“Shit,” Gojiro said.
“How awful,” Komodo added, hushed.
Then the monster turned the page, saw that reproduction, and blanched. It wasn’t the first time Leona Ross Brooks’s portrait of her husband had that effect on the reptile. The picture was just so oppressive, Brooks standing there, in his black parson’s outfit, his arms outstretched, palms up, as if holding an invisible sphere. And those eyes, piercing, searching . . .
Gojiro started to slam the book shut, but Komodo stopped him. “This is the best reproduction I’ve seen,” he said, noting the usual credit: “Used by permission of private collector.” Komodo often wondered who this “private collector” was; how he wished he could see the original painting.
“This X-ray style fascinates me,” Komodo said, referring to the bold primitivism of the portrait, so reminiscent of cave paintings. “It is an intriguing artistic choice. Why would Mrs. Brooks utilize a Paleolithic technique to portray her husband as he stood on the brink of the New Age?”
Gojiro stole another look at the picture. That X-ray stuff, how you could just about look through Brooks, just made it worse. It made the picture seem unfinished, as if it were waiting to be filled in. Except for those eyes! There was nothing transparent about them. They were solid, deadly—so much like they appeared on that imagined afternoon on Lavarock, when Brooks’s gaze kept that youngest zardplebe from the Black Spot. The eyes in that picture always got to Gojiro. What was Leona Brooks doing painting his dream?
It was right then that he noticed that strange discrepancy. “Wait a minute. Something’s wrong. It don’t add up.”
“What does not add up, my own true friend?”
“Look at these dates.” Gojiro flipped back through Visions in Fission, ran a claw to the part about Brooks’s supposed abandonment of physics. “The cat is supposed to be blowing in the Hot Club around 1937. That’s where they’re supposed to have met, right, Brooks and Leona? Well, it says ‘1934’ at the bottom of the painting. How’s she gonna paint him before she even meets him?”
Komodo furrowed his brow. “Perhaps it is a misprint.”
The monster shrugged. “Yeah, a misprint.”
* * *
After that, it got kind of boring, watching Komodo stare into the stereopticon, so Gojiro flipped on the old black and white built into the wall in the Traj Taj’s wet bar. The joint had long since been drained dry, of course. The succession of shiftless tenants and caretakers had put a serious dent in that old producer’s stock, which from the look of it had once been considerable. Too bad, Gojiro thought, he could use a few stiff liquid tons. His 235 stash was running seriously thin.
The call-in born-agains were on again, testifying. Every day these paste-faced yearners appeared to commandeer another channel; it got so you couldn’t even get a decent “Rawhide” rerun. It pissed the monster off. In fact, after suffering still another creationist laying down a moldy 4004 rap, the reptile phoned up the show. The heavily pancaked preachercreature had hardly finished saying “Now, what would you care to share with us this fine day, brother?” when Gojiro, identifying himself as “Vinnie from Ped-ro,” launched into a paraphrase of an ardent Anti-Speciesist lecture, entailing how Christianity was nothing more than an imperialist sapien self-congratulatory ploy. “I’ll tell you the reason your little hustle has gotten over for the past two thousand years. It’s because your advance guys were smart enough to savvy how cocky you sapiens were concerning your ascendency to the top of the food chain, like you didn’t have nothing to fear from those eagles and bears you’d been carving into totem poles for eons. Hey, no knock on Jesus, but that’s your the In-His-Image riff in a nutshell—you’re nothing but a bunch of narcissistic pissants recasting the Sacred in dumboized humanoid form. Well, gloat all you want, but you ain’t fooling everybody.” Gojiro was waiting for one of those pinchfaced Prots to invoke the seven-second delay, but, maddeningly enough, they let him keep talking, finally replying, “Well, praise the Lord for allowing you to get that off your chest this morning, brother. You get back to us, y’hear?” Some people just couldn’t be insulted.
