Gojiro

by Mark Jacobson

  “The Beam! It comes from oil!”

  On the monitors, the well spurted again, black fluid spewing to the stark sky. Stiller’s plan was all too plain: He’d used his position and the secrecy surrounding Joseph Brooks to quietly pilfer the Valley’s lode and then got his lawyers to trump up that specious Native Lands Act case on behalf of the Echo Man as a fallback, so he could keep on stealing. An ingenious scheme, to be sure, but a scheme nevertheless. In the end, just another tawdry caper. Even at this late date, Komodo could not help but feel sorry for Stiller. Why would a man who once seemed capable of undertaking Life’s great gambits settle for something so paltry? What base instinct could have possessed him to dispassionately siphon the Beam itself from the sacred geologies, to shunt it into profane refineries, brand-name pumps, and combusting engines so that Hope might be blown choking and pointless out the ends of a billion exhaust pipes? Kleptomancer! It was difficult to imagine a more heinous crime.

  Komodo looked at the Dishscreen, watched that Equal Sign dissolve. “He’s murdering my friend!”

  Except then: Boom! On the monitors all that could be seen was the flying debris, those roustabouts staggering through the dust, their faces dusked like Jolson. Stiller got it bad. His hair standing on end, his suit shredded, he groped through the swirling grit like a demented pilgrim, irredeemably lost in the maelstrom of his own making. Probably he never even saw those crazy Atoms running back and forth, yowling triumph. They always loved a good explosion.

  “Too late!” Komodo cried, turning back to the Dishscreen. The Beamic energy sustaining the monster’s lastmost neural coupling flared one last time, embered, faded away. Stiller’s offending shaft had pierced through the Beam’s heart, dealt the Font a fatal blow. “My own true friend . . . you are dying. I cannot help you.”

  Except right then, Sheila Brooks came lurching across the White Light Chamber. “That Indian, he told me I would see! He said this would do it. Take it!” She crammed the black vial into Komodo’s hand.

  Komodo held the Echo Man’s flask up, watched the dark fluid inside flow from side to side. “Blood . . . blood from the earth! The Varanidid’s blood—the Black Spot.”

  “What?”

  “Something he always dreamed of.”

  Komodo wedged the cork stopper from the small container, set it down beside his beakers and bunsens. With the utmost care, he grasped the Goldplate Pill between his fingertips. The pellet fit perfectly within the mouth of the vial. Komodo guided it down until it was completely immersed in the black fluid.

  “Leap, my own true friend . . . leap into the Black Spot.”

  It took a moment, a horrible forever. But the image bled back onto the screen. That 90 Series neuron, short-circuited so long ago, had been resuscitated yet again. Komodo turned to embrace Sheila Brooks. But she wasn’t beside him anymore. She was back in front of those monitors, staring at her father.

  “It was fun, you know, riding around together. I didn’t make that up. We had a lot of fun before they came and took him away . . .” She was crying now. “He looks so lonely out there, all by himself. Why didn’t he try to . . . call me up or something, you know? I could have kept his secret. Nobody had to know. Damn it!” She began beating on the monitor screens with her fists.

  Komodo came near to comfort her, but she pulled away. “You don’t know what it’s like, not to know who you are . . . where you come from.”

  “But I do.”

  She was crying harder now. She looked back at her father. “Why’s he out there? What’s he trying to see?”

  Komodo put his arms around her, held her tight, tried to make her feel safe. “What you see. That same thing.”

  “But what’s that?”

  “Ms. Brooks, please listen. There are certain things I must tell you.” Komodo glanced up at the Equal Sign now blazing on the Dishscreen. “You see, once, very long ago, my friend had a Muse, who we called Budd Hazard. In our beginnings, when we were all alone in a cold dark place, Budd Hazard pointed the way for us, turned us toward the Light. However, it is only in the past few days that I have come to truly understand much of what he said. For instance, the Tenacity of Genes and Dreams: ‘Dreams and Genes, it’s them that stitch the seams.’ That’s what Budd Hazard said. Ms. Brooks, did you notice that crook in Ebi’s eyebrow?”

  Sheila Brooks blew her nose, nodded.

