“Nothing.” Komodo wouldn’t understand. He’d come swarming with his suffocating Saint Francis dictums about how hate comes from fear and how you have to conquer both. That stuff just made the monster mad. Wasn’t it fair to hate them for making you afraid? Looking out the limo window at the line of mirrored buildings (mirrors! Why do they need mirrors on the forty-seventh floor? Do they think the birds are as vain as they are?), Gojiro decided there wasn’t anything wrong with the town that a little radicalized urban renewal wouldn’t cure.
Where to start? Hmm . . . there were any number of squatty award-show venues that would fit neatly underfoot. How about the Capitol Records building—sure would be a gas to see the faces of those greed-chiseled bad taste purveyors as they watched that payola-layered tower ripped from the ground and played like an accordion. Century City, that could go, left hook followed by a right. Melrose, too, a thousand caterers and their spindly cuisine microscorched: watta outage for the power lunch! And what might a brace of well-placed kicks do to the lowslung “charm” of so many wicker-decked hotels? The habitat loss would likely send the burnished clientele jumping back and forth over sagging tennis nets, like mainframe-blown replicants at last having their long-deserved day on the court. Then, just for fun, he’d grab giant donuts from the tops of fastfood joints and ring toss them ’round the Watts Towers. He wouldn’t bust off the points; those steeples were about the only structures in the whole benighted burg Gojiro could tolerate.
“Yes!” the monster guffawed. He’d pry the stars right out of that jerkoff Walk of Fame, sharpen the points, send ’em whirring in through the windows of every morning meeting, really let some heads roll. Could there ever be a name more fittingly up in lights than that Hollywood sign ablaze with Radi-Breath? And who knew, a perfectly placed stomp might jumpstart the ole San Andreas; a little press on nature’s reset button. Why the heck not? The place been going downhill since Gondwanaland.
A seethe of excitement came over Gojiro. To be bad! To be really bad. To show the sapiens once and for all. To burrow up through the million sediments of their frenzied yet futile repression, to burst loose from the suddenly unquiet graveyard of their past and stand before them: a true monster, a destroyer without conscience, a dark shadow across landscapes, dorsals silhouetted in the flaming destruction he wreaked, immune to weapons, beyond the reach of fevered prayers, remorseless, unstoppable. A killing machine, tearing ships from the sea, breaking buses in the streets, ripping bodies between his cutting jaws.
“Dread and horror, horror and dread!” the monster’s heated brain shouted. “Lay the black cowl round my shoulders, place skulls and tallow candles upon my bench. Let the bottom of my feet be my heavy gavels. Guilty! Guilty! A hundred years in Hell! A thousand! Justice! Retribution! There’ll be some sentencing done here!”
But then, almost immediately, he felt himself deflate. It was the sprawl that did it, that LA whizzing by: the overwhelming sameness, the diffuse repetition. It dulled all passion, doused every fire. Ever spreading, the city was an amorphous sweep without a vital organ or center at which a determined Destroyer could aim. There were no walls round which to drag the vanquished from the back of a chariot, no flag to capture. There was no Empire State to climb, no Eiffel Tower to snap in half; in what amounted to the perfect defense against exactly the attack the monster envisioned, the town had no cherished emblem of itself beyond its very vagueness. You couldn’t break its will with a swift and symbolic act. No, killing this city was not the job for a Great Avenger bent on the telling gesture. Only an army of forever-canvassing bureaucrats, Chinese likely, could make a dent.
There was one stop to make before they hit the desert. They were going to see Walter. Walter Crenshaw, Pfc., Okinawa medic.
* * *
Walter . . . there wouldn’t be a story to tell without Walter, no windswept journey across two thousand miles of sea, no Radioactive Island, no Glazed Days. Walter was there from the beginning. It was Walter’s dark, hanging moon of a Carolina face Komodo saw in that hospital room when he opened his eyes for the first time in nearly ten years.
“I must go,” Komodo said, through those long-stilled lips. “I have a friend. He lives very far away. He has no one. I must go to him, be with him.”
“I know,” Walter said.
“You will help me?”
“Yes.”
