Tell her now, he screamed to himself. But he couldn’t bear to break the mood. Had her hand lightly brushed his? He stole a glance. Were those thinnest of lips formed into the faintest smile?
Back at the Traj Taj, after Ebi’s thinker fell in, he tried to tell her. They were in the kitchen, waiting for the tea to steep. Recalling the scene was torture. Why did he have to pull that packet out of the pocket of his black pajamas, pour the contents into the steaming water? Couldn’t he have guessed how silly it would seem, those massive heart-shaped balloons flying out of the tea cups like some Lawrence Welk extravaganza? “Magic flavor crystals,” he called them, with an asinine giggle. But he couldn’t stop himself. The sunlight was streaming through the calico curtains of the breakfast nook, spreading across the wood plank table, and Ebi was sitting there between them. The glorious normality seduced him, sent him into a revel of domesticity. A kiss on the cheek, out to work and play, presents under the tinseled tree. Husband. Father. The words themselves made Komodo weak. The shame of it! Sheila Brooks—another man’s wife, a married woman!
What was Ebi’s role in this, Komodo wondered. Who else could have concocted a walk through the Insta-Envir guaranteed to lead them past that brand-new growth of giant roses, which just happened to burst into full bloom as they approached? What scenario was Ebi attempting to arrange in her supposedly guileless head?
Komodo looked at the kudzu-banked freeway and replayed the day, his confusion mounting, turning to dread. How could Ebi know? How could she have remembered what happened that awful day by the Cloudcover? He’d been so careful to keep the horrendous events from her. Yet there was no doubt—Ebi knew! The reference to being surrounded by “water everywhere”—that might have been a guess, a poetic invocation of the womb. But what of her insistence about being born offshore and the description of going around and around? The details were there.
Fool! Komodo berated himself. How his previous sins returned to mock his current ones. Why hadn’t he told Ebi? Would it have been so difficult to drop the guise of the overbearingly cheerful benefactor, to tell the Truth, allow her the joy of calling him Father instead of that tortured Mister? A decade of useless, heartless deception, only to find out that she knew it all along. Recalled every last bit! She remembered her mother’s face . . . Kishi’s face.
“You okay?” Sheila Brooks asked, throttling to eighty-five.
“Some dust has flown in my eye.”
Could Ebi actually remember her Freshout Cry? It seemed impossible, but she wouldn’t say a thing like that unless she believed it to be true—unless it was true. Ebi was a scientist, a follower of the most precise of disciplines. She cared little for illusion, less for fantasy. Yet to remember one’s own Freshout Cry, to be able to summon it at will, to know exactly who you were, from the beginning to now—Komodo staggered beneath the immensity of the idea. “Waaaa!” How long had he searched for the merest hint of that same scream?
The Freshout Cry! The yelp from a blueskinned child, held upside down, slapped on the backside, the shriek of birth across the savannahs—the bugle blast of all beginnings, the clarion of Life itself. The most sacred of sounds. That’s how Budd Hazard described the Cry all those long, long, and lonely nights ago. Except that the Muse spread his net wide. According to Budd Hazard, the Freshout Cry was the Evolloo’s clapboarding cue, the common squawk that announced the fuse of Beam and Bunch, the confluencing clamor of which every baby’s first shout was nothing more—or less—than a celebratory echo.
To Komodo, the Freshout Cry was the soundtrack of Reprimordialization. He bugged the Fayetteville Tree branches with multidirectional mikes, pressed his stethoscopes against the curved glass enclosure. “If only we can record this Cry and gain the means to reproduce it,” he told Gojiro, “it might prove a tonal beacon, an aural clue toward the fulfillment of the solemn Vow.” He didn’t know what to expect. Who knew the tenor of things inside that crease in Time and Space—that Instant where Beam and Bunch came together and only Throwforwards dared to tread? Komodo was forever refiguring his gains and gauges, running them through oscilloscopic speakers so no woof or tweet would remain unexamined. Anything to catch Blip One. But, just as his cameras failed to grasp even the merest phantom of Change, Komodo’s tapes stayed blank. “Just one more tree fell in the forest we know not where, huh?” Gojiro commented one morning after still another newly minted Bunch of chickadees sat preening in the Fayetteville Tree. To which Komodo could only nod sadly.
