“Mr. Brooks, I come to you with a serious matter that represents a potentially . . .” The words caught in his throat, would not clear his tongue. Komodo berated himself. To be granted a moment like this, to stand face-to-face with the great and terrible Brooks, to petition his help in resolution of the Promise, and not be able to utter a single intelligible phrase! Not a comprehensible point! It was madness.
“Mr. Brooks, please listen . . .” Those eyes! Dark and glowing from within the deepset sockets of the physicist’s cadaverous face, they appeared to blaze an unassailable path across the empty landscape. Komodo felt himself wilting before those bituminous orbs.
“You see,” Komodo stammered, holding out the fumetti, “my friend and I . . . we live on an Island, it’s not near here. In fact it is quite far. We were hoping you might pay the smallest attention to our paltry dilemma . . . Perhaps you might chance to glance at this modest work, so as to get a better idea. . . . Please, Mr. Brooks, there is not much time.”
Then Komodo felt that sudden gust pierce through the previously calm desert air, pulling the fumetti from his hands. Caught in an updraft, the old comic first rose straight into the azure sky, then blew across the Valley floor. “Oh no,” Komodo gasped. Then, as if on cue, came that glare. The popping of a flashbulb—someone was taking his picture! And Komodo was running, back across that Valley, away from Joseph Prometheus Brooks.
* * *
Gojiro watched it all on the monitors Shig had set up down in the White Light Chamber. There was nothing else he could do, not after that unfortunate incident following his positive ID of Joe Pro Brooks. “Not dead?” the monster convulsed. The corrective could be applied to that, forthwith, no sweat. “Rarrr,” he roared, long-fermenting bile bubbling up, overflowing. He tail-slammed the Chamber walls, looking for the bust-out. Only Komodo’s quick string and zing of that stun-tipped harpoon stopped the lizard, sending him to Crash Gordonsville. When he woke up he was outraged to find himself trussed like bedlam’s mummy in a straitjacket the size of which no Big and Tall ever sold. But still he promised. He swore he’d stay inside the Chamber and not interfere with Komodo’s attempt to engage the seemingly resurrected Brooks on a high-type scientific plane.
Now, however, Komodo was back in the Chamber, crying. “It was horrible. I couldn’t speak. Then I lost the fumetti, and that flash . . . Oh! How shameful. I panicked, I ran away. Mr. Brooks is our Promise’s last chance, and I failed to communicate with him. Can you ever forgive me?”
Gojiro tried to comfort his friend. For sure, he didn’t care about the jerkoff fumetti—his only reaction when Komodo pulled the thing from the pocket of his black pajamas was, “Don’t you ever throw anything out?” Besides, who was he to blame Komodo for running away? Komodo was the bravest, truest, most reverent. Clean, too. “Hey, man, anybody would’ve bugged out. Cat’s eerie. It’s scary enough just seeing him on them monitors.” That was so; for a dead guy who suddenly turned up alive, Brooks still looked pretty dead. Talk about your timeslips, what was Brooks doing out there, still posing for a picture that had been painted decades before? It was too strange, especially when you considered Brooks was supposed to be six feet under at Arlington. Hadn’t it been giant, Brooks croaking? Gojiro watched the old newsreel at least a dozen times—the flag-draped coffin, slide rule tossed into the open grave, the whole twenty-one guns. A full complement of the rogue’s gallery had been present, Fermi, Lawrence, and the rest, a double row of spaceheads. Victor Stiller himself served up a real heartrending eulogy, his East Euro brogue never smoother as he talked of his “godlike” friend. John Foster fucking Dulles threw dirt on the fluted box, for chrissakes.
Brooks was supposed to be dead. Yet there he was—the dead man, alive, smack in the middle of the Valley of Death.
Gojiro looked at the monitors, studied the unmoving form. “I dunno, maybe he is dead, maybe we’re all dead.” Wasn’t Komodo the Coma Boy, and wasn’t the Coma Boy supposed to be dead, expired after “a nine-year fight to cling to a life he hardly knew”? And what about a certain supposedly imaginary five-hundred-foot-tall star of sleazoid screen and cathode ray? “Never alive”—didn’t that add up to the same as dead? Maybe that’s what this so-called Valley of the Crossroads was, the reptile thought, a limbo land, a halfway house for them between states and stations. “I say we blow this popstand. Ain’t nothing here for us.”
