Scanned by gojukai
From Tales of Fantasy, Elsewhere Vol. II
Edited by Terri Windling &
Mark Alan Arnold

The Fallen Country

Somtow Sucharitkul

He had blank, sky-blue eyes and confused blond hair.
He had a wry, dry voice with just a lemon twist of longing in
it He was small for his age, almost as though he had willed
himself not to grow. As I dosed the door behind us, my
hand brushed against his and he flinched away violently in
the split second before willing himself to smile; from this I
pegged him as a victim of child abuse.

"Hi," I said, answering him. "My name is Dora Marx." 1
eased him into the brown, wombish chair that faced my
desk. "You may call me—" I sat down myself, with the
stuck-record-in-a-groove smoothness that comes from
seeing a thousand children a year for twenty years,
"—either Dora, or Mrs. Marx. Whichever makes you feel
more comfortable."

"I think I’d prefer Mrs. Marx,” he said. "But." he added,
"You can call me Billy." Touche.

He didn't look at me. I went to the window to slam out
the eleven o'clock yelling from the schoolyard. God damn
it, they should never make you work under these condi-
tions . . .

I said, "You're the one who—"

"They found at five in the morning, dinging to the
steeple of Santa Maria's. You read the papers?"

"Sometimes," I said, flicking the dipping out of his file.

BILLY BINDER. AGE 12—

"Where'd you get that scar?” —like an albino earth-
worm, wriggling into the sleeve of his teeshirt.

"Fell off my bike." Sure.

—FOUND HALF-DEAD ON THE LEDGE, HIS ARMS
AROUND THE STEEPLE ON THE SIDE OVERLOOK-
ING ANGEL PLAZA. FATHER EPSTEIN, SUMMER-
TIME PASTOR STANDING IN FOR FATHER SANTINI,
WHILE TRYING TO RING THE BELL—

"It says here,” I said, "that you were suffering from
severe frostbite."

"Yes. From the snow."

"It doesn't snow in Florida in the middle of August—"
No point trying to argue with him yet. My job was to listen,
only to listen. I wasn't trained to root out traumas. It wasn't
up to me to pronounce the kid an attempted suicide either,
or to solve the mystery of how he got to the topmost turret
of a locked historical monument, or to elucidate the medi-
cal wonder of frostbite in a hundred-degree heatwave- I
was only a counsellor in a parochial school too poor and
stupid to afford an expert.

I wouldn't get anywhere by questioning his story.
Perhaps I should start with something else. "How often do
they beat you up?" I said.

"What?" Terror flecked his eyes for a second. Then they
went dead. He said, "Almost every day." It was in the
same tone of voice.

"Who?"

"Pete, my Mom's boyfriend."

"What?"

He told me about it, never raising his voice. I had been
doing this for twenty years. After a while you grow iron
railings round your brains. Nothing hurts anymore. I lis-
tened, staring at my hands and wishing a ton of Porcelana
on them. I knew I would sit there and endure until the
catalogue of beltings and poundings had dissolved into
incoherence, into tears, into hysteria, and then I would
flow Into the cracks in the kid's soul like epoxy glue and
make him seem whole for a while . . . but he didn't give
me a chance. He went on in that same monotone, detail
after detail, until it was I who was ready to crack. I held up
my hand. He stopped.

"Don't you ever cry?" I said.

"Not any more," he said. 'I’ve promised."

"What do you mean, you promised?"

"The Snow Dragon."

"Tell me about him."

"I knew it!" he cried. Now he was exultant, taunting. I
wasn't prepared for the change in mood; I started most
unprofessionally. "You're supposed to be trying to help
me or something, but all you want to do is listen to me lie!"

Shirting gears to accommodate his outburst "Is that
why he hits you?"

"Yes! Yes! But I won't stop!"

"It's all right," I said. "You can He if you want You can
tell all the lies you want in this room. Nothing will ever
escape from here . . ."

"Like a confessional? Like a black hole?"
"Yes." Imaginative imagery, at least This kid was no
dummy. "Like a black hole." He looked me in the eye for
the first time. His eyes were clear as glass; I could read no
deceit in them.

"Good," he said firmly. I waited. I think he had begun to
trust me.

"So what were you really doing, then, up there. Strad-
dling the steeple, I mean."

"Rescuing a princess."

That's how he started telling me the stories. The stories'
They would have been the envy of any clinical psychiatrist
with a pet theory and a deadline and a paper to be churned
out in a fury. To me they were only stories. Of course 1 did
not believe them; but my job was to listen, ^not to judge.