How did Walter know that the poor Coma Boy he’d tended so lovingly had been summoned to an Island no map knew by a terribly lonely giant lizard? Komodo couldn’t tell, never asked. All he knew was that Walter had always been there. That it was Walter who told him about the weather outside his dank room, Walter who rubbed his muscles so they stayed alive, Walter who sang to him, Walter who played him the radio, Walter who slapped his leg when the Say Hey Kid hit a homer. That it was Walter who chased the phonies who came to gawk at the Coma Boy, international freak, Walter who was gentle while the others were brusque. That he trusted Walter, completely.
So that night when Walter helped him from his bed, shoved him through the laundry-room window, put him on a metal gurney, wheeled him down the hallway, Komodo knew it was the right thing to do. Faster and faster Walter pushed him down those corridors; above him, the fluorescent lights blurred against the ceiling. Everything smelled of ammonia. Walter got Komodo into black clothes, smeared camouflage paint on his face. Suddenly they were outside. He could see the stars in the night sky; smells of the sea filled his nostrils. How lush it was, how alive! The sand was between his toes, the ocean too.
Then Walter was waving a tiny flashlight, sending a signal through the fog. The boat came, creaking and shabby, a scow run by Korean fishermen. “Two hundred dollars!” the one in the skullcap screamed.
“You said one-fifty!”
“Two hundred!”
“Motherfucker!” Walter dug into his pocket, pulled out the bills, then lifted Komodo onto the slimy deck. Already the first of the searchlight beams were cutting through the heavy air. Walter was waistdeep in the tide, holding the gray box above his head. Komodo knew that box. It had been in his room, always in his room.
Then the drone of the MP boat filled the night. “Mister Crenshaw!” Komodo called, reaching out.
“You gotta go now! Take this!” Walter pushed the box over the gunwale, but the Korean was panicking, casting off. The box was too heavy, Komodo couldn’t hold it. It slipped from his grasp, fell into the water. Walter tried to shove it back into the boat, but it fell again, back into the sea. Walter dove down, dragged it up once more. “You got to have it!” But it was too late. The cutter was closing, sirens blaring. The Korean revved his engine, jumped ahead.
That was the last time Komodo saw Walter: in the water, holding that box over his head, helpless in the searchlight’s glare. Then he was gone, lost in the fog. Komodo felt as if he were entering another dark world. What happened next, Komodo never knew. Was it a piece of the boat’s equipment that struck him, a forearm of one of those petrified Koreans, or was he simply washed overboard as that chasing MP cutter caught up? Whichever, he felt himself fly up, then down, hard, into the cold, fast current. He remembered nothing more until he awoke the next morning—or was it a week later, a month?—in that gray lifeboat drifting, drifting . . . until he crossed the Cloudcover and his life began again.
It was years later, long before the invasion of any 90 Series, that the monster heard a strange voice inside the Quadcameral. “I got talking inside my head!” Gojiro screamed. “Yuke!”
“Yuke?”
“Yuke the Nuke! He keeps calling for Yuke the Nuke!”
“Yuke the Nuke?”
“He says he would have called years ago but they finally let him out of the bughouse!”
“Bughouse?”
“He keeps playing ‘In the Still of the Night.’ Damn! Am I going crazy?”
Komodo grabbed Gojiro by the supraocular ridge. “How does it go?”
“What?”
“ ‘In the Still of the Night.’ Sing the song, please.
”
Uncomprehending, Gojiro looked at his friend, but then he sang the first few bars. Show-do and showbie-do.
Komodo’s face went pale. “The song he played on the radio! It is Mr. Crenshaw!”
After that, it wasn’t long before they knew the aftermath of what happened that night on the Okinawa beach. He almost made it, Walter said, almost got away. He got off the base before the dogs got his scent, pulled him down from behind, near to gnawed off his leg. They never court-martialed him, not exactly. The way Walter had it figured, they could never really bring themselves to believe it, that a boy who hadn’t stirred in close to a decade could suddenly get out of bed and escape one of the most heavily fortified bases in the world. It was a lot easier to lie, say that Komodo had finally succumbed to his mysterious malaise, stage that phony tearjerker of a funeral. Not that anybody cared much; by then the Hiroshima Coma Boy was a used-up curio, page-eight stuff at best. Besides, the VA needed the bed space.
