Almost everyone carried an Official Embossed-Clawprint Radioactive Island Scrapbook. Those loathsome looseleafs! Not a day went by that the already overburdened Radioactive Island PO box wasn’t packed solid with an avalanche of entreaties torn, shag-edged, from these books. The worst of it was when Shig was running those contests: “Write it to Gojiro. Tell him what your scrapbook means to you. First Prize a real scale from Gojiro’s own back, suitable for keyring framing!” One particular entry stuck in the monster’s mind. It came in from some third-world crudhole, along with a fuzzy Kodachrome of the G-fan’s ten-by-ten cinderblock shitbox of a home. “I have no room,” the attached note scrawled. “My Gojiro scrapbook is my room.” It ravaged the reptile, how it was only when this zardpard stuck his no doubt ringworm-scarred face in his Gojiro scrapbook that he felt free to slam the door, put whatever he wanted on the walls, and play the music loud.
So these were the purveyors of the 90 Series—it was their supplications he’d begged Komodo to banish from the Quadcameral. The monster felt sick. What did they want? Why did they come?
“Because they’re lames, geeks, and freaks.” At least that was Gojiro’s answer back on Radioactive Island any time the subject of his “audience” came up. He made them all desperate dupes, marks for Shig’s marketing technique. “Come one, come all! Fun for genetic misfits from six to sixty!” the monster would mock. “I’ll tell you, man, these turkeys will believe anything, if you pack it up right. It ain’t like they don’t know it’s bogus, they like it better that way. The fakery liberates them, frees them to worship the wrapping.” Gojiro always maintained that the popularity of his films would soon wane. “I’m a microflash in the pan,” he told Komodo. “By next week the most loyalistic of ’tile-o-files will be hollering for Hulk Hogan to skewer my dorsal plates like so much shish kebab.” However, when his fame did not “go to Troy Donahueville” but continued to grow, Gojiro attempted to devise other theories to account for the unending ardor of those who called themselves the “followers of the Greenest Scene.”
He presented his thesis at an Anti-Speciesist seminar, under the heading “Twin Totalitarianisms: The Sick Symbiosis of Dish and Heater—A Suicide Pact Within the Sapien Beam-Bunch Relationship?” Simply put, the reptile argued that once the power-mad hominids invented the Heater, they could not resist using it. “Like a dog and his balls!” Gojiro blustered. “Why’s he lick ’em? Cause he can!” In their Heater-lust, however, the sapiens confronted a formidable foe: the survivalist imperative of the Evolloo. Doom, after all, is against every impulse of the Blessed Blueprint. “Examine the dilemma,” Gojiro intoned. “The Heater is the sapiens’ crowning achievement, he loves it, craves nothing more than to meld with it as proof of his perverted mastery over the planet, yet his own physical nature forbids the gratification of this passion. So what else is there to do but devalue that nature, gnaw away at all that signifies living as worthwhile, thereby establishing annihilation as a palatable alternative? Why else would they shit where they eat, befoul their every niche? But there’s never been a leaking supertanker that left a bigger blot than the Dish Image. That’s the sinful duality functioning within the sapiens’ death wish. The Heater’s the end, but the Image is the means.”
It was the “ascendency of the easily accessible Image,” the monster declared, that robbed the sapien of his ability to be both objective about the past and poetically intuitive about the future. “Check it out. Say you got some raggedy-ass tribesmen in New Guinea, and for two thousand years they’ve been nursing along some stick figure solar trope about a giant bird hauling a glowing stone up into the sky with its beak. Sure it’s weak, a subsistence sort of creation riff, but at least it’s theirs. So what happens the first time they see “I Love Lucy”? Little Ricky blows that glowing stone straight out the back of their heads. Their whole world is common denominated to a Havana nightclub. You’d figure they’d catch on. Don’t sapiens know Bad Art is like a flag flying upside down, mayday for the Beam-Bunch? But no. They just keep on. Devaluing and devaluing. Grinding those cathodes until they get to the Big Signoff.
