The Sky Is Yours
Chandler Klang Smith
For Eric Taxier,
who never stopped believing in the dragons
PART ONE
PRINCESS IN A TOWER
* * *
Anyone with any sense had already left town.
—BOB DYLAN
1
THE FALL
This is a story of what it is to be young in a very old world.
Even before the dragons came, our city was crumbling. It was as though this place was a dream we’d dreamed together, a dream gone to tatters in the morning light. Dull-eyed humans drifted past boarded storefronts, walking all kinds of animals on leashes. Vultures perched on sick trees in the park. A man clad in garbage bags sang his song in the middle of a bleak avenue as a single taxi sputtered past. Young girls dressed as if for the grave in Sunday dresses and secondhand shoes. Couches appeared on the curbs, were joined there by beds and rugs and tables; whole rooms assembled piece by piece, and the shadows of people occupied these rooms. It became the fashion to speak of oneself in the past tense. Wine flowed from dusty casks into dusty glasses. Chaw regained its popularity; dream-candy, some called it, mutant psychotropic moss mashed up with molasses and additives whose names we’d never know. We chewed it up and spat it out. Neon words went dark, leaving orphaned letters behind. Sometimes we heard laughter in our unfinished apartment complexes, though no one else was renting the units on our floor. We lived in a ruin.
The dragons were old when they were born, or else always had been. In the fall of 301970 AF, they rose out of the waters at Nereid Bay.* The first to see them was a little girl who sat in a clanking basket at the top of the Wonder Wheel. The motor had stalled, and she, the only rider, waited patiently for the firemen to raise their ladder. The sky, gray with thunderheads, hung low as a blanket over the world. Out past where old men with metal detectors prowled the shore, an island breached the sea’s frothy waters. An island with a pair of eyes. She pointed, but no one turned to look.
There are two dragons, the yellow and the green. One would be an aberration, a hundred would be a proliferation, but two: two is a species, either dying off or just getting started. Two is a threat. Some think they hatched from moon rocks or nuclear waste the government dumped into Nereid Bay, or that the hands of God shaped them from the bountiful putty of our sins. These explanations are as good as any. The fact is, we know little more about them now than that day, fifty years ago, when they rose from the silver waves with dripping wings. Here is what scientists have learned:
1. The dragons never land.
2. The dragons never eat.
3. The dragons never sleep.
4. Ballistics, rockets, stun guns, paratroopers, lassos, toxic sprays, nets, high-pitched sounds, mass hysteria, and prayer do nothing to deter the dragons.
5. The dragons will not let us be.
We cannot name them. We cannot grow accustomed to them. Even those who cannot remember a time before they filled our skies cannot look at them with anything like calm. They are very large and very wild. When they pass overhead, they cast our skyscraper canyons into dusk. Eclipses confuse animals, and the animals of the city are deeply confused. Most of those animals are us.
Sometimes the dragons quarrel with each other. At those times, they seem like a single creature, a snake biting its tail, the helix of DNA. They twist together in a mass, tooth and eye and claw. At other times, they work together, moving over the city in parallel lines, a destruction patrol. They’ve torched the billboard that said KEEP SHOPPING. They’ve torched the building shaped like a lip-gloss tube. They’ve torched every bridge at least once, and Torchtown, the prison colony in the hardest-hit reaches of the lower city, has been en flambé in one place or another fifty years solid, to the day. Dragon fires start at the roof and work their way down. Often they fizzle out of their own accord. Sometimes they catch and spread. But for the most part, the fires are little love bites on the city’s face, not too big to extinguish but too frequent, too persistent, to ignore. We’ve developed slang for all the different kinds: a sparkler, a smoker, a powder keg, a belch—that’s when the gas tank blows. We make light when we can. It’s not in us to think the worst. Even that little girl said the island winked.
* * *
Empire Island is a winking island too, an island full of eyes. We used to watch one another through its windows, to catch glimpses of ourselves in the mirrored windows as we strolled past. Those windows, cracked or hollow, watch us now, slogging through the cinders on the streets. They watch the skies for more bad news.
It’s late afternoon in the death of summer. The dragons are flying low today, churning the air over Torchtown. A cloud front’s rolling in, gray and muddlesome. High in the vacant blue stretches a thin white line, a crack in the dome over everything: a teenager in a HowFly, trailing out exhaust.
Duncan Humphrey Ripple V. Heir to the Ripple fortune. The dying city’s final prince, in everything but name: his grandcestors never bothered to pony up for a title. But Ripple’s got princely looks anyhow, even tousle-haired today in a hooded sweatshirt, pinkened from a deep-pore acne scrub. It’s something around the eyes, too long-lashed and dopey for a boy’s. Something dreamy, destined. Late Capitalism’s Royalty, that was the name of his Toob series, printed in bling at the start of each episode. The recappers thought it was all scripted, but nope: Ripple played himself, enacting the most intimate details of his own life, from ages six to eighteen, for an omnipresent camera crew he called the Fourth Wall and spoke straight at on occasion during shooting. It was like imaginary friends. They couldn’t talk back or else they’d have to join the actors’ union.
Then, three months ago, Ripple flunked underschool and his dad had to contribute the place into graduating him. It was then Ripple’s parents decided he didn’t get to be a celebrity anymore. In fact, his whole life changed, and not so much for the better. Ripple was pretty fucking jarred. He doesn’t understand delayed gratification or compromise, he’s never seen the point. He doesn’t want to want; he’s never wanted for anything. It’s not in his nature. He’s been spoiled to perfection. He has foie gras for brains.