“They gave me the shocks, but I never told nothing,” Walter said. “Never told them shit. Wasn’t their business why I done it. They said I was nuts. They threw me in a bin.” Listening to Walter describe his life and times, via one of those early generation of Quadcameral external speakers, never failed to send both Gojiro and Komodo into fits of tears and wailing. It seemed that Walter still thought he was an Okinawa paramedic. He peppered much of his talk with phrases like “Well, let’s see what we got here, Yuke” or “I’m telling you, Yuke.” That steady voice, which once had offered comfort amid Komodo’s enforced sleep, now jangled, spasmed. More often than not, he’d speak from a cheap hotel room or while walking down a city street, railing at the sky.
“They have driven him mad,” Komodo screamed in anguish. From then on, he worked night and day trying to refine his Quadcameral devices. The aim was to construct a transmitter, something that could send as well as receive. “We must contact him! We must help him as he has helped us!” But it was not possible. Great strides in Quadcameral research were made; indeed, the prototype for what became the Crystal Contact Radio was devised at the time. But despite hours of screaming, “Come in, Mr. Crenshaw,” Komodo’s frenzied messages were never acknowledged.
As for Gojiro, he continued to listen, overhearing snatches of conversation here, a slice of life there. He heard Walter scorn bill collectors, talk back to the TV. Maybe Walter was crazy, Gojiro thought, but much of what he said rang true, at least from an outcast’s point of view. Once the monster heard him arguing with the mailman, who accused Walter of being paranoid. Walter snapped back, “Man, if you was me, you couldn’t be too paranoid.” Besides, he still played that good R&B. Yeah, in his way, Walter was a social Budd Hazard; plenty of his worldview found its way into the lizard’s lexicon.
There was only one time anything about that box came up. It happened during a period soon after Walter seemed to be doing better, when he went for a job interview at a hospital in San Diego. Walter was excited about “getting back to my proper line of work.” But it was a disaster. “They blocked me right out, Yuke,” Walter commented later that night. “Said they knew all about me.” After that he seemed more discouraged. He bounced around—to Oakland, up to Seattle, back down to Frisco. His communications were often drowned out by the background babel of Greyhound departures and arrivals. Then one night in a fleabag hotel near Delano some migrant onion pickers broke into Walter’s room, tore the place apart. They heard he had a machine that talks to dead people; they wanted it. Komodo and Gojiro heard the scuffle, the high-pitched Spanish screams, the ripping of skin with knives. A few hours later, Walter came back in. “They didn’t get it, Yuke,” he said wearily, all beat-up. “I wouldn’t give it up. I never will. Don’t worry. I don’t regret nothing.”
Hearing that threw Komodo into hysterics. The idea that Walter was still protecting him, still trying to hold that mysterious box for him, was more than he could take. But that was the last time they ever heard from Walter. Within months the 90 Series began to crash the Quadcameral. When Gojiro forced Komodo into the fourth chamber to cut out those supplications, Walter’s voice was swept away, along with the rest.
* * *
They figured it was a long shot, going by Wilma Crenshaw’s house. Once they’d lived together, Walter and Wilma; but then Walter would have a breakdown, wind up on the road again. It broke Komodo’s heart to think Wilma’s love was still another thing Walter had lost in the aftermath of that fateful evening in Okinawa. Still, amid his wanderings, Walter would come visit Wilma. During those times, with respect for the couple’s privacy, Komodo and Gojiro tried not to listen in, but there was no controlling what the Quadcameral overheard. Sometimes yelling and screaming filled their ears, but there were tender moments, too. However, if they were to see Walter, it was worth a try. A quick perusal of the telephone book revealed a W. Crenshaw at 125990 Pollsmoor Boulevard. When they called the number a recording said that the phone had been disconnected. Going over was the only way.
They turned off at Normandie, tooled into the city’s outlying regions, watching the color of people’s faces change. Walter always said that West Coast ghettos were the worst, since they didn’t seem that bad on the surface. You’d get in deep, then it’d be too late. Walter feared this place, Gojiro always felt, and that upset him, the idea of having a home and being afraid of it.
The limo got some attention when it pulled up in front of the house. About twenty or so locals were milling about, debating the alleged intent of such an august vehicle in their sullen neighborhood. When Komodo got out, half the crowd offered to watch the car, for a fee. Shig put the scotch to that, though, slicing his sword through the turbid air faster than any eye could see. “Damn ninja!” was the fleeing cry.
