Gojiro

by Mark Jacobson

  Komodo was unsure. “But my own true friend, wouldn’t this be tampering with the order of things?”

  “Don’t you mean the disorder of things?” Gojiro shot back. “We’ll be righting wrongs, partner, aiding justice! Get to bioengineering, we got miles of niches to restock ’fore we sleep.”

  Of all the reanimation jobs Komodo mixmastered from his widebrimmed beakers the dodo was the most sublime. There was only one problem. Instead of the undying gratitude the reptile expected, the dodo’s Necco wafer-like eyes said only, “Why?” It was then that the monster perceived the grievous error of the plan. Fired by rhetoric, they’d coathangered an entire warp-of-time menagerie back from oblivion, belched them up, robbed of habitat, in a world where they saw not a familiar nut or berry.

  “What have we done?” the lizard moaned. How could they have neglected one of Budd Hazard’s most fundamental teachings, the Principle of Adherence and Disadherence in Beamic Fluidity? The precept was quite clear: Without the conjuncting pull of a living Bunch, Beamic ions rescrambled, became free agents, scattering through the universe. Quite obviously, the Beam that once infused the dodo Bunch, thereby connecting it to the Mainstem of the Evolloo, had long since dispersed. Perhaps that immortal energy now served a crew of screaming Bahian monkeys or had become nothing but a disassociated sheen off the coast of Mars—the monster couldn’t say. One harsh fact was indisputable, however: Within the Evolloo, there was no right of Return. The disappearance of forms was as unconditional as their advent. Besides, if the dodo had been so easily scuttled, didn’t this speak to the calcified Maginot of the bird’s Line? Extinction, by whatever means necessary, obviously suited the Evolloo. Probably that’s why people were invented, Gojiro thought; as the grimmest reapers charged with the task of routing expendables. Dirty job, but someone has to do it, and those sapiens, they were pro.

  “Stand aside!” he screamed to Komodo, readying a fatal blast of Radi-Breath to hurl at the re-created beasts. But the resolute Japanese would not move.

  “Don’t you understand? We created freaks. We got to get rid of ’em.”

  “No!” a distraught but firm Komodo said. He stood between Gojiro and the doleful reconstitutes, a father superior in black pajamas, sheltering his imperfect children. “Perhaps we should not have given them life, but it is not our place to destroy them. Their fate is now beyond our hands, except that we may try to make them as comfortable as possible.”

  Gojiro fell to his knees and slammed the Island floor with his clawfists. He knew Komodo would not move from that spot, that he’d take the first shot of Radi-Breath himself rather than allow those jittery obsolescents to feel the singe. Still, the problem of what to do with this passel of unnaturally selected losers remained. For a while it seemed the animals might make good pets for the Atoms, but this idea was abandoned after they woke up one morning to find the dodo dressed in white boots and a miniskirt, a flashing sign around its neck saying “Dodo au Go-Go.”

  After that, the high-security Zoo of Shame was incorporated as a living shrine to the mysterious workings of the Evolloo. Back on Radioactive Island, in a mournful spirit of spent solidarity, Gojiro often passed a week or two there, shrunk down, mutant among the mutants. Which is where he was right then, in that makeshift zoo pen Shig set up behind the Traj Taj, trying to avoid the dodo’s gaze.

  “Knock it off,” the monster shouted at the moony bird. “Why don’t you go imprint yourself on a lawn jockey? I ain’t your ma.”

  “Excuse me, my own true friend?”

  “Nothing.” The monster hadn’t seen Komodo standing there, outside the Zoo of Shame confines. “How was the party?”

  “Oh, fine. Very . . . interesting.” Komodo looked beat, at loose ends. A good deal of time passed before he was able to relate even the barest outline of the events that had occurred under Albert Bullins’s tent.

  “Geez,” Gojiro sighed, shaking his head as Komodo spoke. But then, attempting an air of unconcern, he said, “No reason to get all pent-up, at least about Stiller thinking he knows you.”

