Gojiro (19 page)
Komodo tried to hold her. “Yes, the letter! Ms. Brooks, we must talk about the letter. Those words at the bottom of the letter . . . what do they mean?”
“What words?”
“Bridger of Gaps . . .”
She stood up straight inside that vacant fourth cameral, looked ahead, trancelike. “Bridger of Gaps . . . Linker of Lines . . .”
“Yes!”
“Defender of the Evolloo!”
“Yes!”
“No!” Whatever had come over Sheila Brooks, it left. “I’ve got to get out of this brain!” All of a sudden she had a gun. A stubby-nosed derringer. It must have been inside her pocketbook. Now she pressed it to her temple.
“Ms. Brooks! No!”
Komodo dove, knocking her sideways. She flew against the side of the Quadcameral model and went through the tear-away fiber, sprung right out of the brain, sure as she was born.
Komodo looked at the hole with an open mouth. “Ms. Brooks . . .”
* * *
He couldn’t find her for half an hour. He wandered through the giant house, calling her name, but the place seemed deserted. Not even an Atom was stirring. He was about to check the grounds when he saw her in his room.
His room.
It figured that Komodo would pick that room out of the dozens in the Traj Taj. It couldn’t have been anything more than a maid’s room, a windowless cell where some poor wetback who risked her life to come sweep up might dwell. It wasn’t nearly big enough to be a walk-in closet for a midget wrestler. “I don’t require much,” Komodo said.
No disputing that. Komodo’s Traj Taj quarters were a near-perfect replica of his cramped crib back on Radioactive Island. Compared to Komodo, Martin Luther was Liberace, accoutrement-wise. Outside of a small writing desk, there was nothing else in the dim-lit room except that stainless-steel slab where he slept.
When Komodo first came to Radioactive Island, he didn’t even use that. He claimed he didn’t need any sort of bed. His rationale was, after years of being the Coma Boy, he’d slept enough. Gojiro knew better. He knew Komodo was afraid to sleep, that he feared wink one might cast him back into the paralytic world from which he’d emerged. It became a problem. Komodo looked haggard and lost weight. Gojiro tried to make him take a nap. The reptile brought warm milk, told endless tales of Lavarock, prescribed every variety of pill. But it was no use: Komodo stayed awake. Then, one day, as the two of them stood out by Corvair Bay Beach, that operating table rolled in with the tide. The words “State Property” and a long serial number were hand-stamped onto the bottom of the metal. Who knew how much pain those who had lain upon that slab had suffered, but it didn’t matter to Komodo. He salvaged it from the surf and put it in the bedroom he and Gojiro shared down the ’cano.
“You gonna slumberland on that?” the monster asked him. “Don’t look like no beautyrest to me.”
“Oh, no, my own true friend,” Komodo said. “This is very comfortable. You ought to try it sometime.”
“No thanks,” Gojiro replied with a shudder.
It killed Gojiro that this loathsome operating table was the only place Komodo could rest. “They’ve made you into a specimen, my own true friend,” Gojiro said to himself, watching Komodo lightly snoring on that unforgiving plate, a mirrored overhead lamp blaring into his eyes, a perpetual clench on his face. “I’ll get them for this,” he swore, “if it’s the last thing I do.”
Then he reached over and switched off the light. He thought the change might wake Komodo up, but it didn’t. Gojiro saw his friend’s face loosen, go a little slack. A small sigh came from his lips. Then Gojiro placed the softest kiss he could upon Komodo’s forehead. “Perchance to dream, my own true friend, perchance to dream.”
Anyway, that’s where Komodo finally found Sheila Brooks: in his room, hunched over his tiny desk. Immediately he felt that odd heat. It hit him in the face like a slap. “Ms. Brooks?” Komodo approached slowly, on tiptoes so as to see over her shoulder.
She was sitting there holding Komodo’s stereopticon, the picture holder Gojiro had snagged out of the Radioactive Island surf so many years ago. “Are these your parents?” Sheila Brooks asked without looking up, her voice hoarse, barely audible. She’d taken off the repeating glasses. Her eyes were greener than ever, but that fear—it was there.
Komodo stared at the picture of the man and woman inside the old wooden frame. How would he answer her question? The two people in that 3-D picture—the young man and his pregnant wife standing on the lush hillside, beside the crystal lake, before the snow-topped mountain—they weren’t really his parents. They were an anonymous couple from long ago whose likenesses had somehow been misfiled into a sack of Fotomat rejects. Yet, they’d been inside that stereopticon for so long . . .
“They’re dead, right?”