In contrast to the rest of the house, which was an amalgam of mismatched siding patterns and chipped paint, the screen door of 125990 Pollsmoor was a spanking-new affair. A wrought-aluminum C in its lower panel gleamed in the raspy late-afternoon sun. After three knocks, the inside door opened slightly and the face of a boy on the insolent fringe of teenagehood appeared. Resting his chin on the latched chain, the boy said, with no small belligerence, “My mom’s not home.”
No doubt this was Trumaine; Walter had mentioned him from time to time. “Bright boy, but he got no frame on the reference.”
“I am looking for Mr. Crenshaw,” Komodo said, after bowing deeply.
“Ain’t no Mister Crenshaw. Just be me and my mom.” Trumaine’s eyes shifted. “You from the government?”
“No. I am a friend. Once, long ago, I knew Mr. Crenshaw in Okinawa.”
“My uncle told me about people like you. I know my rights. Let’s see your badge.” Gojiro peeked out from where he was hiding, in severely diminished form, under Komodo’s collar. His eyes immediately went to the back of Trumaine’s hand and he felt ill. What had the boy used to gouge that symbol into his flesh—a can opener, a corkscrew? The job was grisly, but there was no mistaking the pattern: three concentric circles. Trumaine Crenshaw was a G-fan.
Komodo didn’t notice. “But I am not from the government. It is as I told you: Once your uncle was very kind to me. I just want to thank him.”
“That what them flowers about?”
“Yes.”
“Sure you ain’t got no badge?” Trumaine asked, now with some disappointment. Then he said, “Well, don’t matter. My uncle Walter’s dead. You from the government, you know that.”
Komodo’s breath stopped. “Dead?”
Trumaine watched Komodo intently, without speaking.
“How . . . ?” Twenty years of grief pressed down on Komodo. His knees buckled.
“Just passed on. About two years ago, right around now.”
Komodo bowed unsteadily. “I am deeply sorry and offer my most profound condolences.”
Trumaine’s face tried to stay hard, but it couldn’t. “My mom, she’s sorry.” Then, swallowing, he added, “Me too.” It seemed that Trumaine had given up believing Komodo was from the governm
ent, because, without being asked, he told Komodo where Walter was buried.
It was no more than a twenty-minute ride to the graveyard, but it might have taken forever, the misery they felt. The cemetery wasn’t far removed from a potter’s field. Pitched on a hill behind a giant billboard, it was nothing more than an overgrown array of irregularly sized flat stones sticking from the ground like a stegosaur’s plates. An eerie smogfilm hung densely over the graves as mist might cling to a heath in another time and place. On the low margins of the pocked sky, a hardpressed sun plied its lurid wares.
Some of the headstones were inscribed with magic marker, but Walter’s was better kept. The top line of his engraved stone said, with a kind of quiet defiance, “Crenshaw—Husband.” Beneath that: “He fought for his country. Peace at last.” Neither Gojiro nor Komodo spoke as they laid a single rose upon the tombstone’s jagged top. The rose would bloom for a long time. It was one of the hardy perennials plucked from Ebi’s special garden in the Insta-Envir; those things never wilted. As they turned to go back to the limo, they nearly ran into a stout woman dressed in nurse’s whites. She carried flowers of her own. This would be Wilma, they knew. They watched her go over to Walter’s grave, kneel there. Then she turned and looked at Komodo a second before going back to her silent prayers. Komodo started to speak but couldn’t. They’d already intruded enough of Walter and Wilma’s private moments.
When they got back into the limo, they just cried. Walter: dead. All the sad horns should be playing.
* * *
They went past Berdoo, out to Indio. America gave way to its once and future self. Beyond the Twenty-Ninth Palm there was only desert. Even inside that limo, the arid emptiness could be felt and smelt. “Nothing out here, man,” Gojiro remarked. “Nothing at all.”
“Actually, my own true friend, the desert is full of life,” Komodo remarked, attempting animation. “Many interesting species have carved niches in these harsh environs. It can be a subtle and deceptive place. If one is keen to its every nuance, the reward is bountiful.”
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