Billy had been adopted by one set of parents after
another. He couldn't remember the first few. After the
divorcees had played musical chairs for a while he had
settled with the third or fourth mother, Joan, and they'd
moved to our town, a spiderweb of brash fast food places
that circled the Eighteenth Century Spanish church that
was the town's one attraction. Billy shed pasts like a snake
sloughing its skin or a duck shaking off canal water. The
only thing he kept was the name, Billy Binder. He'd always
been adamant about his name. He'd always gotten his
way about it somehow: throwing tantrums, whining, run-
ning away. It was the only part of him he'd ever kept
successfully. Days his mother typed accounts in a doctor's
office; nights she went to school, dreaming vaguely of a
softer future. As I grew to know Billy I would go over and
meet her sometimes at the doctor's. She was a dark-
haired, tired, cowering, rake-thin woman; I never got
much of a feel for her. And somehow I never met Pete. I
never went to their house, except once, at the end of my
association with Billy; and I shall never return there.

Pete came on a motorcycle and took over their lives. He
and Billy exchanged a single glance and understood each
other to the core: enemy. But Pete was the stronger,
physically anyway. He wielded his leather belt like a lion
tamer in a circus. Nights, after it was over—and it almost
always happened, every night—Billy went to his closet of a
room and lay down choked with anger. He never tried to
disguise his weals. He flaunted them in school, never
offering any explanation for them. And no one dared ask
him for one. They saw him shrouded in anger as in a
burning forc6shield, and they were afraid to touch his
loneliness.

A night came when the anger burst at last It was long
past midnight and the pain had died down a little. Billy got
out of bed, wriggled into some old cutoffs, pulled on a
teeshirt, wincing as it raked against new welts. He tiptoed
out of the house. He found his old bike leaning against the
front door, and then he hiked like a maniac into the
burning night. He did not know what drove him. A quick
twisty path rounded some shadowy palms and crossed an
empty highway and skirted the beach for some miles. It
was a night without stars, the heat wringing moisture from
the blackness. At first he heard the sea, but the surf-shatter
faded quickly. In the distance rose a wall of luxury hotels,
distant giants tombstones. In a while he made a left turn
into the town. He was not hiking with any particular pur-
pose. It began to snow.

He didn't take it in at first His anger was everything. But
it didn't stop. Fragments of cold were pelting his face, and
then great sheets of white, but Billy had never seen snow
before, and he was too busy being angry to realize that this
was a blizzard. ...

(I’ll kill him! he was thinking, forcing the pedals against
the ever-piling snow . . .)

And then it thinned. He came to a stop, stuck against a
rock or a drift. A dead, sourceless light played over vistas of
whiteness. It didn't feel like the world at all. The snow
didn't stop. Sometimes it tickled his face. Sometimes it
swirled in the sky, its flakes like stars in a nebula. There was
no sun or moon. Misty in the horizon, an impossibly far
horizon, Billy saw white crenellated castle walls that ran
behind a white hill and emerged from the other side of it;

they went on as far as he could see, twisting like marble
serpents. Billy began walking towards the hill. He did not
wonder at where he was. The cold didn't touch him, not
like sticking your hand in the freezer. He walked. By a
strange foreshortening or trick of perspective he found
himself facing the hill—

The hill's wings flapped, eyes flared briefly, fire-brilliant
blue. It was a dragon. Again the eyes flared, dulled, flared,
dulled . . . Billy gazed at the dragon for a long time. In a
rush that sent the wind sighing, the dragon spread its
wings, sweeping the snow into fierce sudden flurries. Billy
saw that the dragon had no scales but little mozaic-things
of interlocking snowflakes; when the dragon's eyes
flashed, the flakes caught rainbow fire and sparkled for a
few seconds.

The dragon said, "Billy Binder, welcome to the fallen
country."

Billy was afraid at last. "Send me home!" he cried. And
then he remembered Pete and said nothing.

When the dragon spoke, its voice was piping dear,
emotionless, like the voice of a child's ghost. It wasn4 a
booming, threatening voice at all.

"What are you thinking?" he said. "That I don't sound
fierce and threatening the way a dragon should? That I
don't roar?" He did roar then, a tinny, buzzing roar like an
electric alarm clock.

Billy said, "Who has stolen your roar?" He felt a twinge
of pity for the dragon; but then his anger slapped It down.

"This is the fallen country. Billy. Here there is no emo-
tion at all. We cannot love or hate. We cannot utter great
thunderous cries of joy or terror. . .the world is muted by
perpetual snow. That is why you are here,"

"What do you mean?" Billy was scared and wanted to
go back to his bike. He looked behind him and saw it,
impossibly far away; it seemed strange that he could have
walked this far, through the trudge-thick snowdrifts, in only
a few minutes. Perhaps time was different here. He knew
that time was different in different countries.

The dragon said, "You are here because you are full of
anger. Billy Binder. In the fallen country we need such
anger as yours. Anger is strength here . . . if 1 could feel
such anger, such love, such hatred as you can feel, I would
die. Billy. . . ."

