Shambling Towards Hiroshima

by James Morrow

  “No, Gorgantis!” Darlene cried. “You are a sea creature, but I am of the land! Take me back to the shore!”

  I squeezed my roar-bulb. “Grraagghhh!”

  “Take me back now!”

  Pivoting, I started for the beach.

  “Gorgantis, set me down!”

  The behemoth obeyed.

  “This way,” she said, clasping my claw and leading me toward the pier.

  “Grraagghhh!”

  No sooner had we entered our grotto beneath the boardwalk than my amazing lover, this lissome woman whose urges were now at the boiling point, gave free rein to her imagination. She grabbed my dorsal zipper, pulling the slide downward inch by inch until she’d created an aperture large enough to admit her slender form. Having opened me up, she now proceeded to enter me, first slithering around my spine, then planting her willowy thighs and calves next to mine in the monster’s leggings. A remarkable performance, but it wasn’t over yet. As we stood face to face, our bodies clamped pleasurably together, she seized the interior tab and closed the breach, sealing us within the lizard like unborn twins navigating their mother’s womb. This scenario was not entirely unfamiliar to us. Two years earlier we’d seen an unbowdlerized cut of Sam Wood’s For Whom the Bell Tolls at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, right before the censors snipped out the famous sleeping bag tryst between Robert Jordan and Maria.

  “Where do the noses go?” Darlene asked, retrieving a foil-wrapped prophylactic from the bodice of her swimming suit. I’d never heard her do Ingrid Bergman before. It was a flawless impersonation.

  “Maria,” I said, Gary Cooper’s uninformative response.

  Several minutes later, I died. ‘Twas beauty killed the beast. Practice, practice, practice.

  The next day’s Revenge of Corpuscula shoot found me tackling a relatively simple scene: the monster’s big courtroom speech, in which he explains to the magistrate and the burgomaster that they have no right to put him on trial, “for I am merely an external manifestation of the ghastliness within your own souls.” I didn’t understand that line, and neither did anybody else, including Darlene, who wrote it, but my delivery nevertheless pleased Beaudine, as did the rest of my performance, and the shoot ended earlier than expected. Not long after Dudley declared that we were finished for the day, a gawky Navy courier appeared bearing the final draft of What Rough Beast. He explained that I must read the script right now, furtively and silently, whereupon he would spirit it back to China Lake. He called me “sir.” I liked that. We retired to my dressing room. Every page was stamped TOP SECRET, but beyond that anomaly I found few deviations from Brenda’s Tuesday presentation. The only conspicuous addition was Admiral Yordan’s opening monologue, an exhortation to the effect that the behemoths were an unprecedented weapon against which ordinary heroism would prove pointless.

  Over the next four shooting days, thanks to Beaudine’s efficiency and Katzman’s tyranny, we managed to finish every set-up except one — the monster’s long monologue when he awakes with the supercerebrum in his skull — which Dudley had scheduled for Thursday, but then I explained that, alas, I would be gone that afternoon, working on my secret military assignment, and if Dudley didn’t like it, he should go talk to Katzman. When not declaiming Darlene’s dialogue on stage three, reporting to Commander Quimby on my Dick Tracy set, and studiously observing the movements of terrestrial lizards at a Route 101 roadside attraction called Clem and Bertha’s Reptile World, I subjected myself to seven more rounds of Gorgantis calisthenics, four solo, three involving my girlfriend and her Fay Wray fantasy. In consequence of this demanding regimen, I lost seventeen pounds. Among the many non-fiction books I’ll never get around to writing is The Giant Mutant Fire-Breathing Bipedal Iguana Diet.

  On Thursday morning, shortly after 1100 hours, I arrived at China Lake for the run-through. My first stop was the Château Mojave, where, per the contract, Joy and Dr. Groelish presented me with half my salary: a $5,000 check issued by the United States Treasury and signed by Henry Morgenthau himself. While Gladys placed a fresh oxygen cylinder in Gorgantis’s stomach, Mabel filled his tail with gasoline from red aluminum cans. As a joke, I gave her a five-gallon coupon from my ration book, which she immediately slipped into her purse.