A vise closed around his heart. “Yes, those people are dead.”
“I have one of these, you know. It’s exactly the same as this one. My father bought it.” Suddenly she sounded a thousand years old.
“Your father?”
“It’s weird. I remember that day. We’d been driving . . . for months. We were everywhere, running away. They couldn’t catch us. We were too fast, me and Dad. That’s what we’d say: Hey, hey, nobody’s gonna catch us today. Then he said he wanted to go home. Up north, to where he was born. Later I found out it was in Wisconsin. That’s where he got it, in a little junk store off the side of the road. I was six. The lady said I was real cute. She asked me if I was from around there. I said, No, but my dad is. She asked me my dad’s name, I told her, and she kind of looked funny. Then she took the viewer out from under the counter, told me to give it to him, that it was his.
“The picture inside . . . It was strange, old, like from the Civil War. A man and a woman and a lot of kids, ten maybe, standing real stiff in front of a clapboard house. There was something awful in there, in the man’s eyes. He was looking ahead, but he seemed to be watching everybody, all at the same time. Watching me, too. It got me afraid. I brought it to Dad. Suddenly he looked real upset. What’s the matter, Dad? I asked. He pointed to one of the kids, the youngest one, said it was him. He was standing right next to his mom. Then he pointed to the scary man and told me it was his father. I don’t know what happened then . . . except he made a phone call. And a couple hours later, all those men were in our motel room. They took him away. I never saw him again. Next thing I knew, Victor told me he got sick and died.”
Then, without warning, she yelled: “Doesn’t this get any brighter? Is this as light as it gets?”
It was a little improvement Komodo had made in the stereopticon system, an external backlight source to accentuate the three-dimensional effect. Now he adjusted it for Sheila Brooks.
“Yeah . . . that’s better.” She never moved her head, just kept looking. “Then, years later, it came to me in the mail, in a package without a card. The same stereopticon. Bobby said it could have been any one, there were millions of them, but I knew. Except the picture inside was different. It was him, my dad, and my mom. They were standing in the middle of that valley—”
“Ms. Brooks, are you all right?” Komodo called. Her face grew paler every moment; she looked about to faint.
“That’s not how it’s supposed to look,” she screamed. “The background’s wrong! There’s no mountain, it’s rocks. Red rocks and cliffs. There’s no lake, no snow.
It’s the desert!
Red rocky hills. Dawn light. Red rocky hills. Light!”
She was starting to shake.
Komodo leaned forward. She was seeing something in his stereopticon, something horrible. When he touched her she felt hot. The whole room felt hot, hotter than before. At first Komodo thought it must have come from the small bulb he’d installed, but no bulb could emit such a sear. This was another kind of heat, a terribly familiar fire.
“My glasses! Where are my glasses?” She fumbled about with her hand, trying to locate those black-lensed goggles. But it was too late. Komodo saw those green eyes get big before she screamed: “Mom! No! Dad! Dad! Get Mom!”
“Ms. Brooks! What do you see?”
“Dad! Mom! No!” Her voice—how young it sounded. Small . . .
a baby’s cry.
Then she stopped, sat there a moment.
When Komodo touched her shoulder, it started up again. Except it wasn’t a baby’s cry anymore. It was her own.
“Dad! . . .
Gojiro!
”
Sheila Brooks’s Secret
I
T WAS ALMOST DAWN WHEN KOMODO CAME
running out to the Zoo of Shame to wake Gojiro. “My own true friend!” he shouted. “She has a secret—a terrifying secret!”
“Secret? Who got a secret?”
Komodo told the still-sleepy lizard what transpired in his room after Sheila Brooks picked up the stereopticon. “The worst of it,” he moaned, “was when she came to. She didn’t remember any of it. She ingested a quantity of pills and claimed the blackouts to be the result of a breach in her therapy. Then she said she was late and left as if nothing had happened.” Komodo shivered. “She is haunted by a traumatic image that somehow involves her mother, father, and you, my own true friend.”
Me.
“Yes. It is this image that makes her live in fear. We must aid her, if it is at all possible.”
Gojiro attempted calm. “So she got ghosts—all God’s chillun got ghosts. If she needs a celebrity exorcism, let her get Betty Ford to shake some bedsheets at her.”
Komodo slowly shook his head. “If you had only seen her bravery, the way she charges into the throes of her own terror, seeks to meet it head on. It was . . .
inspiring.
This is why she wrote us the letter, why she appeared at the party at Mr. Bullins’s house, why she came here last night. She is reaching out to us. She senses that we can perhaps save her from the horror that stalks her mind. We cannot refuse the call.”
