Part II � Sex, Death, and Money

What is Dragontown? No one is better fit to tell you than I.

I�m walking through town again, losing track of where I�m going and forgetting where I came from. I�m walking through a jungle of buildings, sloshing through grime, tripping over bodies, breathing smoke. I�m stumbling in the halls of a building somewhere in the residential district. Maybe I live here, I�m too drunk to remember. It smells of the rotting of everything that can possibly rot. The walls are so paper thin I must be careful not to punch through them. They�re slick with residue from the polluted air. The floors are slick too, I realize as I trip and fall.

I suddenly recall what wanderers and passers-by often remark regarding Dragontown; this was the worst place in the world. Taking into account that the world was a place where Heaven was manifest, and thus Hell itself most likely was also, to say that Dragontown is the least desirable place to be is a considerable condemnation. That is not to say, of course, that it is undeserved.

Leaning against the wall� this is as good a place to wind up as any; I don�t remember where I was going anyway. Here, I can watch the people and feel the vibration of the streets and the crowds in my heart. I can watch while the city puts on a little show for me, and what do I see?

Sex. Such a simple little word for such a simple little thing. This is nothing unexpected. All I had to do was walk down the street to find it happening or near to happening. I�ve lost count of my partners. Here in Dragontown, coupling was all but random. A man sees a woman he desires on the road, or in the pub, or anywhere else. She gives herself to him, or he takes her, one way or the other. Sometimes they have the good taste to find a secluded spot before they commence. Sometimes they don�t.

This time they didn�t. The man with the spines and the woman with the hair down to her waist don�t seem to notice I�m here, or perhaps they simply decided that if this place is comfortable enough for me to sit, it is comfortable enough for them to mate. Ha, his spines are sweating.

No one questions it, no one stops it. Why? Because this simple little thing is a simple little pleasure. And it�s almost the only one left for us. Even a simple little pleasure is a simple little distraction from the inevitable.

Death. It was always coming and could never be stopped. Living in Dragontown, we know that it could come at anytime. I set out from my home to drink myself into oblivion and have sex with a woman. I know that I might slip on the grimy street and smash my head on the road. No one would stop to help me. To be optimistic, I might arrive at the pub without incident, and then be stabbed in the back and bleed to death on the floor. No one would protect me. Or I might manage to get my drink, find my woman, only to be poisoned by the diseases she carries.

Or, like poor Sweaty-Spines here, the woman might draw a blade and plunge it into your heart. At least he accepted it without much incident. He goes limp eventually. Oh well, one never knows when it�s coming.

Death, so unexpected and unpredictable, was the great equalizer. The people of Dragontown bred prodigiously, and matured rapidly. I�ve also lost count of the children I�ve fathered. But the deaths resulting from utterly unchecked brutality tended to even things out. And in a place where cannibalism was accepted, if nothing else, death supplied a meal.

Money. Really, food is the only steady currency, so on the street, if someone told you they wanted your money, it was probably best to run. It makes sense, I suppose. No matter what metal seems attractive to people at a certain time or which ancestors might be honored with their picture on numbered notes, a universal value was that everyone needed to eat.

Such as the long-haired woman, though she must not have been very hungry. She carved out a few pieces of Sweaty-Spines, then sifted through his pockets and took the little tools and gadgets he was carrying, and then she was off, leaving me in an amicable silence with the late Sweaty-Spines.

Yes, we always found enough food. In one way or another, Money was the most common thing to be killed over, even if that money is in fact one�s own meaty body.

Do some of us think this is wrong? Of course we do. And the others? Well, it�s quite simple, they don�t think at all.

There is a strict and clear division in Dragontown between doers and thinkers, and with good reason; some of us know how to think, and some don�t. It has been this way as long as I can remember, in fact, as long as anyone can remember, and as far back as the Ministry teaches history. There are hunters. There are builders. There are lifters and movers. And to govern them all are those who plan the hunts, those who design the buildings, those who know what needs to be lifted and where it needs to be moved. The former are doers. The latter are thinkers.

Of course, there are also the painters, but some of them are doers, and others are thinkers. Those strange painters, walking about all the time, drawing things that don�t look like anything. Are they drawing what they wish would be? What they fear would be? Perhaps I�ll never understand it.

The thinkers, such as I, are accorded a rather valuable respect. The doers don�t really understand thinkers, what runs through their heads and how they decide what they do. As such, while it isn�t unheard of for a thinker to be murdered at random like a doer, it is very uncommon. Doers don�t dare murder thinkers the way they murder each other, because although they don�t understand what thinkers think, they understand that it is the thinkers who make their society function to whatever extent that it does. The doers simply amble along, following instructions, listening to the word of the Ministry.

The Ministry are the highest of thinkers. They are above even the work of assigning work. They sit in the monastery and think. They decide what it is right to think. They decide what others should think. And they decide what the doers should believe about their own existence. They also conveniently decide what to conceal from the doers. History changes on the word of the Ministry. Few live long enough to notice.

A long time ago, the Ministry told the doers the truth about how it started. How long ago, everyone was a doer, and everyone hunted in the marshes and lived in the wild. It was the first thinkers who changed things, who organized the people, who finally designed and implemented Dragontown itself.

Unfortunately, that history became clearer as time went on. Before the thinkers came along, everyone hunted in the marshes, roamed the wild, and no one killed anyone and everyone�s life was a strange shade of happiness. Before the thinkers, things weren�t perfect, but they weren�t a vulgar horror either. Nothing like they way things have become.

Eventually, it was decided that no one needed to know how Dragontown began. No one cared anyway, no more than they cared where it would end. The thinkers are an infinitesimal minority, and the doers are only interested in sensation. Flesh. Blood. Push the limits farther and farther and harder and harder. Fry me up in the fires of Sex, Death, and Money. Make me feel anything and everything. Stab me in the heart while you suck my dick. Do it until I�ve felt so much that I can�t feel anymore, and everything starts going black.

Everything starts going black� Is this death, or just sleep? I suppose I�ll find out in a few hours.

Or I won�t.