by Gabe Hudson
The fire around the clear door is even bigger now. It’s pretty obvious their spaceship is going nowhere good fast.
“I know you’re scared, my dear,” says my father, with a warm smile on his beak. “But I still believe we can pull out of this. I know Dr. Terrible is behind this. If I can just figure out what he did to my device, then I can fix it. And then we will land on this planet Earth and make friends with all the creatures. Live in harmony with them. I still believe. We can chart a new path for our species. We’ll raise a happy family. We’ll spend our time helping, not hurting. It will be the next step in dragon evolution.”
My mother gives a look into the camera, as if to say, Isn’t he wonderful and dreamy, even if he’s also a little delusional, considering we’re about to crash and all?
And it’s true. Just looking at my father squatting there in his red cape, you can tell that scaly green dragon wouldn’t hurt a flea. But that he’s also in complete denial about their imminent death. He’s a big-hearted dreamer is all. A gentle fool.
My father turns around and strolls back to the cockpit, saying something.
My mother shouts, “OK, I’ll be right there, honey! Just give me a second.”
Then she turns and looks at the camera. “Now watch carefully, Gork,” she says. She holds up a giant egg in her talons. “This is you,” she says.
And then she goes over and pulls open the fiery clear door and tosses the egg outside into the blue sky.
“ATHENOS,” yells my mother.
“Yes ma’am. How may I be of assistance.”
“You’re tracking the trajectory of that egg, yes?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“And you remember everything we discussed? You won’t forget?”
“Yes ma’am. After the crash, I will find Gork and I will raise him as my own. I will protect him. And I will make sure he receives your Prophecy, ma’am.”
Then my mother comes back over to the camera and says, “You will grow up to become a great and generous dragon, Gork. You will do what your father and I failed to do. You will learn to live in harmony with the animals and creatures on this planet Earth. This is my Prophecy. Some man-creatures will help you. Some man-creatures honor dragons. Some man-creatures honor the animals. But there are many who do not. You will change their minds. Your big-hearted ways will become legend and set a new example for our species. Now listen to me. You will feel scared and frightened. That’s normal. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do what you want to do. You have all the WILL TO POWER you need to be generous of spirit. The hero and the coward both feel afraid. It’s the hero whose actions are different. You will be a great hero and a great poet.”
My father shouts something from the cockpit.
My mother looks at the camera. “I have to go now, Gork,” she says.
Her leathery wings spring out behind her as if she’s anticipating the crash any second. “Now you make your mother proud,” she says. “Do you hear me, Gork? Soon this spaceship is going to crash. But I know that you will live. And I know that you will fulfill the mission that your father and I set out to do. Please say hi to Fribby for me. Professor Nog told me all about her, and she sounds wonderful. I have been friends with many robots in my time, and I have the utmost respect for machines. And you will be famous one day. You will be a legend on this planet. And you will be the last thing I am thinking about when this spaceship crashes.”
She stares at the camera with tears in her eyes. She raises one talon in the air, palm forward, claws extended.
She says, “Gork, I love you. Always know this. Your mother loves you.”
And that’s where the Prophecy holovid cuts off.
[ 97 ]
QUEST FOR MIRACLE
So that was three months ago.
And we’re still up here on the mountain. We’re well into spring now. I’ve recently taken up the hobby of lying on my back in the grass and staring up at the sky while getting drunk on the smell of newly bloomed flower buds. Fribby teases me and says she wouldn’t have fallen in love with my scaly green ass if she’d known she was going to have to share me with a bunch of flowers. She doesn’t really mind, though. Sometimes she’ll even lie down alongside me in the grass and take a couple deep snorts of this luscious mountain air and then sigh. And if you’ve never heard a robot giggle drunk on flower musk, well it’s an awful pretty sound. Yes sir.
What can I say? After seeing my mom in the Prophecy like that, well my fiendish and demented plans for the Great War against the man-creatures just evaporated. My big heart just isn’t cut out for that line of work. Conquering and enslaving and whatnot. My destiny lies in the other direction. Helping folks and extending a friendly talon to those who are different from me. My destiny is a place where there are no capes, and a fella with small horns is free to live as he chooses. Ranking systems and power indexes be damned.
Most of the animals have wandered off. Surge hung around, but in a friendship capacity. Turns out that old grizzly bear was mighty relieved when I called off our battle plans for the Great War. Wolf still stays by my side, nagging me about if I’m ready to give him a proper name. Privately he tells me he doesn’t want any name other than Wolf, though, and that his sassing me is more to prove to himself that I haven’t domesticated him. Other than those two, there’s the she-hawk who goes by the name Lucy. And then there’s this wily bobcat named Garth, who’s a bit of a loose cannon. He’s a former rabies addict.
We still call ourselves the Doomsday Squad. Fribby says we oughta change the name to The Order of the Red Rose, and I reckon that’s the name we’ll end up with. We fill our days reading our newest poems out loud to each other. And practicing tongue-fu. And at first the critters were easy to defeat, because of how tiny their tongues were. But Fribby fixed them up with the Evolution Machine and now they can shoot their tongues a good fifty feet, same as me. And to watch that grizzly bear and that she-hawk throw down in a legit tongue-fu battle, well it’s pretty darn majestic.