Yet, inside that thinker, Ebi screamed “Waaaa!” Furthermore, she said she could do it “anytime”—that Sheila Brooks could do it too! Absolutely she could, Ebi said.
Komodo looked over at the Hermit Pandora. She was still talking about her father. Except now her mood was anguished, wrought up. Her words came in gulps, halting spasms. “Then they were after us, closing in. It seemed like every time we turned around there’d be that car, the gray one, following us. That’s when Dad started to get strange. Days went by, he wouldn’t talk, not a word. I thought he didn’t like me anymore. Then he said we had to go to Wisconsin. He had to see what was left, if anything was left—that’s what he kept saying, over and over—he had to find out if there was any trace. It was fall, nearly winter. I was so cold. He wrapped me in blankets, told me to be brave. We drove up icy roads, farther into the country. It was where he was born, he said, where he grew up—before they found out he was a genius and sent him to Europe.
“Finally we got to this overgrown field. He stopped the car and got out. It was real early in the morning. Dad just stood there, not saying a word, looking at the field for hours. ‘What are you looking for?’ I asked him. He turned to me with the saddest look on his face. ‘Nothing to offend His eyes,’ he said. ‘Nothing for Him to see. As if we’ve never been here at all.’ He told me that’s what his father always said. Then he started tearing at the weeds. Ripping them up. It was awful, I thought he was going crazy. Then he picked up this charred board, held it in his hands, and started to cry.”
She turned toward Komodo, her mouth twisting beneath her grotesque glasses. “He killed them . . . my father’s father. He killed his family. He did it because he thought God was disgusted with the world—that we didn’t belong in His sight! He burned the whole place to the ground so it would seem like they’d never been here, not even a trace. That’s crazy, isn’t it? That’s wrong, isn’t it?”
“Ms. Brooks . . .” She was going faster now, almost a hundred. She wasn’t watching the road, not at all.
“Tell me!”
“What?”
“That it’s wrong.”
“Yes, Ms. Brooks.”
“Yes what?”
“It’s wrong!”
“How do we know?”
“Ms. Brooks! Your father is . . . here! Look!” Komodo reached into his pocket, pulled out the page he’d torn from that Visions in Fission book. “Your mother painted this. It is exactly how your father stands, even now. Look!”
Sheila Brooks grabbed the reproduction of her mother’s X-ray painting. Instantly her hands came off the steering wheel, flew up to her face. “No!”
“But it is so! It is him.”
“No! It’s wrong!”
“What?”
“My mother saw it . . . wrong!”
There was nothing else to do once the little red Corvette began veering into that pickup with the NRA stickers. Komodo had to reach across her body, grab the wheel, flare the car up that off-ramp, out to that wide and mirthless boulevard. A few missed turns later, they were forced to squeeze left, into the underground parking facility of a huge shopping complex. That’s where they got surrounded by all those demonstrators.
“Save the Mall Darter! Transcendental lies must be thwarted!” the crowd chanted as they snake-slalomed between parking meters in the monoxide-thick garage. One seriously overweight teenager, draped with shawls that looked to be back numbers from Madame Blavatsky’s tag sale, crammed a leaflet through the Corvette’s open window. Skimming the li
terature, Komodo was quick to recognize the issues in the Mall Darter controversy. Apparently, the managers of the Oversoul Mall, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Transcendental Corporation of the Southland, in attempting to create “an ecospherically correct shopping environment” had stocked the complex’s interior waterway with several varieties of fish, primarily strains of the Mid-American snapnosed scooter and the bluetipped rock tummeler. These two animals crossbred, which caused quite a stir, especially after a team of naturalists validated Oversoul as the lone habitat of the new species, popularly referred to as the Mall Darter, owing to its propensity to lurch in either direction in response to the stimulus of fast-pitched pennies. Initially, this development was hailed by the mall owners. But the prodigious breeding capacity of the Mall Darter soon proved a problem. Cramped in their poured-latex tub, thriving in the chlorinated water, the fast-growing fish developed a cannibalistic trait. The steady accumulation of mauled and bloody darter carcasses kept customers away, resulting in the pullout of several key tenants. When another mall, the Gary Owens Presents, opened just one exit over, the parent company, seeking debt restraint, opted to restructure the property as a dual-use industrial park/pitch and putt.
