Gojiro (14 page)

The Fayetteville Tree

G
OJIRO WASN’T ABOUT TO STAY INSIDE
that dreary old mansion with the Atoms. Bunk down in there and forget sleep, what with the brain fevers and all-night whine. It was a lot better to lay a pallet under the milky LA sky in the Zoo of Shame.

Not that the Zoo accommodations were exactly deluxe, being nothing but a twenty-foot strip of ground inside a chicken-wire pen populated by that miserable medley of quaggas, moas, sloths, ivory-bills, and the rest. But the conversation was better. Outside of an occasional whimper, those desolate beasts never made a sound. Yeah, the monster decided, the Zoo of Shame wouldn’t be that bad, as long as he avoided eye contact with the dodo.

Peeking between webby claws, Gojiro winced as he remembered when that pathetic bird had come into existence. It was back during those bold activist days, when the great chants of Anti-Speciesism resounded on Radioactive Island. How thrilling it was to shout “Two, four, six, eight! Speciesistic crumbs—get ready to reparate! Reparations for the forcibly extincted now! The checkerspot butterfly will rise again! Buffalo Bill is swill!”

The struggle intensified after a book entitled
Strange and Unusual Animals
washed up. Flipping through the elaborate woodcuts, Gojiro was angered that the book made no distinction between beasts killed off by humans and those that existed only in fantasy. Passenger pigeons were pictured alongside unicorns, centaurs, and—of course—dragons. “So they think they’re the arbiters of reality,” the monster railed. “That they can play mix and match with the great patchquilt of existence? They call it Manifest Destiny, do they? I got some Manyfist Destiny for their face!”

The reptile’s plan was simple, sweeping. Komodo, by means of his green-thumbed beakers and bunsens, would rewhelp representatives of extinct Bunches. Then the formerly obliterated would be transported en masse in a “Repartriation Ark” to the UN General Assembly, where, at a hastily convened Tribunal on International Speciescide chaired by Gojiro himself, the dispossessed would be able to confront their excluders. This procedure was to be repeated in all the great capitals of the world. “Imagine,” the reptile chortled, “a herd of long-retired rhinos, their horns liberated from the dark wood drawers of Chinese apothecaries, charging down every Elysées.”

Komodo was unsure. “But my own true friend, wouldn’t this be tampering with the order of things?”

“Don’t you mean the
dis
order of things?” Gojiro shot back. “We’ll be righting wrongs, partner, aiding justice! Get to bioengineering, we got miles of niches to restock ’fore we sleep.”

Of all the reanimation jobs Komodo mixmastered from his widebrimmed beakers the dodo was the most sublime. There was only one problem. Instead of the undying gratitude the reptile expected, the dodo’s Necco wafer-like eyes said only, “Why?” It was then that the monster perceived the grievous error of the plan. Fired by rhetoric, they’d coathangered an entire warp-of-time menagerie back from oblivion, belched them up, robbed of habitat, in a world where they saw not a familiar nut or berry.

“What have we done?” the lizard moaned. How could they have neglected one of Budd Hazard’s most fundamental teachings, the Principle of Adherence and Disadherence in Beamic Fluidity? The precept was quite clear: Without the conjuncting pull of a living Bunch, Beamic ions rescrambled, became free agents, scattering through the universe. Quite obviously, the Beam that once infused the dodo Bunch, thereby connecting it to the Mainstem of the Evolloo, had long since dispersed. Perhaps that immortal energy now served a crew of screaming Bahian monkeys or had become nothing but a disassociated sheen off the coast of Mars—the monster couldn’t say. One harsh fact was indisputable, however: Within the Evolloo, there was no right of Return. The disappearance of forms was as unconditional as their advent. Besides, if the dodo had been so easily scuttled, didn’t this speak to the calcified Maginot of the bird’s Line? Extinction, by whatever means necessary, obviously suited the Evolloo. Probably that’s why people were invented, Gojiro thought; as the grimmest reapers charged with the task of routing expendables. Dirty job, but someone has to do it, and those sapiens, they were pro.

“Stand aside!” he screamed to Komodo, readying a fatal blast of Radi-Breath to hurl at the re-created beasts. But the resolute Japanese would not move.

“Don’t you understand? We created freaks. We got to get rid of ’em.”