The next few days were filled with numbing run-throughs on that old stereopticon. “All right,” Komodo shouted, holding the wooden photo holder in front of his face exactly as Sheila Brooks had. “When I give the signal, turn out the lights.”
Gojiro followed instructions, then waited a moment. “So?”
“Nothing . . . nothing again,” Komodo reported dejectedly. “Perhaps you would like to try another time, my own true friend.”
“No way. I still got spots in front of my eyes from the last time.”
Another day, another pit of quicksand. How many times had the reptile watched Komodo stare at the two strangers inside his stereopticon, seen him wish that the unknown couple would step from the confines of their artificial three-dimensionality to truly become his parents, tell him the mysteries of his past? It was a lot to pin on a funky old picture, the monster always thought. Except now Komodo wanted more. “We must see what she sees,” the determined Japanese insisted. He went so far as to suggest that whatever hideous nightmare Sheila Brooks kept stored in her ravaged head might actually have significant impact on the Triple Ring Promise. Secret? What kind of secret could Sheila Brooks have—a top secret, an eyes-only secret, an ice blue secret? The monster tried to make light of the affair. But there was no way he could dismiss the fact that, right in the middle of her wacko vision, Sheila Brooks had called
his
name, lumped
him
together with her worldshattering father.
“What a horrorshow,” the monster mumbled, stretching out in that old producer’s bed to claw through a copy of
Visions in Fission: Private Lives beyond Relativity
. Shig had placed the book in the bedside drawer like a Gideon, curtly imparting that the thick-spined tome contained certain “previously unpublished biographical material” on Joseph Prometheus Brooks that “might prove useful” in the development of the upcoming film. “Ain’t gonna be no film,” Gojiro muttered. However, to his surprise, he soon found himself engrossed in the dry-prose account of Brooks’s early life.
“Weird,” the monster grunted, noting that the progenitor of the Heater came from a large family. Gojiro never imagined Brooks coming from anywhere; to the monster, the scientist had always been this apparition in black, set down on the earth by demonic forces to torment the planet. But here it said that Brooks was the youngest of ten children born to Mary and Wallace Brooks, a man described as holding strong religious beliefs. The elder Brooks was obviously some kind of nut. After losing his job as a steelsmith in Milwaukee, he moved his family several times, to increasingly remote sections of northern Wisconsin. Apparently wanting to totally isolate his relations and himself, he vehemently opposed his wife’s desire to send their children to school. “However, Mary Brooks, aware of her youngest son’s special nature, enlisted the aid of a trusted uncle and succeeded in stealing Joseph away from his ever-watchful father. The boy’s obvious gifts were immediately recognized by his teacher, and he was soon passed to the university at Madison. Two years later, shortly after his thirteenth birthday, he was sent to Göttingen, where he was quickly accepted as perhaps the greatest mind of the age.”
“A boy wonder,” Gojiro snorted. However, as he read the subsection “A Colleague Remembered—Off-the-Cuff Remarks Made by Victor Stiller at the Society of Atomic Scientists’ Luncheon, September 1963,” a chill traversed the reptile’s dorsal plates.
“It was Christmas vacation,” Stiller was quoted as saying, “and the school was to be closed. Of course, I would have been most pleased to invite Joseph to spend the holiday with my family, but our home was so dank and cramped, my parents so poor, that this was not feasible. In any event, Joseph had already decided to return home. He loved his mother very deeply and missed her terribly. School officials were against the visit, thinking Joseph, their great plum, still a very young man, might be snatched up by an American institute. But he was determined to go and left after the final day of classes. I am certain he had no inkling of what had happened back in Wisconsin. He’d been with us for nearly three years, without a single piece of mail. The story is horrible to me, even now. From everything we understood, Joseph, traveling alone, did not find out the fate of his family until he actually came upon the site of his former home. His father, a deranged man, had, for reasons known only to himself, bound the entire family to chairs and incinerated them, himself included. The house was burned to the ground; survival was impossible. Of course, it was a great shock to us all. For several months after his return to school, Joseph, our great hope, showed no interest in his studies. I, being his closest friend, was appointed to speak with him and attempt to raise his spirits. I cannot say I had much success. Joseph said little about the events back in Wisconsin, allowing only that the site of his former home was totally overgrown, ‘obliterated, as if it had never been there in the first place.’ That was exactly what his father had always wanted, he said. I found these remarks cryptic but, in deference to my young colleague’s grief, did not pursue the matter. In good time, however, Joseph resumed enthusiasm for his studies, much to the delight of us all.”
“Shit,” Gojiro said.
