Outside this volcano, I can hear Komodo’s hammer. Bang, bang, bang. He’s outside with the Atoms, those sad, misformed children who arrived uninvited on our Island of lost souls and stayed to become equal citizens. They’re working on my death raft. When it’s done, they’ll strap me across the bamboo, and, no doubt amid much somber pomp, send me out past the Cloudcover, where my thermoregulation will stutter to a stop and I’ll finally be no more.
So listen up, ever-faithful G-fans: I ain’t got time to waste. Probably this is just nostalgia for my long-lost Bunch, but, at least for these next few hours, I want my life story to be your life story, and yours to be mine. I know this can never happen, that no one mutant can share everything with another. That is the very definition of who we are—the separateness, the being apart. But still, I wish it. It is, perhaps, my last wish: that when I lie down on Komodo’s raft, I won’t be the only one in the world who knows my story. Maybe then you’ll be better equipped to make up your mind about the sanity of your trusty correspondent here. Too bad I’m not going to be leaving any descendants. Otherwise, maybe your descendants, those poets Komodo is so wild about, could hook up with mine and give each other great ecumenicalism.
Sure.
But still, if you want to tell everything, you’ve got to find the beginning. As I said, that’s no cinch. Most likely it’ll be best to start from last year or, rather, last year minus thirty-seven hours and fifty-four minutes now, back to that terrible night when Gojiro and Komodo swore the Triple Ring Promise Amendment.
·Part One·
A Death Escaped
KOMODO COULD ALWAYS TELL when Gojiro was trying to snuff himself. He just knew. The feeling got around his heart like the Tingler, made his chest so tight he couldn’t breathe right. Then, if need be, he’d jump through a black hole like a circus hoop, swim across two thousand miles of hostile sea. It didn’t matter where from or how far, Komodo would come, never cease to seek until he found. This particular time, though, he wasn’t thousands of miles away. He was right there on Radioactive Island, beside Gojiro’s volcanic home, trying to teach a sub-beginner genetics course to a clot of real slow Atoms.
Not that the monster tried to kill himself all that often. Suicide’s no snap for the invulnerable, you know. Where does the fatal blow go when no blow is fatal? This was the problem, and not a new one. It came up while they were making the first of those King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms home movies Shig stole and spread around the world.
“So what’s my weakness?” Gojiro said to Komodo. “Never been no Hero that didn’t have a weakness. Not a single paragon of Right who didn’t have a heel where to shoot the kryptonite. Got to have a weakness, something to overcome, or how else can I be brave?”
“You make a good point, my own true friend,” Komodo said thoughtfully. Experiments ensued. Poison, guns, fire, and flames. Tests were taken that made for tales no Timex ever lived to tell. But not a dent was made, no soft spot was revealed. No physical phenomenon, particular phraseology, or pernicious Pentagon-like ploy had the stuff to lay that greenest leviathan low.
“Has to be something.” Gojiro shouted.
“Don’t worry,” Komodo said, harried and contrite at what he saw as still another in a series of his failures to find answers to his friend’s ever-pressing problems. “It will appear. Your weakness is within you. It will come out.”
“Yeah,” Gojiro said, “for sure.”
In lieu of certifiable shortcomings, they made some up. The sad truth is those films were laced with lies long before Shig ever got at them with his hot splicer. Sure, it looked like that slaverfaced Opposer’s sword of glowing PCBs slashed through the monster’s previously impervious leathers in Gojiro vs. Dungeons and Dragons Freaks in the World under the Bed and it might have seemed like that Southpaw Sludgicle hypnotized the big fella into nearly strangling himself with his Louisville Slugger tail in Gojiro (8) vs. Hideous Chemical Creatures (6) in the Ballparks of the Night. But all that was just for suspense’s sake, cheap movie logic, setups, so much fish in a barrel. None of those supposed Opposers ever laid a glove on the great Green Machine.
Which made it a bitch if you were trying to commit suicide. “Wouldn’t be no big thing if I was a regular movie star,” the massive reptile thought. “Any regulation, above-the-title player, they just blow into town, chisel their shallow aspect upon the Rushmore of culture, tip out before everyone gets tired of looking at them. The whole beautiful corpse configuration. But not me! Nooo, I got to live forever.”