“No!” a distraught but firm Komodo said. He stood between Gojiro and the doleful reconstitutes, a father superior in black pajamas, sheltering his imperfect children. “Perhaps we should not have given them life, but it is not our place to destroy them. Their fate is now beyond our hands, except that we may try to make them as comfortable as possible.”

Gojiro fell to his knees and slammed the Island floor with his clawfists. He knew Komodo would not move from that spot, that he’d take the first shot of Radi-Breath himself rather than allow those jittery obsolescents to feel the singe. Still, the problem of what to do with this passel of unnaturally selected losers remained. For a while it seemed the animals might make good pets for the Atoms, but this idea was abandoned after they woke up one morning to find the dodo dressed in white boots and a miniskirt, a flashing sign around its neck saying “Dodo au Go-Go.”

After that, the high-security Zoo of Shame was incorporated as a living shrine to the mysterious workings of the Evolloo. Back on Radioactive Island, in a mournful spirit of spent solidarity, Gojiro often passed a week or two there, shrunk down, mutant among the mutants. Which is where he was right then, in that makeshift zoo pen Shig set up behind the Traj Taj, trying to avoid the dodo’s gaze.

“Knock it off,” the monster shouted at the moony bird. “Why don’t you go imprint yourself on a lawn jockey? I ain’t your ma.”

“Excuse me, my own true friend?”

“Nothing.” The monster hadn’t seen Komodo standing there, outside the Zoo of Shame confines. “How was the party?”

“Oh, fine. Very . . . interesting.” Komodo looked beat, at loose ends. A good deal of time passed before he was able to relate even the barest outline of the events that had occurred under Albert Bullins’s tent.

“Geez,” Gojiro sighed, shaking his head as Komodo spoke. But then, attempting an air of unconcern, he said, “No reason to get all pent-up, at least about Stiller thinking he knows you.”

After all, the reptile reminded his friend, it wasn’t completely out of the question that
someone
would finger him as the erstwhile Coma Boy. Hadn’t a copy of that old
Life
magazine floated right by them just a few days before, as they were swimming out to the Cloudcover? “Coma Boy—conscience of our age?” the cover line beseeched, the white letters slung above Komodo’s Heater-struck visage. How many people still had that old issue moldering in their garages, thumbed through it at garage sales? The Coma Boy of Hiroshima wasn’t exactly a nobody. Time was, a million beatniks carried posters with his likeness during candlelight processions. The UN named a week for him, thousands of school children were touched by his plight in their
Weekly Readers
. Even now, his sobriquet was invoked on quiz shows, the answer to one of the higher-priced choices in the Fabulous Forties and Fifties category. Yeah, the Coma Boy had once cut a moral swath, okay; there had to be one person in Hollywood who’d remember a face once thought to be the conscience of the age.

It made sense that it would be Stiller. Stiller had been there, right inside Komodo’s hospital room. The scene was well documented in that old newsreel that kept turning up on the Dish—
Time! Marches On!

What a nightmare . . . Komodo forced to see those murky images of Red Cross workers scouring the broken city for survivors, to watch them come upon a flattened house where, with block and tackle, they pulled a tiny, seemingly lifeless boy from a hole in the ground. “In the wreckage of atomic fury,” the merciless Voorhees boomed his narration, “a young boy found! Where there was only Death, a child alive—alive and apparently unhurt. Just stunned. Stunned into a coma!” Then, they cut to Okinawa, into that miserable hospital room, the camera tight on Komodo’s wide open, supposedly unseeing eyes. How awful it was that first time! To see Komodo stare at that screen, to peer into his own face, hear him say, “My God, it’s me.”

It seemed so long ago, Gojiro had almost forgotten. To recall his friend’s beginnings now made the monster nervous. After all, if today’s headline might be made to read, “Coma Boy Alive!” could “King of Monsters Also Alive!” be far behind? Nevertheless, Gojiro continued to insist that Stiller’s near ID didn’t mean a thing. “What could happen? The army gonna dun you for the hospital bill? You’re
dead
, remember? It’s official: They said you’re dead. Besides, he ain’t gonna remember. The old fart’s totally Palm Springs now; he’s been cooking in Sinatra’s Jacuzzi so long, his brain is poached. He’s just got you mixed up with the Astro Boy.”

Komodo shook his head sadly. “No,” he said, “if Mr. Bullins’s car hadn’t exploded at that moment, Dr. Stiller would have placed me then and there.”

