dragons were mainly found in the center of our most populated areas, so bombs, missiles, or other powerful weapons such as lasers were out of the question. We stopped short of shooting them, which is in itself an enduring mystery. It is true that government at all levels had at various stages ordered, warned, and pleaded with people to not use firearms against the dragons until their provenance and capabilities had been fully ascertained, but such official admonitions had never proven particularly effective in the past. Throughout history, vigilantism, mob behavior, or just the primeval male propensity for violence had overwhelmed any frail edicts by the authorities against “taking the law into your own hands”. Yet it is a fact that no case was ever recorded of any person in any place, whether alone, in a group, drunk, sober, habitually peaceful or pugnacious, ever using a firearm of any kind against a dragon. As those first months wore on, we continued to throng into parks to ogle them, we photographed and sketched them, we occasionally even threatened them or threw stones or other small objects at them, but we never shot at them.
Later, once our relationship to the dragons had changed, harming them in any way became of course unthinkable. Indeed, any individual then foolhardy enough to hurt a dragon, or even speak disrespectfully of one, would have swiftly suffered the violent end at the hands of an enraged mob that one would have earlier predicted the dragons themselves would experience.
The Dragon’s Eye effect possibly had something to do with our inexplicable reluctance to use lethal force against the creatures. As was noted, staring at them for extended periods of time had a mild hallucinatory effect. Sometimes a group of men or youths would (often with the aid of some ‘liquid courage’) psych themselves up to go “catch one of those crazy creatures once and for all!” and head off, full of fire, to the nearest park. But when actually in close proximity to that indifferent, slender figure which seemed never to stop curving around itself, those piercing blue eyes which were following your every move even as the dragon itself remained motionless—well, it was the rare group of would-be gallants which didn’t finally decide to follow more pacific pursuits. Most of the time the men wound up on the grass or a bench, staring bemusedly at the beasts, just like all the others caught in the Dragon’s Eye.
In the beginning, their invulnerability to all our human wiles was certainly humbling. Why, hadn’t we read it a thousand times, imbibed it with our mother’s milk? That comforting tale about how homo sapiens’ superior intellect had allowed our species to outwit every fierce and powerful beast on land or in the sea. Outwit, domesticate, consume, control. And along with this triumphalist account of our rise to dominance over every non-microbial life form on the planet had come a natural pride in our mastery, as well as a certain disdain towards the snarling leopard and gasping tuna, which had let themselves be conquered so easily.
But we couldn't catch the dragons. To this day, no human has ever put their hands on one. And that has made all the difference. Had even one dragon been captured, put in a cage, displayed for all to see like the wild creatures which had had the misfortune to come within our grasp, then at once we could have categorized them. Then we would have briskly assigned them a place in one of the coldly analytical taxonomical schemes which our kind formerly found so necessary to construct. They would have inevitably been reduced to the level of object—a bit odd, even unique, but classifiable nonetheless. But the uncapturable dragons were able to maintain their quiet, seemingly harmless mystery.
5
But at this point that didn’t mean we had given up on getting our hands on one of them. One of the last popular TV shows (How strange to write those words, stranger still that they are true!) was called Hangin’ with St. George’s Crew. The title of course referred to the dragon-slaying English saint. The program faithfully followed all the conventions of the reality-show genre. It relied on gobs of blaring narration and non-stop, flashily-cut, substance-free interviews. Themselves digitally captured in their native habitat of living room, back yard, or front stoop, the soon-to-be heroes would wax poetic about how their inimitable combination of brains, guts, group loyalty (“Der ain’t nothin’ I wouldn’t do for deez guys! Nothin’!”) and sheer can-do spirit was going to be the difference between their ‘crew’ and all those other losers. It was rawly hilarious, it was touching, it was classic man-on-the-street TV. Then there were more interviews with their [please select]: (long- suffering/ shrill/ affable/ dimwitted) spouses, and still more interviews with their offspring, who fell somewhere on that infinite scale which ranges from charming cherub to loathsome brat.
As was usually the case in that era, the content of the show, what was actually happening on the screen, didn’t matter very much. All that people cared about was that it hold off the boredom for a short while and help sate our apparently endless appetite for titillating details of other people’s lives. Oh, how mind-numbingly bored we were in those days, Brothers and Sisters! There was no form of entertainment too vacuous, no pastime too asinine or degrading for our over-sexed, over-stimulated, unspeakably weary souls. Stuck in jobs we usually hated and in relationships with people we didn’t really know, hooked on mindless, environment-ravaging consumption, strung out on endless hours of television and Internet ‘surfing’, (What a consequence-free, bubbly euphemism for the reality of our addict’s stagger across that dark, deceptive landscape!) we moved about in what one insightful observer called, “a state of continuous partial attention”. We were a lost people, adrift on a shallow, lonely sea. All of which helps explain the ensuing events.
The St. George show ended every week as all such popular fare did: in a chaotic, anti-climactic jumble. “The boys came, they saw, they were conquered,” summarized every episode, whether it was taped in Portland, Miami, or Kansas City. The boisterous group march to the park; a few minutes of farcical play-acting and pantomime as the men ‘demonstrated’ like male gorillas, pounding their chests and prowling dangerously about, far underneath the hunched, impassive figures of the dragons; the gradual falling-off of high spirits and tension; the sitting-down that signaled the end was near: th
St. George had a brief afterlife in the guise of an international version (“This week: St. George in Rio! Watch the boys from the favela try to catch a dragon for the Carnaval!”) but the moment for such diversions had passed. After the Turning, time was simply not something to be wasted on sitting on a couch watching the foolish, programmed antics of strangers.
6
As the months passed, we began to incorporate the dragons into our routines. Many urbanites had always enjoyed eating their lunch outside or going for a stroll in a