“Come on, Mr. Brooks, let’s put a few things on the table here. F’r instance, I’d like to know why there’s been a mess of seismic irregularities in the area of the abandoned test sites. Also, I’m wondering about the two-thousand-percent increase in radioactive levels in that same twenty-mile radius.”
Stiller stood up, surprise on his face. Obviously he’d been expecting another kind of data. “Gaylord, where do you get these numbers from? Why wasn’t I informed of this study?”
“And have you squash it like every other one? This old soldier isn’t that stupid, not yet, anyway.”
“Let me see that report.”
“Not so fast.”
“But it sounds like testing.” Stiller wiped his forehead with a silk handkerchief. “There’s not supposed to be any testing out here.”
“Now, isn’t that a fact?” Grives glowered.
Stiller regarded Brooks with widening eyes. “Joseph, if there is something—”
“I’ll do the interrogating!” Grives was right next to Brooks now, his eyes slitted, saliva flying. “You’re cooking something up out here, aren’t you, Mr. Brooks? I want to know what it is, and I want to know now! Talk, you—” Grives’s hands rose in front of him. For a moment it seemed as if he was about to take hold of Brooks, throttle him.
“Gaylord! You know his condition.”
“Don’t give me that. You can hear every word I say, can’t you, Brooks? Confess, or I’ll have my men rip this place apart.”
Gojiro looked down from his suctioned perch, acknowledged the irony of the situation. Here was Grives blaming Brooks for those shaking seismatics and big fallout numbers when it was obvious enough who was freaking the Geigers. “Little old me.” It was no surprise. Hadn’t Komodo warned the reptile to stop pacing around the White Light Chamber and belching those gratuitous blasts of Radi-Breath?
Yeah, it was a real scaleslapper okay, Brooks taking all that heat. Probably, once upon a time, nothing would have tickled the monster more. Except now he wasn’t laughing. Gojiro knew the hate on Grives’s face; it was the same hate he himself had once felt toward Brooks. It was an ugly thing, wiping away all mirth.
“All these years of spending money to protect this madman, when all along we should be protecting against him!” Grives signaled to his men. “Go to it boys. Whatever he has out here, we’ve got to find it.”
“That is not your decision, General!” Stiller was on his feet now. “You have no authority when it comes to Mr. Brooks.”
“I’m taking the authority, Doctor.”
“On what grounds?”
“On the grounds of national security. On the grounds that it is the right of every human being on this planet to be guaranteed a chance to live their lives free of whatever this man has inside his head. On the grounds that it is incumbent on every right-thinking individual to oppose Evil.”
Stiller rolled his eyes. “Not that again!”
Grives leveled his gaze. “Victor, tell me one thing. Have you ever lost a night’s sleep over what he did? Has it ever ruined a single meal for you? Have you ever been sitting with your wife, relaxing, watching the Early Show maybe, and suddenly you have to drop her hand and run to the bathroom because you get sick just thinking of it? I bet not. I bet it doesn’t bother you at all. Well, it bothers me. I remember . . . what he did!”
That’s when the monster went off, riding the sound of those voices he’d heard so many times before, at night, in his sleep. He rode those voices all the way back to Lavarock, bellydowned amongst his type, watching that silver plane land on the water. And again, the three of them were walking through the surf: Grives and Stiller, then Brooks. His old dream, the back pages of a life he always assumed to be of his own writing. Never real.
Below, he could still hear the argument, the rising volume.
Grives: “We saw what he did here, yet we took him to that island, gave him another chance.”
Stiller: “These things happen in science; mistakes are made. We’ve been over this a hundred times! It was a miscalculation. A twenty-five-year-old miscalculation.”
Grives: “As if the passing years could ever dull the crime! Twenty-five thousand years can’t erase what he did. Forty-seven times the prescribed payload—forty-seven times! That was no mistake, that was murder! Premeditated murder. The only miscalculation was that he didn’t kill us all—which is what he wanted to do!”
The monster heard this on a separate track. The rest of him was back on Lavarock, a youngest zardplebe once more, trying to heed the Black Spot’s call, kept from the mantle of age-old Identity by Joseph Brooks’s gaze.