  After all, the reptile reminded his friend, it wasn’t completely out of the question that someone would finger him as the erstwhile Coma Boy. Hadn’t a copy of that old Life magazine floated right by them just a few days before, as they were swimming out to the Cloudcover? “Coma Boy—conscience of our age?” the cover line beseeched, the white letters slung above Komodo’s Heater-struck visage. How many people still had that old issue moldering in their garages, thumbed through it at garage sales? The Coma Boy of Hiroshima wasn’t exactly a nobody. Time was, a million beatniks carried posters with his likeness during candlelight processions. The UN named a week for him, thousands of school children were touched by his plight in their Weekly Readers. Even now, his sobriquet was invoked on quiz shows, the answer to one of the higher-priced choices in the Fabulous Forties and Fifties category. Yeah, the Coma Boy had once cut a moral swath, okay; there had to be one person in Hollywood who’d remember a face once thought to be the conscience of the age.

  It made sense that it would be Stiller. Stiller had been there, right inside Komodo’s hospital room. The scene was well documented in that old newsreel that kept turning up on the Dish—Time! Marches On!

  What a nightmare . . . Komodo forced to see those murky images of Red Cross workers scouring the broken city for survivors, to watch them come upon a flattened house where, with block and tackle, they pulled a tiny, seemingly lifeless boy from a hole in the ground. “In the wreckage of atomic fury,” the merciless Voorhees boomed his narration, “a young boy found! Where there was only Death, a child alive—alive and apparently unhurt. Just stunned. Stunned into a coma!” Then, they cut to Okinawa, into that miserable hospital room, the camera tight on Komodo’s wide open, supposedly unseeing eyes. How awful it was that first time! To see Komodo stare at that screen, to peer into his own face, hear him say, “My God, it’s me.”

  It seemed so long ago, Gojiro had almost forgotten. To recall his friend’s beginnings now made the monster nervous. After all, if today’s headline might be made to read, “Coma Boy Alive!” could “King of Monsters Also Alive!” be far behind? Nevertheless, Gojiro continued to insist that Stiller’s near ID didn’t mean a thing. “What could happen? The army gonna dun you for the hospital bill? You’re dead, remember? It’s official: They said you’re dead. Besides, he ain’t gonna remember. The old fart’s totally Palm Springs now; he’s been cooking in Sinatra’s Jacuzzi so long, his brain is poached. He’s just got you mixed up with the Astro Boy.”

  Komodo shook his head sadly. “No,” he said, “if Mr. Bullins’s car hadn’t exploded at that moment, Dr. Stiller would have placed me then and there.”

  Without another word, Komodo got up and walked over to where Shig had installed that Fayetteville Tree. “Four new species in the last twenty-four-hour period,” he noted flatly, devoid of the excitement with which he customarily greeted further editions of the North Carolina chickadees living among the Tree’s glass-enclosed branches. “An unprecedented increase. Ebi is correct. These are extremely fecund environs.”

  “For sure.” There wasn’t much else for Gojiro to say. Once Komodo peered into that Fayetteville jar and began thinking about the Instant of Reprimordialization, conversation was useless. The sight of those crappy little birds flitting about the gnarly neobonsai always seemed to transport Komodo into a meditative realm. You might say that as old Darwin had his finches and Galapagos pine, Komodo had his chickadees and Fayetteville Tree. However, to tell the truth, the monster had grown increasingly weary of his friend’s ever more arcane search for the key to what he called “the vast enigma of the Reprimordial change.”

  Not that Gojiro hadn’t once admired—even envied—the cosmological boldness of Komodo’s original conception. The earnest Japanese first hit upon his insight in the middle of a typically laborious exercise aimed at placing Budd Hazard’s mysterious koan, “Reprimordialization is the hand on the Wheel, the Engine of the Evolloo,” within the co
ntext of the Muse’s doctrine of Beam/Bunch collective self-awareness. Komodo was moving through the dry contingencies when he scribbled two formulas on his worksheet: P = I and P + AT = I.

  “That is Prewire equals Identity, Prewire plus Acquired Traits equals Identity,” Komodo blurted, that look on his suddenly animated face. Then, defining Prewire as initial Beamic input and indicating Acquired Traits to be the sum total of a Bunch’s ongoing experience, Komodo asserted that the two equations were cyclical and eternally linked.

