Gojiro (15 page)

Komodo viewed the ever-prolific Fayetteville Tree as a beacon of hope. “Oh, my own true friend,” he said to Gojiro, “once again Budd Hazard’s law has guided us. Reprimordialization is indeed the Engine of the Evolloo. New life is being created each day in this seemingly forlorn jar.” Then, when the monster only shrugged, Komodo said, “Do you not see the great opportunity presented us? Our Promise calls for the establishment of a New Bunch to live upon our Island. If only we can isolate this Change, this Instant of Reprimordialization, then perhaps we might peer into the means of our own salvation.”

After that, Komodo set up his cameras like some Muybridge gone Captain Video—720 at the height of the investigation, one long and wide lens for every half degree in his circular surveillance pattern—around the bottle containing the Fayetteville Tree. Each unit was equipped with Komodo’s customized high-speed shutter, up to ten thousand frames per second, capable of producing the slowest of motion. Whatever happened in that tree, Komodo was taking no chances on missing it.

But it didn’t work. Every morning Komodo would come out to the Zoo of Shame and count the new species pacing herkyjerky on the Tree’s dungcaked branches. There were always more; one representative of the somber-browns had crossed with a showy orange to produce a toffee. New forest-greens abounded. However, when he developed his films, nothing could be seen. No moment of conception, no Instant of Reprimordialization.

“I don’t get it,” Gojiro fumed, barely resisting kicking the glassed-in tree. “One minute we got 57 varieties, the next there’s 58 and it’s like, all invisible?”

Komodo rubbed his chin. “It is very puzzling.”

Shortly thereafter, Komodo suggested that the Instant of Reprimordialization might “reside in a hidden zone, a realm out of time, out of space, a zone that cannot be recorded.”

Gojiro rolled his eyes. “Wow, you mean like another dimension or something, where Vaseline’s on the lens and the Stockhausen music starts up?”

Komodo only shook his head. But he did not give up. Not Komodo. Call it dementia, call it faith, but as mentioned before, Komodo’s innate capacity for believing expands when he’s confronted with the apparently insoluble. The more that Instant of Reprimordialization resisted his attempts to render it part of the temporal world, the more he became convinced not only of its existence, but of its sacred indispensability.

In place of the photographic record, Komodo substituted the Reprimordial Scenario. Much of this hinged on a shadowy reference once made by Budd Hazard to “a special Breed inside a Breed, those who journey to the outside of What Is: the Throwforwards.” The engendered imagery was full of awesome terror: two small and insignificant entities, emissaries of a Bunch so overloaded with Acquired Traits as to be struck autistic, moving toward each other, ever closer. They don’t know why they go, or how, only that they must, because deep within them lies the preservation of their race. Closer and closer they come, until they enter the voidscape of Change, that private domain where they must meet and create something New, separate from what had gone before. Just thinking of such a trek made Komodo and Gojiro weak. Sometimes they’d look through the thick glass at the Fayetteville Tree, scan the feathered faces there and wonder: Which ones are the Throwforwards? Which one of the blue-greens possesses that one extra chromosome, that as-yet unimagined adaptation that will become kinetic only when linked with the exact opposite chromosome hidden in the helixes of a light-yellow—and when you put them together, you got an aquamarine. Which were chickadee Adams and Eves, the ones who would push the outside of What Is, come into that void that is out of time, out of space and, once there, create new Life?

“That chartreuse over there, he’s got a randy look,” Gojiro said quietly after crossing the Zoo of Shame to join Komodo in front of the Fayetteville Tree. “I take him and that magenta. Give me four to one, you got yourself a bet.” Komodo did not respond. He looked pale.

“My own true friend,” he finally said, his face a haunted mask. “It was like a dream . . . a frightening, yet somehow beautiful dream. I felt Mr. Bullins’s car explode, and then it was as if all time had stopped and I was transported to a vast and distant place. It was a moment of suspended will. I went toward her as if I were being pulled by an unknown force, as if I had to reach her—as if everything depended on it. Oh, my own true friend, can you understand what it might be like to be in such a place?”

And Gojiro shuddered, because he did. He absolutely did.

* * *

The horror played inside the monster’s head always, a vicious loop.