And I’m pleased to report that Fribby laid her first clutch of eggs. We got a real nice nest fixed up here in the back of the cave. I’m actually sitting on the nest right now and let me tell you, these giant eggs are some of the most gorgeous things you could ever hope to see. The shells have these boss silver streaks and swirls running all over the place, because of how they’re half Normal and half machine. Every few minutes I lift a wing and peek down at them and get a giddy feeling in my belly.
Meanwhile Fribby is out there patrolling the mountaintop, keeping watch for intruders. The other night she found some dragon tracks at the base of the mountain, and she said it looked like Rexro and his goons were still trying to hunt us down.
So while sitting here keeping these eggs warm for hours on end each night, well that’s when I got to thinking about Dean Floop and Dr. Terrible. And ATHENOS. And Trenx. And Metheldra. And all those scaly DataHater cadets back at WarWings. And my home planet Blegwethia. And about how the love that binds me and Fribby persevered through it all. And how our love is a miracle. And about how these eggs are the living proof of that miracle. Or maybe it’s more like these eggs are extra miracles stacked on top of that first miracle. I don’t know. Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It almost drove me crazy. And so finally I decided to write down my story and put it in a book. But now I’m almost at the end of my tale.
And if you’re a man-creature here on planet Earth, well don’t be scared none if we happen to bump into each other. I mean say you find yourself traipsing ’round a mountain and you stumble upon a big old scaly green dragon. Well all you got to do is call out: “Red Rose, Red Rose, oh you immortal Red Rose!”
And if that scaly bastard calls back: “I sing to you from the bottom of the claws on my toes!,” well that’s when you know it’s me. Gork. And that you’re safe.
Because this much I can promise you. Nothing in the world can hurt you as long as I’m around. On that, I give you my solemn word. No
body’s going to harm a hair on your head as long as old Gork is nearby.
THE END. YOURS TRULY, GORK.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Edward Kastenmeier, for all your heroic effort on behalf of Gork, for your enthusiasm and guidance, and for being a wellspring of editorial truth. Thank you to my agent Susan Golomb, for wise counsel on all matters dragon and otherwise, for good humor, and for your lionhearted ways.
Thank you to Deborah Treisman, for countless times pulling me out of the abyss. Thank you for gently saying those magic words that clicked in my head and made me rush straight home and start writing this book. Thank you for giving me so many things to thank you for that I could go on forever.
Thank you to Dave Eggers, for your generosity of spirit, for crucial sustenance, and for being true of heart. From the beginning, thank you for life-changing encouragement and support. Thank you to Tracy K. Smith, for soaring example and inspiration, for your vision, for unwavering light. Thank you to Isaac Fitzgerald, for singular brilliance and insight, and for your kind way. Thank you to Gary Shteyngart, for refuge, for solace, for your song, which does wonders for the heart. Thank you to Chang-rae Lee, for vital support, and for treating me like family.
Thank you to all the wonderful and bighearted people at Knopf who worked heroically on behalf of Gork. A special thanks to Tim O’Connell, Stella Tan, and Andrew Weber in editorial. A special thanks to Jordan Rodman and Danielle Toth in publicity and marketing. I am so grateful to Peter Mendelsund, Jennifer Olsen, Kathy Hourigan, Kathleen Fridella, Lawrence Krauser, Anne Achenbaum, Marisa Melendez, Pei Koay, Stephanie Kloss, Christopher Woodside, Michelle Tomassi, Chris Gillespie, Paul Bogaards, and Sonny Mehta. Wherever these people go, dragons will bow their heads in gratitude.
Thank you to Crystal Sikma, Cecilia de la Campa, James Munro, Maja Nikolic, and all the other supportive and enthusiastic people at Writers House.
A very special thank you to Akhil Sharma and John Wray.
A very special thank you to Ben Marcus.
A very special thank you to Jim Shepard.
A very special thank you to Susan Fou.
Thank you to Ed Park, Suketu Mehta, Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, Eli Horowitz, and Edmund White.
Thank you, Dr. Marie Sacco.
Thank you to my mother. Thank you to Lola and Hank Deneault.
Thank you to Sonya Rhee, for faith and support, and for the journey into the unknown. Thank you for being first reader on this book, and for your perfect editorial eye. It’s such an honor and a pleasure to travel with you through the dimensions. I.H.B.D.
Thank you to all the booksellers who befriended Gork.
Thank you to all the librarians who befriended Gork.
And lastly, thank you most of all to my readers. Without you, there is no magic.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GABE HUDSON is the author of the story collection Dear Mr. President, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Hudson was named one of Granta’s 20 Best of Young American Novelists and was a recipient of the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction from Brown University, and the Adele Steiner Burleson Award in Fiction from the University of Texas at Austin. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, McSweeney’s, BlackBook, and Granta. For many years, he was editor-at-large for McSweeney’s. He lives in Brooklyn.
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