Being denied death was the irony of ironies. After all, wasn’t he the Heater’s Child, and isn’t Doom what the Heater dealt—the opportunity to end it all with one depressed button? He didn’t even have to die completely. It wasn’t the living that was killing him, it was the thinking. What he needed was a little reductive surgery on that burgeoning torture chamber up between his earwhorls. Lobotomy! To be a sedate zucchini, staring thoughtlessly from beneath the fluorescent lights of a Miami Beach hotel, a thin smile on his placido domingo.
That was the plan: blow out the Quadcameral. That was the offending organ, wasn’t it? It had to be plucked out. Obliterated. Nothing must be left over. The monster knew if he left a single vestige of his fabulous brain alive, a lone neuron, a solitary synapse, Komodo would be in there with his ever-healing hands, weaving those suffocating gray curls back to life.
Gojiro figured one of those old enhancing mirrors might do the deed. Years before, when Komodo poured the mold for the massive reflectors, the monster couldn’t believe it. If there was one thing he didn’t need it was a device that magnified whatever was put in front of it by fifty times. More of himself? How much more could there be? Fifty tons, five hundred feet from webfoot to cranial dome—wasn’t that enough? Now, however, he imagined he could put the special properties of the enhancing mirrors to use. He’d rage a roar of Radi-Breath straight at the silvered glass, and when it came back at fifty times the investment, it’d blow his brain to kingdom come.
It was evil, he knew. Attacking his own matchless Quadcameral mind—was there any greater taboo? The Quadcameral was the compendium of Life’s great march from the days of the reptilian, up through the mammalian limbic belt, to the humanoid Neo-Cortex, and onward to that mysterious, yet unspecified, upper zone. The Quadcameral was unique among minds. It was the wellspring of Cosmo, the citadel of Evollooic Thought! The Four-Tiered Oracle! How many times had the monster heard Komodo spout these sanctified phrases? How many times had he invoked them himself? To angle a death ray into the clearinghouse of everything they knew or would know—once it would have been inconceivable, akin to blotting out the sun. But things weren’t as they were. The Quadcameral wasn’t as it was. The great brain was befogged, degraded, irretrievably stained. No, Gojiro told himself, this would be no violation. He wasn’t murdering the Q-cam, just putting it out of its misery.
The plan was an amalgam of junk he’d seen on the Dish: how the cowboy uses a polished beer mug to ricochet a bullet, how the Israelites turned their shields to the sun, blinded the Romans, made them steer their chariots into fiery pits. A nursery rhyme recurred in the monster’s head, something about things coming “back on you, like glue.”
“I’ll stick some Elmer’s on this sucker, all right,” he snarled. “Seal my fate but good.”
Not that it was going to be that easy. The shot had to strike him in the parietal, that third eye a million mystic chanters hope to find but that every zard has, right there, smack in the middle of his head. On Radioactive Island it was universally accepted that (in Komodo’s words) “the parietal is the window to the Quadcameral.” Now, however, Gojiro planned to use the sacred passage as a conduit to oblivion. It was the only way, the monster told himself. If he missed the parietal’s foot-across diameter, the rebounding blast would impact pointlessly into his humongous noggin. Slabs of himself would shear off, but what good would that be, regenerative as he was? What a drag to slash your wrists and watch the wound heal even before the blood hit daylig
ht. The Quadcam was different though; it didn’t grow back. That much had been established.
Adjusting the mirror’s angle—no simple trick when your fingers are the size of Greyhound buses—Gojiro pictured his odoriferous decomposing body being found in the solitary gloom of his cell-like burrow, the next day or perhaps the next week, the Dish droning the theme song from “Green Acres.” He wouldn’t leave a note. What was there to write? “No Thank You” was the best he could come up with, and even that seemed redundant.
But it never got to that. Because you see, just as Komodo knows, in his heart, what Gojiro does, Gojiro knows about Komodo. And, right then, Gojiro knew Komodo was coming. He felt him plug in, sensed him running across the beach at Corvair Bay, heard him wrap his satin pants around the fireman’s pole at the volcano’s summit and begin the three-thousand-foot descent.
“Stop!” Komodo screamed as he jumped from the pole. “You mustn’t!”
