The Mammoth Book of Kaiju

by Sean Wallace

  He never understood the why of his Project, just that it needed to be. He knew it had something to do with his mother, her fascination with the hill, and her anxiety at being an outsider in the city, surrounded by strangers. Finally, it just made him feel more secure to watch, and to record.

  His mother’s death after a year in the hospital left him inconsolable. He lay on the floor in front of her old TV, his mismatched clothes snatched from the upstairs closet, still smelling of past lives and now his own pathetic stink. He interrupted his despair only with trips to the bathroom, to the refrigerator, to the basement storeroom where she’d kept foodstuffs as a hedge against the city’s “criminal element.”

  Then one day his despair broke, pushed out by anger over what she had turned him into. He hadn’t a clue what he should do with himself. All he thought he knew about was that hill they’d both been so fascinated by, and his Project. So the next day he took sledgehammer and crowbar to the floorboards in the living room, tearing a hole near the back wall of the house, widening it, adding supports where he’d severed supporting timbers, then erecting a post to support a seriously sagging portion of the floor.

  He emptied the basement easily—he simply threw it all away, an accumulation of belongings he knew nothing about. The resulting space was huge, yet barely sufficient to contain the Project pieces he retrieved from all parts of the house and yard.

  Molded with clays from the garden, plaster from the hardware, twigs and branches, paints and glues and buttons and shredded bits of cloth from her sheets, even from her favorite Show Night dress, the Project took its final form: a fan-shaped mound of hill beginning in his basement, rising up through the space in the floor into the living room, its upper crust of grand dwellings almost kissing the night-and-star-painted ceiling. And across that expanse he’d created the minute detail of hundreds of strangers’ lives—their houses, cars, and dangerous serpentine lanes. Finally he placed the tiny effigies themselves, eyes painted and varnished and polished to a high, reflective sheen, staring, at last seeing him.

  Another envelope dropped to the carpet under the mail slot, added to the layers of bills and notices. Similar, larger notices and warnings had been plastered over the front door and windows, yellowing the light filtering through to the living room. Henry now used the back door off the kitchen, and a circuitous route down an alley to travel to his clean-up job at a restaurant nearby. His mother had left him a surprising amount of money, but not enough to last forever, and he could not bear a job of much visibility. The Project required constant updating as pets and vehicles were replaced, as buildings were repainted, burned up, torn down, defaced, and weathered, as strangers moved and strangers died. All this work required a constant expenditure of his time and money.

  His mother, if she had lived, would no doubt have despaired as her grand gentlemen and ladies moved away, and middle-class families and blue-collar laborers moved in. And a new phenomenon had evolved: secreted here and there within ruined foundations, in abandoned culverts and boarded-up buildings were homeless people, beggars, and figures unidentified. From his viewpoint, and with his devotion, Henry witnessed it all.

  They still held shows and concerts down in the district on the other side of his neighborhood, but the entertainment was likely to be of a more popular, cheapened variety. Sometimes they held open-air music festivals in the plaza; Henry would open his windows and listen with eyes closed.

  Keeping up with the Project had become more difficult.

  Every day Henry would spy some new stranger.

  “So where’d you come from?” he’d say to the figure trapped inside his binoculars. “You certainly weren’t there yesterday!” He pulled his tattered notepad out of his back pocket and jotted down a few particulars: relative height, weight, “R” for resident or “V” for vagrant, and some speculation about the figure’s state of mind.

  Down in the basement he rolled out the clay, made arms and legs, torso, a head. This all went down quickly. A half-hour in the oven and he had “Mr. Everyman.” But then he brought out the paints. Three hours later he was still painting. He painted and repainted trying to get the face right, and then the eyes. The eyes were the windows to the soul, correct? But whose soul? For so many of these figures staring up at him, their eyes led to places he did not understand.

  He had to keep a constant eye on their positioning, often moving a dozen or more of their effigies every evening to keep the Project properly aligned and representational.

