Gojiro (16 page)
Then he saw her—Kishi! In the bottom of that boat, out in the water.
Water? What was Kishi doing in a boat? There was no water here, in the middle of that great red-rimmed valley where Death ruled.
Something was happening to Kishi. She was writhing at the bottom of that boat. Komodo was hunched over her. Komodo? What was he doing here, in this valley, in this desert?
It was only then that he saw the situation, what he’d done. Possessed to get to Kishi, he’d raged a savage whirlpool out by the Cloudcover. The torrent threw Komodo and Kishi from that little boat, slapped the two of them tight to the centrifuging sides of that terrible vortex. Round and round they went, holding hands. There was no sound inside that swirl. Numbed and helpless, Gojiro watched them go. Round and round. Komodo and Kishi, Komodo and Kishi.
When he finally heard that scream, he was certain it was his. His own horror at what he’d done. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t him at all. It was a baby’s cry. “Waaaa!” A freshout baby’s cry. It was the last thing he knew.
When he woke up, he was on the beach, alone with the anguish of his deed. There was only one thing to do. He dragged himself back down the ’cano to prepare. He fired up a crosshatched section ripped from an old smelter, grid-ironed it to his chest. Down and down he forced the white-hot pattern, until the Triple Rings could no longer be seen.
Then he heard Komodo sliding down that greased pole. “My own true friend! What have you done?” Komodo shouted. “Your Triple Rings!”
“I thought you were dead! I thought I killed you!”
Komodo looked a hundred years old. “Please! Let me help you, this is terrible!”
Gojiro recoiled from his friend. “Leave me alone! How can you bear to touch me . . . after what I’ve done.”
“Lie down!”
Komodo put his welder’s hat over his head like a shroud. He worked with his plasti-cosmetic torch, blazing away, scaling, contouring. “There,” he said, “good as new.”
Gojiro felt his Rings. “Good as new,” he croaked. “How good is that?” He couldn’t look at his friend. He didn’t have to see Komodo’s face to know: Kishi was dead. He’d murdered Love.
That was when he heard that cry again. The same one that broke the silence inside that whirlpool. “Waaaa!”—that little baby’s cry. Komodo smiled then, because beside him was a child.
* * *
That was it, the final turning point. When and if the definitive history of Radioactive Island is ever written, that maelstrom will be the demarcation, the exact spot the Glazed World stopped and everything else began. Sure, Komodo tried to tell him that Kishi, like all the Atoms who would come after her, was going to die anyway, that she was dying that very day. As if that absolved him of anything! There was no forgiving this. Thank God for Shig. Who could blame him for pouring on the malevolence like he did, never letting up. At least
he
was sane.
Gojiro never told Komodo about that crazy compulsion. Not about the weird valley, the jutting red cliffs and the Death all around, none of it. To talk about it was to relive it, to be that deranged creature once more.
Now, though, out back of that sad producer’s mansion, in the Zoo of Shame, Komodo was saying strange things. How did he put it? That he “pulled” toward Sheila Brooks? That he had felt himself transported “to a huge and distant place”? That for that “frozen” moment it seemed that “everything depended” on him reaching Sheila Brooks?
Gojiro tried to make sense of it. Back on Lavarock, he recalled, there was talk of something called “the pheromone.” What a pleasure it was for that youngest zardplebe to sit upon the great Stone listening to the Initiates talk of that mysterious airborne chemosignal and how it triggered your inborn reflexes, directed you to your Chosen One. How wondrously racy those full-growns made the pheromone sound, and how spectacular to do its piquant bidding! How, once it came into your body, there was nothing but sex—tailtip, snoutjoust, and backscratch, and when you shake it all around, the next link in the Line been laid down. Later, of course, in the stream of supposed “scholarly journals” that washed up on Radioactive Island, the reptile came across an article entitled “The Role of the Pheromone in the Reproductive Cycle of the Common Southsea Monitor Lizard.” Made the monster so mad. As if those hornrimmed fieldworkers really figured it was as simple as your cloacals come coldcreeping, then bong!—time to breed. What did those assholes know about love?
When Gojiro looked up, Komodo was still pressing his face against the container of the Fayetteville Tree. Was it the pheromone his friend felt under Albert Bullins’s big top, the monster wondered. Komodo seemed too wrought up to talk about the incident right then. Besides, that dodo was getting antsy, smacking his cracked beak against the rocks again.
“Dodo didn’t get a treat,” Gojiro mentioned.
“Really?” Komodo said, jumpy, spreading out a handful of Moa Chow. “I could have sworn I gave him some . . .”