Wrenching his feet out of the knee-deep coldless snow.
Billy forced himself to walk toward the dragon. Even the
dread he had been feeling had passed away now. "But
who has done this to you? Who has stolen your feelings?"

"You know. You have touched his shadow. His shadow
has come pursuing you. The Ringmaster. With his whip of
burning cold."

Pete.' "You should kill him!" Whiteness burned all
around him, making the tears run.

"He cannot be killed. He slips from world to world as
easily as you have done." Again the pitiful whinebuzz that
passed for a roar. "But we can work against him. Slowly,
slowly we can sap him of his strength. Your anger is
powerful here. Your anger can build bridges, can bum
pathways through the snow. Try it, Billy."

Billy clenched himself, feeling the rage course through
him, and when he opened his eyes he saw greenery pok-
ing through the snow for a few seconds, but then it was
misted over by white again.

"Do you see?" the dragon said. "You are Binder,"

"That's my name," said Billy, "but—"

"Your roots are in the fallen country. That is why you
have never felt truly at home in your world, why you have
been tossed from household to household, taking only the
name Binder with you."

Thunder shuddered through the cloud-haze. For a mo-
ment the sky parted. A whip cracking, halving the sky,
retracting Into the greyness, a burst of sound that could
have been applause or a circus band starting up or a crowd
deriding a fallen clown—

"Pete!" he blurted out

"No," said the dragon, "only the shadow; the Ringmas-
ter has a thousand shadows, and it is only a shadow of his
shadow that has followed you all the way to your distant
world."

Billy nodded, understanding suddenly.

Then he saw a red weal open on the dragon's neck,
blood trickling in slow motion onto the snow, blood that
stained the whiteness like a poppy-duster—"He's hurt
you!" he said. They were akin then, he and this alien
creature. Both were at the mercy of—"Can't you cry out?"
he cried into the howling wind, "Can't you feel anything?"

"No." The dragon's voice did not change. "Here one
need feel no pain at all. It's better to feel nothing; isn't it?
Come now. Ride me."

He extended a wing; it fanned out into a diamond-
speckled staircase. When Billy stepped onto it he realized
that he felt no cold at all. He should be freezing to death
through his worn sneakers, but he felt only numbness. It
was less real than a dream.

"Lets go now. We'll have adventures, rescuing prin-
cesses, fighting monsters and such. Isn't that what every
child wants to do? A lot of children find their way into the
fallen country. And they find a use for themselves here
. . . one day we'll have a whole army of them."

"But I want to find the Ringmaster himself! I don't want
him to hurt you and me anymore. I want to kill him."

The dragon only laughed, a wretched ghost of a laugh.
Billy clambered up the wing.

"Every child who comes here dreams of reaching the
Ringmaster. Of shaping his anger into a bridge that will
touch the very heart of the Ringmaster and topple the
circus where he wields his whip. They learn better, Billy."

"I want to kill him!"

Again a spectre of a laugh. Billy settled on the dragon's
back; it was ridged with soft dunes of snow. The dragon
flapped his wings, not resoundingly, but with a thud like a
cellar door slamming shut in a next-door house.

The dragon said, "You'll never need to cry again. Billy.
From now on you will have to save your grief, your anger,
save it for here where it will be of some use. Listen! I am the
Snow Dragon, the last surviving dragon of the fallen coun-
try. I survived by purging myself of all that made me
dragon: my fire, my rage, my iridescing, sparkle-flashing
scales that gleamed silver in the moon and gold in the sun.
Now sun and moon are gone. And I have waited for a
thousand years, so long that I have lost the capacity to feel
any joy atyour coming. . . I, me Snow Dragon, tell you
to dry your tears for the last time. Promise me."

"I promise." Billy found himself acceding, on impulse,
without thinking it out Already his eyes felt drained. Only
the melting snowflakes moistened his cheeks. He felt no
motion, but saw the ground fall from the dragon's claws.
They were rising.

They flew through snowstorms into landscapes overcast
and lightly puffed with snow. here and there the outlines of
castles, here and there a spire poking through the white-
ness. There were oceans frosted with vanilla icing. There
were cities full of silent people, trudging listlessly, never
pausing to watch the dragon swooping in the sky, never
lifting their glazed-dead eyes from the snow. At times the
sky opened, the whip cracked once, twice, thunderclap-
swift, raising fresh welts in the dragon's hide. They flew on;

and the Snow Dragon never seemed to notice the Ring-
master's capricious punishments,

"Do you still want to kill him?" said the dragon. The air
streamed past Billy's face, and yet he felt nothing, as
though he carried around him a bubble of utter stillness.
"After what you've seen he can do—"

"Yes! Yes!" Billy cried fiercely. Anger pounded inside
him. "I see what I have to do now; I see why I was brought
here!" And he dosed his eyes, thinking of the bridge of
anger. And again and again the lightning-whip cracked.
Although he didn't feel its wetness he saw he was sitting in
a pool of congealing blood. Dragon's blood. Purple, smok-
ing in the chill air.