“The worst of it,” the monster screamed, holding up a lobby card announcing the Midville Manyscreen’s showing of Gojiro vs. the Casey Kasem Beast on a Journey to the End of the Dial, “is that we’re part of it! Right there in the white-hot center of this infernal process!” Then Gojiro stopped talking. He couldn’t go on. As cynical as he’d tried to make himself over the years, he couldn’t tolerate his own Image, pirated or not, being the consort—the henchman!—of the Heater. It was too bitter an irony.
* * *
Yet here, bellydowned on that beer-can-flecked freeway median, watching those ragtag ’tile-o-files, Gojiro felt a shift. Suddenly, it was like that horrible night up on Dead Letter Hill, when he stood beside that oppressive spire.
“Who’s it on?” the monster had asked, confronted by the detoured 90 Series’s seethe and roil. “Who’s got to take the weight?” Komodo shook his head then, said the weight would fall on whoever was prepared to bear it. And the monster wailed, ’cause he knew: face-to-face with all that pathetic longing, the Varanidid wouldn’t have turned away. The Varanidid would have gone forth. Because what does a Hero really need . . . but Need? Wasn’t all the Need in the world right there, leeching into the ground on Dead Letter Hill? Wasn’t that same Need present right now, amid that scrapbook-carrying horde that came to sit at the foot of the big picture in the middle of the blank desert night? “Who’s it on?” The question pulled at him, yanked like a billion umbilical cords. It was his Image up there! It didn’t matter by what means it got there. It was still his picture. Him.
There was no choice but to come clean, he decided. He would go back into that limo and make Komodo reverse the shrink ray. He would return to his normal size, then break through that Image and expose the real Gojiro. He would tell it all. The Truth.
And what was that Truth? That he was a coward. A fake.
“I ain’t tough. I’m a wimp. A coward,” he screamed out, still beside the roadway. He’d tell those zardpards everything, set them straight on how the movies were shams, how those supposed epic battles were nothing more than setups, tank jobs, fixes. Hero? Bully was more like it. After all, those supposed deathless Opposers weren’t even real Beasts. They were nothing but animatron messes of recombinate slime Komodo fudged up in plastic molds. Those sludgicles didn’t have a single thought in their pseudocellulose heads, much less a diabolic design on how to subjugate Radioactive Island’s carefree little crew. Even so, the reptile feared them, quaked before them. He’d cower in his dressing room afraid to come out. Komodo would have to slip him a pill, stick him shivering on his chalk mark. Sometimes the reptile would make Komodo reconfigure the sludgicles on the spot, lop off a head or two, anything to make them less frightening. But then, when he finally did summon the nerve to face the tox-o-masses, he’d whale on them, beat on those bland slabs as if nothing pleased him more than the sound of his fist against insensate chlorophyll.
It was an ugly story, but one that had to be told, Gojiro decided. His fans needed to know all of it, the whole reeking enchilada verde. They needed to understand why he’d turned away their supplications, why he could never be this thing they wanted him to be. He was no King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms. He was a reclusive mutant, a vain, spouting, lonely fool. He would tell them every last bit. Then he would throw himself on their mercy. If they felt they should rip him apart, he would allow them to do so. It would be the only decent thing he’d done in his life.
However, as he turned to begin the execution of his plan, Gojiro looked back up at the screen. They were playing the scene where, guided only by the sound of Johnny Hodges’s solo on “Star-Crossed Lovers” and the Atoms’ mass reading of the retard parts from The Sound and the Fury, the monster breaks through the squid’s obscurantistic fog, letting there be light. Always kind of liked that part, Gojiro thought. It seemed a shame to interrupt a scene like that. If he was going to set straight the
swindle he’d wreaked upon his wretched fans, the apologia’s timing had to be precise. There was no need to be hasty, jump the gun. “Give them this last moment of illusion,” he said to himself.
But then, as quickly as it had come, the desire to confess fled. What would be gained from it anyway? Would it bring peace of mind to anyone? His sins were beyond any simple act of contrition. Besides, what was the assurance that his fans would accept his word? Why should they? They could take him for an imposter, ignore him, leaving him to twist slowly in the night wind like some moldy warmup act. That would be great, really super. But worse than that—much worse—was that he’d succeed in convincing them he was a fake. Then what? If there was one thing certain as far as those luckless clutchers of Crystal Contact Radios were concerned, it was that Gojiro was the center of their botched universe. What gave him the authority to pull the sun out of their system, just because he happened to be very same merry ole sol? It would be like snatching the last pastry off the plate of a motherloving French memorist, feeding it to just anyone in the street. Where would be the greater good in that? Maybe the zardpards were a dismal bunch now, worshipers of a crooked icon, but to wrest even that from them was to remove even the chimera of Hope.