  After helping me into the PRR, the twins led me outside, then pointed toward three pyramids of orange crates intended to represent O’Brien’s models of Shirazuka’s buildings and landmarks. Languidly I lumbered onto the shooting range, unhappy to be dragging an extra thirty pounds of fossil fuel behind me. Suddenly Jimmy Whale appeared, pacing fretfully among the fragile targets, aglow in his white linen suit like a statue carved from phosphorus.

  “What’s the magic word?” he asked.

  “Caliban,” I said.

  “‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,’” Whale said.

  “There’s a one-way valve in the nozzle,” Gladys told the director. “Right now the regulator’s in position five, wide open.”

  “Ready to breathe fire, Syms?” Whale asked.

  “It’s every actor’s secret wish,” I said.

  “Just squeeze the burn-bulb,” Gladys told me. “Slowly but steadily.”

  I did as instructed, and a thick jet of flame spewed from the behemoth’s mouth. The blast struck the first pyramid head-on, instantly reducing it to ash.

  “Much too quick,” Whale said. “Stop it down all the way.”

  Mabel reached into Gorgantis’s maw and set the regulator to position one.

  “Open fire, Caliban,” Whale said.

  An incisive ribbon of burning gasoline shot forth, bisecting the second pyramid with the precision of a welder’s torch cutting sheet metal. The whole configuration collapsed, but none of the crates caught fire.

  “Impressive, but not apocalyptic,” Whale said.

  Next we tried position three, which gave us a growling shaft of flame that transmuted the third pyramid into a vivid, riveting, altogether satisfying conflagration.

  “This porridge is just right,” Whale said.

  “Mazel tov,” Mabel said.

  “On with the show,” Gladys said.

  We ate lunch in the Château Mojave, feasting on a surprisingly tasty mulligan stew that Whale had improvised from available ingredients. Just as Gladys and Mabel finished zipping me into the PRR again, a troop transport vehicle appeared in the sandy parking lot, Admiral Yordan’s personal chauffeur behind the wheel. I shambled up the ramp to the canopied load bed without assistance — practice, practice, practice — and then we took off, Whale and the Rubinstein twins following in the director’s battered Rolls Royce, Joy and Dr. Groelish bringing up the rear in her convertible.

  The ethos of a demented circus held dominion in Hangar B, a whirling hurly-burly that put me in mind of the traveling carnival that opened Robert Florey’s artsy little Poe adaptation of ‘32, Murders in the Rue Morgue. Sailors bustled about, relaying messages, delivering coffee, and installing fire extinguishers at each corner of the model metropolis. Stagehands winched aloft the gigantic glass moon that would illuminate the sea battle. While a score of Obie’s artisans put the finishing touches on the facsimile of the facsimile of the hypothetical city, a squad of Seabees channeled a thousand gallons of fresh water into Toyama Bay from a storage tank on the roof. Naval officers paced the perimeter of ill-starred Shirazuka, trying without success to look essential to the operation.

  My entrance as Gorgantis caused an understandable stir. Except for Admiral Yordan, nobody in Hangar B had seen the lizard rig before. But an instant later, duty called — American boys were fighting and dying in the Pacific — and everybody went back to work.

  Had I not already beheld the miniature in Hangar A, I might have assumed that Shirazuka’s present incarnation was intended for the eyes of the Japanese delegation. While lacking the exquisite details of the final model, it was hardly the shoddy affair Joy had led me to expect. If the rehearsal went badly, it would not be for lack of a proper set.

  Equipped n
ow with a bullhorn, Whale placed an avuncular hand on my shoulder. “Remember, Caliban, you must seek your soul’s darkest sanctum. Get thee to Sycorax’s foulest fen and revel in the muck.”

  “Just so he sticks to the script,” Yordan said, arriving in our vicinity.

  “I am not familiar with your credentials as a director,” Whale said.

  “I don’t have any — but then again, you’re not a Naval officer,” Yordan said.

  “I’ve seen more of war’s horrors than you,” Whale said.

  And with that my director kissed me on the snout, traded scowls with Yordan, and climbed the ladder of a lifeguard stand that the Navy had evidently commandeered from the private sector — the sign on the tower read Redondo Beach Aquatic Club. Whale didn’t need to call for quiet on the set. The mere sight of this Hollywood god perched in his empyrean was enough to bring silence to Hangar B.