The Atoms were raising a ruckus, their high-pitched voices shearing through the smoggy air. They’d been restless since setting foot in America. Something about the place hacked up their maloccluded helixes. Just the day before, ten of them found their way onto the Ventura Freeway, tied frying pans to their faces, and ran out waving whatever hands they had, screaming that they were invaders from an angry red planet. Those nutty kids! What they wouldn’t do for a chain reaction. Back on Radioactive Island, they loved to knock down endless lines of dominoes and blow ping pong balls around with hair dryers. Here it was the freeway. The results were predictable: squealing brakes, front end-rear end, a State Farm feast. Shig arrived just in time, getting the Atoms off the scene while the cops were still trying to strap Breathalyzers on the whiplash screamers.
“Always something with those wackos. I think their dosage is going to have to be reevaluated,” Gojiro noted idly, casting a gaze in the direction of the noise. Then: “Oh wow . . .”
It was Sheila Brooks, staggering from the Insta-Envir.
The Dinner Guest
S
HE FOLLOWED A HOME OF THE STARS MAP
so out of date as to still list the Traj Taj as a major attraction, parked her little red Corvette outside the iron gate. Probably most visitors would have run away when they saw those fifty-foot mother-in-law tongues lurching over the fence, but she never even noticed. All she saw was the late-afternoon sun glinting off the shark teeth of the cocohead palms. To her, every one of those lurid faces said, “Come in.”
She couldn’t have gotten more than ten feet inside the gate before the turf jerked beneath her feet, sending her flying into a crowd of fiberglass daffodils that embedded spiky plastic shards into the furry Dale Evans chaps she wore. That’s when Al Capone and the others surrounded her. Henry Kissinger gnawed on her leg, Billy Graham offered her a controlled substance.
Ebi saved her. She came running through the creeper vines and scattered those eggheads. The others, they sensed something about Ebi, deferred to her. And really, that’s what had Komodo and Gojiro so flummoxed. It wasn’t just that Sheila Brooks was coming out of the Insta-Envir, but that she was coming with Ebi—the way Ebi, so small and brown, was pulling Sheila Brooks, so big and white. “Help me!” the little girl shouted, “I think she’s going to faint.” Which Sheila Brooks did, right then.
“Let’s get her into the house!” Komodo screamed, his voice tinged with hysteria. It wasn’t easy carrying Sheila Brooks. Over six feet tall, her lank body seemed only to elongate as it folded over Komodo’s slim shoulder, her wild white mane streaming down nearly to the floor. Still, Komodo managed to transport the groaning Hermit Pandora across the Traj Taj’s vast ballroom and set her down on one of the long couches.
It was several minutes before she came to.
“Oh, Ms. Brooks!” Ebi said with delight. “We are so pleased and excited you have come to visit us. You cannot know how long we have waited for you and how welcome you are!”
Sheila Brooks craned her head around. “You are? . . . I am?”
“Yes!” the Atoms shouted.
There was nothing left to do but invite her to stay for dinner.
* * *
Komodo sat in his usual place at the head of the long, narrow table. He never felt at ease with this patriarchal positioning, but this was how the Atoms liked it. Sheila sat at the opposite end, likewise by demand.
Dinner was the usual slop scene, splatter left, splatter right. Immediately the Atoms began chanting for the Burger Train. “Burger Train! Burger Train . . . sixteen coaches long!” It was useless to protest. So, smiling like a ninny at the uncomprehending Sheila Brooks, Komodo laid the Lionel track around the edge of the table. Onto each flatcar of the toy midnight flyer, he laid a steaming hamburger, then he whirred the transformer dial. As the doublediesel engine began its circular creep, the Atoms whistled a disjointed version of the theme from
The Bridge on the River Kwai
.
It was a straight Russian-dressing roulette trip, based on an idiot sabotage movie. According to a chance program, the train crunched to a halt in front of one Atom’s placemat, and then another’s. The trick was to snatch your burger off as quickly as possible; you never knew at which stop on the train’s culinary passage the boiled meat would blow up. This time it happened in front of poor Bop. Wham! Saturated fat erupted, forty feet or more, geysering up to the vaulted ceiling of the Traj Taj dining room. A solid sheen of mustard, followed by a second surge of ketchup, showered Sheila Brooks as if she were a nonrepresentational canvas.
“Oh my God!” Komodo shouted, running toward Sheila with a wad of napkins. Crinklecut pickles gummed both lenses of her glasses. A roll stuck to her head like a shrunken pillbox hat. “I knew we shouldn’t have played our silly games! Are you all right, Ms. Brooks?”
A tension gripped the room. Every Atom hung on the reply.
Sheila Brooks peeled off the pickles, looked around at the expectant, misshapen faces. “I guess so. Sure. I’m okay.”
