Gojiro

by Mark Jacobson

  “Whoa!” Gojiro screamed, but the flow kept on. Outside the parietal window, the history’s half gainer withdrew its savage splash, swooped upward, landed its merciless feet once more upon the platform of malign design. Every army marched in retreat, cavalries choked on their own dust, ships of conquerers denavigated, returned to port, were dismantled board by board. Romans disappeared, followed by Greeks, and a hundred hairy tribes beat back to caves, their fires fading to black.

  No landscape or life form was untouched. Butterflies became caterpillars, frogs lost legs, turned back to tadpoles. Those that spent a million generations inching from the muck so they might walk on land now regressed, slipped back into the swamp, submerged beneath their own bubbles. Ice fanned down from poles, froze solid, melted to vast pools, froze, advanced again. Old mountains, weathered and rolling, gathered themselves up, shot jagged and virile into the skies, then fell off the map altogether.

  “On some crazy rewind here,” the reptile yelled, his panicked shouts fading in the whooshwake, each syllable left a hundred years behind the next. It was like being inside an endless, retrorunning pneumatic tube. Eras whizzed by, too quick to see; ages were swishpans. It was insane! Wasn’t forward motion the Big Wheel of the Universe? What could drive him against that most immutable grain?

  It hurt, too. Blasted face-first into the teeth of the tide, the monster felt his snout contort, his leathers smoke. He looked down, was aghast. First he had scales, then not so many scales. His tongue forked and reforked. No configuration lasted very long. Four toes! No, three! Two! “Going Gumby here!”

  Then, all of a sudden, he felt himself slow down. Out of the distorting warp came faces. Zards! A million zards, maybe more. A forever flipbook of zards. Lavarock! Was the strange force nothing but another wooly detour into the same old recurring dream? The monster couldn’t say; all he knew was that he was the youngest zardplebe once more, basked out amongst the great carpet of his fellows upon the Precious Pumice. But it wasn’t just an ordinary day in the seemingly timeless sweep of the Bunch’s realm. The buzzy telepathies calling assembly denoted that. The youngest zardplebe looked up, saw the grizzled hisshonkers—Initiates all—begin to gather. Immediately he knew why. It was Ritual of the Molt—gala among galas, the most sacred day on the herpic calendar. For weeks Initiates would ready themselves for the ceremony, speaking in hushed tones of magic words like “renewal” and “reconnection.” A particularly elderly fullgrown, the wisest of the wise, described what would take place: “Together we whirl, from the First Moment to the Last, from then to now, and when it’s done, we’re ourselves again—One.” As for what actually happened during the mystic moment—no more than an imperceptible split second—the youngest zardplebe never knew. The Ritual of the Molt was closed to those who had not yet immersed themselves in the Black Spot.

  To Komodo, the Ritual of the Molt seemed central to the Reprimordialization process. “Based as it is on the shedding of old skin and the celebration of the new, the ritual affirms the eternal cycle,” the thoughtful Japanese observed. “Yet what is the medium by which the group collectively whirls ‘from the First Moment to the Last’? Could it not be the Beam?”

  Once Gojiro scoffed at this notion. But now, swept up in this coercing pneumatic force, Komodo’s words took on a new resonance. Beam. The word seared through Gojiro’s brain. Could that be the source of this insane backdriving energy . . . a Beam?

  Not that there was time to consider this incredible possibility. Because right then, water filled his mouth. He was swimming—swimming for his life. But swimming backward—away from Lavarock! Back across the sea. “Wait! Wrong way!” With every fevered stroke his Hallowed Homelands grew smaller on the retreating horizon until they disappeared altogether. Then the sea itself was gone, and he was back inside that roaring retrogressing tunnel.

  Until: bump. Like being thrown out of a truck. “Owww.”

  When he opened his eyes he saw an immense jungle. Even at his zardplebe dimensions, he knew this place was gigantic. Crenelated swirls of elephant-eared leaves fanned out twenty feet or more. Moss-draped cypresses rocketed upward to a canopy so thick no sky could be seen. Branches heaved under the weight of swelling, redbellied fruits. How lush this world was, how imposing. There was nothing in Radioactive Island’s hysterical thicket to match this majesty. Ah, the monster marveled, instantly drunk—finally a country pitched at a proper scale! Beam or no Beam, that strange flux had snatched him from the hellish White Light Chamber, checked his bags straight through to EDEN.

