Finally the shrimpers beached the catamaran on the Isle of Youth, the second-largest Cuban island, not far south of Havana. The tide pools on the black beach were full of tiny dragon eggs, the shrimpers advised me, nearly large enough to see with the naked eye. “They hatch as soon as you swallow them. It's part of their natural life cycle.”

One guy kept repeating that some dragons do better in the large intestine, other in the small intestine, until this became annoying and the others made him shut up. I asked if they wanted to try some, and they laughed and called me crazy. “But the only laws you'll be violating will be Cuban ones.”      

I looked into a shiny pool and thought I could almost hear dragons gargling. The shrimpers left me a crate of whiskey and departed. “You're a stupid motherfucker from a long line of stupid motherfuckers,” one of them called to me in farewell. “Let us know how it all works out for you.”

“Your only problem,” the wisest of the shrimpers called, “is you don't like having problems.”

I swallowed the rock dragon eggs by the handful, a taste somewhere between caviar and kimchee, washed down with whiskey in the baking sun to maximize ecosystemic diversity in my entrails.

Time slowed down. I became acutely aware of unseen forces.

An oil tanker passed in the distance. I made an elaborate sand castle. Things veered slowly in and out of focus.

I could feel the planet circle slowly towards the sun. I drew dragons in the black sand, drank more whiskey, and poured some into the tide pools for the newly-hatched dragons. Evolution, I thought, makes of every organism a map of its environment. Then a dragon is a map of my intestines. So what was I a map of?

At this point, several days are missing from my memory.