“But your wonderful clothes, they are ruined.” Several Atoms came over with gooey napkins and despite good intentions only ground mayonnaise deeper into the suede nap of her quisenberry-dyed buckskin vest.
Sheila managed a gruesome smile through the ketchup. “Don’t worry about that. I have a dozen outfits like this. I don’t pay for them. They send them to me for free because I’m famous. I try to give them to the Goodwill, but the designers threaten to sue. Besides, that was . . . fun. Yeah! That was great!”
The Atoms went into an uproar. “Hooray for Ms. Brooks!” they shouted. Some of them started dancing on the table. “Ooga-booga,” they chanted; Sheila was “one of us.”
The rest of dinner was more relaxed. The squirm food caused only minor difficulties. Squirm food was a nutritional measure worked up by Komodo in an effort to get the Atoms to eat. As befitted their postholocaustal neoferal tendencies, few of the unfortunate children would consume anything if it simply lay on a plate. They preferred to hunt and gather, or at least chase. Komodo, after much dietary R&D, managed to concoct a menu of syntho-veggies and mock meats equipped with a spittle-proximity escape mechanism; when an open mouth got close, the food bolted away. Several of the clumsier Atoms sustained fork wounds as they attempted to pin their prey, but this could not be helped. It was the heat-seeking seaweed that almost got to Sheila. Some slob Atom dropped a piece of it onto the floor and it began lacing itself up her leg like Caesar’s sandal. Komodo, however, was able to slice the weed off with his pocketknife before her circulation was affected.
After dinner, the Atoms brought out their potholders: an inevitability. Originally conceived as Monster Day presents for Gojiro, the potholders were another arts-and-crafts project gone awry. In the beginning, even the grouchy reptile had to admit it was kind of cute, each and every Atom independently turning out the same exact design, an off-angled profile of Gojiro, fire raging behind. Except they got carried away. They kept making the things, churning them out like Helen Keller’s assembly line. Then they’d bring them to the lip of the ’cano and rain the ratty things down on the Monster like a polyester inversion. “Make ’em quit,” he roared, knee-deep in potholders. “Don’t they know I got hundred-inch-thick skin and nothing in the oven?” Attempting to save the situation, Komodo suggested that the Atoms sew their potholders together into a quilt, which they could then present to Gojiro. To avoid the fight about whose potholder would go where in the finished project, Komodo put them all in a giant drum and spun them around. But when he dumped them out, there it was: a football field-sized replica of the smaller potholders, that same off-angled profile of Gojiro, fire raging behind. Komodo couldn’t fathom the math of how it had turned out that way. Gojiro could only shrug. How do you fight obsession like that?
There was no such hassle when the Atoms presented their potholders to Sheila Brooks. They sat her in a velvet chair at the front of the mansion’s ballroom, then lined up in painful imitation of a department-store Santa Claus scene. One by one, the Atoms did their best bow and said, “Thank you, Ms. Brooks, for inviting us to your wonderful country.” Sheila Brooks accepted each potholder with an exaggerated nod of her head, putting each one on the neat pile in her lap. “This will really help me in the kitchen.”
“Are you a thrifty home economist?” Ebi asked.
“Uh, sure . . . I try to be,” Sheila said. She did, after all, spend hours a day poring over the supermarket ads, circling the best prices, scrupulously cutting out coupons. However, the idea of actually getting into a car and going to a wide-aisled, fluoro-bright market filled with gleaming wagons was psychically out of the question, so she just threw the coupons into a drawer.
“Perhaps you will cook for us sometime,” Ebi suggested.
Cook? Sheila considered the concept. “Well, I made a meatloaf once. You know, from a recipe on the back of the oatmeal box. I was going to make mock apple pie, too, except I ran out of crackers. I dunno. I got out of practice after Bobby said I was nuts to try following the thirty-day budget-stretcher menus in
Woman’s Day
when we had twenty million dollars in the bank. So mostly we order in . . . you know . . . the studio sends the catering truck over. But . . . I could try. I could try to cook for you.”
“Hoorayyy!” the Atoms yelled.
It was about then that Lapu-lapu, that fishboy, started having a fit. Something was alive beneath his Ban-Lon shirt, circumnavigating his belly again and again. Komodo reached under his collar and pulled out a threeheaded frog. It was Crag’s work, couldn’t be any other. That kid! Him and a petri dish were a dangerous recombination. Komodo tried to harness the boy’s bio-gen talents, but it was no use. He created things only to destroy them. That’s what happened this time. The frog slipped from Komodo’s grasp, and Crag crushed it flat against the marble floor with a shovel.