  The key was the interplay between the two formulas, Komodo explained. “Even though nearly all of a Bunch’s time is spent within the P + AT = I paradigm, this statement can be said to be meaningless. True Identity can never be absolutely glimpsed by a group in the midst of acquiring traits. Immersed in the Great Flow, their passage is eternal, ever changing; they cannot stop and look at themselves. Luckily, an unconditional determination of Identity is not crucial to the growing, healthy Bunch secure within its Beamic framework. It is only during Crisis—a condition that Budd Hazard defines as the Crossroads of Life and Death that every entity must face sooner or later—that a Bunch must conjure a reconfirming vision of itself and its place in the Universe or, failing that, cease to exist.”

  It was at this critical moment, Komodo contended, that the symbiosis of his two equations came into play. “A Bunch can only continue within its P + AT = I configuration so long,” he declared. “At some point the acquisition of traits will become a burden rather than a boon. Development turns to decadence as an entity moves too far from its original perception of itself. Yet the goal cannot be the restoration of days gone by; that has been proved in our failures with the Zoo of Shame. The Evolloo is an endless forward-moving river. The goal of all Bunches is forge ahead to a new understanding of their nature.”

  This could only happen, Komodo said, “through willful, symbolic reconnection to the Mainstem.” It was then that, like yesterday’s skin, the used-up, overloaded P + AT = I would be discarded to be replaced for a fleeting moment of searing clarity by the P = I. It was at that point—when a Bunch internalized who knew how many eons of acquired traits into a new reincorporated Self—that the Evolloo lurched ahead, and Life pushed on. Komodo called it the Instant of Reprimordialization.

  That’s what the Fayetteville Tree was all about. From the moment he saw the twelve-foot tree-inside-a-bottle bobbing like Brainac’s live-action paperweight in the waters off Indemnification Shore, Komodo understood its value as a Reprimordial laboratory. To him the Fayetteville Tree, with its stunted limbs and equally stunted population (owing to the proximity of the Philip Morris Company to the town that gave the Tree its name) was “the perfect container—a closed, controlled, yet totally natural habitat with which to study the immortal branching of the Blessed Blueprint.”

  This was due, in part, to the remarkably rapid rate of species diversification among the Tree’s aviary populations and the ease with which this differentiation could be discerned. The chickadees were color-coded, so to speak. When the Tree first appeared, there were only three primary population types—yellow ones, blue ones, and red ones. But then, overnight, came orange ones. Purple ones. Green. Green-yellows. Burnt siennas. It soon became necessary to crib taxonomic nomenclatures from the large-size Crayola boxes to accommodate the influx. However, Komodo’s DNA X-rays revealed these color changes to be more than feather deep. There were morphologic changes as well. Every fresh-mixed hue of chickadee represented a distinct animal, a wholly unique Bunch.

  Komodo viewed the ever-prolific Fayetteville Tree as a beacon of hope. “Oh, my own true friend,” he said to Gojiro, “once again Budd Hazard’s law has guided us. Reprimordialization is indeed the Engine of the Evolloo. New life is being created each day in this seemingly forlorn jar.” Then, when the monster only shrugged, Komodo said, “Do you not see the great opportunity presented us? Our Promise calls for the establishment of a New Bunch to live upon our Island. If only we can isolate this Change, this Instant of Reprimordialization, then perhaps we might peer into the means of our own salvation.”

  After that, Komodo set up his cameras like some Muybridge gone Captain Video—720 at the height of the investigation, one long and wide lens for every half degree in his circular surveillance pattern—around the bottle containing the Fayetteville Tree. Each unit was equipped with Komodo’s customized high-speed shutter, up to ten thousand frames per second, capable of producing the slowest of motion. Whatever happened in that tree, Komodo was taking no chances on missing it.

  But it didn’t work. Every morning Komodo would come out to the Zoo of Shame and count the new species pacing herkyjerky on the Tree’s dungcaked branches. There were always more; one representative of the somber-browns had crossed with a showy orange to produce a toffee. New forest-greens abounded. However, when he developed his films, nothing could be seen. No moment of conception, no Instant of Reprimordialization.

  “I don’t get it,” Gojiro fumed, barely resisting kicking the glassed-in tree. “One minute we got 57 varieties, the next there’s 58 and it’s like, all invisible?”