As shouts of “Maintain the Habitat!” filled the parking lot, Komodo felt his mind wander. He thought of the darkened shopping center, its filtered air acrid with ammoniated floor cleaner, nothing moving save the rise and fall of the gently snoring night watchman’s chest . . . and then, in that undersized pool, a single snapnosed scooter, following an incomprehensible yet imploring compass, moved forward toward a lone rock tummeler. And then—resounding through the silent sneaker stores and shuttered game parlors: “Waaaa!”
Komodo’s reverie was soon shattered, however. Sheila Brooks was pushing a ten-thousand-dollar check, hastily made out to the Mall Darter Must Live Fund, into the hand of a young punker with chain saws tattooed onto his shaved head. “That okay? Can we go now?” she shouted hoarsely.
“Sure thing!” The stunned boy’s eyes bugged. He was beginning to clear a path for the Corvette but then stopped. “Hey, wait a minute. Shit! We got Sheila Brooks here!”
Almost immediately the plight of the Mall Darter was forgotten. Placards were abandoned as a swarm of protesters lurched forward, a crush of black leotards and gypsum cheeks. Everyone in that indoor parking lot had a terrible Apock Vision they wished to convey to the Hermit Pandora herself.
The chain-saw-headed boy tore up Sheila’s check. “Doesn’t matter!” he screamed, his features twisted against the Corvette’s windshield. “What good’s money with no banks? No banks, no stores, no nothing! Year Zero! That’s what I see: Year Zero! Fire and flames! Fire and flames shooting out of eyes like blowtorches! Sheila Brooks, listen! I see the End—every night!”
Her lipstick-smudged mouth was contorted into a frightful oblong. “Go away! What you think—it’s wrong! We’re better than that!” Still the crowd forged ahead, a sea of harrowed faces.
“Oblivion!” they shouted. “Oblivion!”
However, when Komodo turned back to Sheila Brooks again, she no longer seemed affected by her fans’ hysteria. She was looking into a stereopticon. It must have been in her purse, fallen out in the tumult. Komodo studied it. What she’d said back at the Traj Taj seemed accurate: Her stereopticon was remarkably similar to the picture holder Gojiro snatched from the flotjet tide all those years ago. Except, of course, for the image within. It wasn’t of a mom and dad on a lush hillside, beside the bluest lake, before the towering mountain with the diamond sparkle of snow upon its crowning top. No. This picture showed Joseph Prometheus Brooks and Leona Ross Brooks standing together. They were in the middle of a Valley. A Valley surrounded by red craggy hills, beneath a wide-open sky. And they’re smiling, happy. Brooks’s hand is on her belly. She’s pregnant!
Komodo’s head spun. Sheila Brooks . . . inside.
The crowd surged on, desperate to unburden their Doom upon the Dreamer of the Sad Tomorrow. But in the car there was only silence. Silence and heat. Komodo felt it, that terrible, familiar fire—until she started to scream.
Then: Varrooom. She gunned the motor, squealed the tires. The Sheila Brooks Club members flew away. In the distance, Komodo could still hear them yell. “The End . . . I’ve seen it . . .”
They were back on the freeway now. She didn’t need the speed anymore. Whatever potential terror might pass by, it could never get to her. Behind those forbidding goggles her eyes were fixed, straight ahead. Komodo sat beside her, said nothing. There was nothing left to say.
* * *
On they went, past Berdoo, out to Indio, Desert Center. Komodo felt as if his heart was about to break, watching Sheila Brooks’s hands tighten about the steering wheel. How awful, to see that terror on her blanched face, to watch it bully her across the landscape, yet remain aloof, unnamed, out of conscious range, never to be acknowledged or exorcised. Komodo thought he’d seen expressions like that before, many times, always on his birthday.
Every August 6, he’d sit by the Dish, watching the hibakushas. One by one, the stolid Bomb survivors rose from their folding chairs, stood behind the podium, bore their witness. The pointylipped woman said, “The sun was before me, but then there was no sun. It was a red ball of wax. I was seized, inexplicably, with the need to see if it was raining. I held out my hand and a drop of the sun fell on my palm, like a bloody tear.” Then came the man with the dark glasses, the one with the tic. “My fingernails were ripped out. They flew across the room like darts.” Another woman told how she saw her own shadow burned into the wall.