I pushed myself into a nice, controlled, professional
posture.' 'I liked your story,'' I said, noting from the silence
through the window that the forty-five minutes were over.

HOW can he sit there and spin such a haunting web of
dreams—I was shivering in my chair. So was Billy, as
thought from terrible cold. I thought. He has plucked, out
of the septic tank of the human unconscious, an image
of such precision, such startling profundity, an image of the
dark country we all carry inside us ... I checked myself,
knowing I was beginning to sound like a pretentious
academic paper. Get a grip on yourself.

"Billy," I said, trying to gauge my tone, to show just the
right blend of concern and unconcern. His story cried out
for involvement, for belief, the way poetry does even when
it lies. But my job was not to sit back and revel in the
mystery and the beauty of his delusions. It was to help him
find reality ... to shatter the crystal goblet with my
sledgehammer of platitudes. "I liked it," I repeated-

"It wasn't a story."

"Of course not."

Pause. "See you next week," I tried a noncommittal

half-smile.

"Sure," And suddenly he was gone, leaving me alone to
hunt for shadows in the shadowless sunshine.

The following week, Billy said, "I wait until it builds up,
until I can't stand it any more. And then it bursts out of me
and I'm free to enter the fallen country. And afterwards, m
find myself in bed or maybe in some strange place, and
sometimes FU be blue with cold and my joints will feel like
icicles and I'll be shaking all over ..."

I found the mother, Joan, at a desk in an office in a huge
building, coffined in by expanses of naked glass, always
reaching for the phone.

I said, "You know there's at least one way of ending the
problem, don't you?"

She said, "Yes." When she looked at me she reminded
me of myself, and I was unnerved by this. She was a
dark-haired, slight woman, who didn't look like Billy at
all—well, that was only to be expected. Unlike her stepson,
she did not hide her feelings well. 1 saw her guilt very
clearly.

I said, "Then why don't you get rid of the man?"

She paused to take an appointment A crisp, mediciny
odour wisped by for a moment. Outside, palm-fringed con-
crete paths criss-crossed a carpet of harsh, brash green.
But I was thinking of snow, of cold, numbing snow. Finally
she answered me, speaking with difficulty.

"I can't,»i can't!" She was crying a little, and I found
myself turning away, embarrassed- "What can I do, Mrs.
Marx? He's a force, not a person—he's not human. And
what about Billy's lies? Will they suddenly end?"

"By imagining that Pete is not human." I said cruelly,
"you make it a lot easier on yourself, don't you?" Mustn't
lose control . . .

Feeling very foolish, I turned around and walked out I
don't know what I was trying to accomplish. All I knew was
.that I was well past my good years, and that I longed for the
snow, for the fallen country that we all keep locked in our
hearts. I wanted to be like Billy. I was looking forward to his
next appointment, even as I felt guilty, because I had been
spying on another's pain.

Then there were the princesses: some were in dun-
geons, buried neck-deep in the snow; others were chained
in the topmost turrets of candycane castles of intertwisting
tourmaline and olivine, half-veiled by the clinging white-
ness. Billy saved a princess the second or third time he
came to the fallen country.

They were swooping down from where the sun should
have shone, and Billy saw the castle, a forest of ice-caked
spires, mist-shrouded, dull grey in the unchanging cold
light of the fallen country.

'Time to rescue a princess!" said the dragon.

They circled the tower, for a minute Billy revelled in the
rushing of the wing-made wind. The dragon's flight was a
dance that almost seemed like joy. But when Billy asked
the dragon, "Are you happy. Snow Dragon? Has my
coming done this to you, then?" the dragon's swooping
seemed to lose its passion.

The dragon said, "Now, Billy, isn't rescuing princesses
one of the oldest compulsions of your world? Isn't it what
every earth creature longs to do?"

"I wouldn't know," said Billy, who didn't always do too
well in school, and did not know of such things as myths.
"Where's the princess?"

"In the castle, of course. And now—" they were skim-
ming the turret's edge, almost, and the windrush had
become still—"you must do what you know best how to
do."

"1 don't know what you mean!"

"Your anger, Billy . . ."

And Billy understood, then, what he was capable of
doing. He took the anger inside him, he thought of Pete
and of terrible nights lying awake and burning for ven-
geance, he concentrated all this anger until it took shape,
took form... a bridge sprang up where the dragon had
hovered, clawing the emptiness—a bridge of thin ice, as
though someone had sliced up a skating rink and slung it
into the sky. The bridge ran all the way to a round window,
gaping with serrations like a monster's mouth, at the top of
the tower. Billy sprang lightly from the dragon's back. He
looked down for a moment, thinking I should be scared
but I'm not, I'm too angry.