  That was when the ground began to shake. Something vast and terrible was crashing through the primeval, smashing flat the undergrowth, crushing boulders like candyrocks. It was coming closer. Closer. The lizard took a deep breath, watched the forest fall away above him. Then he saw him: a Rex. A T-Rex! Gojiro’s jaw hung slack.

  It was a dirty secret, the monster knew, a chauvinistic fleck on his otherwise impeccable Anti-Speciesist politics, but he’d never been able to reconcile saurs within the egalitarianism of the Evolloo. To him, saurs had always been different—another class, unclassifiable—a presence too grand to be hemmed by even the infinite boundaries of the Magnificent Matrix. The saurs were rulers. Masters, Doms. True Doms.

  It was pathetic, Gojiro would remonstrate, the way sapiens pretended to the exclusivity of the Sauric summit. Them—Doms? What a laugh. It was one thing to Attila over everything, smash it flat, squeeze it dry, and another to rule. No saur was ever up in the morning and out to school, taking care of business, working overtime. Saurs were Titans, kings, gods. Maybe books say they once ranged across every continent, but Gojiro had difficulty accepting that the great beasts had ever sullied their claw bottoms with the same wretched terra firma over which sapiens now claimed to lord. Full of bluster, he’d charge that when it came to saurs, paleontology was nothing but a hoax. “Ever wonder why UFOs don’t leave hardware?” he’d badger Komodo. “It’s because they know some dumb Okie just gonna pick it up along the highway, nail it to his garage wall alongside the plates off his dead Plymouth. It’s the same with saurs. Why should a God leave a mandible for some museum clod to fit into his tinkertoy vision of times gone by? Fossils! I sneer at fossils!”

  This didn’t mean there was no relationship between the sauric and sapien crews. That was clear enough in the way children loved their dinos, took the stuffed effigies to bed. It made sense that younger humanoids, more in touch with the most primal levels of their cameral mentalities, would retain true love for that most transcendent element of their own nature. When they got older, though, watch out. Grown-ups—vicious, insecure—spared no propaganda in their endless effort to demean the so-called Terrible Lizards. Slow-witted, lumber-footed, brains the size of a walnut—was there any misinformation the temporary arbitrators of reality hadn’t spread?

  Gojiro looked up at the snarling, gleamtoothed T-Rex, felt his pulse race. Could there ever be a creature more magnificent than this? A more perfect predator? So often, morphologically dim reviewers likened the diffident star of the King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms movies to a T-Rex. Fools! Imbeciles! There was no way the regal beast now towering above that great jungle could be crammed within the deprecating confines of a movie screen. The thought came to Gojiro that he should run, hide. But he dismissed it. If that backscanning energy was a Beam and it brought him to this place for no other reason than to be served up as a tiny hors d’oeuvre upon this master’s table, the monster had no kick. It would be an honor to be torn asunder by those magisterial claws. The monster looked up in tribute; if he had a hat, he would have taken it off.

  But right then, Gojiro saw the twinge, that crimp of confusion across the sheen of the beast’s unchallenged ascendency. It was awful to watch, like a cut across the eye, a dirty print in fresh snow. Something was happening to that T-Rex, something the saur could never guess. How could he? Until that instant he’d been invincible, the most ultimate of weapons. By what means was he to respond to that stab of doubt, much less deal with the
dambreak of fright that followed it?

  Gojiro, of course, knew the sensation only too well. “Oh, no!” But there was nothing to do, nothing to say. The Rex twitched once more, staggered a moment, fell out of the frame.

  Then came the holocaust. Hadros, spinos, a thousand birdy dromis, spunky parkies, bonehead pachycephals, saurs of every kind, pantheon members all, stumbled through the near impenetrable haze, gasping as if the air itself was poison, then tottered, thumped down. “They’re dying! The gods are dying!” the monster screamed out. The worst of nightmares: paradise crumbling, descending in flames. The ground shook. Towering treetrunks splintered like so many arthritic femurs, bushes curled and shriveled, the jungle’s shielding canopy slid away to reveal a sky not unlike Bayonne’s own. Crevasses ruptured the land, opening hideous gullies running for miles, mass graves for the thundering herd.