Without another word, Komodo got up and walked over to where Shig had installed that Fayetteville Tree. “Four new species in the last twenty-four-hour period,” he noted flatly, devoid of the excitement with which he customarily greeted further editions of the North Carolina chickadees living among the Tree’s glass-enclosed branches. “An unprecedented increase. Ebi is correct. These are extremely fecund environs.”

“For sure.” There wasn’t much else for Gojiro to say. Once Komodo peered into that Fayetteville jar and began thinking about the Instant of Reprimordialization, conversation was useless. The sight of those crappy little birds flitting about the gnarly neobonsai always seemed to transport Komodo into a meditative realm. You might say that as old Darwin had his finches and Galapagos pine, Komodo had his chickadees and Fayetteville Tree. However, to tell the truth, the monster had grown increasingly weary of his friend’s ever more arcane search for the key to what he called “the vast enigma of the Reprimordial change.”

Not that Gojiro hadn’t once admired—even envied—the cosmological boldness of Komodo’s original conception. The earnest Japanese first hit upon his insight in the middle of a typically laborious exercise aimed at placing Budd Hazard’s mysterious koan, “Reprimordialization is the hand on the Wheel, the Engine of the Evolloo,” within the context of the Muse’s doctrine of Beam/Bunch collective self-awareness. Komodo was moving through the dry contingencies when he scribbled two formulas on his worksheet: P = I and P + AT = I.

“That is Prewire equals Identity, Prewire plus Acquired Traits equals Identity,” Komodo blurted,
that look
on his suddenly animated face. Then, defining Prewire as initial Beamic input and indicating Acquired Traits to be the sum total of a Bunch’s ongoing experience, Komodo asserted that the two equations were cyclical and eternally linked.

The key was the interplay between the two formulas, Komodo explained. “Even though nearly all of a Bunch’s time is spent within the P + AT = I paradigm, this statement can be said to be meaningless. True Identity can never be
absolutely
glimpsed by a group in the midst of acquiring traits. Immersed in the Great Flow, their passage is eternal, ever changing; they cannot stop and look at themselves. Luckily, an unconditional determination of Identity is not crucial to the growing, healthy Bunch secure within its Beamic framework. It is only during
Crisis
—a condition that Budd Hazard defines as the Crossroads of Life and Death that every entity must face sooner or later—that a Bunch must conjure a
reconfirming vision
of itself and its place in the Universe or, failing that, cease to exist.”

It was at this critical moment, Komodo contended, that the symbiosis of his two equations came into play. “A Bunch can only continue within its P + AT = I configuration so long,” he declared. “At some point the acquisition of traits will become a burden rather than a boon. Development turns to decadence as an entity moves too far from its original perception of itself. Yet the goal cannot be the restoration of days gone by; that has been proved in our failures with the Zoo of Shame. The Evolloo is an endless forward-moving river. The goal of all Bunches is forge ahead to a
new
understanding of their nature.”

This could only happen, Komodo said, “through
willful, symbolic reconnection
to the Mainstem.” It was then that, like yesterday’s skin, the used-up, overloaded P + AT = I would be discarded to be replaced for a fleeting moment of searing clarity by the P = I. It was at that point—when a Bunch internalized who knew how many eons of acquired traits into a new reincorporated Self—that the Evolloo lurched ahead, and Life pushed on. Komodo called it the Instant of Reprimordialization.

That’s what the Fayetteville Tree was all about. From the moment he saw the twelve-foot tree-inside-a-bottle bobbing like Brainac’s live-action paperweight in the waters off Indemnification Shore, Komodo understood its value as a Reprimordial laboratory. To him the Fayetteville Tree, with its stunted limbs and equally stunted population (owing to the proximity of the Philip Morris Company to the town that gave the Tree its name) was “the perfect container—a closed, controlled, yet totally natural habitat with which to study the immortal branching of the Blessed Blueprint.”

This was due, in part, to the remarkably rapid rate of species diversification among the Tree’s aviary populations and the ease with which this differentiation could be discerned. The chickadees were color-coded, so to speak. When the Tree first appeared, there were only three primary population types—yellow ones, blue ones, and red ones. But then, overnight, came orange ones. Purple ones. Green. Green-yellows. Burnt siennas. It soon became necessary to crib taxonomic nomenclatures from the large-size Crayola boxes to accommodate the influx. However, Komodo’s DNA X-rays revealed these color changes to be more than feather deep. There were morphologic changes as well. Every fresh-mixed hue of chickadee represented a distinct animal, a wholly unique Bunch.