Soft come the dragons

personal vendetta."
    "Listen—"
    The radio crackled, interrupting the building rage within Marshall. "Twain here. Menchen is in his room. Ill. I'm going to trundle him back."
    "What about the dragons?" Marshall snapped into the mike.
    "I can hear them bumping softly against the window shields, trying to get in. Like big moths. Creepy."
    "None in the halls?"
    "No, Starting back. Out."
    The dragons that killed with their eyes. Beautiful dragons so the automatic cameras showed. But dragons that no man could look upon.
    Somehow, men must be able to see, he thought. The photos— Dante's mind seemed dangling on the ravine of inspiration.
     
    When Twain returned, he was quite relieved, forgot about Marshall, and lived the moments of good poetry the younger man had composed, commenting and discussing.
    "Why do you write?"
    Twain thought a moment. "To detail Truth."
    "With a capital T?"
    "Yes."
    "There isn't such a thing. Don't interrupt. There is no such thing as Truth, no purity with a tag. It is a shade of gray somewhere between black and white. It is one thing to a slave, another to a monarch, and yet another to the monk who kneels alone in cloistered walls of towering granite, fingering beads. It is for no man to delineate, and for no man to criticize another's understanding of it. Truth, old son, is relative. And more than relative, it is nonexistent as a pure entity."
    "But in the literature classes in college, they said we were to search for the truth. The textbooks on poetry say we should write to discover truth."
    The sixty plus men muttered among themselves. Marshall followed his scopes, his dials, his unfailing measuring devices that justified the way of things to man.
    "That's what they tell you, Mr. Twain. That is also what I will tell you. Write to delineate truth. Yet I warn you there is no such thing. Yet I tell you never to stop looking, never to forsake the search. Yet do I tell ye that ye shall never end the quest. Do you have guts enough to keep looking, Holden Twain?"
    Twain looked at him, and silently without needing to explain, he walked off and sat in a corner, staring intently at the wall where it joined the ceiling.
    The rest of the day he spent tramping in and out of Abner's clinic, checking on Menchen's progress.
    The blue walls of the med room made him feel as if he were hanging, dangling precariously from the center of the sky. The thin silver instruments on the table, the stark functional furniture, the university degrees on the walls, the anatomical chart above the operating table as if the surgeon followed a paint-by-number method in removing an appendix—all seemed like flotsam and jetsam swirling around in the crystal sky, remnants of mankind's achievements hurled into the stratosphere after a violent swipe of a disgusted God's powerful hand.
    "What does he have?"
    Abner stared at the diagnostic machine's readings. "Could be a tumor."
    "Could be?"
    "Could be half a dozen other things. It's hidden in the maze of tissues in his bowels. Maybe I found it. Maybe not.
    "What can you do?"
    "Nothing."
    "He'll die?"
    "We don't have the most modern hospital devised by mankind at our disposal."
    "I'm not blaming you, Abe."
    "I am."
    "He will die, then?"
    "Yes. And because I don't understand. I don't understand."
    At night, while Dante slept, Menchen died. But the poet didn't know. No one would know until the morning. And it would disturb no one's sleep. A thousand sparrows could fall at once . . .
    A thousand sparrows, a million sparrows fell from the sky, between the snowflakes. They crashed silently into the pavement. They tangled in the telephone wires—looking like notes in a staff of copper, separated by pole-bars into economical musical measures. But there was no music.
    After they fell, he stood, the collar of his coat turned up to ward off the cold, and looked at their bodies, broken and bleeding. And he did not understand.
    Looking up into the gray sky from whence came the snow swirling like a thousand dandelion puffs blown on by children, he searched hopefully for the source of the coldness.
    Far away, tires screeching . . .
    Metal shredding . . .
    Ghostly screams in the night, a woman in agony . . .
    Perhaps, he thought, if I could look with a mirror, I could see and know. Perhaps, seeing everything backwards, the world makes sense. Maybe, if we change our perspective . . .
    "Yes," said a voice.
    He turned and looked at the snakes in her head, and he could not keep his eyes from