* * *
“Bridger of Gaps! Linker of Lines! Nexus of Beam and Bunch! Defender of the Evolloo!”—again and again those horrid locutions swarmed inside the monster’s head, contrails of gluey semiology, spinning their Sargasso-like net. It didn’t take any elementary Watson to figure who the weaver of that web was. It was like one of those turgid 1950s teleplays where the private eye gets all pent-up about a particular murder only to find every clue pointing to the shaving mirror.
“The chickens,” Gojiro anguished to himself as he swam through the murk, “have come home to broast.”
The 90 Series! That was the fate-sealing blow, the self-starter for this most forbidding journey. What a horrorshow it was that first night as the monster, his mood mean and desolate, reeled about the ’cano under the influence of rotgut 238, and then, resounding in the Quadcam: “Gojiro . . . Please come in, Gojiro. Please heed this humble servant’s plea.”
“Huh?”
“Gojiro, come in, man. This is Tyrone Everett of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Be waiting on the 90 Series! You got to give it up, that 90 Series! And, by the way, I be needing some transportation, okay? And none of that ten-speed shit. One of them mountain bikes! Please come in, Gojiro.”
The sound slapped the reptile end over end. What was a supplication doing inside his head? “Known I shouldn’t have messed with that 238,” he croaked to himself. “Swill pulls the cruelest of coats!”
But it came again. “Gojiro, come in! This still Tyrone! Telling you, man, you got to reveal it! You got to reveal it now! The 90 Series!”
Then: “Whoa!”
Like teleportation, Gojiro wasn’t down the ’cano looking to lick the last cranny of a microwave anymore. He was in a small, unhappy room in the south section of Philadelphia decorated with torn Earth, Wind, and Fire posters. He wasn’t inside his own body either, he was a small-for-his-age nine-year-old black kid wearing high-top Cons. He saw a woman, his mother, cowering by the cold radiator. Then there were footsteps on a staircase, a door smashing open. “Jimmy!” his mother screamed, terror in her eyes. “You get away, don’t be coming back here. I’m calling the police!” Much as he wanted to turn away before Jimmy’s fist hit his mother’s mouth, he didn’t. Instead he rushed toward Jimmy, trying to strike him, to rip his eyes out of his head, anything to keep him from hitting his mother again. He knocked the big man sideways for a minute, then saw him scowl, lash out. The pain from where Jimmy smacked him across the face was terrific. It was the first time he’d ever felt physical pain like that.
Then, like nothing, Gojiro was back inside that vulcanized volcano again. A moment passed, and the voice returned. It was quieter now, full of sobs. “Gojiro . . . Come in, Gojiro. Please heed this humble servant’s plea. Be Tyrone again. I don’t mean to bother you all the time. I mean, I know you got all them other supplications on your desk too. But I got to have that 90 Series. Just got to! Please!”
Gojiro stayed very still. In a low, disguised tone he said, “You got the wrong number, man. Sorry.” After a distant whimper, he heard a click and Tyrone Everett of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was gone.
Gojiro lay down on the ’cano floor, drained. But there was no rest. More came. First it was a trickle, then a flood, a hundred shrieking state hospitals inside his Quadcameral brain, all of them wanting the 90 Series. “Gojiro,” they called, “come in. Please heed this humble servant’s plea! Wake up! Reveal the 90 Series now!”
It seemed like his body was fractioned out in a billion slivers. Just as he’d been instantaneously set down in Philadelphia, he was in Guatemala, in a dark jungle. Soldiers were dragging away his family, shooting them before his eyes. Then he was in Cambodia, in a barbed-wire-fenced pit, given a bowl of rice swarming with maggots to eat. And then, in the Sudan, he was an eight-year-old carrying an AK-47. And in Beirut, stealing food from pockets of the dead and decomposing. And in Winnetka, Illinois, they wouldn’t let him borrow the car.
“NOOOOO!” he screamed, rolling around, holding his head.
Komodo came immediately. “My own true friend! What is happening to you?”
“There’s millions of them! Inside! Wanting me!”
“Try to speak, to tell me what you feel.”