Beneath him the whiteness stretched limitlessly. He
could not be scared; you could not gauge the distance of
things at all, the ground seemed cushiony-soft, not a
death-trap at all. He took a couple of steps on the bridge. It
was slippery. He looked at the dark yawning jaws of the
window, feeling no fear, fuelled instead by his terrible
anger, and he began walking.

He leapt gingerly from the bridge into the room; he
expected it to be dark but it was lit by the same depressing
sourceless light mat illuminated the world outside. The
princess was-chained to the wall. He closed his eyes and
shattered the chains with a swift spurt of anger, and the
princess came towards him. She was a typical blonde,
boyish, unvoluptuous princess like the ones in Disney
cartoons, with kohl-darkened eyelashes fluttering over ex-
pressionless glittering eyes that seemed almost faceted like
an insect's. She did not smile, but walked towards him
stiffly and thanked him.

"That’s all I get?" he said.

"What did you expect?" said the princess. Her voice
was like the dragon's voice: thin, toneless, uninterested.

"Buy expected—“

The princess laughed. "Expected what? Something
strange and beautiful and romantic? How can that be, with
him up there, watching, watching? He'll catch me again,
don't you fret."

“I want to kill him.”

"I know you want to kill him," the princess said, seem-
ing to read his mind. "But you won't, you know. He is
more real than you will ever be."

And then she stepped out of the window and left him
stranded; for the bridge was gone, melted into the air. And
it was because he had lain aside his anger for a moment.

"That’s how I ended up on top of the church," Billy told
me. But how could I believe such a thing? And yet it was so
neat, so cleverly paradigmaticized. That the real world and
the fantasy should have such interfaces of confluence: the
church, the castle. Piety and passion, authority and rebel-
lion, father-shadow and princess-anima, superego and id.
An amateur analysts dream.

I said to Billy, "Let's work together now, you and I. Let's
come out of the fallen country into the real world, let's fight
this inner grief of yours." The words sounded so false,
They were false.

"You know what he told me?" said Billy. "The Snow
Dragon, I mean."
"What?"

"He told me that I would never have to leave if I didn't
want to."

That bastard Pete! But ifs people like him who pay my
rent. I too am a vampire, feeding myself on children's
emotions. Would Billy understand, if I told him, how we all
have apiece of Pete inside us?

Billy said, "Our time's up, Mrs. Marx."
"Wait a moment—" I had no business going on longer
than the allotted time. "Billy, won't you stop and just let
me help?"

He paused at the door. We confronted each other for a
moment, an innocent child who daily harrowed hell and a
middle-aged, middle-class, middle-grade counsellor Jaded
with trivialities who must supposedly know all the answers.
His face was trusting. He was a pathological liar, a Bar of
frightening vividness, but all I saw was a frightened kid who
yearned for something I did not have to give. He said,
"How can I let you help me if you won't even believe me?"

I said—I couldn't lie, even to reassure him—"No, I don't
believe you."

"But until you believe me, Mrs. Marx, well never get
anywhere."

To my surprise I found myself longing to agree with him.

When I looked up he was gone. I saw that carefully,
methodically, I had been shredding his file with my finger-
nails. Hating the sunlight, I found myself walking through
the schoolyard. wishing it would snow..

I live in a luxury condominium—there are dozens such
in our town—where children cannot come. There the old
people hide. There I am protected from the nightmares
that I must face every day.

Usually I do not remember any dreams; but that night—
the fourth week of Billy's visits with me—I do remember
things: dragons' wings, leathery, hung with icicles - - . Did
my father ever beat me? I couldn't even remember, damn
it!

Waking up. Outside—a hurricane building up? Beating
of giant wings?

I sat up on the bed. Through the mosquito netting of the
open window I heard night-sounds, insects, the ocean
hidden by a dozen Hiltons and Ramada Inns. I thought of
calling Pop, whom I hadn't thought about in years, but I
knew it was too late to patch up my life now—

There was a knock on the door.

Not the buzzer, not the little loudspeaker I use to force
strangers to admit that they came in peace. I did not move.
It came again, and then that voice, that heart-wring-
ing voice: "I'm cold, Mrs. Marx."

Children may not enter this domain.

How had he gotten past the security? Unless he had just
materialized, like in his stories... I pulled on a bathrobe
and went, through the dusty little living room, to the door,

opened it-
He collapsed into my arms. It was like. . .when I was a
kid, hugging a snowman. "For God's sake, Billy."

“I killed a monster today!" His voice frail, defiant. "But
now I'm ready for him.'"

