“Hurry,” Komodo screamed, grabbing his medicine bundle, “we must attend to them!” A moment later, Komodo astride his dorsals, Gojiro was butterflying through the heavy sea.
The tract steamed and smoked and was hot to the touch. Komodo had to wear syntho-booties just to walk upon it. “They are alive! Help me! We must get them back to shore.” That was when Gojiro saw them for the first time: a boy in his middle teens and a somewhat younger girl. Even as they lay there—silent, brownskinned, remote—it was clear that they had come from the same womb.
It was Shig and Kishi. Brother and sister, escaped from the Heater’s grasp on this hummock of palm desert, the first Atoms ever to come to Radioactive Island.
She was only fourteen then, six years younger than Komodo, but you’d never know. The Heater had aged her, twisted her features, turned them into the face of War, a thousand years of War. They got her back to shore, laid her down right there. Komodo pulled out his remedies and went to work, utilizing techniques picked up during all those years of keeping his Coma Boy ears open back on Okinawa.
“Your sister needs a transfusion,” Komodo shouted to Shig, but he just sat there stunned. Somehow, he’d avoided serious damage. Shock and exhaustion seemed his only maladies.
Komodo could waste no time; he rolled up his sleeves, jabbed a needle in his arm, ran a line to Kishi’s. Gojiro turned his head when the tubes went red. He couldn’t stand to watch Komodo pour himself into this unknown girl. More than blood was going in there, he knew, from the very first. It took what seemed like hours, and Komodo’s face went white. Gojiro feared that his friend was being bled dry. But just when it appeared Komodo had nothing more to give, Kishi began to stir.
From then on, Komodo cared for her. He brewed medicinals in his beakers and bunsens, but mostly he did it with his hands. His hands divined where Death lurked, doused it out, dispersing the darkest swarm with the lightest touch. For six weeks he tended her. Then, one day, she smiled, and the next she walked, and you could see she was more than a girl. She was next to being a woman, a very beautiful one. She had the whitest teeth, and the blackest hair, and the brownest skin. Komodo had kneaded the Heater’s terror from her, brought her back to life.
When the feeling first began, Gojiro imagined he was only jealous. As jealousy he could accept it, try to overcome it. Besides, it seemed perfect, Komodo being in love with Kishi, her loving him back. Why shouldn’t the two of them stroll the meadows of Vinyl Aire, stand serenaded by the dissonantly clashing rocks off Ba-lue Bo-livar Shore, Komodo holding her hand, in the most chivalrous of courtships.
It made sense, Gojiro thought, that Komodo should no longer wish to ride upon his back, that the two of them would cease to soar behind their sun. Hadn’t he himself railed against the lie of eternal boyhood? If his life with Komodo was to become no more than a yellowing page, a bittersweet turn of time, then so be it. He wouldn’t be one to try to push the past beyond its proper limit. What was would be.
As weeks turned to months, Gojiro saw Komodo less and less. He was always with Kishi. Sometimes Gojiro would hear him, telling her his poems, singing her his songs. The same songs they once sang down the ’cano to get them through those long, long and lonely nights. It was no big thing, listening in, Gojiro told himself, watching them through the spread of Insta-Envir. Komodo was happy, finally. That was cause for mutual celebration.
He just wanted to see what love was like. Some details stood out. How they’d laugh and then fall silent, then laugh again, the joke being beyond speech. Everything they did had an unconscious dynamic. They’d be lying there, then they’d jump into the water and swim, then they’d be lying on the beach again. There was no windy philosophy between them, none of the overheated intellectuality that so often bullied his own relationship with Komodo. That made sense too, the monster thought; Komodo no longer needed to forge artificial meaning from his fractured existence. “He doesn’t need Cosmo anymore, his world is complete,” Gojiro said to himself, watching the lovers.
It became his life, sneaking in the darkness, thirsting for glimpses of them. It seemed that he spent his every moment peering over the top of the ’cano, spying. It was then it started up, that gnawing inside him. An unknown sensation, inundating, frightening.
He tried to discuss the compulsion with Shig, for all the good it did. Even then the bizarre teenager was what he always would be: sullen, forbidding, obscure. Yet it seemed right that the two of them attempt some kind of relationship, so Gojiro tried. “I’m having trouble dealing with my attachments,” the monster offered one afternoon as Shig practiced his swordplay on Corvair Bay Beach.
