Gojiro (8 page)

“Fuck,” Gojiro exhaled.

* * *

Resolutely paddling out to the seething Cloudcover, onward to their no-doubt-fateful meeting with Sheila Brooks, Gojiro now regarded the 90 Series as just another cinch in an ever-tightening noose around his neck. Not that he would call it a tremendous surprise. He’d been girding himself for some new gambit on Shig’s part.

Gojiro’s growing apprehension that Shig followed a private agenda, some sort of master plan aimed at boxing him into some unknown yet horrific corner, commenced several years before during one of those beachcombing jaunts he and Komodo often took to pick through the flotjet flow.

“Look at this,” the monster said, quizzically, eyeing the steady stream of lobby cards washing over his semisubmerged clawtoes. “These stills—ain’t they from
Gojiro vs. Anti-Syncopators on the Street of Forgotten Cool
? Yeah—here’s a shot of me rescuing that stack of Chick Webb records from that Electronic Sampler Beast.”

Komodo examined the garishly colored photo. “Yes,” he said, biting his lip. “But here the title of the film is given as
Gojiro vs. the Square Grabbyhands of Jump on Fifty-Third Street
.”

“Fifty-Third Street? Ain’t Fifty-Third Street. It’s Fifty-Second Street! What’s going on here? We never made any lobby cards for any of those movies.”

“There was no need to, because—”

“Because
they never played anywhere
!”

They weren’t supposed to play anywhere, either. The movies were just another pastime, one in a series of activities Komodo worked out in hopes of providing those unfortunate Atoms a few moments of mirth before their inevitable demise. “Many of the children display superior technical abilities and would make excellent crew members,” the kindhearted Japanese explained to Gojiro, attempting to get the reluctant reptile to star in those old scenarios the two friends conjured up during the heady Glazed Days. Assured perpetual over-the-title billing, the monster could not resist. So the movies were made. But they never—ever—were intended to go beyond the Cloudcover.

Yet here Gojiro was picking up a dripping poster for a movie supposedly entitled
Gojiro vs. the Most Nasty Internal Cells inside the Heavy Heart
but which, from the accompanying stills, was readily identifiable as
Gojiro vs. the Buzzsaw Teratomas by the Bad-news By-pass
. At the bottom of the sheet, in balloonish handwriting, it said, “Playing all this week, Centerville Simplex, theaters one, five, nine, twelve. Free RV parking.”

It wasn’t until several months later, when the Gojiro—King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms movies first began turning up on the Dish, that the monster became aware of his international celebrity. “I can’t believe it!” he cried. “Shig stole those jerk movies! All over the world they’re looking at my swollen supraoc, laughing at my mutated face. God, I’m so embarrassed!”

Then, not for the first time, Gojiro felt like crashing across Vinyl Aire Meadow, knocking down every tree in Asbestos Wood until he found Shig’s hideout, and having it out with the weird boy. But that was out of the question. The reptile’s shameful memories defeated him. He couldn’t say a thing.

* * *

It was only with the advent of the 90 Series, however, that Gojiro began to glimpse Shig’s ultimate scheme. Of course, the monster was well acquainted with the contents of the other eighty-nine so-called Gojiro Crystal Communications, not that the dictums, in his opinion at least, amounted to shit. Maybe they did at one time, but not now. Once, in another form, they represented his personal interpretations of the Great Teachings of the Evolloo, as revealed by the prophet Budd Hazard. At least that’s how the monster billed his lecture series to the Atoms back in the days when he retained some hope that those abnormals might psychically upbootstrap themselves and become Initiates in the New Bunch he and Komodo dreamed of founding on Radioactive Island.

“Do ’em some good to catch a smack of the Cosmo,” Gojiro told Komodo as he mounted the rec-room podium to deliver the opening lecture, “The Evolloo and You, a Young Mutant’s Guide to the Unfathomable.” “Couldn’t do no harm,” he added as he faced his drooling audience.

For six, sometimes eight hours, Gojiro talked, carried away by the beauty of the Design he loved so much. But the Atoms, the ones who stayed awake, were less than rapt. They threw gummy spitballs at the blackboard, smearing Gojiro’s diagrams of Beam-Bunch matrices, and their renditions of Anti-Speciesist chants had neither rhythm nor resonance.

“It’s pointless,” Gojiro said, throwing up his claws. “I have lost my dreams for them. They have no grasp, no scope.”

