The Eyes of the Dragon (1984)
I listened to the audiobook of Stephen King's The Eyes of the Dragon beginning sometime in November of 2020 and finished it in January of 2021. In between, my mother died.
I have started and restarted this blog entry more times than I care to remember. It seemed I should have something to say, first because it would be some semblance of forward momentum--in my life, my mind, my grief--second because it seemed particularly relevant to the circumstances at hand. In the book, a father has died, the lone parent to two boys, a central figure in their upbringing, mentoring, sense of self and worth...in my life, my mother has died. A single mother, central to my upbringing, development of self and worth, the person I tried to care for in what turned out to be the last years of her life. The crushing finality of that fact alone is still too much to bear.
Truth be told, my mind flattened and evaporated into tiny drifting particles of unfocused misfires and bland, muffled clicks like the relentless tock of the clock. I gather it together to form a brain, rickety and shaking emotional debris, so that I may tend to the business of the end, what must be done to settle the debts, close the accounts, and shut the book on my mother's life. This process persists due primarily to the horrifically disorganized, bloated, immoral entity of avarice that is the U.S. healthcare system, but most of the task boxes have been checked, papers tucked away, and a once long spreadsheet has been reduced to a few odds and ends. Her ashes rest in the closet. Her material world has been claimed by loved ones or donated to charities. Daily I grasp for a new distraction, or I intend to grasp, but then it evaporates, particles swirling in no particular order, no discernable plan.
At the very least, I should be able to do this. Write a short essay about one of King's departures from the horror genre, certainly one of the lesser read and least appreciated from the fan base. The unfair dismissal of The Eyes of the Dragon from the fandom at the time was later inspiration for King's far more popular (and wildly delicious) Misery, about the writer held captive by a psychotic superfan who makes him write, bitch or ELSE. I admit to being one of those disappointed fans. I read the paperback in 1988 at the notoriously merciless age of sixteen, and had no time for that boring swords and sorcery nonsense. My interests at the time were, in no particular order, King's horror, The Legend of Zelda, composing snarky poem/songs, smoking Marlboro 100s, The Cult, and rampant, unchecked idolatry. My bedroom walls were plastered in pictures of adored actors and musicians, dominated primarily by Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando, with one particularly huge poster of Bronson Pinchot, scene stealer from Beverly Hills Cop and star of the hit show of the time, Perfect Strangers. This will be relevant later.
So I read The Eyes of the Dragon once. Thereafter, the copy traveled with me from house to house, apartment to apartment, Kansas to New York. It was last seen at The Strand in Manhattan, where I believe it fetched zero dollars or cents and was tossed unceremoniously to the dregs cart. I never intended to read it again, but for a large part of my adulthood, I couldn't conceive of ever breaking up my King collection. So it was dragged along, shelved, re-shelved, and largely forgotten.
From the bottom of my heart, I apologize for my previous dismissal of this particular King work. It's a great, clever story, brimming with heart. What I most remember from my first read-around was knowing that he'd written The Eyes of the Dragon for his daughter, Naomi, because she was no a fan of his horrorbooks and he wanted to write something specifically for her. As a mean little turd, I thought TOO BAD she can't handle it but why do the rest of us have to be punished? This isn't reminiscent editorializing; I was actively mad that King wrote a dumb fantasy book that was barely scary at all. Fantasy, as you might remember, was my mother's thing. Terminally uncool.
It was a pleasure to listen to the story unfold, for as much as the book traveled with me through life, I remembered so little of the plot save the basics. I found myself gripped by the story and its pivotal conflict, and even knowing generally how it would be resolved, it was still a delight to hear it unfurl. I could not have known that parallels would be so easily drawn to my own life, when in December, over the course of eleven days, my life went from normal to fractured and askew. In the space of those short yet interminable eleven days, I had to come to terms with the drastic turn my mother's life was taking. I had to make decisions I wouldn't wish on anyone. For everything I tried, every best intention, I could not save her.