Komodo did not reply. He just stood still, watching those snowy Philcos and Admirals, studying Joseph Prometheus Brooks. “Look at his eyes! How they stare ahead. My own true friend, what do you suppose he’s looking for?”
“Who knows? Who cares? He’s one zoned hombre. Bonked. Total.”
Komodo drew closer to a monitor, held out his hand, lightly touched its sheer face. “It was awful, being out there. I thought if only I could get his attention, then I could make him understand. But he wouldn’t look at me . . . no, that’s not right. He did look at me. But it was as if he wouldn’t see me. He looked right through me, as if I wasn’t there at all.”
Gojiro was up, pacing. “Just what I’m saying. The guy is nuts. Mindblown. Look man, we gave it a good shot, coming here. But it’s a dead end. Besides, someone took your picture out there. This gotta be some sickass CIA shit. Makes my blood run more cold and clotty every second.”
Komodo did not look up. “I sensed that he was searching for something . . . something he had to see. Perhaps that’s why he wouldn’t see me. Because somehow, I was . . . wrong.”
Then Komodo turned away from the screens, faced Gojiro. “I must go.”
“Go? Where? Back out there?”
“No. To her. She must be told her father is alive.”
“But . . .”
Komodo rubbed his face agitatedly. “I spoke with her about her mother’s portrait. She said she’d never seen it. ‘I don’t want to see my mother’s dreams’—those were her very words. Yet she does see what her mother saw.” Komodo reached into the pocket of his black pajamas, drew out his stereopticon. “She saw it in here! Think, my own true friend, of Ms. Brooks’s mother’s portrait. The background is a blaze of white, but there is no detail, no physical features that identify the land. It was Ms. Brooks who provided those details—‘Red rocks!’ she called out. ‘Red rocks and cliffs!’ Oh, my own true friend. Do you not feel the gratitude we owe her? We came to this foreign land hoping she might provide us with an insight into her father’s thinking. Has she not done better than that? She provided him!
“Now we must reciprocate. We must seek to alleviate her torment—free her from the spectres that haunt her.”
The monster interrupted with a scream. “I don’t think we should be messing with stuff we don’t know nothing about. Whatever’s happening here—it ain’t our business.”
Komodo frowned at the reptile’s outburst, then peered intently at the stereopticon. “So many times I have wished this photo would spring to life. That somehow these people would step from this holder. But it has not been possible; my prayer has never been answered. Yet, that night, when she looked into this very frame, she saw her father. It was as if by seeing him, she has snatched him from Death.”
Komodo turned to look at Joseph Prometheus Brooks. “Perhaps it is strange to say, but through Ms. Brooks’s vision—it is almost as if my own father has been returned to me.”
A tightness seized the monster. His head felt as if it was about to shoot off his shoulders. It was one thing to propose that a picture in an antique viewer found on the beach of a mutant’s island might somehow qualify as an area of transference, a smallest rectangle where every needy soul might come to petition love, and that the love found there might be interchangeable with all currencies of the heart. But including Joseph Prometheus Brooks in that exchange. Wasn’t that going off the cognitive map? Brooks as Komodo’s dad—as any dad—it was insanity. Still, the monster knew there would be no arguing his friend out of telling Sheila Brooks that her father was alive, if not kicking, in the Encrucijada. “Okay, you win. Let’
s cut. Don’t want to knock the service, but this joint was getting a little old.”
Komodo looked at Gojiro resolutely. “I feel it would be better if I went myself.”
“What?”
“It would only be for a short while.”
“You want me to stay in this spook house by myself? You crazy?”
Komodo threw some clothing in a bag. “You will be safer in this contained environment. Your thermoregulation has been fluctuating. It will be easier to maintain a proper temperature here. Also, there is the shrinkage problem.”
“Screw the shrinkage, I ain’t stayin’.”
Komodo bit his lower lip. The words were hard for him. “I desire to go to see Ms. Brooks . . . by myself.” The tortured expression on his face begged Gojiro not to protest.
“Oh.”