“Me too,” was all Shig would say, stopping only to pluck a pair of Ray Bans from the water.
Obscene, seemingly unthinkable thoughts began to seize the reptile’s brainscan. He could think of nothing else but Kishi. It was as if his mind were impulsing a hideous message, daring his unwilling body to carry it out. He’d close his eyes and see her, then wake himself, horrified, revolted at his fantasies. “This is hell!” he screamed.
One night he saw them in the moonlight, Komodo’s arm placed so gingerly around Kishi’s back. “In our moonlight,” Gojiro muttered, dragging himself back down into the ’cano. He was a miserable thing; his leathers were without elasticity, his hyoid hung.
“I’ll leave. I’ll make my own way in my own world,” the monster exclaimed, his head filled with jaunty pictures of himself as a vagabonding Tom Joadish sort of zard, hitching and hoboing along the windswept highways and byways, a hard travellin’ song on his lips. He tossed a few personal items in a bag, among them that most primitive napkin holder fashioned from a distributor cap that was the first present Komodo had ever given him. He would go with no hard feelings, leave with only joy in his heart. His own true friend had reached happiness, and wasn’t that the true goal of the Triple Ring Promise?
I forsake Radioactive Island with a free and easy mind, he told himself, hoisting his bindle onto his shoulder. He paused on the beach to peer out into the distant Cloudcover, wondering what adventures lay on the other side.
But it was no good. Before he could place a foot into the foaming surf, that sensation was looming once more, commanding him. “Komodo, I need help! Komodo!”
But his friend did not answer.
That’s when he knew it was more than jealousy. Whatever malignancy consumed him, it exceeded any of the seven deadlies, was more than all of them squared. It was something utterly compelling, something beyond all self-control.
So he killed her.
He thundered across the land, possessed by an impossible demon. “I want her!” he bellowed, crashing through the contorted vegetation, ripping the tops from trees, mashing everything in his path. “Now!”
He caught up to them on the beach out by Past Due Point. Komodo knew. He sensed the madness welling up inside his friend. He and Kishi were already in the water, aboard that same inflatable raft that had carried him to the Island all those years before, feverishly pulling at the starter rope of a corroded outboard motor. “My own true friend! Please stop! You are not yourself!”
And, you know, maybe it holds up in court and maybe it doesn’t, but Komodo was right. Gojiro was not himself. In fact, as far as the monster knew, he wasn’t even in that water thrashing out toward the Cloudcover. He wasn’t anywhere near Radioactive Island. He was in a zone, seized by a bizarre hallucination. Inside a crazy world he’d never seen, never known.
He was in the middle of a great valley, its reddish walls lurching high above. He was little: a tiny zard again. And everywhere around him was Death. Giant animals—saurs? Were they really saurs?—fell to either side of him, lay writhing on the smoky ground. But he couldn’t stop, not for a moment. He had to go forward. As if everything depended on it. “Doom behind!” an undeniable voice inside his mind called out. Ahead: her. Her and a million more like her. A billion more, as many of her as could be seen in opposing mirrors, an unbroken chain snaking to infinity.
Then he saw her—Ki
shi! In the bottom of that boat, out in the water.
Water? What was Kishi doing in a boat? There was no water here, in the middle of that great red-rimmed valley where Death ruled.
Something was happening to Kishi. She was writhing at the bottom of that boat. Komodo was hunched over her. Komodo? What was he doing here, in this valley, in this desert?
It was only then that he saw the situation, what he’d done. Possessed to get to Kishi, he’d raged a savage whirlpool out by the Cloudcover. The torrent threw Komodo and Kishi from that little boat, slapped the two of them tight to the centrifuging sides of that terrible vortex. Round and round they went, holding hands. There was no sound inside that swirl. Numbed and helpless, Gojiro watched them go. Round and round. Komodo and Kishi, Komodo and Kishi.
When he finally heard that scream, he was certain it was his. His own horror at what he’d done. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t him at all. It was a baby’s cry. “Waaaa!” A freshout baby’s cry. It was the last thing he knew.