  That afternoon returning from work more tired than usual—he’d made bad mistakes, dropping a rack full of dishes and angering the new assistant manager with his clumsy attempts to clean it up—he climbed to his bedroom and collapsed into his observation chair. He wanted just to sleep, but something nagged him. He blinked a few times, trying to shake off a blurry impression . . . of what?

  He leaned forward with sudden understanding, letting his eyes sweep back and forth across the hill: the high profile of the mound, spiky with eaves and chimneys, the serpentine sweep of road, streamlined for safety over the years, flowing evenly and gently down the hill, the broad scales of mown grass and removed brush, smoothing the terraced profile, the reduction of tree growth, the slopes chiseled out and walled. It had never registered with him before, so intent he’d been with the minute, specific changes occurring to the strangers, but it was so obvious in this late afternoon light: the hill had lost mass, had in fact been losing mass over a period of years.

  The next day Henry began removing pieces from selected portions of the Project, rearranging things in order to achieve a more accurate representation of the hill. It was a laborious task; his specific detailing was spot on—it was his scale, his relative spacing that was off. The Project was bloated and inflated by his own ego. Now he had to let some of the air out.

  The dilemma was how to take things away without creating an imbalance in the entire structure, and threatening its very existence.

  From repeated trips topside other things became more apparent. The city had introduced flaws into the real structure he was trying to emulate, through both poor planning and negligent maintenance. Concrete retaining walls had dangerous cracks, drainage errors had been introduced threatening the roads. On the western slope of the hill several of the houses appeared to be leaning ever so slightly.

  If he were being true to the Project he would duplicate these flaws. But how could he without jeopardizing the integrity of the enterprise itself?

  He had no time to consider such issues. He had to keep his hands moving, applying and taking away materials, making observations topside then implementing them on the Project below—he didn’t dare stop until some sort of equilibrium had been achieved. Once on his hurried way down he bumped the post supporting the sagging living room floor. The house shuddered around him as if with sudden, appalled awareness. He halted mid-step, holding his breath. Boards whined around him. Somewhere in a distant part of the house a gathering of cookware complained.

  He gathered himself together and went back upstairs and into his bedroom. Sat in his chair, his mother’s chair. Looked out at the grand hillside, his life’s amphitheater. And in the twilight saw that the homeless strangers had rearranged themselves, and were in fact, looking his way. Impossible as it seemed, he could just detect the whites of their eyes, feel the direction of their collective gaze.

  Henry spent the rest of the night down in the basement. First he moved the strangers, repainted their eyes to match the intensity he’d sensed in their postures, then he felt compelled to repaint the eyes of all the tiny figures on the mound. Hundreds of pairs of deliberately aimed eyes. He’d been watching these strangers all of his life. Now, apparently, it was his turn.

  By the morning Henry had completed his revisions. The strangers would move again, of course, but it comforted him that the Project at least reflected their relative positioning at some particular moment in time. All heads had been re-angled, all eyes repainted, and all looking at him.

  So
me of the figures lay hidden in the vegetation as these vagrants slept during the day. Some camouflaged themselves on purpose against a fence or folded into shadow—these were the strangers who did not want to be seen.

  He became aware of a distant pounding, upstairs, outside the front door. He crept up to the main floor, careful not to jostle the essential, if fragile, post. Silhouettes played on the front window shades: arms waving, heads pressed against the outer glass.

  He continued up another flight to his bedroom, stood in the shadows by the house’s great eye of window, peered down into his front yard and street, where construction vehicles idled, several police cars pulled across the road, officers directing traffic.

  Someone pounded the door and shouted his name, barely recognizable since they’d pasted “Mister” to the front of it. Of course he did not answer.

  Then there was an argument, strange to his ears since he’d witnessed so few in his lifetime, except on the television where they were more physical in nature, ritualized to fit within the time slot available. Someone shouted “paper!” Someone shouted “work!” As the morning wore on he came to realize from this war of words that some essential paperwork had gone missing. Someone had forgotten to cross their “t”s. Some “i”s had gone undotted.

  He looked out at the hill, watching serenely in its enormity, unconcerned.