Fifteen minutes later, Komodo was ready to leave. “This time will pass quickly. Perhaps this separation will be a good thing. As Budd Hazard says, ‘In the pursuit of True Identity, one must sometimes follow his own road not taken.’ ”
Gojiro grunted. Komodo was too much! Quoting Budd Hazard, at this latest date, extrapolating the Muse’s mumbo jumbo about the solitary path to self-knowledge. Not that the monster denied the principle. Even on Lavarock, where each was everyone and everyone each and the Line linked all, there remained a crucial moment when a zardplebe had to walk alone, make his decisive plunge into the Black Spot by himself. But what could these sentiments matter now, inside this fearsome Chamber?
“I’m trying to be brave, but . . . I’m afraid.”
Komodo hugged his friend. “Me too, my own true friend. Me too.”
Then he threw a sack over his shoulder. “Please do not think me impolite, my own true friend, but you must be . . . Gojiro. Be Gojiro, then you won’t be afraid.”
* * *
Was there anything that couldn’t happen to a mutant zard in this crazy, mixed-up world, the monster wondered, the singular prisoner in the Heater’s own Spandau.
There wasn’t anyone to talk to, if you didn’t count Brooks. The old worldshatterer was on every one of those Philcos and Admirals, gray blue and hoary, that black-eyed stare boring from his lanternous head, his vampire hands clutching at that phantom ball. “Dude looks like Max Schreck on the Stillman diet,” Gojiro shuddered, wanting to turn away but not quite managing it. What was it with Brooks? Why was it always like this with him and his stare. Years ago, in a dream, that same look kept the youngest zardplebe from the Black Spot. Even now, with the physicist reduced to seemingly nothing more than a loony desert anchorite, Gojiro was appalled by his own powerlessness to resist the man. Again and again, he’d try to escape the lure of his wizened nemesis, only to succumb once more. Those eyes! Peering out, searching.
“Hey Brooks! What the hell are you looking for?” the monster yelled at the bank of monitors. “What do you want to see?” Why did he have to promise Komodo he wouldn’t mash the scientist, scatter his frayed helixes across the windswept plain?
Frustrated, the monster catapulted himself across the foul cave, pounced down on a transistor radio Komodo left for him. “Got to get some sounds!” But all that came out of the box was that cruddy forty-five he cut on Radioactive Island, back when he was trying to put a little slink into the Atoms’ funkless step. “Get Up Offa That Levi-a-thang” by B. Hemoth and the Cosmic Rhythm Kings: It wasn’t nothing but a thin Soul Bro #1 homage, a synth-sampled, drum-tracked demo, never supposed to seep ’neath the garage door. But Shig copped it, put it out. The flacks did the rest. Now a digital-voiced deejay was saying the platter was top ten for the fifty-sixth straight week.
“Goddamnit!” The reptile smashed the box with his fist, knocked it clear across the Chamber. When it came down it only got one station, the Kountry Kousin out of Alamogordo, an endless pelt of flat licks about how hearts be broken in a plastic-paneled station wagon. Well, at least those peckerwoods made no bones about being dumb.
How could Komodo have left him stowed away in this hellish abscess? Some friend! “Be Gojiro, he tells me,” the monster spat, “as if I’m supposed to know what that means. What I should have said was, Sure, I’ll be Gojiro. All you got to do is be Komodo. Be Komodo and you won’t be afraid!”
But then the monster stopped himself, because he knew Komodo was afraid. The fear on his face when he said he had to see Sheila Brooks by himself told the whole story. He looked the way he did the night Albert Bullins’s Bearcat blew up and he found himself in that zone with Sheila Brooks. But it wasn’t the kind of fear that makes you run and hide. Rather, there was an awesome expectancy in that look. Gojiro thought he’d seen it on his friend’s face before, a long time ago, as he walked with Kishi on the Radioactive Island shore.
Bang, bang, the monster crashed his massive skull on the Chamber wall. “Can’t take this no more!” Again and again he bashed himself. Then, without warning, large slivers of the vault’s roof rocketed downward, glancing off his supraocular ridge. “Ye-ow!” He’d loosened a cascade of dagger-shaped stalactites from the cavity’s upper reach. They rained down like the arrows of a vengeful tribe. Shielding his eyes, the reptile peered up. It was weird how the rocks appeared to have tracers on them, luminescent contrails.
