I hadn’t been lying before. There’s no better place to be alone than a large party, especially when almost everyone around you was trying to be the biggest and most gleaming version of themselves. Through the crowd, I could glimpse Gatsby introducing Tom and Daisy to another famous movie star while Nick looked on in consternation. No, certainly not my scene that very moment, so I moved on.
I was ready to be delighted by Gatsby’s home, but there was something desperate about it. If hanging around in New York in the summer of 1922 taught me anything, it was how to nose out desperation, and Gatsby’s party reeked of it. Everything was just a shade too bright, everyone just a little too brilliant to be borne. There were tumblers darting through the crowd, human statues in the garden that the people could direct in an enormous chess game, and the usual ubiquitous lights that danced over us like angelic halos, but it all felt so very tiresome to me.
Or maybe I’m the tiresome one, I thought with a grimace. It had been known to happen, and the summer was wearing on like a runaway car or at a snail’s pace, depending.
I was just beginning to wonder if I should find a quiet ledge to play gargoyle when I came around a corner in the garden and nearly had my head taken off by a dragon.
Despite my earlier jaded thoughts, there was a moment when a rush of wind pulled my clothes awry, when I stared after a flash of light over gold scales, that I forgot everything except a startled wonder. For a moment, I thought some exotic bird had made its escape from the trees, but then I saw the dragon for itself, larger than a horse, long and slender as a lamp post.
It was a dragon, I knew that, even if it was like no dragon I ever saw in the fairytale books. The head recalled the wickedly blunt heads of the crocodiles that I had seen at the menagerie, while a pair of deer’s horns sprouted from its brow. The tail was the vast majority of its length, corkscrewing and curling as the dragon seemed to swim through the air, cat-like paws reaching out, toes extended for purchase.
The golden dragon twisted around to dance over my head, and I clapped at the display of skill and delicacy. It was a marvelous thing, one more wonder to add to Gatsby’s list, but then the dragon pointed its nose at the night sky above me and started twisting its way up, the tip of its tail weaving back and forth like a counterbalance.
I stood staring after it, craning my neck, and I saw the moment when it started to drop. First it was flying, then it was falling, and then it was doing some combination of the two and gaining speed as it did so.
The moment that I realized that it wasn’t going to stop was the same moment when I realized that I couldn’t do more than stumble back, likely landing on my rear. I had had cruel tricks like that played on me before, and I narrowed my eyes at the diving dragon. I wasn’t going to be bullied, and that was why I did quite a silly thing, looking back.
The dragon could have been anything. It could have been a clockwork wonder taken from a German workshop after the war, and it could have left scars in my arm from jagged metalwork teeth. It could have been a slight and narrow aerialist in some kind of enchantment with more daring than sense. It could have been a dozen and one other things that would have utterly ruined my night, but in the end, it wasn’t.
Instead it was paper, and I brought the blade of my hand up in an instinctive motion that let the dragon sheer in half from nose to tail tip, the ripping sound making goosebumps stand up on my skin and a prickle of something almost achingly familiar running up my spine.
I stood there in surprise as the two halves of the dragon, nothing but paper intricately cut and scrolled, drifted down to either side of me, and a delighted laugh rang out behind me.
“Rotten brat, that took two hours to make.”
I turned to meet the speaker with my chin up and my shoulders back, nearly losing my poise with surprise when I recognized him.
He was the boy in the gallery the day Gatsby had shown us his treasure house. Now he was dressed in a black skullcap and a red brocade robe, covered all over with dragons, though, I saw after a moment, ones that were different from the one that had flown at me with such aggression. A long black beard, neatly combed, had been attached to his chin with spirit gum, and a pair of green spectacles obscured his eyes. I shouldn’t have been able to recognize him at all, but I did, and I felt at once that sense of attraction and repulsion again.