"Don't try to attack Pete, he's too strong for you—"

"Pete? Screw Pete. I mean him."

He's going into fugue. Got to keep him here, got to keep
him warm, or God knows what he'll try—

"Look at me, you bitch!" He ripped his teeshirt open. I
saw blood. I saw scars. I saw blue bruises. Red, white and
blue, like the goddamn American flag. But his eyes were
dry. And blazing. "Now try to believe. You're all I have,
Mrs. Marx. I'm going back like me Snow Dragon says,
maybe forever. Or until I kill the Ringmaster."

"No!'' I tried to hold on to him, but he twisted away from
me. Somehow he had warmed up, as though the very
fever of his anger could melt away the cold. I knew how
unbearable the real world was, I knew the cold hard
beauty of his imaginary one, but I couldn't let him run
-away from reality, I couldn't let him hide inside himself, I
was conditioned to helping the children face the truth—

"Believe me!" he shouted. "Come with me!"

Grasping at straws, "All right All right" Quickly I was
pulling on an old dress, not caring that he could see my
sagging breasts—we had come too close for modesty
now—I was shepherding him out of the door, down the
steps, into the car, thinking Hospital, doctor, shrink, any-
thing, just anything . . .

I am ashamed to admit that 1 was also afraid that seeing
me walking through the condo grounds at midnight would
Jeopardize my rental agreement, would force me out of my
own fallen country.

As we pulled out onto the highway, it began to snow-

I panicked, fumbling for the wipers. Billy watched me
solemnly, with a kind of 1-told-you-so superiority. The
snow grew from powder-fluffy to blizzard sheets; I
stomped on the accelerator and slithered, I couldn't see
the road at all.

"I knew it," Billy was saying softly. "I knew you had it in
you to come with me."

He understands, I thought suddenly. About my secret
fears, about the pain I think I hide so successfully. And all
the while I thought I was taking the lead. We ploughed
through the thick whiteness, until—

I stalled out. I pushed hard on the door handle, cursing
old clunkers. When 1 got the door open the snow flew in,
whipping my face and flooding the car floor with chalky
ice.

"Out of the car now," Billy said.

"We'll freeze!" I didn't want to lose control of the fan-
tasy. didn't want to relinquish myself into the hands of a
demented kid.

"No we won't," he said firmly. He scooted over me, a
bony bread crust of a boy, and then he was walking out
into the billowing whiteness, was striding, oblivious to the
cold, had become a grey shadowghost streaked with
white.

I tried to remember the things he'd told me. Be angry! I
told myself- Anger will warm you.

Why didn't I ranch myself? Why didn't I think I was
going mad? I must have known all along, the realness of
Billy's fantasy must have touched me all along. . . .

I followed the kid cautiously. Soon I too felt nothing. The
wind lashed my face and I could have been in a shopping
mall buying shoes. I called out the kid's name but he was
too Intent to answer. I fell into the fallen country's strange
detachment; it lured me, it drugged my pain, I knew that I
could live there forever.

The snow whirled around me and I saw nothing but
eye-smarting toothpaste commercial dazzlewhite, and
then, through the burning white, two pinpoints of blue fire.

The Snow Dragon!

The storm subsided a little. There he hovered. I watched
him, believing in him completely. The wings were not
leathery-^my nightmares had lied to me—but like a
thousand layers of crystal-stitched gauze. He landed,
shook a snowdrift from his back—whiteness peppering
whiteness—and I saw the sky open and the whip crack and
I saw the blood trickle down him, and he did not even
tense in pain. I called his name, "Snow Dragon."

"You have brought another one?" The dragon spoke
only to Billy. I was here only as an observer, then,

"She's been hurt, too, Snow Dragon! Only she doesn't
see it; sometimes she hides it too well."

"You are back too soon. Something is wrong with
things. The fallen country is all disordered."

"This time I've come to kill him!"

"You cannot kill him." He sounded resigned. "You
haven't energy enough."

"I am energy enough! She's seen! She can tell you!"

The dragon seemed not to hear. The wing came down,
lashing the snow and making it dance for a moment.
Without hesitating Billy leapt up. I followed, searching in
vain for my fear.

And then we broke through the thick mist, and still there
was no sunlight, only a kind of grey clarity in the air. I sat
hunched into a ridge on the dragon's spine, my shapeless
blotchy dress fluttering a little. 1 saw the castles blanketed
with white; I saw the distant ice-sea, the snow-forts ringing
the snow-hills.

"My bridge of anger," Billy said. His voice did not
waver. The dragon circled slowly, I felt the kind of unease
you feel on a plane in a holding pattern, but only for a
second; then I felt nothing again. It was good to feel
nothing.