But as much as he complained, the monster was hooked on the shows. There was something undeniably poignant about them. Sure, maybe call-in Christians were small-eyed haters, hincty squares who couldn’t snag a taste of the millennium if Dolphy blew B-flat upside their eardrums, but you couldn’t dog them for buying into a Cosmo, could you? Couldn’t dog anyone for that. The dimmest Cosmo had to be better than none; there had to be something to hurl into the discord. Then there was the frenzy, the raptured abandon. Sometimes, when those hallelujahs got hot and heavy, the monster felt himself getting swept up, ready to sign on the line when the next prayercloth salesman knocked.
But then he’d catch himself. Because, maybe it’s a heck of a space saver, having only one book on the shelf, but which book? Surrendering to the fervor was an endlessly attractive option, but it wasn’t as if you wanted to look bad doing it. You didn’t want to sign up for an all-encompassing creed then read the fine print and find out you had to wear bell-bottoms and tie-dye. No, man, for the Hip zard, it was an intractable dilemma: how to believe and be Cool at the same time.
Depended on your definition of Cool, the reptile always thought. You could be a rigorless nihilista, forever flattening your affect in dim-lit formica lounges, cementing your cute shoes in the staid permanency of the avant. But where was that at? Walking the walk, talking the talk—it’s all for sale these days, pick ’em up by the checkout counter, one size fits all. This wasn’t to say Gojiro eschewed the facile, that he didn’t think someone who dug Clifford Brown wasn’t intrinsically a more worthwhile individual than someone who did not. Hip is a constantly whirling Rolodex; one can never neglect the power of the surface. But that didn’t mean you should make a talisman of it. You had to go deep.
Seek. Find. Accept. Believe. That was the regimen of the Hip zard. But that was also where the process broke down, in the believing part—that final step. “Be Cool, don’t drink the Kool-Aid” had always been the monster’s motto. Even throughout his most strident declarations of fealty to the Evolloo, with Budd Hazard inside his head, there was something in him that flinched at the mantle of True Belief. It seemed so final, so unequivocal, so anti keeping one’s options open. It was one thing to polemicize, to propose and propound, even to die for an Idea. But to believe in it? All of it smacked of goosesteps, crashing kristall in the night.
“I think we are dealing with two visions here, not one,” Komodo cried from the other side of the room.
“Huh?”
“She called out twice. First for her mother and father. Then, after a discernible pause, for her father and you, my own true friend. Two related but distinct visions. It is almost as if the first triggers the second. I must note that. It could be a crucial factor. What do you think?”
“Yeah, two visions. Triggered. Very important,” Gojiro grunted. Two visions! Why not four? Four hundred visions. Why not four million shards of visions, throw them in a pile, get all the king’s kabbalists to stick them back together again? Komodo was going to drive him crazy. The monster wondered: When he finally cashed in that odious Amendment, would it still be listed as a suicide? Probably. There were all kinds of suicides available, whole showcases full of them. Sometimes it’s just an open window, a total impulse buy. But most, the monster decided, were drawn out installment-plan deals. Wait it out, he told himself, sit tight.
When he turned back to the television, the Heater filled the screen. At first, he thought it was part of the born-again show. After all, wasn’t the Heater the biggest bailout those revelation-mad brimstoners ever got, the government-subsidized cornerstone of their pitch? But then he realized that his tail had accidently brushed that remote control Komodo jerryrigged for him. This was another station altogether.
A Heater station? A station that played only looped billows of mushroom clouds twenty-four hours a day, like the yule log?
Gojiro stared at t
he cloud on the television screen, wondered which Bomb had made it. Once he’d been on a first-name basis with all Heaters. Mike from Eniwetok, the Russian Joe, he knew them all, the Fat Man’s rock and Little Boy’s roll. Every Cloud had its quirks, was dense with its particular psychic marrow; none could be mistaken for a nimbus any idiotgrin weatherman ever slapped to a plexiglas map of the lower forty-eight. For Gojiro, shroomic recognition went beyond run-of-the-mill iconography; it was interior, congenital, imprinted like a duck. Once, as sick fun, the reptile got Komodo to project a series of random Cloud configurations on the ’cano wall. Gojiro shouted out his immediate impression of the pattern, Rorschach style. “The spirit of an evil count rising above the smoking ruin of an ancient castle,” he screamed. “A manta ray with a thorn in its paw” . . . “Bicarbonate run amok” . . . “Julius Erving’s hair.” He saw everything in those Clouds. It was like stumbling through the most impenetrable of jungles to come upon a squatting holy man holding a seemingly harmless fungus between his dirty fingers. “Come,” the man beckoned. By the third bite the world was white.