Below, Stiller and Grives kept yelling. But on that ceiling, Gojiro was leaping . . . higher and higher . . . to the apex . . .
It was Brooks who brought him back, his voice low, like a sound from down a well.
“That was no miscalculation.”
Gojiro looked down, watched Brooks grow, his lank body unfolding in hinged segments like a massive insect burst from an invisible wrapper. It was incredible the way the old man’s neck seemed to unfurl, pushing the great white face, suddenly infused with blood, high into the air. He’s schagging, the reptile noted with dazed wonderment, making clinical reference to the lizard proclivity to body inflation. Schagstellunging was the Teutonic term those biologists used; nothing wrong with that, but if you believed their monographs, you’d conclude schagging was an everyday occurrence, invoked liberally by zards for everything from turf war to amour. Gojiro knew different. His dreams of Lavarock told him that to schag was to step out, announce yourself, make a statement of your own. This was no little thing for those who lived within the aegis of the Bunch, sanctified in the collective flow of the Magnificent Matrix. For them, to differentiate was to challenge the sacred uniformity of the Line. To go against every grain. You schag, you better be serious. You schag, you better be right.
“That was no miscalculation,” Brooks said again, growing bigger every second. “Technically it was perfect, in every aspect of planning and execution. The error was one of commitment, not performance. I believed forty-seven times the projected yield to be sufficient. But it was not. The payload was too weak.”
Brooks shifted his raven gaze toward Stiller. “You never understood that, Victor. You never understood any of it. We failed.”
For the first time, sweat beaded on Stiller’s forehead. “What do you mean, Joseph? How did we fail?”
“He didn’t notice. That’s the goal. It always has been. To make Him look at us. So we might see His face.”
Grives exploded. “Madman! Blasphemer!”
Brooks kept on. “Forty-seven times the projected payload was not enough. I understand that now. If it had been a hundred times it still wouldn’t have been enough. There is only one thing we can do to get His attention. We must threaten all creation. We must harness the power to extinguish every light, to obliterate every blade of grass. Ultimate destruction is the only path to ultimate redemption. He will show His face when everything is at stake, and only then.”
The monster felt a shiver, nearly lost his grip.
Down below, Brooks was done. His statement made, he seemed to deflate, go limp once more. A sickly silence overcame the room for an instant. Then Grives screamed, “I’ll see you burn, just the way you sent her out to burn! Your own wife!”
Gojiro looked down, watched the ruckus below with curious detachment. For when Grives ran at Brooks it might as well have been happening on a beach slated for destruction, before a crowd of unsuspecting lizards, in a dream. Except this time, instead of driving Brooks into the soon-to-be-poisoned surf, Grives knocked him out of the ranch house door, into the air of the Encrucijada.
Gojiro released himself, fell fifteen feet, scurried after them. When the monster reached the dusty yard, Grives was on top of Brooks, pounding him with a fist. With his free hand, the general pointed to the horizon. To the very spot where Brooks always searched. “I close my eyes at night and I see it!” Grives screamed. �
��Right out there! How could you let her do it?”
Then, his face a mask of anguish, Brooks emitted a single word. “Wrong!” With one great spasm, he flipped Grives over, throwing the heavy man onto his back.
Brooks stood up straight, brushed the grit from his black suit. “She did what she thought was right. She thought she was going toward Him. But she was wrong.”
Brooks turned away, stood again behind the stone wall.
Gojiro skirted along the rocky ground to his observation spot in front of the ranch house. Brooks was searching, as always, but now a tear ran down his face.
The Escape
KOMODO BURIED EBI ON THE LEE SIDE OF A HILL behind the Traj Taj. There was no question about where the grave should be. Ebi picked the spot herself, about a week before, in her elegant, offhand way. The two of them were taking a walk, stealing for themselves one of those moments during which nothing was ever said. In the absence of those words only love, implicit and fiercely tender, poured forth.
They walked the back acres, where the Insta-Envir thrived, through the foams of chemofragrance, the exuberance of the neo-fecundity weaving its particular luxuriance about them.