When he woke up, he was on the beach, alone with the anguish of his deed. There was only one thing to do. He dragged himself back down the ’cano to prepare. He fired up a crosshatched section ripped from an old smelter, grid-ironed it to his chest. Down and down he forced the white-hot pattern, until the Triple Rings could no longer be seen.
Then he heard Komodo sliding down that greased pole. “My own true friend! What have you done?” Komodo shouted. “Your Triple Rings!”
“I thought you were dead! I thought I killed you!”
Komodo looked a hundred years old. “Please! Let me help you, this is terrible!”
Gojiro recoiled from his friend. “Leave me alone! How can you bear to touch me . . . after what I’ve done.”
“Lie down!”
Komodo put his welder’s hat over his head like a shroud. He worked with his plasti-cosmetic torch, blazing away, scaling, contouring. “There,” he said, “good as new.”
Gojiro felt his Rings. “Good as new,” he croaked. “How good is that?” He couldn’t look at his friend. He didn’t have to see Komodo’s face to know: Kishi was dead. He’d murdered Love.
That was when he heard that cry again. The same one that broke the silence inside that whirlpool. “Waaaa!”—that little baby’s cry. Komodo smiled then, because beside him was a child.
* * *
That was it, the final turning point. When and if the definitive history of Radioactive Island is ever written, that maelstrom will be the demarcation, the exact spot the Glazed World stopped and everything else began. Sure, Komodo tried to tell him that Kishi, like all the Atoms who would come after her, was going to die anyway, that she was dying that very day. As if that absolved him of anything! There was no forgiving this. Thank God for Shig. Who could blame him for pouring on the malevolence like he did, never letting up. At least he was sane.
Gojiro never told Komodo about that crazy compulsion. Not about the weird valley, the jutting red cliffs and the Death all around, none of it. To talk about it was to relive it, to be that deranged creature once more.
Now, though, out back of that sad producer’s mansion, in the Zoo of Shame, Komodo was saying strange things. How did he put it? That he “pulled” toward Sheila Brooks? That he had felt himself transported “to a huge and distant place”? That for that “frozen” moment it seemed that “everything depended” on him reaching Sheila Brooks?
Gojiro tried to make sense of it. Back on Lavarock, he recalled, there was talk of something called “the pheromone.” What a pleasure it was for that youngest zardplebe to sit upon the great Stone listening to the Initiates talk of that mysterious airborne chemosignal and how it triggered your inborn reflexes, directed you to your Chosen One. How wondrously racy those full-growns made the pheromone sound, and how spectacular to do its piquant bidding! How, once it came into your body, there was nothing but sex—tailtip, snoutjoust, and backscratch, and when you shake it all around, the next link in the Line been laid down. Later, of course, in the stream of supposed “scholarly journals” that washed up on Radioactive Island, the reptile came across an article entitled “The Role of the Pheromone in the Reproductive Cycle of the Common Southsea Monitor Lizard.” Made the monster so mad. As if those hornrimmed fieldworkers really figured it was as simple as your cloacals come coldcreeping, then bong!—time to breed. What did those assholes know about love?
When Gojiro looked up, Komodo was still pressing his face against the container of the Fayetteville Tree. Was it the pheromone his friend felt under Albert Bullins’s big top, the monster wondered. Komodo seemed too wrought up to talk about the incident right then. Besides, that dodo was getting antsy, smacking his cracked beak against the rocks again.
“Dodo didn’t get a treat,” Gojiro mentioned.
“Really?” Komodo said, jumpy, spreading out a handful of Moa Chow. “I could have sworn I gave him some . . .”
The Atoms were raising a ruckus, their high-pitched voices shearing through the smoggy air. They’d been restless since setting foot in America. Something about the place hacked up their maloccluded helixes. Just the day before, ten of them found their way onto the Ventura Freeway, tied frying pans to their faces, and ran out waving whatever hands they had, screaming that they were invaders from an angry red planet. Those nutty kids! What they wouldn’t do for a chain reaction. Back on Radioactive Island, they loved to knock down endless lines of dominoes and blow ping pong balls around with hair dryers. Here it was the freeway. The results were predictable: squealing brakes, front end-rear end, a State Farm feast. Shig arrived just in time, getting the Atoms off the scene while the cops were still trying to strap Breathalyzers on the whiplash screamers.