“No choice!” Gojiro shouted back. “Please, get away! Here it goes!”
“My own true friend!” Komodo dropped to his knees. “You cannot do this!”
Gojiro didn’t look at Komodo; it was one thing he couldn’t do. Let Komodo’s love through and it would pull him back from death, snatch away its liberation. The monster tried to make his heart a block of dry and smoky ice, all hermetic, like a sub beneath the Arctic cap, an iron lung orbiting beyond the most farflung asteroid. But still Komodo’s love came ahead, a relentless, viscous flow, expanding, enveloping, seeping like the H-man through the smallest cracks of the most barred door, across the sill, over the transom.
“Let me go! Can’t you see, it’s over,” Gojiro bellowed. So many times Komodo’s all-forgiving love had pulled him from the slough of despond, but now that love seemed the slough itself. What right did Komodo have to hold him now, when death was the only answer?
“Don’t try to stop me!” Gojiro shouted. He drew his withery arms close, squeezed his every lid tight. He’d block out Komodo’s love, make a barricade it couldn’t vault. It was his only chance. Death, full speed ahead.
“My own true friend, you must not!” Komodo screamed, but his voice was a radio thrown out the window of a speeding train.
Suddenly there was nothing in Gojiro’s eyesweep but that mental X he’d pasted onto the center of his parietal. A cool sense of precision came over him, a clinical calm. Plenty of times, after watching those old newsreels, Gojiro wondered how those fliers did it, how they followed their flight plan, opened their bomb-bay doors, let the cataclysm descend. Now he knew. It must have been like this, a crease in all emotion, a void where the sum of their supposed charity, the best of what made them themselves, detached and fell away. Maybe, in a wholly different context, with wholly different motives, this was how it once was for him, when he was still a lizard like any other, when he’d wait with boundless patience for the exact right moment to forktongue an insect from the cypress bark. It was a realm where all that existed was the target.
The Radi-Breath left his mouth, white light to chase the spectrum. The sound was a drowning wave.
Then: “Fuck! I can’t believe it.” The zap charged, but the Ancient Reflex was quicker. The nethermost portion of the Quadcameral, that longest arm from a past that he could neither embrace nor escape, hurled the brimstone tablets of its Law to monkeywrench his designs. That Zardic part of his brain, impulses still triggering millions of years after their incept date, wouldn’t allow him to kill himself. Elective death was apparently not an option under his former program. At the last moment, his head veered from harm’s way. The blast sailed past his right earwhorl. He felt the singe as it kept going, took a fifty-foot-square divot out of the side of the ’cano and continued on to the Cloudcover, where the impact set all of Radioactive Island jiggling like a fried egg on a sea of shook grease.
“Why can’t I die?” Gojiro moaned, a puddle of green self-loathing in the middle of his ravaged burrow.
As always, Komodo was there to comfort him, those long Jappish fingers commencing their soothing work, the high, gentle tenor singing one of those Ellington lullabies the monster loved so much.
“The zard brain overrode,” Gojiro said in anguished explanation. “It wouldn’t allow it. My used-to-be self. Shit! All my life I search for it, and it hangs in the shadows, on the outskirts. Now you know me, now you don’t. But when I’m about to finally get off this idiot world, it’s there—like Yale’s bulldog, screaming, Survive! Survive! For what? What’s it to it if I live or die?”
Komodo stayed with him. They snuggled together, the way they used to in the early days, before Gojiro demanded his own quarters down the bottom of the ’cano and Komodo took up his own, in that monk’s den deep in Asbestos Wood. Then Komodo asked, “What was it that made you so upset, my own true friend? Was it snakes again?”
“No,” Gojiro answered, trembling at the mere mention of the unpleasant incident several months earlier. More than any other recent event, the snake episode showed the ironic anarchy reigning in the Quadcameral. It was a horrible hallucination, a nightmare of vipers for a viper’s nightmare. Snakes were everywhere! Wall-to-wall squamata. Slithercity. They coiled across his chest like bandoliers, circled his neck, lassoed about his legs, toppled him with a thud. A Lilliputian army of garters, they lashed him down, began to crawl into his open mouth. The symbolism was disgusting, the pornography of a suburban shrink’s couch. The bourgeois humiliation!