  “It’s the End! Death’s knell!” the monster shouted out. He felt he should plunge into one of those voracious chasms, that if the mighty saurs should succumb, certainly he had no business living. But he couldn’t make himself. Something made him go on. Forced him on, toward the steaming hillside looming before him. Up and up he went, over the ruined hulks of allosauruses, across fields of heaving, doomed ultras. Then, at the top of the hill, he could look down to the other side. “Oh, wow!”

  Even through the consuming murk he knew these hills, that sky. “The Encrucijada!” But it wasn’t the same Valley he’d just left, not the Heater’s birthplace, that stark, moribund place where Joseph Prometheus Brooks stood and stared. It was rockier, raw and seething. And, somehow, the monster knew there was no choice for him but to cross that terrible bowl, to pass the falling bodies of former kings, to traverse extinction itself. His course was set, immutable.

  “Death behind, her ahead.” The message blazoned unconditional in his head, driving him on. The pheromone! Here, as he journeyed, no bigger than a zardplebe, across a world’s killing fields, the pheromone had returned to him.

  “Wrong!” He screamed out the mistake, tried to explain that he’d treaded this exact path before, through this same redrimmed Valley, that it had led only to disaster. To that horrible whirlpool and Kishi’s death. “No! This is not for me!” But the pheromone wouldn’t listen. It kept pushing, as if the whole force of the Evolloo were behind it.

  Then, up ahead, in the center of the Valley, he saw a figure, blurry, too far ahead to make out . . . “No!” he screamed again.

  But it didn’t matter, because then, as if some unseen, all-powerful hand had reached down and plucked him from his path, the monster was lurched backward once more.

  The trip wasn’t long. A local hop, less, even. But there was a finality about it. This, he understood, would be the last stop. Like the sidewalk springs up on the absentminded jumper, he saw a wall ahead, knew there would be no dodging. He girded for the splat, but it never came. Instead, a viscousness enveloped him, a warmness, wetness. He found himself in a very small, completely curved room, enclosed in a diaphanous darkness. He expected death, a final crush, but it wasn’t that at all. He felt safe. Safe and new.

  All he heard was the steadiest of rhythms. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Thump. Thump. Thump. Gojiro thought he could listen to that sound forever. It was like nothing he ever knew, being in that dark, feeling the generous dampness about him, listening to that beat. That . . . heartbeat. The beat of the purest heart!

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Is it possible that the womb is so safe and sure that no child would ever want to leave it, and, to make certain the world continued, the Evolloo felt the need to invent some measure to make that most perfect place somewhat less than perfect? Gojiro would say yes. He would say that once one hears that beat and realizes what it is, whom it belongs to, that perfect place becomes a prison. Because in there, the child cannot see the mother’s face.

  “Mom!” It was absurd, biologically impossible. How could that thump come from his mother’s heart? The maternal zard lays eggs in a burrow, moves on. It’s the Law, an affirmation of the all-succoring power of the Line. For a zard, to be secure within the bosom of the Bunch—that’s mothering enough. Yet what was that sound?

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  “Mom!” The audacity of dreams!

  He used his special hooking tooth, the one included with his morphological set-up for this task and this alone. He slashed through the leathery shell, nudged a nose out, triggered his fresh-issued claws to dig up through the sand.

  “Mom!” Four to six inches—that’s how much ground the schedule said he had to get through before he hit the surface. It’s all right there, spelled out in the program: the proportion of how deep a zard’s eggs have to be buried so as to afford the freshouts protection against sniffing mammalians while not be so deep as to exceed a newborn’s strength to burrow up.

  “Mom!” Four to six inches? He’d already gone eight and still it was dark as night. He thought he couldn’t make it, that his new-issued body had used up all its energy, that he’d suffocate before he ever saw the light of day. Before he saw her face!

  “Mom!” She’d dug her eggs too deep! How could she make a mistake like that? His mother? “Mom!” His limbs were too heavy, he couldn’t make it. He was sinking down. Dirt filled his mouth. Birth and burial—all before dawn!