  “So many times, over the years, I would steal a peek at that crook. There was a special angle to it that gave me so much pleasure; I never knew quite why. Ms. Brooks—once I was like you. All that I knew was taken from me, everything that I was. These things have now been returned to me. I’ve reached back to my beginnings. And now I know the source of that crook in Ebi’s eyebrow. It came from my own mother—all those years, without knowing so, I saw my mother in Ebi. Somehow, across the great abyss, an exploded generation, that crook persisted.”

  “Ebi’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. She was my daughter. I could not say that before.”

  “I knew it. I don’t know how, but I did.”

  Komodo squeezed her tighter. “Ms. Brooks, there is much that must be accomplished in a short time. We must adhere to Budd Hazard’s teaching, we must demonstrate the Tenacity of Genes and Dreams. We inherit more than the simple helix coil from those who gave us life. We take on their aspirations, their hopes and wishes . . . their delusions as well. Ms. Brooks, your mother came to this Valley and dreamed of your father standing at its center. Just as he is right now. That same vision lives inside you—it always has. Your mother’s own unfinished vision! You are the only one who can complete it. We must get it out of your head. It is the only chance—Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision. The movie must be made!”

  Sheila Brooks wailed. “But how? What do you want me to do?”

  “Are you afraid of needles, Ms. Brooks?”

  “You mean shots?” Suddenly, there was a wariness to her voice.

  “Not exactly.” Komodo reached into his pajama pocket and pulled out a four-inch probe. “I’m sorry I’ve not yet developed a more sophisticated method. The hookup will be subcutaneous in the parietal.”

  “The what?”

  “The forehead.”

  “You’re gonna stick that knitting needle in my head?”

  “Just under the skin. It would be a three-way process, a line between the Goldplate Pill, yourself, and this machine.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This is a radio. Quite an old one. It was designed by my father, in Hiroshima. He believed it might enable him to speak with other species. I am not certain if he ever achieved his goal. I think not. He bequeathed it to me before his death. However, some time later, I lost it. It has only recently been recovered. Ms. Brooks, nothing remains of my friend save a single neural coupling. The function of that coupling is to receive cries for help. Supplications. There is one supplication, a special one, the one you wrote at the bottom of your letter summoning us here, that I believe is essential to my friend’s survival. I think this machine contains unique properties that will enable you to reach him.”

  Sheila Brooks ran her stark white hand over the box’s singed surface. “Your father made it?”

  “Yes, he was a great inventor. I am but a mere shadow of him. I feel by using his invention in this way, I am satisfying his quest.”

  Then she looked away, to the monitors. “But what about my father? What’s it gonna do for him?”

  * * *

  She made a joke before it started. “Kiss a sleeping lizard on the lips, make him a prince? Why not? It’s all in a day’s work for the Hermit Pandora of Hollywood.” Then she lay down on the White Light Chamber floor, alongside Komodo’s father’s radio and the vial containing the Goldplate Pill.

  “Are you ready, Ms. Brooks?” Komodo asked, handing her the stereopticon. She nodded, squeezed his hand. How he wished to embrace her then. But there was no time. As soon as she glimpsed the image inside the viewer, the vision started up.
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  Komodo was at the Dishscreen, checking for signs of Quadcameral activity, when he heard it. His father’s radio—its crystal connections were hissing, spitting. One after another the heavily corroded inner workings began to pop. The stress was too much for the old transmitter. It was burning out.

  Sheila Brooks’s vision was starting. “Mom! Dad!” she shouted, her face a mask of familiar terror. Stunned, Komodo watched the smoke pour from his father’s radio. Should he unhook her from the box now, right in the middle? He couldn’t decide. On the Dishscreen, the 90 Series neuron was becoming unstable once more. Komodo tore at his face. “I’m going to kill them both!”

  But then he felt the heat. The Triple Ring grillework he’d reaffixed to the radio’s speaker was starting to glow. Komodo peered at the fiery concentrics, stood in their light.

  It came back to the Triple Rings, as everything always did.

  It was a funny thing, too, because when they left Radioactive Island to come to America, Gojiro asked Komodo what he would do should they be unsuccessful in their quest to fulfill the Promise. “Like, if we don’t get Identified, and after I’m snuffed.” Komodo thought for a moment and said likely he’d enter a life of contemplation.