It killed the monster, this love-hate relationship he maintained with nuclear holocaust. He wanted his hatred of the Cloud to be complete, palpable. But couldn’t hate the Cloud. It was too much a part of him. The Heater, it pulled you by the short hairs, put on you the long stare. Enola Gay, the kiss you gave, will it ever fade away?
As it was, the Heater playing right then on that TV wasn’t any humdrum cog in the national defense. It was the very first. The Trinity. The Cloud faded away to an old file film taken from an airplane. Below was a large, desolate crater. It might have been the moon. There was nothing much around, just some somber outcroppings of red rock strewn about the scooped-out floor. Gojiro blinked. Where was this place?
A voice-over started up, reading portentous copy about how “this barren, inhospitable stretch of high desert was, for a single yet permanent moment, the center of the world.” They flashed a couple of stock photos of the scientists. Brooks was there, Victor Stiller and that Colonel Grives too, the whole crew. “After these cataclysmic events,” the voice, now recognizable as that of a local newscaster, continued, “this place faded back to anonymity. For the last three decades the army has used it largely as a weapons dump. But now, a potentially far-reaching lawsuit concerning the title to what has been called one of the most uninhabitable stretches in the world has arisen.”
They cut to a decrepit-looking Indian standing in front of a motel by the interstate. Tractor-trailer tires whined in the background. The Indian squinted into the camera. Off his looks, he could have been any age over a hundred. His forehead was deeply lined; the skin on his cheeks hung like mailbags slung over the back of an exhausted pony. A fly buzzed around his head. The unseen newscaster kept talking. He said that Indian land claims on federally held territory were nothing new, “but this one is different due to the historical significance of the land in question and the fact that this man, Mr. Nelson Monongae, is the only living member of the claimant tribe. The only one.”
“I am the Echo Man,” the Indian said in a timbreless whisper. “Echo Man is the last one. Only he knows what has been known.”
Now they showed the newscaster, a pleasant-looking young man whose trench coat blew tight against his body in the wind. “Yes, that’s very interesting, Mr. Monongae, but you’re just one person. You’re claiming more than ten thousand square miles. Why would you need such a large space?”
The Indian’s face was full of twitches. “Because I am the Echo Man. I speak for the People. This land is the sacred Land of the Monongae Clan. I speak for all the Monongae Clan. I do the will of the Monongae Clan.”
“But what happens when you die?”
“When I die, nothing matters. Now I am still the Echo Man of the Monongae Clan.”
“Monongae . . . Does that have a literal translation?”
The Indian craned his weatherbeaten neck. He seemed to be having trouble paying attention. Every so often, as a kind of twitch, the mottled fingers of his right hand reached up to grab hold of a blackish vial that hung from a loose necklace down to the middle of his chest. “Translation to what?”
“English.”
“Yeah. Called in English ‘lizard.’ Lizard Clan. Monongae is lizard. I am the Echo Man of the Monongae Clan.”
Gojiro had been about to switch the stations after the Trinity Cloud faded. Only the pictures of Brooks and Stiller had kept him watching. Now he widened his every lid. There was something about that old Indian. A look. It drew the monster in.
Nelson Monongae was twitching worse than ever now. He kept grabbing at the vial strung around his neck. It was black, whatever was inside that vial. Blacker than black. “Monongae Clan people was led to the Valley by my great-great-grandfather, who said, ‘The Heart of the World is here. The Blood of the World runs from here.’ I am the Echo Man, I must reclaim the Land before there is no memory.”
Gojiro drew a deeper breath. “Hey, come look at this,” he yelled to Komodo. On the screen the newscaster was stating some charges local residents were making concerning the land case. “People say that you’re being used, Mr. Monongae. That, in fact, you have been known to have spent a good deal of the past several years in the county drunk tank. What about that, sir?”