  “Places, everyone!” Whale ordered.

  The artisans abandoned their labors and melted into the shadows. Stagehands scurried up the ladders to the catwalks and manned the klieg lights. Ordnance technicians assumed their positions before the master control console.

  “Musicians!” Whale called from on high.

  “Musicians?” Yordan shouted. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I hired an orchestra,” Whale explained.

  “An orchestra? Why, for Christ’s sake?”

  “To play the score.”

  “Score?”

  “Mr. Waxman wrote us a score.”

  “And how do you intend to pay your musicians?” Yordan asked.

  “The Midget Lizard Initiative hasn’t been officially shut down yet,” Whale explained. “Dr. Groelish still has a large discretionary fund. Mr. Waxman agreed to write an overture, a main theme, and a dozen cues for only three thousand dollars, considerably less than what you’re paying me.”

  A side door opened, and a parade of musicians filed silently into the hangar, forty or so men and women gripping violins, violas, cellos, trumpets, cornets, clarinets, flutes, and percussion instruments, led by a bronze-haired conductor in a tweed jacket. It was indeed Franz Waxman, who’d composed the music for Bride of Frankenstein and Evil of Corpuscula.

  “Those people better all have security clearances!” Yordan screamed.

  “Please calm down, Admiral,” Whale said. “You’re getting on my nerves.”

  Approaching a grid of folding chairs at the back of the hangar, the musicians assumed their seats and prepared to play the overture.

  “Kliegs off!” Whale shouted.

  The stagehands complied.

  “House lights off!”

  A sailor opened a box mounted on the far wall and began flicking switches, plunging the hangar into a lugubrious gloom. The only illumination came from the tiny bulbs brightening the Shirazuka houses, the public lighting along the city’s streets, and the cowled lamps on the orchestra’s music stands.

  “Moon!”

  The huge sphere glowed to life, its reflection sparkling softly in Toyama Bay.

  “Gorgantis, find your mark!”

  Gladys and Mabel took me by the claws and led me across the same threshold by which we’d entered the studio. Shuffling along the outside wall of the hangar, the Mojave sun wringing dollops of sweat from all my pores, I was tempted to grab my navel and open the valve on my oxygen cylinder, but I knew it would be best to conserve that precious resource. We reached the stage door, passed through the jamb, and followed a corrugated aluminum tunnel to the dry hatch on the bathyscaphe. As I dropped to my knees, Mabel turned the wheel-lock, then pulled back the great circular slab. I wriggled inside the chamber. The ceiling was barely a yard high, and I had to lie prone on my bulging belly like a fat soldier crawling under barbed wire.

  Gladys and Mabel jammed my tail into the tiny compartment, then stepped away, sealing the hatch behind them. I was doubly entombed, a man inside a lizard inside a bronze casket. My underwater habitat was evidently wired for sound, because I had no trouble hearing Yordan’s monologue and the accompanying Japanese translation.

  “Honorable emissaries, you are about to witness the destructive fury of the most terrible weapon yet placed in the hands of man! There can be no valor in resisting such a force! The warrior who would take the field against a behemoth will reap nothing for his courage beyond a bereaved wife and fatherless children!”

  Waxman began conducting his overture, a frenzied, dissonant composition in which exotic Oriental chords and conventional Western progressions fought for supremacy within the listener’s reeling brain.

  “The doors of hell open!” Yordan cried. “The beast rises! Doom comes to Shirazuka!”

  The overture built to its frantic climax. I turned the wheel-lock on the wet hatch, yanking with all my reptilian strength. As the bay flooded the compartment, I forced my way through the opening, then assumed a crouch on the floor of the pool. The music faded. I rotated the valve in my navel. A stream of cool air flowed forth, soughing against my rubbery shell. Now came the majestic “Gorgantis Theme,” as we would eventually call it. I straightened my knees. With ponderous malevolence the behemoth breached Toyama Bay, then threw back his head, roared above the stately melody, and made ready to sack the city.