  “Just think? About what?”

  “About the Triple Rings,” Komodo said forthrightly.

  It was a vocation Komodo sometimes considered, disappearing deep within Asbestos Wood to become an itinerant monk. It would be a quiet but fruitful life, he imagined, meditating upon the Evolloo and the role of the Triple Rings within it. Now, however, he rejected this option. He could never allow the Triple Rings to recede to mere abstraction. He needed those perfect arcs alive. He needed them raw, savage, burning into his flesh.

  The Triple Rings opened an aperture amid the gloom of that White Light Chamber. Komodo peered through. Again, he saw what the Beam had shown him—what happened on that clear, warm morning when his parents put him in the hole. He saw it again, and this time understood what his mother meant when she said, “Long be your line, my sweetest son.”

  The Triple Rings told him what he needed to know. They told him he’d done more than survive that exceedingly bright morning the Heater ripped through all continuity. When those Rings flew toward him, they brought a new logic, another way to be. No wonder he’d slept all those years. Transfiguration can be arduous, it takes time to assimilate.

  The words passed Komodo’s lips: “I am a Quadcameral. I have always been. Quadcameral and Throwforward.”

  It would, of course, change everything. It already had.

  Then Komodo bowed to the Triple Rings. He thanked them not only for the revelation of his destiny, but also for the repose with which to perceive it. For no matter how byzantine and beleaguered the antic Cosmo became, the Triple Rings remained the center of the cyclone, the crystalline, unshakable eye, steadfast against the encroach of Chaos. To return to them was to touch home base, affording the assurance and courage to go on.

  Komodo went on. He looked at the singed hulk of the radio his father had made and smiled. The gray box had come a long way, but now its work was done. Gently, Komodo moved it from its spot and lay down in its place. Then he took the two wires, one that led to Sheila Brooks and one attached to what remained of Gojiro, and forced the strands into his forehead.

  Three Rings

  WAS HE DEAD? Was death what the Goldplate Pill dealt? The monster couldn’t say. He had no claim to know dat about Dis. Sure, the poster nailed on the sheriff’s wall says “Wanted: Dead or Alive”—no paying off on in-between. But who’s to tell where one stops and the other starts? Is the demarcation hard and fast, so that a degree either way—212 or 32—pushes you to water, steam, or ice? Or is it possible to be in several states at once, like a zard poised at the fourcornered point where Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona collide, a claw across every line? Could it be that “living” and “dying” are just bureaucratic shorthands, syntactical shams invented by quota-driven medics itchy for the bag and tag? Tell me: They slam the morgue drawer behind your head, does that mean you’re dead? Who knows? Bigger than Life, Death, hard to get the specs on.

  Not that the monster had wads of time to spend on these questions subsequent to submitting himself to the Pill. The reaction was too rash and blitzing, a sensurround to shock every scope. It’s a bit o’ schizo, okay, tom peeping at the Big Bang of your own self. The reptile saw the ever-expanding array and said, “Geez, a Milky Way of me.”

  It didn’t hurt, not a bit. Throughout his molecular diaspora, all Gojiro felt was release. Indeed, if a mutant’s nothing but an endless stalemate on Mendel’s tic-tac-toe board, the Goldplate Pill took the role of a tentyard preacher; it broke the crutch of yesterday’s paralyzing paradigm across a knee and screamed, “Walk!” To long, skinny molecules mashed flat and coughing in the sootcaked smokestacks in Birmingham, it said, “Run free!” To particles shackled white and glossy within PR sheets handed out by flacks, it shouted, “Liberty!” To polyester nodules needlerammed in the sweatshops of Guatemala City, it said, “Don’t look back!”

  “Adiós arm,” the monster remarked with particular detachment as his withery upper-right appendage vanished from his ebbing torso. “Check you later, leg.”

  It was easy, letting go. What else was he to do? Ride herd on those fleeing elements, hound them back into his in-no-way-OK corral? He had no right, no claim. Unbolted from that Superfortress of his unending misery, those atoms became free agents. He could not deny them what the Goldplate Pill offered: the clean slate, the new deal.