“Always something with those wackos. I think their dosage is going to have to be reevaluated,” Gojiro noted idly, casting a gaze in the direction of the noise. Then: “Oh wow . . .”
It was Sheila Brooks, staggering from the Insta-Envir.
The Dinner Guest
SHE FOLLOWED A HOME OF THE STARS MAP so out of date as to still list the Traj Taj as a major attraction, parked her little red Corvette outside the iron gate. Probably most visitors would have run away when they saw those fifty-foot mother-in-law tongues lurching over the fence, but she never even noticed. All she saw was the late-afternoon sun glinting off the shark teeth of the cocohead palms. To her, every one of those lurid faces said, “Come in.”
She couldn’t have gotten more than ten feet inside the gate before the turf jerked beneath her feet, sending her flying into a crowd of fiberglass daffodils that embedded spiky plastic shards into the furry Dale Evans chaps she wore. That’s when Al Capone and the others surrounded her. Henry Kissinger gnawed on her leg, Billy Graham offered her a controlled substance.
Ebi saved her. She came running through the creeper vines and scattered those eggheads. The others, they sensed something about Ebi, deferred to her. And really, that’s what had Komodo and Gojiro so flummoxed. It wasn’t just that Sheila Brooks was coming out of the Insta-Envir, but that she was coming with Ebi—the way Ebi, so small and brown, was pulling Sheila Brooks, so big and white. “Help me!” the little girl shouted, “I think she’s going to faint.” Which Sheila Brooks did, right then.
“Let’s get her into the house!” Komodo screamed, his voice tinged with hysteria. It wasn’t easy carrying Sheila Brooks. Over six feet tall, her lank body seemed only to elongate as it folded over Komodo’s slim shoulder, her wild white mane streaming down nearly to the floor. Still, Komodo managed to transport the groaning Hermit Pandora across the Traj Taj’s vast ballroom and set her down on one of the long couches.
It was several minutes before she came to.
“Oh, Ms. Brooks!” Ebi said with delight. “We are so pleased and excited you have come to visit us. You cannot know how long we have waited for you and how welcome you are!”
Sheila Brooks craned her head around. “You are? . . . I am?”
“Yes!” the Atoms shouted.
There was nothing left to
do but invite her to stay for dinner.
* * *
Komodo sat in his usual place at the head of the long, narrow table. He never felt at ease with this patriarchal positioning, but this was how the Atoms liked it. Sheila sat at the opposite end, likewise by demand.
Dinner was the usual slop scene, splatter left, splatter right. Immediately the Atoms began chanting for the Burger Train. “Burger Train! Burger Train . . . sixteen coaches long!” It was useless to protest. So, smiling like a ninny at the uncomprehending Sheila Brooks, Komodo laid the Lionel track around the edge of the table. Onto each flatcar of the toy midnight flyer, he laid a steaming hamburger, then he whirred the transformer dial. As the doublediesel engine began its circular creep, the Atoms whistled a disjointed version of the theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai.
It was a straight Russian-dressing roulette trip, based on an idiot sabotage movie. According to a chance program, the train crunched to a halt in front of one Atom’s placemat, and then another’s. The trick was to snatch your burger off as quickly as possible; you never knew at which stop on the train’s culinary passage the boiled meat would blow up. This time it happened in front of poor Bop. Wham! Saturated fat erupted, forty feet or more, geysering up to the vaulted ceiling of the Traj Taj dining room. A solid sheen of mustard, followed by a second surge of ketchup, showered Sheila Brooks as if she were a nonrepresentational canvas.
“Oh my God!” Komodo shouted, running toward Sheila with a wad of napkins. Crinklecut pickles gummed both lenses of her glasses. A roll stuck to her head like a shrunken pillbox hat. “I knew we shouldn’t have played our silly games! Are you all right, Ms. Brooks?”
A tension gripped the room. Every Atom hung on the reply.
Sheila Brooks peeled off the pickles, looked around at the expectant, misshapen faces. “I guess so. Sure. I’m okay.”
“But your wonderful clothes, they are ruined.” Several Atoms came over with gooey napkins and despite good intentions only ground mayonnaise deeper into the suede nap of her quisenberry-dyed buckskin vest.
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