By and by, they came upon a bald spot where nothing grew. Ebi bit her lip and stopped. “This place seems neglected,” she said, momentarily pained. From anyone else it might have been an idle comment, but Komodo caught the quiet purpose in Ebi’s words. He understood her bond with the misbegotten soil in which she toiled, the way she thought of herself as extension of the earth, interchangeable with it. And how, if a place was barren, she took it as a personal mission to make it bloom.
He dug her grave with a rusted shovel from an old tool shed. It was unorthodox. On Radioactive Island, when an Atom died, the procedure was to call everyone together, light candles, make a procession of banging drums and tinny trumpets, a loud yet stately composite of a New Orleans secondline and Chinese New Year. Still, Komodo found the ceremony’s unchanging repetition irksome. Death should be as idiosyncratic as life, he thought. But on Radioactive Island; there were so many funerals. It was better, making them all the same. That’s how he should have buried Ebi, Komodo knew. He should have followed form, called assembly, rung the somber gong, let the wailing fill the night.
But, in this final act, he couldn’t treat Ebi as he had the rest. “I’m weak, selfish and weak,” Komodo sobbed, digging Ebi’s grave, alone, unwitnessed save by those wretched residents of the Zoo of Shame. Glassy-eyed, they stood, watching Komodo cover Ebi’s coffin, never making a sound.
It wasn’t but a few moments after he’d packed the soil flat and hard that the first green sprigs peeked through. Komodo bent down, grasped one of the resinous sprouts and named it: Shaft grassine ebius. It was not the practice to utilize names of Atoms in the taxonomic process, but Komodo felt Ebi would not mind. Continuity, not the labels themselves, had always been her great concern.
Right then, a lancing mother-in-law tongue pronged from the Insta-Envir, tearing through Komodo’s black pajamas, nicking his skin. Strange, he thought, looking at the dot of blood on his fingertips. In all the years he’d spent in the thicket, no plant had ever caused him harm.
Then Shig was by his side. The two of them stood together for a moment, without speaking. They turned, exchanged a glance. Was there a bit of softness in the rigid boy’s eyes? Komodo wanted to fall into those wintry arms, but Shig pulled away. The glance was all he would allow. “There are many people outside, seeking information,” he said. “Your safety here is no longer assured. Contingency plans have been initiated.” Shig then said that Komodo had a midnight appointment, that he would have to leave immediately, by the back way.
* * *
Bobby Zeber was waiting for Komodo in a nondescript Toyota secreted behind a clot of plastic shopping carts at the far end of a Ralph’s Supermarket parking lot.
“I feel like I know you,” Zeber said, sending the car onto the vapor-lit boulevard. He was wearing an old leather jacket and a pair of jeans torn at the knee. The uneven light gave him a furtive aspect, deepening the pocks scattered across his cheeks.
“But you do, Mr. Zeber,” Komodo replied with cautious good will.
“No, not like that. From long ago. I wrote you a letter once. You know, letters to the Coma Boy. It was a class project, from the Weekly Reader, in between the articles about what to do about communism. The teacher said mine was the best letter in the class. It was very compassionate, she said. I had just gotten this new electric football game—I wanted you to come play it with me. I never understood why you didn’t write back. Stupid, huh?”
Twenty minutes later, at the bottom of Neptune View Lane, Zeber stopped, flashed his headlights twice. A parked car returned the signal. Then Zeber went ahead, turning at the Turret House gate. A broadfaced man with Latin features leaned out the window of the other car. Beside him, a stout black man dressed in a nylon jacket said, “So far, so cool.”
“Need some more coffee?”
“No more coffee, please! But you can empty this bottle.” The Latin held up a container filled with a yellowish liquid.
“You guys are disgusting,” Zeber smiled. “Appreciate this, man.”
“No problem.”
“Cops,” Zeber exhaled as he drove through the open gate. “If they think you’ve got the Power, you can get them to do anything.” The house was dark. Zeber led Komodo around to the beach side, past the contorted statues, and out onto a cement dock. At the end of the pier, they turned, looked back at the house.
Komodo gasped. Up there, a shadow framed in the same picture window where he’d first seen her, was Sheila Brooks.