By that time, Komodo would be weeping, his head in his hands. “Why should I escape while they suffer?” he asked Gojiro. “Why am I not on that platform, sharing their pain?” The monster would respond, as was his reflex, with rage. “Every year the same stories! Ain’t there a Dean Martin roast on or something?” But then, more tenderly, the reptile would hug his friend. “You wouldn’t like it. They’d make you dress up, wear itchy clothes. You know how you hate itchy clothes. Come on, turn it off.”
But Komodo couldn’t. He had to keep on watching, looking at the faces from his devastated hometown, hoping for a clue as to who he was. One survivor in particular stuck in his mind; she was different, not a regular. She was younger, no more than forty, which would have made her a child when the Heater hit—six, no more. Yet she looked older, wearier than the rest. They put pancake makeup on her haggard face to cover the keloid scars, but that only made her look more ghastly. Speaking in a grinding monotone, she said she’d wanted to be a teacher, to “create a world where a child would feel happy. A pretty world.” But then the Bomb fell, so that was over, of course. “I saw something I knew I wasn’t supposed to see. I saw Hell. I shall never leave it.”
Komodo watched that woman’s face and found it impossible to imagine her saying anything else. The Heater had stolen all her other words. This seemed the greatest horror of the Bomb, Komodo sometimes thought, the way it consumed the minds of the living. It was as if the agony of the dead had been transferred to the minds of the survivors, remaining with those hibakushas to see, and resee.
So many times Komodo wished he could find that hibakusha, snap his fingers before her eyes, throw open the doors of that Hell in which she dwelled. But there was nothing to be done. The sad woman never returned to the Dish, no matter how many of Komodo’s melancholy birthdays passed by. Now Komodo peered across the interior of that little red Corvette and felt the same appalling impotence. Sheila Brooks was in Hell, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
The most hideous thing was that he wouldn’t, even if he could. There was no way Komodo would lift a finger to alter the course of that speeding sports car. The Triple Ring Promise prevented it. “She has a secret, a secret that she may not even know herself.” That’s how he’d pled his case, trying to convince Gojiro that Sheila Brooks’s dilemma might overlap their own, that light shed on one might illuminate the other. Now the words resounded with an awful i
rony, for there was no turning back. What was sworn was sworn in blood and fire. If Sheila Brooks was driving straight toward the Encrucijada, Komodo understood that he had no choice but to go along for the wrenching ride. He could not, would not, stop her. It was his most sacred vow.
The shame of it! Gojiro was right, Komodo knew then; there were limits to Cosmo, boundaries to self-dramatized Order. He had no business being in that little red Corvette. What was happening now was a private thing. It was between Sheila Brooks and her father and her dead mother. If he had any decency he would jump from that speeding car and dash himself against the black slab highway.
At least that’s what Komodo was thinking when he noticed that car behind them again. A gray Mercedes. Komodo thought he’d seen it earlier, before they turned off at the Oversoul Mall, the large, sleek Germanic automobile effortlessly keeping pace with the frantic accelerations of the Corvette. Now it was trailing them again, not particularly close, but there nevertheless.
“ . . . Every time we turned around there’d be that car, the gray one, following us . . .”
It was just then, with the moon rising higher in the giant sky, that she slammed on the brakes. Sand flew as the Corvette hairpinned across the median, hurtling between yuccas until it cracked into the wooly trunk of a Joshua tree.
“Ms. Brooks! Are you all right? A good thing we were wearing our seat belts. Their effectiveness in the reduction of highway fatalities cannot be overestimated. Did you swerve to avoid an injured animal?” Sheila Brooks did not answer. She’d already left the car.
When Komodo got out all he saw was the towering screen of the Desert View Motor Cinema. Gojiro vs. the Enigma-Inking Squid at the Rock of Knowledge! A long shot now: the leviathan bellowing, beating his withery foreclaws on his Triple-Ringed chest. Komodo paused to watch. It was involuntary. From the earliest of times, even the slightest glimpse of his friend would cause Komodo to stop, be stirred.
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