So imagine his chagrin when, one evening, he saw the Atoms sitting in orderly rows and reciting in unison the Communications Shig made up. “Now repeat,” Shig barked, his spiked pointer screeching across the blackboard. “Gojiro Crystal Communication 42: Either you are in the Evolloo or you are not.” And the Atoms, even the impossible stutterers, all repeated “Gojiro Crystal Communication 42.” Ten times they said it. Then they went on to Number 43.

To Gojiro, this was obscene, abhorrent: Shig had taken the vast-reaching teachings of Budd Hazard, the splendor of the unknowable Evolloo, and reduced it to rote. “I won’t allow it,” he stormed at Komodo. “I won’t stand by and listen to him make fortune cookies out of everything Sacred. You hear what he did to the lecture on Fate? Wait a minute, I got it here. Yeah. Gojiro Crystal Communication 27: ‘The Evolloo covers Fate like paper covers rock, like rock smashes scissors.’ ”

Komodo raised his narrow eyebrows. “You must admit, my own true friend, there is a certain ring to it.”

“Ring? There’s a certain ring to ring around the collar! Doesn’t it bother you that the only songs they know by heart are hamburger jingles? I’ve had it with this
Reader’s Digest
of a world. Isn’t it our charge, as followers of the Evolloo and Anti-Speciesists both, to renounce this undercut of wonder?”

Komodo was troubled. Certainly he agreed with Gojiro. Yet while his own true friend’s methods had so resoundingly failed to motivate the Atoms, Shig’s short course had gotten results. Now, instead of the tumult that formerly accompanied dinnertime, the Atoms marched into the dining hall and spoke a grace asking for “good fortune of all Beams and Bunches.”

“This is some progress, isn’t it?” Komodo asked.

Gojiro did not agree. “Standing in a straight line is no progress,” he rejoined. “Don’t you know maladapts will goosestep to the smallest smack of supposed structure? Especially maladapts! I liked it better when the oatmeal was running out the sides of their mouths.”

It only got worse when the tide pools bore evidence that Shig had packaged the Communications (price, $1 per Comm, “#1–#89—collect ’em all”) for the growing mass of G-fans. Apparently Shig was not content to have Gojiro—King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms be just another outsized pseudo-saur battling in the box-office wars for the minds and spending money of hero-lusting twerps and twitchers. Not that every other so-called superguy on the shelf didn’t come complete with a marginal moral spiel, perhaps a dim Arthurian hustle or some Valhalla-in-space knockoff. But the Comms, as debased as they were, spoke to more than that. Gojiro thought of his fans, the alienate pizzaeaters from Toledo, the turned-out bellies from Bangladesh, Paramus pimplefaces sucking on the poison pacifier, and began to quake. Shig’s Comms, stylized hokum that they were, nevertheless held out the chimera of world critique, the intimation of
Weltanschauung
. A little bit of that, the monster knew, was more than a dangerous thing. The notion of his Cosmo-needy followers plugging into that purloined, jerryrigged philosophy chilled the behemoth no end.

“He’s trying to turn me into a Jiffy Pop Godhead,” the monster agonized, his brain on fire.

“Get out!” Gojiro screamed as those 90 Series supplications invaded the Quadcameral. “Leave me alone! Haunt Odin, bother Wayne Newton, see if he’ll punch your ticket. Who you think I am, some cold-blood Ann Landers? Don’t they got no gypsy ladies in storefronts no more?” But it was no use. Whole colosseums of yowl besieged him, the seeming babel of their pleas falling into a common rhythm, coalescing into a wrenching harmony of need. “90 Series now! 90 Series now!” they chanted.

The reptile bashed his giant head against the ’cano wall seeking relief, but there was none. Supplications surged from every corner of the globe, each one transporting the monster into the tortured mind of the supplicant. “Borneo!” he cried in torment. “They’re eradicating my culture in Borneo!” Then: “Patafreakingonia! Brigands stole my goat!” And: “KwaNdebele!—ain’t there no end to misery in this world?” No matter how much anguish torrented into the monster’s Quadcameral, there was always room for more.

The worst of it was he had no idea what they wanted, what was being asked of him. That was the most galling aspect of Shig’s 90 Series spiel—the lunacy about how Gojiro supposedly possessed the key to Salvation, if only he could remember it himself and tell everyone else.

“Shig’s unbelievable,” the reptile railed at Komodo. “First he makes up this bogus cut-rate notion of the Evolloo, perverts every tenet, then he tells the little buggers out there that unless I validate the lie, make the valorizing duck come down by saying this 90 Series secret word—
which I don’t know the first fucking thing about!—
the world is going to come to an end.

