Dragon Tears

hell, I discovered I’ve got a reason to live that I never knew about.”

The light had turned red again. A couple of cars whooshed past on the coast highway, and she watched them go.

Harry said nothing because he was afraid that any interruption would discourage her from finishing what she had begun to tell him. In six months, her arctic reserve had never thawed until, for the briefest moment in her apartment, she had seemed about to disclose something both private and profound. She had quickly frozen again; but now the face of the glacier was cracking. His desire to be let into her world was so intense that it revealed as much about his own need for connections as it did about the extent to which she had heretofore guarded her privacy; he was prepared to expend all of his last six hours of life at that traffic light, if necessary, waiting for her to provide him with a better understanding of the special woman that he believed existed under the hard veneer of the streetwise cop.

“I had a sister,” she said. “Never knew about her until recently. She’s dead. Been dead five years. But she had a child. A daughter. Eleanor. Ellie. Now I don’t want to be wiped out, don’t want to surf on the chaos any more. I just want to have a chance to meet Ellie, get to know her, see if I can love her, which I think maybe I can. Maybe what happened to me when I was a kid didn’t burn love out of me forever. Maybe I can do more than hate. I’ve got to find out. I can’t wait to find out.”

He was dismayed. If he understood her correctly, she had not yet felt for him anything like the love he had begun to feel for her. But that was all right. Regardless of her doubts, he knew that she had the ability to love and that she would find a place in her heart for her niece. And if for the girl, why not for him as well?

She met his eyes and smiled. “Good God, just listen to me, I sound like one of those confessional neurotics spilling their guts on an afternoon TV talkshow.”

“Not at all. I… I want to hear it.”

“Next thing you know, I’ll be telling you how I like to have sex with men who dress like their mothers.”

“Do you?”

She laughed. “Who doesn’t?”

He wanted to know what she meant when she said what happened to me when I was a kid, but he dared not ask. That experience, if not the core of her, was at least what she believed the core to be, and she would be able to reveal it only at her own pace. Besides, there were a thousand other questions he wanted to ask her, ten thousand, and if he started, they really would sit at that intersection until dawn, Ticktock, and death.

The traffic light was in their favor again. He entered the intersection and turned right. Two blocks farther north he parked in front of The Green House.

When he and Connie got out of the car, Harry noticed a filthy hobo in the shadows at the corner of the restaurant, by an alleyway that ran toward the back of the building. It was not Ticktock, but a smaller, pathetic- looking specimen. He sat between two shrubs, legs drawn up, eating from a bag in his lap, drinking hot coffee from a thermos, and mumbling urgently to himself.

The guy watched them as they walked toward the entrance to The Green House. His stare was fevered, intense. His bloodshot eyes were like those of many other denizens of the streets these days, hot with paranoid fear. Perhaps he believed himself to be persecuted by evil space aliens who were beaming microwaves at him to muddle his thoughts. Or by the dastardly band of ten thousand and eighty-two conspirators who had really shot John F. Kennedy and who had secretly controlled the world ever since. Or by fiendish Japanese businessmen who were going to buy everything everywhere, turn everyone else into slaves, and serve the raw internal organs of American children as side dishes in Tokyo sushi bars. Recently it seemed that half the sane population — or what passed for sane these days — believed in one demonstrably ridiculous paranoid conspiracy theory or another. And for the most thoroughly stoned street- wanderers like this man, such fantasies were de rigueur.

To the hobo, Connie said, “Can you hear me, or are you on the moon somewhere?”

The man glared at her.

“We’re cops. You got that? Cops. You touch that car while we’re gone, you’ll find yourself in a detox program so fast you won’t know what hit you, no booze or drugs for three months.”

Forced detoxification was the only threat that worked with some of these squires of the gutter. They were already at the bottom of the swamp, used to being knocked around and chewed up by the bigger animals. They had nothing left to lose — except the chance to stay high on cheap wine or whatever else they could afford.

“Cops?” the man said.

“Good,” Connie said. “You heard me. Cops. Three months with not a single hit, it’ll seem like three centuries.”

Last week, in Santa Ana, a drunken vagrant had taken advantage of their unattended department sedan to make a social protest by leaving his feces on the driver’s seat. Or maybe he mistook them for space aliens to whom a gift of human waste was a sign of welcome and an invitation to intergalactic cooperation. In either case, Connie had wanted to kill the guy, and Harry had needed every bit of his diplomacy and persuasiveness to convince her that forced detox was crueler.

“You lock the doors?” Connie asked Harry.

“Yeah.”

Behind them, as they went into The Green House, the vagrant said thoughtfully: “Cops?”

4

Having eaten the cookies and potato chips, Bryan briefly used his Greatest and Most Secret Power to insure total privacy, then stood at the edge of the patio and urinated between railings into the silent sea below. He always got a kick out of doing things like that in public, sometimes right out in the street with people around, knowing that his Greatest and Most Secret Power would insure against discovery. Bladder empty, he started things up again and returned to the house.

Food alone was seldom sufficient to restore his energy He was, after all, a god Becoming, and according to the Bible, the first god had needed rest himself on the seventh day. Before he could work more miracles, Bryan would still have to nap, perhaps for as much as an hour.

In the master bedroom, lit only by one bedside lamp, he stood for a while in front of the black-lacquered shelves where eyes of many species and colors floated in preserving fluid. Feeling their unblinking, eternal gazes. Their adoration.

He unbelted his red robe, shrugged out of it, and let it drop to the floor.

The eyes loved him. Loved him. He could feel their love, and he accepted it.

He opened one of the jars. The eyes in it had belonged to a woman who had been thinned from the herd because she was one of those who could vanish from the world without causing much concern. They were blue eyes, once beautiful, the color faded now and the lenses milky.

Dipping into the pungent fluid, he removed one of the blue eyes and held it in his left hand. It felt like a ripe date — soft but firm, and moist.

Trapping the eye between his palm and chest, he rolled it gently across his body from nipple to nipple, back and forth, not pressing too hard, careful to avoid damaging it, but eager for the dead woman to see him in all his Becoming glory, every smooth plane and curve and pore of him. The small sphere was cool against his warm flesh, and left a trail of moisture on his skin. He shivered deliciously. He eased the slick orb down his flat belly, describing circles there, then held it for a moment in the hollow of his navel.

From the open jar, he extracted the second blue eye. He trapped it under his right hand and allowed both eyes to explore his body: chest and flanks and thighs, up across his belly and chest again, along the sides of his neck, his face, gently rotating the moist and spongy spheres on his cheeks, around, around, around. So satisfying to be the object of adoration. So supremely glorious for the dead woman to be granted this intimate moment with the Becoming god who had judged and condemned her.

Winding tracks of preserving fluid marked each eye’s journey over his body. As the fluid evaporated, it was easy to believe that the tracery of coolness was actually a lace of tears upon his skin, shed by the dead woman who