The morning tide would be heavy on that long-past day, they knew. It never failed that whenever a Heater was shot off, whether thrummed deep beneath Nevada or cracked open like a glowing crown above Novaya Zemlya, Komodo and Gojiro felt the preseismic smack like a pair of old codgers rocking on a wooden porch who can tell, sure-nuf, next Tuesday it’s gonna rain. It welled up in their lymphatics, raged fetid blisters on their skins and leathers. Then they’d start bawling, crying and crying. It was a signal to watch the shorelines, since Komodo’s research indicated that the density of the flotjet flow was in direct proportion to the worldwide explo of Heaters. Whenever the fissions and fusions were busy, the shorelines of Radioactive Island bulked up big.

“Come on, my own true friend,” Komodo said that early morning, “we must go out to greet the newest immigrants to our Land.”

“Some fucking alarm clock,” Gojiro groaned, picking at the Macy’s parade-sized tumor ballooning from the side of his jaw. “How come they always got to blow these babies off before dawn? They ashamed to face the light of day, or they just want to knock off early, beat the traffic?”

The two of them trudged out to see what the current brought them. “There! What’s that?” Komodo gasped from his perch on Gojiro’s supraoc.

Squinting, Gojiro saw a ragged piece of land, singed and sawtoothed at its circumference. On either side were two barrel cactuses, and in the center a tall palm, its fronds dry and brown. Beneath the palm, barely visible, were two unmoving figures. Gojiro swallowed hard. People!

“Hurry,” Komodo screamed, grabbing his medicine bundle, “we must attend to them!” A moment later, Komodo astride his dorsals, Gojiro was butterflying through the heavy sea.

The tract steamed and smoked and was hot to the touch. Komodo had to wear syntho-booties just to walk upon it. “They are alive! Help me! We must get them back to shore.” That was when Gojiro saw them for the first time: a boy in his middle teens and a somewhat younger girl. Even as they lay there—silent, brownskinned, remote—it was clear that they had come from the same womb.

It was Shig and Kishi. Brother and sister, escaped from the Heater’s grasp on this hummock of palm desert, the first Atoms ever to come to Radioactive Island.

She was only fourteen then, six years younger than Komodo, but you’d never know. The Heater had aged her, twisted her features, turned them into the face of War, a thousand years of War. They got her back to shore, laid her down right there. Komodo pulled out his remedies and went to work, utilizing techniques picked up during all those years of keeping his Coma Boy ears open back on Okinawa.

“Your sister needs a transfusion,” Komodo shouted to Shig, but he just sat there stunned. Somehow, he’d avoided serious damage. Shock and exhaustion seemed his only maladies.

Komodo could waste no time; he rolled up his sleeves, jabbed a needle in his arm, ran a line to Kishi’s. Gojiro turned his head when the tubes went red. He couldn’t stand to watch Komodo pour himself into this unknown girl. More than blood was going in there, he knew, from the very first. It took what seemed like hours, and Komodo’s face went white. Gojiro feared that his friend was being bled dry. But just when it appeared Komodo had nothing more to give, Kishi began to stir.

From then on, Komodo cared for her. He brewed medicinals in his beakers and bunsens, but mostly he did it with his hands. His hands divined where Death lurked, doused it out, dispersing the darkest swarm with the lightest touch. For six weeks he tended her. Then, one day, she smiled, and the next she walked, and you could see she was more than a girl. She was next to being a woman, a very beautiful one. She had the whitest teeth, and the blackest hair, and the brownest skin. Komodo had kneaded the Heater’s terror from her, brought her back to life.

When the feeling first began, Gojiro imagined he was only jealous. As jealousy he could accept it, try to overcome it. Besides, it seemed perfect, Komodo being in love with Kishi, her loving him back. Why shouldn’t the two of them stroll the meadows of Vinyl Aire, stand serenaded by the dissonantly clashing rocks off Ba-lue Bo-livar Shore, Komodo holding her hand, in the most chivalrous of courtships.

It made sense, Gojiro thought, that Komodo should no longer wish to ride upon his back, that the two of them would cease to soar behind their sun. Hadn’t he himself railed against the lie of eternal boyhood? If his life with Komodo was to become no more than a yellowing page, a bittersweet turn of time, then so be it. He wouldn’t be one to try to push the past beyond its proper limit. What was would be.

As weeks turned to months, Gojiro saw Komodo less and less. He was always with Kishi. Sometimes Gojiro would hear him, telling her his poems, singing her his songs. The same songs they once sang down the ’cano to get them through those long, long and lonely nights. It was no big thing, listening in, Gojiro told himself, watching them through the spread of Insta-Envir. Komodo was happy, finally. That was cause for mutual celebration.