It was an impossible situation.
That was when he heard it: “Please come in.”
And again: “Please come in, Gojiro.”
It sounded like it was coming from the screen. The monster turned, did a double take. “Can’t be!” That great Image was staring down at him, beckoning. Beckoning to him! “Please come in, Gojiro! Please heed this humble servant’s plea.”
“I must be going crazy.” The picture was shifting now, closing in on the behemoth’s head, drawing a bead on the parietal. Gojiro squinted. He didn’t remember that shot. Shig cut stuff out, sure, jumbled it up, but he never refilmed anything. A zoom shot! There weren’t any zoom shots in that picture! Cinematically, Komodo admired Ophuls, von Sternberg, early Skolimowski—his mise en scène was fluid, sumptuous, eschewing cheap TV effects. Yet there it went, in and in. Closer and closer until the parietal seemed to be right in front of the monster’s face, a swirling psychic peristalsis. “Come in, Gojiro . . .”
It was insane, but right then he could have been back on Lavarock, staring down at his reflection in the Black Spot.
“Please come in, Gojiro. Please heed this humble servant’s plea.”
“I’m thinking about it!” he screamed back at the screen. He wanted to. Bad. He wanted to hurl himself through the air between him and that creature on the screen . . . but there was all that space between. He’d have to vault over the rumbling traffic, the wideslung hurdle of the GOJIRO VS. SQUID marquee, a thousand fans in vans—but that would be no problem for a monster who could jump as high as a moon. This was a different kind of space.
“Come in, Gojiro. Please come in, Gojiro, Bridger of Gaps, Linker of Lines, Nexus of Beam and Bunch, Defender of the Evolloo. Please heed this humble servant’s plea.”
“Wha?” Suddenly Gojiro realized the sound wasn’t coming from the screen at all. It was closer, right next to him, the voice of a boy. A wild, sun-baked boy. Billy Snickman! Gojiro knew it instantaneously, instinctively. After all, he’d been Billy Snickman! He’d lived in the same foster homes, hidden in the same car trunks, eaten out of the same garbage cans. He’d been inside Billy Snickman’s head, and Billy Snickman had been inside his.
That night! That terrible night on Dead Letter Hill. “I only got one question,” Billy Snickman had said then. “Who are you?” Goddamn! What kind of question was that? That question should be banned from speech!
Gojiro reeled about feverishly, trying to get a better look at this boy whose voice he’d sought to avoid for so many years. In the screaming headlights Billy Snickman appeared as a mad, mall-age Moses. His hair was matted and flung itself away from his head in great plaited slabs. His clothes were shredded, the tatters spreading in the wind like flames. He lived in the hollow of the freeway underpass, inside a skeleton of sticks and stretched green garbage bags. It was easy to see why he’d chosen that particular place: The sightline to the giant drive-in screen was perfect, unimpeded. Never once did Billy Snickman take his eyes off that massive Image. He just sat there, repeating that supplication, over and over, into the cool night. A mantra, that’s what it sounded like. Billy Snickman, the author of “Forget That House,” poet of dislocation, had become a crazed sitting sadhu out there on that freeway, putting his every rhyme and reason into this one unremitting petition.
“Enough!” Gojiro screamed. He couldn’t wait another second to find out what Billy Snickman wanted of him. He resolved to confront the boy then and there. But, before he could move, Komodo grabbed him.
“My own true friend!” Komodo shouted through the raging night. “She has been here!”
“Who?”
“Sheila Brooks! I have found this in the sand.” Komodo held a small gun. A derringer. “It is hers,” Komodo said, his face flushed. Engraved on the barrel, faintly visible in the headlight glare was “From Albie B. to Sheila B.”
“A present from Mr. Bullins,” Komodo yelled above the traffic roar. “It is identical to the one she had the other night.”