  But then, air. Light. Another swipe. One more.

  “Waaaa!” The breath of air and his cry together—his first ever cry, his Freshout Cry—echoed in his ears. Alive!

  When he felt the heat he thought it was her, her body warming him. “Mom!” He pried loose his lids. Her face! To see her face! But there was only the falling rock. Black and obscuring. Then, the whitest of lights.

  The Thinker

  IF ONLY HE WERE COMING TO TELL HER about her father’s death, then he’d know what to do. Komodo knew Death, was accustomed to its somber nuances, its terrible finality. But someone coming alive? What words were right to herald the rolling away of that stone? Should he charge into the oceanside Turret House blurting, “Wonderful news, Ms. Brooks! Your father is alive!” Or should he approach quietly, matter-of-fact, so as to minimize the potential shock? Besides, what assurance was there that Sheila Brooks would deem news of her father’s continued existence to be “wonderful”? Komodo felt ill. The idea that his unending bungling might cause Sheila Brooks more pain was a dagger in his heart.

  As it was, however, he never made it to that brooding Turret House. There was no time, Shig informed from the driver’s seat, his comportment tighter than the whole KGB. They were already late for a “very important meeting.” As was clear from the thick document prominently displayed in the limo’s magazine rack, Shig had exercised the power vested in him as the sole bargaining agent for King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms Productions and finalized a deal with Hermit Pandora Productions to make Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision. Eyes glazing over, Komodo thumbed through the legal sheets. Nearly every item was crossed out, the wholesale deletions reducing the once lengthy contract to a few sparse paragraphs. The heavy editing came as no surprise. In business, as in all else, Shig, ultimate man of few words, pursued only the short and (not) sweet. Should he meet with any resistance, the neoteen wasted little time puncturing the old saw about the pen being mightier than the sword. But what struck Komodo about the contract were the initials “OK—BZ” scribbled next to every obliterated clause and subclause. Bobby Zeber had agreed to every change.

  Komodo stared uncomprehendingly. The possibility of actually making a film entitled Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision never entered his mind. The most unsettling item, however, appeared on the contract’s final page. There, in Shig’s clipped hand, was written: “Existing footage, if any, is to be destroyed if said movie is not completed to the absolute satisfaction of ALL concerned within ninety days from the date of contract completion.”

  Ninety days? Komodo counted quickly. August sixth! His birthday—the date the Triple Ring Promise
Amendment fell due!

  The whole thing seemed incredible. There was no time. Why, they hadn’t even begun casting yet. Bobby Zeber would have to know that. But he’d initialed this last clause as well.

  Before Komodo could inquire about any of this, however, Shig had the limo spitting gravel up the wideflung oval of Albert Bullins’s Bel Air driveway. “You are awaited in the garden,” said a Filipino super-Jeeves in a sarong, ushering Komodo up a marble staircase. Circumnavigating the outside of the house with numbed obedience, Komodo was led between a series Macedonian columns, which according to the antique dealer had once resounded with the plinkplunk of Apollo’s lyre. From there he walked out onto a splendid terrace overlooking a great lawn dotted with low conical shrubs that could have started moving at any time, like gumdrops in a Czarist ballet.

  “Komodo! You son of a Jap. Come on down!” It was Albert Bullins, the mogul’s voice staccatoing through the heavy haze of honeysuckle and other aromatic transplants. He was wearing a nineteenth-century British field commander’s uniform and had a pearlbutted rifle slung over his shoulder.

  “Mr. Bullins,” Komodo said, bowing.

  “Bully bitchin’ you could make it over!”

  “Mr. Bullins, it is to my great shame that I have as yet to apologize to you for the destruction of your beautiful automobile. I will do everything in my power to make proper restitution—”

  “What? You kidding?” Bullins bellowed. “Haven’t had so much fun since I shot Hemingway in the ass by mistake back in Rwanda. You see all those jackasses run for cover? You couldn’t duplicate that in million years.” Bullins turned and landed a heavy arm over Shig’s linen-clad shoulder, eliciting a bloodcurdling sneer from the odd boy. “Duke here and I been discussing an honest little test of eye-hand coordination. So if you’ll excuse us, I understand you and Bobby have some business.”