And Then What

A child, a dragon, and the present tense

I was not expecting to be anyone’s best friend that day.

I had come to the house to see a client. I had been working with her since before the boy was born — long enough that I had watched, from the periphery, a child appear in the household and gradually take it over. My work, broadly, involves living alongside families. Whatever is going on in the house, I am, to some degree, part of it. I have sat through dinners, arrivals, departures, minor emergencies, and the particular kind of afternoon in which nothing is happening and everyone is, nevertheless, busy.

Usually, the work is adult. There are things to discuss. Decisions, mostly, and the conversations that lead up to decisions, and the conversations that follow them. I had come, that day, expecting one of those.

I walked into the room, and before I had fully entered it, he saw me.

“Andy!” he said, with the kind of excitement that makes you immediately question whether you’ve done something to deserve it.

He ran over, took my hand, and turned to the room.

“This is my best friend.”

There was no hesitation. No checking with me. No announcement that an announcement was coming. Just the announcement.

I smiled the way you smile when a child has said something generous about you and you’d like, very much, not to ruin it.

“Hi,” I said.

He didn’t let go of my hand.

We walked together for a bit, which felt less like walking and more like I had been acquired. He showed me his collection of superhero books and explained, at length, the entire Marvel Universe, including several people I had not previously been introduced to. A book was placed in front of me. I was asked, repeatedly, to read from it.

At some point, I sat down on the sofa.

He stayed close, which made sense. You don’t announce a best friend and then let them drift.

There was a pause, and I thought perhaps the role was largely ceremonial.

“Tell me a story,” he said.

Ah.

So there were responsibilities.

“I’m a little tired,” I said, hoping to negotiate the terms.

He nodded, which I took as a good sign.

“Grandpa starts with animals.”

This was presented as a helpful guideline, not a suggestion.

“Okay,” I said. “There’s a tiger.”

“And an elephant,” he said.

“Right. They’re friends.”

“Why?”

This felt like an aggressive level of scrutiny for a relationship I had just invented.

“Because they like each other.”

“Why?”

“Because… they have things in common.”

“Why?”

I was beginning to understand the structure of the conversation. He was not, as I had hoped, going to accept things.

“They find a cave,” I said, moving us along.

“Why?”

“Because there’s a dragon in it.”

“Why?”

“Because dragons live in caves.”

“Why?”

I paused. I had been treating each why as an obstacle. But it occurred to me, somewhere around the fourth one, that he wasn’t trying to slow the story down. He wanted to understand what was underneath it.

“Because he’s protecting something,” I said, more carefully now.

“Why?”

“Because it’s his. And he’s worried someone’s going to take it.”

He looked at me, satisfied, finally, with an answer.

“Then what?” he said.

And this was a different question than the ones before it.

The whys had been going downward. Then what meant we were going forward.

I thought about it.

“Then someone comes to the cave,” I said. “And the dragon has to decide what to do.”

“What does he do?”

I looked at him. He was waiting. Not for a guess. For the answer.

“He says hi,” I said.

He nodded.

That seemed to be the right one.

But he didn’t move. He didn’t go off to find something else, the way I had assumed he would once the story had reached a place that could pass for an ending. He stayed exactly where he was, looking at me the way a starving person looks at the last thing on the table.

There was, apparently, more.

I am, by trade and by temperament, someone who recounts. I tell stories about things that happened. I describe rooms I have been in, conversations I have had, people I have met. The stories are, in their way, accurate. They are also, I am realizing now, a kind of safety. If the thing already happened, I cannot get it wrong.

I had not known, until a few minutes earlier, that I could make something up. Or rather — I had known, in theory, the way one knows that one could, in theory, learn an instrument. I had not known what it felt like. There had been a tiger, and an elephant, and a dragon worried about losing something that was his, and none of them had existed before he asked me to find them.

That was one thing.

The other thing was him. Still watching me. Still waiting.

I had been listening to him the whole time, but I had not, until that moment, noticed how he was listening to me. Not the way I listen, which involves a great deal of preparation for what might be said next. He had been entirely inside each sentence as it arrived. When the dragon was scary, the dragon was scary. When the dragon was worried, he adjusted, without resistance, to a worried dragon. He was not, as I tend to be, three sentences ahead, getting ready.

I had written, often, about how we lose the present — how it becomes a thing we pass through rather than a thing we are in. But I had written it from the outside, the way you describe a country you have read about.

He was the country.

And for a few minutes, sitting next to him, inventing a dragon, I had been there too.

“And then what?” he said.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​