Gojiro looked over at Billy Snickman. Gojiro vs. the Enigma-Inking Squid at the Rock of Knowledge was over. The last of those phony credits rolled by, the screen grew dark. But obviously Billy Snickman did not consider his evening finished. He kept on, reciting his supplication. Vans and pickups rolled by, heading, no doubt, for squalid dwellings all over the desert country. None of them seemed to notice Billy Snickman. If the boy was a prophet, his message went unheeded by its natural constituency.
Gojiro kept watching Billy Snickman until he heard Komodo once more. “Something has happened in this place. Her gun, it has been fired!”
Into the Valley
THEY KNEW THEY WERE CLOSE when they pulled into an all-night Fina station and saw the wizened attendant sitting four inches from a television showing The Day the Earth Stood Still. The gas station was “For Sale,” the house behind it was “For Sale,” the half dozen rusting cars off to the side were also “For Sale.” In fact, everything around the station was “For Sale”—even the dog, which was a surprise, since it looked dead. It seemed about right for a place called El Callejon sin Salida, which, according to a shredded billboard out on the blacktop, was “the town closest to the site of the first A-bomb explosion.”
Even so, they still had a goodly portion of Big Panghorn Missile and Bombing Range to cross. KEEP OUT said the tedious succession of signs posted every few feet along the horizon-piercing stretch of cyclone fence. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Shig drove the perimeter, then stopped at a shot-up wooden building that had served as the world headquarters of the Deviants MC before that shoot-out with state troopers. They hid the limo behind a lava mound and crawled under the barbed-wire fence. From there they’d have to walk; it was miles to the Valley edge.
In the moonless night, even with Komodo’s nite scope strapped to his snout, Gojiro’s underneaths were stuck with so many cholla needles he felt like a dimestore voodoo doll dangling from a rearview mirror. “If I knew it was gonna be like this, I would have worn a steel bib,” he complained.
Four hours later, they reached the Valley’s lip and peered down. Spreading out before them like a vast black sea, the hole was immense, seemingly without bottom. The vista, so huge and hidden, took their breath away, weakened their knees.
The name told it all. El Valle de Encrucijada—Valley of the Crossroads, or Valley of the Ambush, depending on which meaning you took. The monster saw them as the same: To a mutant, every crossroads is an ambush. “Went down to the Crossroads, tried to flag a ride,” was how the cheerless song went. “Down the Crossroads, tried to flag a ride, didn’t nobody seem to know me, everybody pass me by.”
The crossroads was the preserve of the sly and smiling Trickster, sitting on a fence, chewing on a reed. The tired traveler comes up to the crossroads, says
, “Hey, you there, sitting on that fence, which way to Chicago?” “Chicago? Been there a hundred times,” the Trickster says, pointing. “You got to go that way, you want to get to Chicago.” And there you go, down that road, never to feel the wind off the lake on your face, save the gales of Hell. “Went down to the Crossroads, tried to flag a ride, nobody seemed to know me, everybody pass me by.” The Heater ruled the crossroads down in that dark pit stretched out in front of him, Gojiro knew. The Heater that tricked a world, turned it to a negative, a ghost didn’t nobody seem to know, everyone pass it by.
“Down there,” the reptile said, his voice an awed whisper, “that’s where it all began, huh? The womb of the Modern World.” Komodo nodded. Tears were in their eyes. Standing over that Valley—there was a solemnity in it.
Just then a helicopter came racheting, spraying light across the Spanish bayonet and yucca. Shig grabbed Komodo and the two of them hit the ground beside Gojiro. “The one o’clock patrol,” Shig said, as a matter of fact. “In two hours they test the newly commissioned Eleggba III not far from here. The safety zone for this system has not yet been established; it is very erratic. To linger in this spot might be dangerous.”
Shig motioned left. “Please come, I have prepared accommodations for the night. It is not far.”
* * *
Maybe once it was nothing more than a cave, a guano-splattered bat haven, but now the cavern’s mouth was a metal door that screwed open with the perverse squeak of an urn lid. Inside was a latticework of rusting catwalks that threatened to give way at any moment. Down and down they went into the consuming gloom, until they reached bottom and walked out into a huge underground room.
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