Gojiro started to answer but another wave came through, wrenching him everywhichway.
“Beat it!” he screamed at an unseen assailant. “Don’t touch me with those wires . . . I didn’t shoplift that candy bar . . . Don’t take my mother away, she didn’t mean what she said about the government . . . But all the other kids have one . . . You mean I’ll never walk again?
“THIS FREAKING 90 Series, WHATEVER IT IS, IT’S KILLING ME!”
In lieu of more precise information, Komodo did what he thought best. He pulled out emergency medicinals from the pocket of his black pajamas and rammed half of Pakistan through Gojiro’s parietal. And soon the voices in the monster’s mind merged to a faraway clamor, then to the wash of the local news, street noise, easy to ignore.
It wasn’t until a week later, while watching the late-night Dish, that Gojiro and Komodo found out anything about the 90 Series.
“It’s me!” the monster shouted, looking at the fuzzy transmission. He was standing on the parched beachfront of Corvair Bay, all the Atoms looking up at him, their goony eyes swirling counterclockwise. Gojiro recognized the footage immediately. Komodo had shot it at one of the misfit kids’ birthdays, years ago, when the monster would still turn out for those things.
“Hola, zardpards! Yo, yo ho, and hi-ho!” Gojiro listened to that image of himself say. “Calling all Green Scene fiends! Check this out, ’tile-o-files! Talk is not for me, you know. I don’t like talk at all—action is the louder thing. But now I have no choice. So listen up.”
“What the hell is this?” Gojiro stormed. “That ain’t my voice. It’s . . .”
Komodo swallowed hard but was silent.
“It’s Shig! Putting on some crazy accent. Making me sound like a mush-mouthed Chinese waiter!”
On the screen Gojiro’s picture kept talking. “Loyal zardpard fans, do you possess some wonderment why there have been no new exciting, ultrafantastic adventures of your favorite King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms lately? Could others of you, collectors of the very philosophic Gojiro Crystal Communications who have had much edification from numbers 1 through 89, say: why? Why, after 89: none other? Never 90? Never 91? 92? Well, I say to you it is not because I do not love you anymore, or that I am too much partying down with my swinging Radioactive Island joyboys and galpals. Actually I am in grave danger! It has been with great risk that I even send you this message.”
“What is this crap? What’s he trying to pull?”
“Shhh,” Komodo motioned, his attention on the screen.
That voice Shig put into Gojiro’s mouth went on. “I have been placed into that most terrible spell by the evil zombie see-zombie do Opposer. Yes! That same pencilneck geekster I personally refried in that cool cooking adventure Gojiro vs. the Depthless Society Beast in the Achromatic Casino. Can you believe it, ’tile-o-files? That crumbum came back! He sneaked up on me when I was playing poker with my monster friends and used his Stultifying Art Ray on me. I had two aces looking up and two eights turned down too!
“Zardpards! This ever-bad Opposer has caused me to fall into a deep trance. I cannot wake up. And I must. I must awake and give you the 90 Series! Listen now, this is the important thing: The 90 Series is everything! It is all that counts! I must reveal it to you so we all will be saved! It is the only way.
“But there is trickiness. The 90 Series is a hidden thing. No one knows it except yours trulyest. Except I forgot. This evil ray has made it fly from me. You must help me remember! Only by hearing the 90 Series from my own lips will I be awakened. Help me to know what I know so I can tell you!
“Yes, you, Timmy and Tommy, you Billy and Bernice, you Debbie and Dwayne! Only you can do it! But there is only one way to reach me. You must supplicate for the 90 Series through a Gojiro C
rystal Contact Radio!”
Then, in some real cheesy “trick” photography, a pair of what looked like plastic earmuffs appeared on the head of that phony Gojiro. “Save me! Save yourself!” the dubbed dummy implored. “Supplicate for the 90 Series! Get your Gojiro Crystal Contact Radio today! Only five dollars!”
The screen went blank, and Shig, in his normal voice, said, “For your special Save Gojiro, Save Yourself offer, send five dollars, plus postage and shipping.” He gave a post office box number somewhere in Fiji.
“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 t
hat 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.
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