  Henry stood there and continued to listen, attempting vainly to gain some insight into the activity below, but there appeared to be too little to measure. And still the hill watched him, unrevealing of its concerns.

  Finally there came a slamming of car doors. He watched as most of the vehicles left the front of his home. All conversation appeared to have stopped for the day, but several construction vehicles—some earth movers, a crane—had been left behind, doubtless gassed up and ready for the next morning.

  In the graying of late afternoon the hill exhaled the tension from its system. The flowing lines of road bent and stretched.

  Henry descended the steps wearily. He stopped in his living room to look at the top layers of the Project rising behind his Queen Anne chair. Eyes glowed in the dim light. A long shadow shifted across the breadth of the mound, and he stepped back, ready for some catastrophic collapse, when the tremor subsided, and all the eyes shut, leaving him alone.

  Down in the basement things were quiet. He sank to his knees at the base of the thing that filled his house and laid his hands on it, in it, and found it surprisingly warm.

  He leaned over without volition, then fell sideways against the mound, crushing houses, trees, cars beneath him, and untold numbers of strangers’ lives. But without surprise, it seemed, or complaint. Then his own eyes winked out.

  When Henry stood up again the house shifted with his imbalance, and in the dimness of evening the mound appeared to change position, before resettling into the same space. The low light brought into relief the muscle-like planes, the bone-like structure, spine, and ribs pushed out in sleep. When nothing else happened he climbed the stairs.

  He tried the light switch but nothing happened. He attempted to turn on the TV, but again with no result. They’d cut the power. Who they were, he couldn’t be sure, but he knew there had always been a “they,” and always would be. They were the city, and the people who lived there, and after enough years had passed, they had become the same. And they were no friend of his.

  He unbolted his front door and walked outside. The great expanse of hill roused itself. Thousands of eyes blinked themselves open, parasites whose lives and deaths might pass practically unnoticed, until one of them did something extraordinary, or foolish.

  The hill stood up, turned around, and snapped its teeth. Behind him the house came roaring down.

  Love and Death in the Time of Monsters

  Frank Wu

  We got Mom’s diagnosis the day the monster came ashore in New York.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d been coughing for a while. The night before she’d spat up blood during dinner. She covered her mouth with a napkin, as if I wouldn’t notice. She kept saying she didn’t need a doctor, all the way to the hospital.

  While they were examining her, I watched TV in the waiting room. New York, so many thousand miles away, was on fire. The whole city was aflame. They showed the same footage of the Museum of Modern Art smoking and collapsing, over and over. People were grabbing Picassos and de Chiricos off the walls and crashing through the glass into the streets, burnt flakes of Monet’s water lilies fluttering down around them.

  Why did the monster have to pick that city? I grew up in Connecticut and I loved New York. It had all the best museums and restaurants. Had.

  The creature was reptilian, walking upright like an allosaurus or carnotaurus, but dragging its tail. It was huge, impossibly huge. A frantic commentator guessed it was eighty feet tall, but that seemed an underestimate. In the long shots, its stubby little forearms looked comically puny. But, considering how big its body was, these “tiny” arms were the size of boom cranes. They didn’t have any problem picking up garbage trucks and throwing them through department store windows.

  As it toppled smokestacks and smashed through waste disposal plants, flames reflected in its unblinking, robot-like eyes. The eyes were fixed in its head, which swiveled like a turret, scanning for new targets. Burning oil dribbled from the top of its head, cascading down the canyons ringing the jagged scales around its brow.

  The reporter saw anger in the eyes, but to me the monster’s expression was mechanical, almost clinical, as if it were instinctively responding to stimuli, systematically dismantling the city which urinated and defecated into its personal ocean.

  They took a lot of samples from my mom. They could feel a lump when they pushed on her tummy, but wouldn’t give us any final answers. They said they’d confirm or deny the preliminary results in a day or two and that we should go home. But the doctor’s eyes told us what his words would not.

  When we were back at her house, I put my mom to bed.

  “Am I going to die now?” she asked.

  “No, no, you’re not,” I said.

  “I know it’s the cancer, Bobby,” she said.