“Goddamn Shig! Can’t he forgive? Can he really hate me that much?”

“I don’t feel he hates you,” Komodo said quietly. “He’s not like that, not really.”

“Oh, sure, he’s Joe Quality of Mercy all right.” It was only then that Gojiro noticed Komodo’s tears.

“My own true friend,” Komodo sobbed, “again my negligence and stupidity cause you pain.”

“Ain’t your doing.”

“But it is! I have played my part! That machine, the one called Crystal Contact Radio . . .”

“Those earmuffs Shig’s selling? What about them?” All at once, it hit the monster. “Wait a minute. It’s them that’s putting those supplications into my head, right?”

Komodo lowered his head. “Yes, I’m afraid you are right.” Eyes downcast, Komodo told what happened. How one night several weeks before, almost without being aware of it, he arose from his lonely bed, walked to his lab, and made the Crystal Contacts.

Now if there’s one thing you got to understand about Komodo’s man-of-science scene, it’s that some things come easy for him and some don’t. Patterning a neon tattoo, punching up a new injector for an electro plasti-car—those were cherrytopped pieces of cake for Komodo. It was only when it came to what he called the Quadcameral communication samples that his method became erratic. That’s when, after weeks of frustration, he’d suddenly find himself sleepwalking to his lab, feel a half-conscious obsession overtake him. More often than not, he’d wake up, feverish and exhausted, on the laboratory floor, his bunsens still roaring their blue-green fire. Then he’d look at what he’d made, shake his head, melt it down, obliterate it from his sight. “This has no business being invented,” he’d cry. “It’s not what I intended at all.”

It was as if the one thing he
really
wanted to invent, he couldn’t.

To hear Komodo tell it, that was the basic situation that night a few weeks before the 90 Series trouble started up. “As I was working,” Komodo told Gojiro, “I had the strongest sense that I was close, that what I’d been seeking was right there, in my hands. My thoughts skipped with light assurance from point to point, factors coming to me faster than my hands could record them. But then, when I stood back to see what I’d made, I knew it was
wrong
. As wrong as all the others!”

A mordant look came over Komodo. “If only I had smashed it like the others. Destroyed it as it should have been destroyed. Then he wouldn’t have—”

“Wouldn’t have what?”

Komodo couldn’t speak.

“Don’t tell me,” the monster said with soft resignation. “Shig stole it. He was in there with you, he knew what it was, and he stole it.”

Komodo stood up straight, looked Gojiro in the eye, and bowed sharply from the waist. “It is to my everlasting shame, my own true friend, that I did not tell you this until now.”

Gojiro felt the air go from him. “Oh, boy.”

* * *

The very next morning, Komodo was up on Dead Letter Hill, erecting that spire. He made it from what was left of the Eiffel Towerette that the fifty-thousand-watt TalkRadio Beast wore as a headpiece during
Gojiro vs. the Casey Kasem Creature on a Journey to the End of the Dial
. At the top of the spire, Komodo installed an advanced-generation Crystal Contact receptor capable of attracting the 90 Series supplications, rerouting the ever-more-urgent pleas from Gojiro’s besieged head.

Tired and worn from his ordeal, it took Gojiro several days to summon the will to even look up Dead Letter Hill. When he did, he couldn’t believe it. The entire cliffside, once teeming with the typically grotesque Radioactive Island flora and fauna, was bald, empty. Around the spire’s base, the soil was bleached a dour white. Every day the blank spot spread. It was an awesome and terrible sight.

“That 90 Series,” Gojiro gasped, unable to turn his eyes away. “It’s sucking life from the ground.”

Komodo nodded grimly.

Suddenly, Gojiro felt a clutch at his heart. “Tell me about this 90 Series. I mean . . . I know it’s Shig’s doing and all, some arbitrary revenge plot. But look at all that . . . pain up there. All that
need
. Who do you think it’s
on
?”

“
On?
I do not understand your meaning, my own true friend.”

“You know, like, who’s got to take the weight? Whose responsibility is it? Anyone’s?”

Komodo rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I think it is
on
whoever feels it.”

* * *

It started under the guise of an evening constitutional, except that it was after midnight and Gojiro was not in the habit of taking such walks. “Just a little stroll, stretch the old hindquarters,” he said to himself, intending to go by Corvair Bay and skip a couple of recapped tires across the turbid sea. Soon enough, however, he found himself at the base of Dead Letter Hill.