  Going, going, but still not gone. Because, really, what’s the big deal to lose a body? Nine out of ten spiritual professionals agree: The body is the rent-a-car of life. Crash it into the side of a semi-truck, leave it in flames, who gets bent out of shape? Hertz? No. It’s the soul—the soul you got to shake! The soul’s the Continuum’s Krazy Glue. You want to bust the bearings of samsara’s ever-churning treadmill, you’ve got to take the soul off the Line.

  Except Gojiro didn’t believe in souls. Never did, wasn’t about to start now. Still, looking through nonexistent eyes and seeing nothing, he wondered: Why am I still here? Something was holding him, lashing him to his next-to-defunct self. But what could it be? What part of himself would cling resolutely to Life when the rest was so pleased to leave?

  Suddenly, he was moving. Being pushed. Back. That Beam! The monster didn’t get it. How could the Beam take hold of what did not exist and hurtle it back through time yet again? Then he heard the thump; a heartbeat across Eternity. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  “Mom!” He was inside that egg again, hatching out, burrowing up . . . But wait, there were others there beside him—two others! One on either side, fighting through the blackness with him, fighting to the light.

  And then he heard that Cry. The Cry that pierces sleep, that can’t be shut out. But not one . . . three! Three cries! “Waaaa!” Three Freshout Cries together!

  Someone was talking now. “Ms. Brooks! Can you see yourself?” It was Komodo, again in Hiroshima, again being born. But what was he doing talking to Sheila Brooks?

  “Wait a minute,” Gojiro called. But there was no waiting, no stopping. He could feel himself slipping down, coming out, then looking up, through blurry eyes, and seeing faces above him. Smeared and blotched at first, but then clear. Brooks! Joseph and Leona Brooks, smiling down at their daughter!

  Then there were more voices, dry, authoritative. “To the New Era!” Victor Stiller said, a champagne bottle exploding in his hands. The rest were cheering now, those European faces—wintery even here in the desert, in the middle of July. They all wanted to see the baby, the child whose entry into the world came at the stroke of midnight of such an auspicious day, to such auspicious people.

  After that they went away, because they were very busy. There was so much left to do, so little time in which to do it. Just the two of them remained. Brooks (had he ever been that young?) and Leona, the great pitch of reddish hair framing her green eyes. “Sheila,�
� she said, her voice both soft and thunderous. Her name! Hearing her name for the first time! “You’ve come in time. You will see . . .”

  Then it was dawn and they were standing in the desert chill. Leona was wrapped in her bloody sheets, barely able to stand, and Sheila, in her father’s arms. Cradled in her father’s arms. They were walking across the Valley floor, to the dark tower ahead, the gadget hanging down.

  “Get those people out of there!” came the call. It was Grives, screaming in terror. Then another shout. “Sir! It’s Mr. and Mrs. Brooks . . . they’re leaving the forward bunker.”

  Grives again: “Brooks! You’re crazy! Get out of there!”

  And Victor Stiller: “Leona! Joseph! What are you doing? Go back! . . . My God! They’ve got the child out there with them!”

  She remembered it—now it all came back! She looked up into her parents’ faces, what bliss. What was all the shouting about? Wasn’t this the most normal sight she’d ever hope to see: her parents kissing, embracing, looking down at her with pride? She was only six hours old.

  She remembered it! The terrible wind across her face, the fire, her mother’s eyes raising up, a tremendous glow upon her forehead. “Yes . . .”

  Gojiro tried to turn away, but there was no choice. He was in her body, he’d have to see what she saw: her mother walking, stumbling ahead, forward to that seethe.

  “Leona!” It was Brooks’s voice, shouting after her. “It’s wrong! That’s not Him, not Him at all!” Then the monster felt Brooks’s arms tighten, trying to pull his daughter’s eyes away. Away from It. Away from Hell.

  But the shock knocked him backward, his grip slipped. She flew up, out of his arms. It wasn’t more than a second before he grabbed hold of Sheila again, managed to shield her eyes. But she’d already seen too much. She saw her mother walking ahead, into the flash, a melting silhouette.