“Ah-ha,” Komodo said, turning from the quivering blotch. “Bedtime, my little friends. Let’s be on our best behavior for Ms. Brooks.”
To Komodo’s amazement, this worked on the first try. It was too strange how eager those Atoms were to “be good” for Sheila Brooks. Suddenly as docile as sedated members of a police lineup, they made their way up the ornate staircase. “Good night, Ms. Brooks,” they intoned.
Sheila waved wanly.
Just then, Ebi broke out of the line. Had she ever looked prettier, happier? She moved so lightly, her long nightgown skimming the cool Italian tiles. Then she grabbed hold of Sheila Brooks’s limp hand and asked, “Can Ms. Brooks come upstairs and tuck us in?”
“I . . . well—Ms. Brooks, how do you feel about that?”
Sheila Brooks shuffled her outsized feet. “I dunno . . . I mean, if that’s all right.”
“Oh, Ms. Brooks!” Ebi exclaimed joyfully. Then, standing on tiptoes, Ebi put a kiss on Sheila Brooks’s whitecaked cheek.
* * *
The notion of anyone tucking in the Atoms was ridiculous, of course. Once, after much medical research, Komodo had customed a special bed for each of the luckless children, to fit their individual handicaps. But it was a waste. They threw themselves on top of one another and slept in a jumble, zardic style, which is exactly what they did right then, under the chandelier of the Traj Taj’s master bedroom. From the pile came the shout: “Story and song! Story and song!”
“I usually tell them a story,” Komodo said to Sheila Brooks, who was pressing herself against the thick velveteen wallpaper. “Do you mind?”
“No . . . I don’t. I like stories,” she said, wringing her long fingers.
As with the potholders, if the Atoms weren’t tired of something the first time, they never got tired of it. So there was only one bedtime story, told over and over. It was an old tale of Evollooic survival, the one about the wicked king and the antlers.
“Once upon a time, in a sad kingdom very far away,” Komodo began, in his most sonorous voice, “there was a bad king. This king didn’t like anyone, but there was one group of his subjects he hated more than the others. These people were proud and fierce, and they stayed to themselves and would not bow down when the king passed by. One day, the king sent his soldiers and made all these people come to the palace.
“ ‘You must prove your love for your king,’ the king said.
“ ‘How might we do that?’ they asked, for they did not care for the king in the least.
“ ‘By growing antlers,’ the king proclaimed.
“The people protested. How could they grow stubby bones from their skulls? ‘It is asking the impossible. Please have mercy.’
“But the king did not have mercy. ‘Antlers in six weeks! If you love your king enough, you’ll be able to do it. If not, I will have every last one of you killed.’
“ ‘Six weeks!’ the people cried. ‘How can we manifest such a massive adaptation within so short an interval?’ They did not know what to do. Some of them tried to fool the king. They tied wire hangers onto their heads, covered them with papier-mâché, pretended these were antlers. But the king was wily. He sent his guards to destroy these people.
“There was one small boy and one small girl in this kingdom, and they did not want to die. ‘Maybe we can save ourselves by taking the king’s advice,’ the little girl told the boy. ‘Perhaps, if we concentrate on how much we love our king, we’ll grow antlers on our heads.’
“ ‘But I
hate
the king,’ the boy said.
“ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ the girl replied. ‘We have to survive. If it takes loving him to do it, we must.’
“The little boy didn’t know if this was possible but said he’d try. Every night they went to bed thinking only of how much they loved the king. Every morning they woke up and checked their heads. But no antlers appeared. ‘It’s no use,’ the boy despaired. ‘I can’t control my hatred.’
“Then, only one day before the king’s deadline, the boy and girl vowed that they would love the king as they had never loved before. They would love him as if he were more than himself, as if he were All Things, as if without him and the love of him, the world would cease to be.
“The next morning both the boy and girl awoke with the first bumpy ends of antlers sticking out of their heads. They went to the king’s castle and were examined by the court scientists. These great men conferred for some time and agreed: Antlers had grown.
“ ‘You are spared!’ the king proclaimed. ‘Your families are spared as well. But tell me, how did you do it?’
“ ‘We vowed to love you with a love greater than any that we could conceive of, more than Love itself,’ the little girl told the king, who was very pleased.
“So, by and by, it came to be that the little boy and girl, whose antlers grew bigger and bigger, were married and had children. Their children had antlers too. Eventually there was a whole community of people with antlers in the kingdom. And soon enough, they declared war on the rest of the people, the ones without antlers, and wiped them out. The king was the last to go.
“ ‘What makes you think you have a right to do this?’ the now elderly king asked with his dying breath.
“ ‘On the basis of our superior love,’ the girl said, as the boy rammed his sharpened antlers into the king.”