Billy stood. The dragon braked in mid-air, an eerie,
weightless feeling. And then Billy began to dream his
bridge into being,

At first nothing. Then the whip, cracking in the sky, over
and over, the dragon shivering himself into stillness as
though concentrating the pain deep inside himself, and I
was sitting in fast-hardening purple blood, and the drag-
on's breath came harder, clouding the chill wind- And as
the cloud cleared I saw that a bridge was growing in the air,
a suspension bridge with great columns of ice sprouting up
from the mistiness below, pathway of living ice, thrusting in
a rainbow-curve across the sky, reaching for the crack in
the sky where the whip still cracked, from which great
thunder-howls of laughter burst forth now, shrieks of a
blood-lusty crowd.

The bridge hung there. Girders, rainbow-fringed from
the sourceless light, a boy-wide road that thinned in the
distance into a point.

"Your anger," the dragon said, "you are exhausting
your anger, see, it will soon be gone, Billy Binder."

"Never!" the boy cried resolutely. "Only when he dies,
that'll kill my anger, only that." He stepped out onto the
ice. Again I felt a second's anxiety, and then the fallen
country's spell drug-dragged it from me.

"Let me come too!" I yelled after him. Already he was
tiny in the distance. Space and time seemed to work
differently in this country. An adventuress now, this old
woman who had made nothing of her life, I ran after him,
my low-heels clicking like castanets on the thin ice. I had to
be with him. I was angry too, angry because of all the times
I'd listened to the kids and done nothing while they bawled
their guts out onto the floor of my little office-1 was going to
kill one child abuser in my lifetime! I was going to crush this
dream-Pete that Billy had created, to throttle him to death
with my twenty years of rage! Already I felt my fury fuelling
the bridge, making it firmer, easier to run on.

I was getting tired fast. But Billy still ran ahead, relentless
as a wind. With a burst of anger I caught up with him, we
ran neck and neck for a moment, and 1 saw that he wasn't
even fired yet, and I knew I was wrong to think I could help
or that I had anger enough in me—I who had never been
hurt like that, who experienced the hurt only vicariously.
The bridge soared up, steep in the strange foreshortening,
and now even Billy was gasping. Then I was lurching
forward, seeing the bridge telescope contact between my
eyes, seeing the splitting sky.

A circus tent now, walls of flapping canvas painted sun
moon stars shivering sheep-cloudlets, floors of mist-
steaming packed snow, countless rings where bone-bare
children leapt through fire-hoops, their faces tense with
terror, frightened seals with planets whirling on their noses,
scared to drop them, elephants trampling with earthquake
feet, toppling skyscraper building-blocks, trumpeting
thunderstorms. ...

I stood there, panting, exhausted, couldn't take any-
thing in. But Billy ... he strode through the chaos,
single-minded, seeking the centre of things. And then I saw
him, a little man with a whip, and he was dancing as he
waved the whip, his eyes were as cold and expressionless
as tundra-snow that has never thawed. And I knew his
face. My face, Pete's face, even Billy's face, a template of
human faces, always changing. I even saw Pop. I swear it,
even Pop . . - Pop whom I couldn't remember beating
me, until tonight.

The Ringmaster bowed to the audience. The cacklebuzz
that had been a constant background, soft-brush percus-
sion to the raucous band music, died down. He spoke very
quietly. I recognized a little of Snow Dragon in his voice.
and I was chilled by it.

The Ringmaster stepped out of his ring. He advanced
towards Billy; again I saw that I was being ignored, that I
was a watcher in another's confrontation, that I might as
well have been sitting at the desk In the office listening to
the screaming children in the yard.

The Ringmaster cracked his whip. Once. Worlds
whirled! Children leapt! Blood spattered the sand! And
then, like clockwork winding down, they sank into slow
motion.

"You came, Billy Binder," said the Ringmaster. 'I’ve
been expecting you."

"You bastard!" Billy cried. "But I'm strong enough to
get you!" Laughter echoed from the stands; I spun round
to watch, and I saw that they all had his face, his face that
was also mine and Billy's and Pop's and everyone else's
and they all laughed in unison, as though animated by a
single hand.

"So come and get me!"

Billy reached out with his rage, a fireball burning tracks
in the snow. I saw grass for a split second.

"You've got it alt wrong!" the Ringmaster said. "You
haven't come here to kill me at all! I sent for you. I bred you
to be another shadow, another Ringmaster even—that's
how you were able to find me. I granted you this gift of
anger so you could build a way to me "

"No!" he shrieked.

"A shadow of my shadow," said the Ringmaster, raising
his whip but never his voice, "You too are to become a
shadow of my shadow, like Pete, like all the others.

"Billy, Billy . . ." the Ringmaster said. "You could be
just like me, I have no pain, I only give pain now; I've been
freed . . . Hate me, Billy. Hate me! Your anger only
makes me greater, only binds you more to me! For you
are my son, Billy Binder, be free, Billy, be free, like
me .