  Although we got through the entire script in a mere three hours, with a satisfyingly flattened Shirazuka to show for our efforts, the run-through was a mélange of misadventures. When Whale ordered the dreadnought Yamato and her sister warships to shell the monster, her guns emitted not BB’S but only feeble puffs of smoke. The passenger train I was supposed to devour hurtled off its trestle before I could seize it. As I set about trampling a factory complex underfoot, the counterattacking fighter planes and dive bombers lost their bearings, some crashing into Mount Onibaba, others suffering fatal encounters with the lifeguard stand, only a few getting close enough for me to bat them out of the air as the script required. And while Gladys had carefully set the flamethrower nozzle to position three, the regulator had evidently gone kablooey during the bumpy journey to Hangar B, because the gasoline streamed forth with uncontrolled exuberance, so that much of Shirazuka was instantly immolated in an exhibition as perfunctory as a fireworks display at a church picnic. Disappointment clouded the sailors’ faces as they smothered the residual flames.

  Surprisingly, none of these disasters fazed Whale. He declined to chew out Obie over the obstreperous props or scold the Rubinstein twins for acquiring a persnickety flamethrower. Au contraire, the worse things went, the more fun Whale seemed to be having. Perhaps he subscribed to the principle that a disastrous dress rehearsal portends a successful opening night — a truism that in my experience happens to be true. Instead of indulging in a Katzmanian tirade or a Beaudinesque sulk, this suave gentleman put all his energies into his art, feeding me brilliant bit after brilliant bit as I performed my slow dance on the killing ground. When we practiced the sea battle, Whale suggested that I seize two aircraft carriers and smack their flight decks together to the crash of cymbals, a sound that Waxman’s percussionist was pleased to provide. Under the master’s direction the behemoth’s appetite for human flesh became a darkly comic affair, with Gorgantis stuffing Nipponese homunculi into his mouth like handfuls of popcorn. After the Japanese armored divisions took up their positions in the Chiaki Mountains, prepared to defend the Emperor at any cost, Whale had me grab the Chi-Ro tanks two at a time, soften them with my breath, and tie their gun barrels together, the resulting configurations suggesting knotted pairs of socks. Only once that afternoon did Whale waft out a genuinely bad idea. Calling down from his lofty roost, he asked Obie whether Gorgantis might gouge and scrape Mount Onibaba with his claws until it became a bust of Hirohito, which the monster would then pulverize. Before Obie could reply, a chorus of suppressed groans arose. Absorbing this spontaneous critique, the director declared that on second thought it would be better simply to plant a large packet of stage blood in the Imperial Palace.

  Whale’s greatest contribution to
What Rough Beast was a concept that lay outside the domain of Brenda’s script. How poignant it would be, he decided, if our visiting emissaries found themselves hoping against hope that the dwarf behemoth might, just might, perish before completing his mission. Thus, when the attack reached its inevitable climax, with Shirazuka smoldering and Gorgantis triumphant, the delegation’s shock would be that much greater. And so it was that Whale had me lurch back in feigned agony when my claws sliced through a mass of high-tension power lines, and he coached me to appear exhausted — faint, almost — as I kicked downtown Shirazuka to pieces. Right before the final assault on the mountain, Whale stopped the rehearsal and ordered the ordnance technicians to supplement the BB’S in the defenders’ tanks with tiny blisters of red dye. When the battle resumed, the effect was exactly what Whale envisioned: a ripped, stricken, bullet-ridden Gorgantis, bleeding from a hundred wounds, but still charging toward the Imperial Palace, as if his unconquerable soul knew nothing of his torn flesh.

  The klieg lights faded, ensconcing the victorious reptile in the shadows beyond the city. Slowly I shambled toward my director, receiving congratulatory strokes and pats along the way. Whale descended from the lifeguard stand. He thanked everyone for their work on “an auspiciously catastrophic rehearsal,” then tenderly caressed my dorsal plates and said, “Caliban, my friend, we’ve got a hit on our hands.”

  “You’re not a man in a suit,” Joy told me. “You’re a living, breathing mutant iguana.”

  “I’m going to nominate you for an Oscar,” Gladys said.

  “The Yamato’s guns will be working in time for the performance,” Obie assured me. “The planes, too.”

  “And the flamethrower,” Mabel said.

  Now Yordan came swaggering onto the scene. Appropriating Whale’s bullhorn, he informed the assembled artisans, technicians, and military men that he had heartening news from Washington.