“Beautiful night, huh, Mr. Komodo?”
“Yes, it is a full moon.” His breath was coming quickly.
Zeber lit a cigarette, leaned against the railing. “I come out here a lot when there’s a full moon. Moon, rhymes with swoon . . .” Zeber let out his sad laugh. “You think the moon’s the same, even after Buzz Aldrin crunched his rubber boot across its face? You think Shelley could still write a poem about a place that’s got a plaque on it signed by Richard Nixon?”
Komodo watched that window. She was out of the shadows now. A light fell across her face, a small, roundish pool of illumination. The stereopticon! She was holding it in front of her, at arm’s length.
“What do you think?” Zeber asked again. “Do you think that by obsessively following our aspirations, we inevitably wind up defiling what we most revere?”
Komodo’s eyes stayed on the window. “I think the heart’s space is infinite, ever changing, and that Inspiration, no matter how battered, can adapt even to regions thought to be most defiled, leeched of Light. Yes, I believe there can be poetry, even in a world on which Nixon wrote his name.”
Then he felt the heat. It was beginning, up in that window. “Ah!” came her first shout.
“The Hermit Pandora of Hollywood at work,” Zeber said quietly. “But you know that already, don’t you, Mr. Komodo.”
Komodo began to stammer, but Zeber waved him off. “It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything. I know. I know that you know, anyhow. I have, ever since that night she was at your house.”
Zeber dragged hard on his cigarette. “It’s pathetic, you know, all these years those idiots said I ruled her, that I made her do what I wanted. But it was always her. Her idea . . . from the beginning. That’s what she said when she woke up that first time, talking about the Tidal Wave—‘Wouldn’t this make a great movie?’ She had it all down—the whole plot, the dialogue, even the pitch. A total package.
“Hey, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like she had to twist my arm. Sure, I could have stayed in New York, been a starving artist. But it was a different time. I had the idea that movies were going to change the world. I put my Bolex in my backpack and rode across the Brooklyn Bridge thinking, I’m going to change the fucking world. Nebraska, Colorado, Nevada—I never noticed them. Then there she was: this incredible creature, falling right into my lap, saying, ‘
Please take these dreams, make Art out of them—real Art. Get rich and famous while you’re at it. Do it, or I’ll kill myself.’ ”
He laughed again. “Out of all the sweaty little careers in Hollywood, she’s got to walk into mine.”
Sheila Brooks was beginning to shriek. A terrible high-pitched scream. Komodo began to go toward her, but Zeber grabbed his arm. “Don’t.”
“But . . .” Komodo tried to break free.
Zeber gripped tighter, drew Komodo’s face close to his. “Nothing you can do now. She’s getting close, closer all the time. That’s how it works. You have to know that. All those movies, those millions of dollars—it was just repression. Substitute images. You see, there’s something in there. She looks at it, and it looks back—whatever it is. Except it’s too big, too much for her to take in all at once. So her head invents something else. Tidal waves, rocket ships full of doomed executives, anything to throw into the breach. But now, she can’t avoid it anymore, can’t think of anything to protect herself. It’s too close.”
Sheila Brooks screamed again. Komodo jumped. “I can’t just sit here!”
Zeber pushed Komodo back. His face was full of rage and sorrow. “How do you think I feel?”
Then, quieter: “I always hoped she’d wake up one morning and it would be gone. Like a bad cold. Then, maybe we’d stay here, become regulation Industry scum—eat lunch, buy West Hollywood real estate. Or maybe we’d get on the bike, blow out to Phoenix or Little Rock, buy a doublewide, sit in front of the cable, twelve-packs and cheez snacks, bounce checks, have bad teeth. Be happy. But that’ll never happen. It won’t go away.”
The heat seared Komodo’s cheek. She was screaming louder. “Mom! Dad!”
Zeber kept talking, his dark eyes boring into Komodo’s head. “There was no chance, until now. Until you came along, Mr. Komodo.”
“Me?”
“You said it yourself, at Albie Bullins’s party. About the Way Out. The earned arf. What more can anyone hope for in this life? For me, Mr. Komodo, you’re the earned arf.”
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