Once Gojiro had felt malicious glee in the way previous evolutionary stages of mind remained in the brains of supposedly more modern forms of life. “That’s why a sapien can’t stomach a ’tile,” he’d chortle. “We make their mealy flesh crawl. Well, let them build their Chinese walls to keep us out, it won’t help. We’re inside, burrowed deep inside their heads. You can’t deny what you once were. We’re the gargoyles that come to life at night, prowling through their sleep, hissing boo into their soft and downy ears.”
But now that same fear was his. He woke with a start that night, his claws springing in disgust from his very own hide. He couldn’t stand to touch himself. The merest brush filled him with repugnance. “This is the last straw,” he swore then. “Making me haunt myself! What’s next? Handing out innocence-banishing apples? Plague Dragons leatherwinging across the ocher moon? Serpents off the port bow?”
Komodo tried to remain calm, analytical. He suggested that the snake experience might be the product of an unfortunate glitch in the Quadcameral, that the internalized fears of the newly sedimented sapien cortex were becoming tangled with the reptilian foundation. Almost certainly, Komodo contended, the problem stemmed from a misdirection in the midlevel limbic areas, originating in those sectors most associated with the great cold blood-warm blood battle for land control back in the deep Mesozoic.
But it wasn’t snakes again.
“No,” Gojiro moaned. “No snakes.”
“Then what?” Komodo asked. “What could have caused you to do such a thing?”
Gojiro slammed his fist into the parietal loam. “It’s like I got a million boy scouts rubbing sticks together inside my head. I can’t take the heat no more! It has to come out—somehow.”
“But my own true friend, we still haven’t tried everything, we must have hope—”
Gojiro was bawling now. “No . . . no hope, don’t you see? I’m at the end of the road. One step forward or back, the gallows trapdoor drops out. It’s always been like that, we just wouldn’t admit it before.”
Komodo wept too. “We can’t allow ourselves to think in this manner. We cannot be self-pitying.”
“Don’t worry about helping me. Help yourself.”
“There is no me without you.”
“Don’t put that kind of pressure on me.”
“Please!”
“Stop it. Leave me be.” Gojiro turned away. He couldn’t stand looking at Komodo, knowing that the earnest Japanese thought their every shortcoming to be his fault. He piled their sorrows on his back, humping them up like Quasimodo. It wasn’
t fair! Komodo did his best. Komodo was blameless.
It could not go on.
One more look at Komodo—sad Komodo, kind Komodo—convinced the reptile. For so long they’d pledged undying loyalty, a united front. But it was useless; the battle was already lost. Together they were stymied, they dragged each other down. Better that one of them should carry on, and that one should be Komodo. But what chance would he have with a massive Zardic albatross around his neck? On a journey to the end of the night, you’ve got to travel light.
The clarity of this perception renewed the monster’s resolve. If he could shut out Komodo’s love, he could do the same with whatever moldy impulses conspired to confine him to the gnawing prank that was his life. Without warning he lurched upward, a great green swell inside that close rubber cone of his volcanic home. Goodbyes would be brief, better that way. “Farewell, my own true friend!” he shouted, brave, without doubt. Death was just a breath away.
In the split second it took him to realign the enhancing mirror, Komodo managed more. Gojiro first saw him in that reflector, fifty times his normal size. But the amplification was not necessary. One peek at Komodo made the giant lizard feel shabby, paltry. Komodo didn’t need mirrors to prove his purity.
“Ahh,” Gojiro gasped.
Down below, Komodo had ripped open the top of his black pajamas, exposing his pale, hairless chest. “A ghost’s skin,” Komodo sometimes laughed, saying if he’d been a normal Jap he would have had steady work in No plays, driving evil lords crazy. The monster looked down, saw the rings—three concentric circles, burned into Komodo’s chest as if with a branding iron.
The Triple Rings!
Komodo had already drawn blood. It trickled down, over the circular scars. He held one of those swords Shig walked around with whenever he wanted to look extra cool. Shig was full of that Bushido: sunglasses and steel! But Komodo held the sword like a master, without flinch or flourish. He positioned the point at the exact center of the smallest ring; the weight of the sword alone was enough to pierce his skin.
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