There are no parallels in the death itself--the father, King Roland, is murdered, after all--but the aftermath resonated; the shock, the inability to think clearly, the thin membrane of nothing protecting my soul from any further injury. When I picked up with the narrative of the book again, some weeks after my mother's passing, my mind kept circling back to one theme: potential. The Eyes of the Dragon is chock full of familiar themes, one of which is the ever-compelling spectacle of dueling brothers, in this case not so much against each other as for ownership of their father's love and admiration. One son, the eldest, is tall, handsome, and quick minded, a beloved reflection of the lost mother who died giving birth to the second son, an average, portly kid who takes after his average, portly father. The king favors the elder, Peter, of course, much to the dismay and heartbreak of the younger, Thomas. King's favorite, time-and-universe-hopping, go-to villain Flagg, King Roland's right hand man and house freak in this time and world, takes full advantage of the situation. Flagg, across all King works, is an agent of chaos and despair. He seeks riches only to buy suffering and grabs power only to bear misery. The well-adjusted, intelligent, self possessed prince Peter is a problem to be solved, and Flagg beats an intricate path to his dark purposes by means both foul and fouler. He isolates the king by killing his queen (a slip of the knife by the midwife), and befriends the surly, rejected Thomas early on, mentoring him with emotional manipulation and well-timed, wholly self-serving confidences. When the time is ripe, Flagg strikes, dispatching King Roland in a memorably horrific way, setting up Peter to take the fall, and unintentionally (and unknowingly) ensnaring young, simple, emotionally stunted Thomas into the stinging web.
Both boys are destroyed by their father's death in entirely different ways. Peter, reeling with shock, is soon imprisoned for murder; Thomas, knowing the full truth of what has transpired and in no way prepared to confront or deal with it, is bedridden in a fever of grief and despair. There is a moment early on in Flagg's scheme when he sees young Thomas harm an animal after another dismissive, lecturing interaction with the king, and knows how he can use the boy's insecurities and growing inner turmoil to his full advantage. The boy, powerless, finds power in hurting something smaller and weaker. Flagg can relate. Anyone who has ever been hurt in such a fundamental way can relate. The difference is how we deal with it. Thomas, set permanently to the margins, grew toward the dark, and Flagg pruned him twisted and fed his roots bitter water.
Still. Thomas never becomes Flagg. He never wrings his hands in evil glee, cackling like a malevolent loon at the suffering of others. He simply sags, leaden with the weight of the evil he's witnessed, sodden with the poison that surrounds and drowns him. He is not evil; he is weak and terrified of the terrible crown placed on his head through the inscrutable mechanics of malice and murder. Thomas, knowing full well what Flagg has done, has no one to turn to but Flagg. He clings to Flagg's cloak hem like a mewling, yellow toddler. After all, Flagg's duplicitous attentions are the only nurturing Thomas has ever been able to count on. His inner turmoil is as genuine as it is paralyzing.
The twists and turns of the plot never let you forget about potential, what brave and resourceful child might grow from consistent love and adoration, beyond whatever genetic advantages might bear...versus the opposite, or the lazy inevitability of the second son, whose genetic misfortune was sunk even further by his own father's worst qualities now borne again in his own making. The criminal unfairness of the father holding the "lesser" son somehow accountable for these shortcomings, and brushing the boy aside to favor the shiny, clever boy lucky enough to take after the mother brings terrible consequences for them all, but is familiar enough to any family. The banality of neglect.
When the king dies, every chance Thomas might have had to claim his father's respect, validation, and love is gone in the flash of dragonsand fire. He doesn't flow over with evil, he curdles with despair. The pain of being denied that love in favor of another is one thing; the notion that there will never be redemption is something else entirely.
It's all about potential. Proving oneself to the whole world still wouldn't add up to impressing that one particular person. So what does it mean when that person is gone? When that particular validation will never happen? Ever? Whenever my mind coalesced enough to consider sitting down to write this piece, this is where it would inevitably land. Thomas in his lost misery, bedridden with grief, me and my pollen brain, drifting, drifting. What value is potential when the only person whose opinion mattered is gone?