  “You’re going to beat it.” I wanted to hold her the way she’d held me when I was little.

  I called my wife Janie to tell her I’d be staying the night.

  As Mom slept, I watched the news. We shouldn’t have been surprised when the monster appeared, considering all the radionuclides and biochemicals that we’d been dumping in the water. Now they were blaming this thing for every ship that had disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. The reporter said its fire breath was the cause of El Niño and global warming.

  Next to the TV were Mom’s lighter and a pack of Marlboro Reds. Janie had been telling me for years I should make her quit. How could I do that? Some things you just can’t tell your mom. Like the fact that she can’t sing. Or that margarine isn’t really better for you than butter. Once I watched her finish one cigarette, but she didn’t have her lighter. So I was relieved when she was done. Then she took the dying cigarette and used it to light a fresh one. It was a clever use of fire, but I was horrified. I was six. I decided then I’d never smoke, years before my teachers lectured us on cancer. But the notebooks I brought to school smelled of tobacco.

  The summer after college, I couldn’t find a job and had to move back home. One night she asked me to run to the store and get her cigarettes. I didn’t know what to do. They were poison, but she said she didn’t want to live alone, now that Dad was gone. She wanted to be with him. She smoked because of love.

  Sometimes she’d yell at me—actually yell—for the stupidest things, like water I spilled around the sink or hair left on the bathroom floor. But not when she was smoking. I’d be upstairs working on a project, and she’d call out my name in a singsong voice. I’d come down the stairs, and she’d grab my hand and take me out to the porch. We’d sit on the concrete and talk about life and dreams, all while she smoked and I tried not to gag.
She was calm—not happy, but real, and we could talk about stuff that mattered. The best times we had were when she was smoking. So I bought her cigarettes to protect myself from her fits of rage when she was in withdrawal. Is that bad?

  I took her smokes and her lighter and threw them in the dumpster that night.

  I threw away a little plastic monster, too. He was green, with a plump yellow belly, a jolly Godzilla. A wind-up that shot sparks from his mouth as he walked. Mom had put him in my Christmas stocking years ago. He sat on the coffee table next to the magazines. Every week I’d find him moved, facing the wrong way after she’d cleaned up. She didn’t understand that he was a movie monster watching monster movies.

  Fire-breathing lizards are cute when they’re a couple inches tall and made of plastic with badly-painted eyes. Not when they’re eighty feet tall and flattening your favorite city. I always thought the alveoli in your lungs were cool-looking. When they’re microscopic, not when the mass of cells is as big as a grapefruit.

  They chop out pounds of my mom’s flesh.

  She makes an unexpected joke about losing weight, but mostly she complains about the chemo. It’s worse than the disease. Throwing up, headaches, racing heartbeat. Did her hands used to shake like that?

  The TV screen goes white for a moment as another missile explodes at the monster’s feet. He emerges unscathed from a cloud of smoke. Are the missiles leveling more buildings than the monster?

  “Does the doctor have to kill me to get the tumor?” Mom asks.

  “No, no, he doesn’t,” I say.

  “Do I have a pained look on my face?” she asks, with a pained look on her face.

  “No, no, you look fine,” I say. “You’re just going through a rough patch.”

  “Do you believe in miracles?”

  “Yes,” I say, but only for other people.

  As I say this, the cancer’s already in her lymph system, using it like a highway to spread through her body.

  They’re trying some new techniques, and the doctor’s hopeful. Combination therapy, he calls it. I drive her to hours-long chemo sessions. When I can’t be there, I phone my mom from work to make sure she’s taken all her pills. She says she has, but sounds like she’s lying. I think she has trouble swallowing. She’s given up. The doctor says she has a chance at recovery if she makes it through chemo and takes all her pills, but he’s lying, too. Janie says we should move in with her. The hour-and-a-half drive from our house to hers is killing me, while I try to keep my job to pay her medical bills. Mom’s not sick enough to be in a hospital full-time yet, but she shouldn’t be in that house alone. She says she can take care of herself, but that stubbornness is going to kill her.