He just wanted to see what love was like. Some details stood out. How they’d laugh and then fall silent, then laugh again, the joke being beyond speech. Everything they did had an unconscious dynamic. They’d be lying there, then they’d jump into the water and swim, then they’d be lying on the beach again. There was no windy philosophy between them, none of the overheated intellectuality that so often bullied his own relationship with Komodo. That made sense too, the monster thought; Komodo no longer needed to forge artificial meaning from his fractured existence. “He doesn’t need Cosmo anymore, his world is complete,” Gojiro said to himself, watching the lovers.

It became his life, sneaking in the darkness, thirsting for glimpses of them. It seemed that he spent his every moment peering over the top of the ’cano, spying. It was then it started up, that gnawing inside him. An unknown sensation, inundating, frightening.

He tried to discuss the compulsion with Shig, for all the good it did. Even then the bizarre teenager was what he always would be: sullen, forbidding, obscure. Yet it seemed right that the two of them attempt some kind of relationship, so Gojiro tried. “I’m having trouble dealing with my attachments,” the monster offered one afternoon as Shig practiced his swordplay on Corvair Bay Beach.

“Me too,” was all Shig would say, stopping only to pluck a pair of Ray Bans from the water.

Obscene, seemingly unthinkable thoughts began to seize the reptile’s brainscan. He could think of nothing else but Kishi. It was as if his mind were impulsing a hideous message, daring his unwilling body to carry it out. He’d close his eyes and see her, then wake himself, horrified, revolted at his fantasies. “This is hell!” he screamed.

One night he saw them in the moonlight, Komodo’s arm placed so gingerly around Kishi’s back. “In
our
moonlight,” Gojiro muttered, dragging himself back down into the ’cano. He was a miserable thing; his leathers were without elasticity, his hyoid hung.

“I’ll leave. I’ll make my own way in my own world,” the monster exclaimed, his head filled with jaunty pictures of himself as a vagabonding Tom Joadish sort of zard, hitching and hoboing along the windswept highways and byways, a hard travellin’ song on his lips. He tossed a few personal items in a bag, among them that most primitive napkin holder fashioned from a distributor cap that was the first present Komodo had ever given him. He would go with no hard feelings, leave with only joy in his heart. His own true friend had reached happiness, and wasn’t that the true goal of the Triple Ring Promise?

I forsake Radioactive Island with a free and easy mind, he told himself, hoisting his bindle onto his shoulder. He paused on the beach to peer out into the distant Cloudcover, wondering what adventures lay on the other side.

But it was no good. Before he could place a foot into the foaming surf, that sensation was looming once more, commanding him. “Komodo, I need help! Komodo!”

But his friend did not answer.

That’s when he knew it was more than jealousy. Whatever malignancy consumed him, it exceeded any of the seven deadlies, was more than all of them squared. It was something utterly compelling, something beyond all self-control.

So he killed her.

He thundered across the land, possessed by an impossible demon. “I want her!” he bellowed, crashing through the contorted vegetation, ripping the tops from trees, mashing everything in his path. “Now!”

He caught up to them on the beach out by Past Due Point. Komodo knew. He sensed the madness welling up inside his friend. He and Kishi were already in the water, aboard that same inflatable raft that had carried him to the Island all those years before, feverishly pulling at the starter rope of a corroded outboard motor. “My own true friend! Please stop! You are not yourself!”

And, you know, maybe it holds up in court and maybe it doesn’t, but Komodo was right. Gojiro was not himself. In fact, as far as the monster knew, he wasn’t even in that water thrashing out toward the Cloudcover. He wasn’t anywhere near Radioactive Island. He was in a zone, seized by a bizarre hallucination. Inside a crazy world he’d never seen, never known.

He was in the middle of a great valley, its reddish walls lurching high above. He was little: a tiny zard again. And everywhere around him was Death. Giant animals—saurs? Were they really saurs?—fell to either side of him, lay writhing on the smoky ground. But he couldn’t stop, not for a moment. He had to go forward. As if
everything depended on it
. “Doom behind!” an undeniable voice inside his mind called out. Ahead:
her
. Her and a million more like her. A billion more, as many of her as could be seen in opposing mirrors, an unbroken chain snaking to infinity.