My therapist once told me that the one thing I wanted from my mother--ultimate validation--I would never get. It was impossible. Instead, I should work on coming to terms with this fact before it metastasized into something unmanageable and irreparable. I didn't understand what she meant at the time. In fact, it made me furious. I wasn't ready to admit that I wanted my mother's approval for anything, first of all. There was still a great deal of work ahead, grappling with the past, the things I wished were different and had not yet realized never could have been because we are the people we are. Could things have been different? Somewhat, maybe, but not uncharacteristically so. I was still mired in the blame game, obsessing over lost potential, what it cost us as a family, how she could have made a million different choices better than the ones she'd made. I was fully focused on judgement. I didn't need her damn validation.
Also, what an infuriating notion. I would never get what I really wanted from my mother? Never? Why? How? She would never be proud enough? Or I would never do something extraordinary enough to garner her ultimate praise? Just what the fiddlyfuck was that supposed to mean? I bristled at the very thought. I understand it now, though. And while it's taken decades to figure it out, it's been an immeasurably healing revelation for me and for my relationship with my mother.
One small and irritating-yet-hilarious example: My very sense of humor--hambone, attention seeking, razor wit, honky-horn, clown-shoe goofballery--was honed specifically around my mother's extremely twisted, entirely unpredictable sensibilities. Her sense of humor was an ever-moving, often invisible target. From an early age, I would riff and jive, test every level of funny against her granite expression, landing little, sometimes provoking the smallest chuff of laughter, more of a charitable grunt than anything. Then, when I would least expect it, the most benign thing would set her off into gales of laughter, leaving me all twisty browed, gesturing at the tv in annoyed bemusement, "This? This you find funny?"
Sometimes I could make her laugh, really laugh, by some odd observation with only the glint of hilarity around the edges. I'd never know what would get her, so it was always a bright surprise. It would just happen, out of the blue, that chuckling, deep roll of laughter. More rarely, I'd get the coveted whipcrack cackle. For nothing. For things I couldn't remember even in random reverie and in the right here and now as I write this, no matter how hard I try to recall even one time that I made my mother really laugh. Because her humor was set to Random and I was on a lifelong journey to ferret out the secret, impossible circuit. The sheer volume of humor, ranging from simplistic to sophisticated, the quips, the puns, the overarching themes between Big Large Ideas and Small Mundane Life, all of it, casting the widest net to catch the tiniest, most elusive and clever little butterfly of a laugh. That genuine expression of delight from my mother. It was galling, insane, frustrating, and priceless.
This "ultimate validation" my therapist mentioned was far more than the ability to make my mother laugh. And the truth of the matter is that it would never happen because no matter how many times she told me she was proud, or how much I understood this to be true, it was never going to happen how my most secret, shamed heart had imagined it. Perhaps a cinematic kind validation filmmakers build whole movies around--Lucas, Rudy, etc.--that dramatic, world-shaking astonishment. By God, you've done it! You are indeed the very best girl! There is no shining moment like that. Worse yet, as close as you might get to that movie magic parallel, the moment will end. You could chase that high for the rest of your life never realizing that it will never quite feel the same way again. It can't. And in the case of chasing validation from that one person who shaped your life from birth, those moments never translate the way you imagined. Random conversations, overarching compliments, healing words to counterbalance harsh ones. Once the high dissipates, you're still you; still flawed, still wonderful, still short-tempered and longwinded. You're changed, maybe, but largely the same. One of the worst feelings in the world is standing quietly alone, after the noise has abated, the thrill of the moment has faded, wondering "Is that all there is?" Especially if you aren't prepared for it.
Mostly, though, that ultimate validation was never going to happen because I simply am not wired that way. It's the cyclical curse of the way we grew up together. To the very end, I wanted to please her, to make her happy, even when I knew that it was out of my control. As much as my inability to feel the full measure of her pride and love for me was completely out of her control. The ruthlessness of this self-sabotaging drive has diminished the older I've gotten and the better I understand myself and my motivations, but it still lingers. The saving grace is understanding my limitations and hidden pitfalls and knowing, at least intellectually, the truth of my mother's love and pride. Those sword and sorcery brothers, with their dragon slaying father, scheming doofwizard, royal lineage, and an ever-twisting drama spinning their lives into folklore, aren't nearly as lucky.
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