Soon enough, the deluge ended. Stacked around him, like kindling, lay a glowing hillock of fallen shafts. Cautiously, Gojiro picked up a medium-sized stone, inspected it. “Hmmm,” he said, giving the rock a quick lick, “what have we here?” It figured, really, the joint being a nukish shooting gallery, that there’d be some hardcutting 235 about. “Some spoons been fried down this crib, no lie,” the monster commented, goon-eyed. Then he popped a rock into his mouth, gobbled it down.
The jolt and glide brought him far and wide. The next several hours floated by in the most vaporous of hazes. Blue lights bubblegummed, and all about wove a spidery net spun by the hottest and blackest of widows, the arachnid’s raunchy, bursty belly moving to the low-slung bleat of the baritone saxophone. His viscera, so long seized up, let go, his every joint rolling in its socket like an outsized ball bearing in a honey pot. Sometimes he’d catch a dose unpleasantly alloyed with the rank ardor of 238, or some other contaminant. Then he’d put on his Lugosi accent and say, “I never smoke . . . strontium 89,” breaking into hacking fits of hilarity at his joke.
A new broom of mental floss swept through the plaquelike polar cap of his hates and fears. His thoughts became farflung, speculative. He meditated on the White Light Chamber, imagining it not a vile blast hole, but a sad pocket, a tear-shaped bead in the vast sea of earth. “They had to bring the Heater down here,” he thought, “to hide it. It’s like how they shut up their brilliant but antisocial children, never allow them to see the Light.” Then he shook his head, a silent comment on the sapien species, magnificent in so many ways, a race with the power to invent a second sun—but a Bunch forced to bury that sun inside a hole in the ground, after they found out its artificial heat could do nothing except melt their all-too-waxy wings.
What about Brooks? The madman was still out there, staring, even as the moon began to rise above the Encrucijada. Didn’t he sleep? Fortified with fallout’s brand of oblivion, the lizard engaged the worldshatterer’s glare, looked back into the black eyes. And, right then, a wild idea crossed the Quadcameral transom. It sounded like something Komodo might come up with—the notion that, like his daughter, Joseph Brooks also had a secret, a consuming enigma that haunted him, and that the old man would stand there until the solution came to him. The nutty part was how the monster decided the trajectory of Brooks’s stare could be traced, plotted in space, and, at the end of that line, the key to the worldshatterer’s secret could be found. After that the idea just got sillier, because Gojiro thought it was possible to repeat the process with Sheila Brooks, abstract the path of how she looked into Komodo’s stereopticon, prolong it, see where it went. Then, suddenly, there were more lines, more desperate stares extending outward from eyes—a million lines, a million million lines, all starting from diffe
rent places, going in different directions, lines that could never meet, never cross, except somehow, they did; a million million lines extending from a million million eyes, every one of them connecting in the same place, at the same time, nexusing there in the Encrucijada, at that very spot where Brooks looked. And somehow, in that collision, each gaze would glimpse what it hoped to see.
“Geez! I must be stoned.”
So he forgot about the nexusing lines, ebbed them from his addled mind. He lay back on his dorsal crease and looked up at the luminous ceiling of his abode. Like some ancient movie palace, all varieties of heavenly bodies could be seen up there: orions, dippers, great bears, and dogs; a Milky Way of stars etched into the black stone heavens. Some gleamed so brightly he took them to be supernovas, flaming out in the most spectacular of finales. Others were so faint he couldn’t conjure the necessary zeros needed to calculate their distance from him. It was the Heater’s firmament, a nebula of rocks, innocent and dense, made bold and noble by fusion’s brush. Gojiro looked at them and saw jewels, glittering and precious, diamonds and pearls.
He proclaimed the gems to be his hoard. “Ain’t this the postmod’s perfect dragon lair—and who could that dragon be if not me, and what’s a dragon without a hoard?”
It was exactly then, as he lay back to behold his riches, that he felt that sear in his brain. Right off, he knew it came from deep.
A Beam
THE FLUX TOOK HIM, SENT HIM. His eyes went blind; only the parietal saw light—light of day, then night. But not the next night, or the next day. It was yesterday’s sun that set and reset, with hastening repetition, yesterday’s and the one before that. Hands of clocks whipped around backward, faster and faster, the counter-flying friction melting their faces. Pages of calendars uncrumpled inside wastepaper baskets, sailed across rooms, refastened to walls. Every Sunday became a Saturday, each November an October, 1955 turned to 1954, then ’53—a hundred years of backflashing montage.
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