Billy stood, catapulting firedarts of anger, and the
Ringmaster absorbed them all and grew tall, and snow-
tempests swept around him, blurring him. Once I tried to
step in, to add to Billy's store of rage, but I was frozen to the
floor of snow.

The Ringmaster went on, "Oh, Billy, how can you turn
your back on this? We are alike, you and I. You too can
wield the whip and make a thousand universes dance with
pain, and never feel the pain yourself."

'Til never be like you! Never, never, never—" Billy
screamed, and then I saw a final blast of rage explode from
him and the canvas wall split open for a moment and I saw
for an instant another whip, and another face of another
Ringmaster up in the sky above us, and behind him
another and another'

Then I looked at Billy, saw him shrunken, spent, the
anger burned from him. I looked at the Ringmaster,
panicking, thinking: We're stranded here now, we'll never
get back to the real world; we'll stay and rescue princesses
and fight monsters and see the princesses get recaptured
and the monsters get reborn, for ever and ever.

I began to yell hysterically at the Ringmaster. He stood
for everything I'd ever been angry about. I shouted:' 'I hate
you! There's no reason for you to be; you're senseless, you
screw up the whole universe!"

But Billy said, very quietly, "I don't have any anger left."
And the Ringmaster's face grew pale, and he said, "But
you must hate me! I bred you to hate me! I followed you
and beat me hatred into you ..."

Billy turned and spoke to me at last "Don't you see?"
he said, "I could have been like that He's not the real
Ringmaster at all. You glimpsed it, didn't you? I was so
angry that I opened up ... another country, the fallen
country behind the fallen country, and I saw that the
Ringmaster was only a shadow himself, that he danced to
the whip of a higher ringmaster. . . How can I hate him?' '•

"Don't. . ." the Ringmaster said. I saw anguish cross
his face for the first time. Or maybe I was just imagining it It
was only for a second.

Deliberately, quietly, Billy turned his back on him,

I followed the boy like an idiot. The dragon waited by
the bridge, the bridge was already dissipating into mist, the
dismal, cold light was brightening into sunlight, and—
By the car, patches of green.

Billy said to the dragon, "It's true. isn't it? What he said.
That he's my father."

The dragon said nothing. I knew, though, that he did not
disagree. And then Billy said, "It's strange, isn't it, how he
plants in all his kids a little shred of something . . . that
could destroy him, like he was dancing for his Ringmaster
and secretly working to sabotage him at the same time'

The dragon said, "I too am part of the shadow. Billy, the
part that seeks the shadow's own death, the left hand that
does what the right hand dares not know about You have
killed us both: him by your compassion, me by compelling
me to feel love for you . . .

"The snow is melting. The fallen country will be dosed
to you now." He did not speak again, but uttered a roar
that rent the sky as sunlight broke the cloud-veils, a cry
both of heartache and of joy. and he spread his wings and
soared upwards with a heart-stopping whistlerush of wind.
And then he was gone, disintegrated like a windgust, like a
dream, like a half-stirred memory.

There was the car. I drove like a madwoman, churning
up snow, bursting suddenly into the known world of con-
crete roads and forests of hotels and condominiums
bleached lifeless by loneliness—

Police sirens! Lights! 'The house!" Billy cried. We
rounded a turn, he sprang out and sprinted towards the
house, red blur of revolving sirens everywhere, swirl-
ing ... We watched, silently. They brought Joan out.
shaking, and then a stretcher, a covered one, I heard the
onlookers muttering, looking curiously at Billy, avoiding
his eyes, heard them say how Pete had gone crazy and just
gone and crashed his motorbike into the house.

"I killed him," Billy said softly, for me alone. And I
believed him. For he had found the way into Pete's soul,
and in understanding it, in giving it peace, had destroyed
it. The inner and outer worlds are congruent in a thousand
places. Wherever we stand, we are within a hair's breadth
of the fallen country.

Billy had understood things which I had never under-
stood, I, whose job was understanding. I'd been so
sure of myself, coaxing traumas out of children, beating on
their tittle minds until they danced out their pain for me in
my office- But where was my peace? My suffering was
trivial, and so was my reward—to be beset by little
things only, to be a watcher, not one who can compress
the shadow-substance of her dreams until they become
diamond-hard, like truth.

I moved closer to him, trying irrationally to shield him
from the screaming sirens. Quietly, but openly, without
shame, he had begun to cry.

If only we could wear our griefs as lightly as the snow
wears the sneakerprints of children's dreams.

I went closer to him, almost touching him now, and
began to do what I am trained to do. At first no words
would come. Damn it, Dora Marx, I thought- Who has
stolen your roar? I groped—

"Sure," I murmured. "Sure." I wondered if he would
flinch if I tried to hug him.