Before the Echo Man could answer, however, a well-tanned man in a silk suit interceded. “Mr. Monongae does not have to reply to these rumors. His case is just and lawful under the Return of Native Lands Act. He will win it. Thank you.” With that the man hustled the Echo Man into a gray Mercedes and roared away. Maybe there was some time to kill or something, because the newscasters decided to stick a little coda on the report. Once more cameras panned the redcliffed Valley, the newsman saying, “Here, years ago, time stood still . . .” But he was drowned out by Komodo.
“That’s it! The place she saw!”
Past Berdoo
GOJIRO ALWAYS WANTED TO SEE THE USA in a Chevrolet. But when he and Komodo left the Traj Taj, they had to go in that fatassed limo. It was Shig’s idea and there was no way out of it. Ever since Sheila Brooks’s unexpected arrival at the Traj Taj, the severe neoteen had kept an exceedingly close eye on Komodo. So, shrunk down to four feet and peeved, Gojiro threw himself into the wonderless plush of the limo’s ample back seat. This didn’t figure to be fun, he decided.
It got worse as they pulled down the dusty path to the Traj Taj gate. Ebi was there, digging by the side of the road, collecting her specimens, making her identifications. She was so busy, then. Every day, it seemed, another sector of the Traj Taj grounds erupted in aerobic and/or anaerobic bloom. Turn around and a dozen new phyla splurted from the sandy soil, came cracking through the mansion walls. One afternoon three separate varieties of barbed-wire vines (Razorcoilus brentwoodus) latticed across the back section of the house, cocooning the old servant’s quarters with a tighter weave than the gauze across the face of an invisible man.
Ebi was constantly on the go, taxonomically taxed. No sooner would she identify a specimen when two others would begin the herbic creep. She was out in the thicket at sunup, didn’t return to the house until dinnertime. Then she’d toil by moonlight on nocturnals.
“It’s almost as if she’s trying to get it all in before . . .” Gojiro said to Komodo, unable to finish the sentence.
Ebi waved as the limo sped by. Gray dirt smeared across her face, the way it always did. Gojiro loved how, no matter how freshly she’d turn out in her striped party dresses and patent-leather shoes, there would always be a tiny daub of her beloved soil beside her eyebrow, or a slight smudge on her elbow. Komodo pointed it out quietly, unobtrusively, so she would never be embarrassed. He’d wipe the spot away with a moist cloth. Then she’d look perfect.
“Ebi!” Gojiro shouted, pressing himself to the heavily tinted windows, but she never even heard him, the big car soundproofed like a tomb.
* * *
They went out the Santa Monica Freeway, through the neon and the neon, the money a
nd the money, the Alpha-Beta and the Alpha-Beta, and the Thrifty Drug too. They traversed the choked inner suburbs, rode past freeway walls covered with the glyphic jumble of bellicose invocations of ethnocentricity and metal bands. “Iran Maidan!” Gojiro squealed. “Morons! Can’t they just copy the words off their T-shirts?”
Shig drove the way he always did, fast and reckless. Not that he was alone. The road was full of maniacs. “Asshole!” Gojiro screamed out the window at a Porsche as it whipped in front of the limo.
“Please, my own true friend, get down, they’ll see you,” Komodo said nervously.
“That bastard cut us off! That one there, the jowly one with silver hair.” Then, out the window: “Yeah, you, I’m talking to you. You: Kenny Rogers scumface!” Gojiro could only cackle when the Porsche, its driver stunned by the sight of an accusing lizard hanging out a limo window, skidded into two Ferraris. “And stay over, asshole!”
“Restrain yourself, please!” Komodo shouted in his sternest tone. He pushed the automatic window closed.
“Hey! That hurt!” After this, Gojiro lay in the back of the funereal car, watching the town go by. Really looks like shit, the whole joint, the reptile thought to himself, checking the dense petrochems gumming the horizon. Was this the best the sapiens could do for themselves? Was this their shining City, this pastel smudge? Bah, Gojiro scoffed. Bah and double bah. “Be better if this place was smashed flat,” he muttered.
“What?” Komodo asked. A Lamborghini semi-truck swerved into their lane, nearly running them into a Maserati step van.
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