  Komodo rubbed his chin. “It is very puzzling.”

  Shortly thereafter, Komodo suggested that the Instant of Reprimordialization might “reside in a hidden zone, a realm out of time, out of space, a zone that cannot be recorded.”

  Gojiro rolled his eyes. “Wow, you mean like another dimension or something, where Vaseline’s on the lens and the Stockhausen music starts up?”

  Komodo only shook his head. But he did not give up. Not Komodo. Call it dementia, call it faith, but as mentioned before, Komodo’s innate capacity for believing expands when he’s confronted with the apparently insoluble. The more that Instant of Reprimordialization resisted his attempts to render it part of the temporal world, the more he became convinced not only of its existence, but of its sacred indispensability.

  In place of the photographic record, Komodo substituted the Reprimordial Scenario. Much of this hinged on a shadowy reference once made by Budd Hazard to “a special Breed inside a Breed, those who journey to the outside of What Is: the Throwforwards.” The engendered imagery was full of awesome terror: two small and insignificant entities, emissaries of a Bunch so overloaded with Acquired Traits as to be struck autistic, moving toward each other, ever closer. They don’t know why they go, or how, only that they must, because deep within them lies the preservation of their race. Closer and closer they come, until they enter the voidscape of Change, that private domain where they must meet and create something New, separate from what had gone before. Just thinking of such a trek made Komodo and Gojiro weak. Sometimes they’d look through the thick glass at the Fayetteville Tree, scan the feathered faces there and wonder: Which ones are the Throwforwards? Which one of the blue-greens possesses that one extra chromosome, that as-yet unimagined adaptation that will become kinetic only when linked with the exact opposite chromosome hidden in the helixes of a light-yellow—and when you put them together, you got an aquamarine. Which were chickadee Adams and Eves, the ones who would push the outside of What Is, come into that void that is out of time, out of space and, once there, create new Life?

  “That chartreuse over there, he’s got a randy look,” Gojiro said quietly after crossing the Zoo of Shame to join Komodo in front of the Fayetteville Tree. “I take him and that magenta. Give me four to one, you got yourself a bet.” Komodo did not respond. He looked pale.

  “My own true friend,” he finally said, his face a haunted mask. “It was like a dream . . . a frightening, yet somehow beautiful dream. I felt Mr. Bullins’s car explode, and then it was as if all time had stopped and I was transported to a vast and distant place. It was a moment of suspended will. I went toward her as if I were being pulled by an unknown force, as if I had to reach her—as if everything depended on it. Oh, my own true friend, can you understand what it might be like to be in such a place?”

  And Gojiro shuddered, because he did. He absolutely did.

  * * *

&nb
sp; The horror played inside the monster’s head always, a vicious loop.

  The morning tide would be heavy on that long-past day, they knew. It never failed that whenever a Heater was shot off, whether thrummed deep beneath Nevada or cracked open like a glowing crown above Novaya Zemlya, Komodo and Gojiro felt the preseismic smack like a pair of old codgers rocking on a wooden porch who can tell, sure-nuf, next Tuesday it’s gonna rain. It welled up in their lymphatics, raged fetid blisters on their skins and leathers. Then they’d start bawling, crying and crying. It was a signal to watch the shorelines, since Komodo’s research indicated that the density of the flotjet flow was in direct proportion to the worldwide explo of Heaters. Whenever the fissions and fusions were busy, the shorelines of Radioactive Island bulked up big.

  “Come on, my own true friend,” Komodo said that early morning, “we must go out to greet the newest immigrants to our Land.”

  “Some fucking alarm clock,” Gojiro groaned, picking at the Macy’s parade-sized tumor ballooning from the side of his jaw. “How come they always got to blow these babies off before dawn? They ashamed to face the light of day, or they just want to knock off early, beat the traffic?”

  The two of them trudged out to see what the current brought them. “There! What’s that?” Komodo gasped from his perch on Gojiro’s supraoc.

  Squinting, Gojiro saw a ragged piece of land, singed and sawtoothed at its circumference. On either side were two barrel cactuses, and in the center a tall palm, its fronds dry and brown. Beneath the palm, barely visible, were two unmoving figures. Gojiro swallowed hard. People!