“How awful,” Komodo added, hushed.
Then the monster turned the page, saw that reproduction, and blanched. It wasn’t the first time Leona Ross Brooks’s portrait of her husband had that effect on the reptile. The picture was just so oppressive, Brooks standing there, in his black parson’s outfit, his arms outstretched, palms up, as if holding an invisible sphere. And those eyes, piercing, searching . . .
Gojiro started to slam the book shut, but Komodo stopped him. “This is the best reproduction I’ve seen,” he said, noting the usual credit: “Used by permission of private collector.” Komodo often wondered who this “private collector” was; how he wished he could see the original painting.
“This X-ray style fascinates me,” Komodo said, referring to the bold primitivism of the portrait, so reminiscent of cave paintings. “It is an intriguing artistic choice. Why would Mrs. Brooks utilize a Paleolithic technique to portray her husband as he stood on the brink of the New Age?”
Gojiro stole another look at the picture. That X-ray stuff, how you could just about look
through
Brooks, just made it worse. It made the picture seem unfinished, as if it were waiting to be filled in. Except for those eyes! There was nothing transparent about them. They were solid, deadly—so much like they appeared on that imagined afternoon on Lavarock, when Brooks’s gaze kept that youngest zardplebe from the Black Spot. The eyes in that picture always got to Gojiro. What was Leona Brooks doing painting his dream?
It was right then that he noticed that strange discrepancy. “Wait a minute. Something’s wrong. It don’t add up.”
“What does not add up, my own true friend?”
“Look at these dates.” Gojiro flipped back through
Visions in Fission
, ran a claw to the part about Brooks’s supposed abandonment of physics. “The cat is supposed to be blowing in the Hot Club around 1937. That’s where they’re supposed to have met, right, Brooks and Leona? Well, it says ‘1934’ at the bottom of the painting. How’s she gonna paint him before she even meets him?”
Komodo furrowed his brow. “Perhaps it is a misprint.”
The monster shrugged. “Yeah, a misprint.”
* * *
After that, it got kind of boring, watching Komodo stare into the stereopticon, so Gojiro flipped on the old black and white built into the wall in the Traj Taj’s wet bar. The joint had long since been drained dry, of course. The succession of shiftless tenants and caretakers had put a serious dent in that old producer’s stock, which from the look of it had once been considerable. Too bad, Gojiro thought, he could use a few stiff liquid tons. His 235 stash was running seriously thin.
The call-in born-agains were on again, testifying. Every day these paste-faced yearners appeared to commandeer another channel; it got so you couldn’t even get a decent “Rawhide” rerun. It pissed the monster off. In fact, after suffering still another creationist laying down a moldy 4004 rap, the reptile phoned up the show. The heavily pancaked preachercreature had hardly finished saying “Now, what would you care to share with us this fine day, brother?” when Gojiro, identifying himself as “Vinnie from Ped-ro,” launched into a paraphrase of an ardent Anti-Speciesist lecture, entailing how Christianity was nothing more than an imperialist sapien self-congratulatory ploy. “I’ll tell you the reason your little hustle has gotten over for the past two thousand years. It’s because your advance guys were smart enough to savvy how cocky you sapiens were concerning your ascendency to the top of the food chain, like you didn’t have nothing to fear from those eagles and bears you’d been carving into totem poles for eons. Hey, no knock on Jesus, but that’s your the In-His-Image riff in a nutshell—you’re nothing but a bunch of narcissistic pissants recasting the Sacred in dumboized humanoid form. Well, gloat all you want, but you ain’t fooling
everybody
.” Gojiro was waiting for one of those pinchfaced Prots to invoke the seven-second delay, but, maddeningly enough, they let him keep talking, finally replying, “Well, praise the Lord for allowing you to get that off your chest this morning, brother. You get back to us, y’hear?” Some people just couldn’t be insulted.
But as much as he complained, the monster was hooked on the shows. There was something undeniably poignant about them. Sure, maybe call-in Christians were small-eyed haters, hincty squares who couldn’t snag a taste of the millennium if Dolphy blew B-flat upside their eardrums, but you couldn’t dog them for buying into a Cosmo, could you? Couldn’t dog anyone for that. The dimmest Cosmo had to be better than none; there had to be
something
to hurl into the discord. Then there was the frenzy, the raptured abandon. Sometimes, when those hallelujahs got hot and heavy, the monster felt himself getting swept up, ready to sign on the line when the next prayercloth salesman knocked.
But then he’d catch himself. Because, maybe it’s a heck of a space saver, having only one book on the shelf, but which book? Surrendering to the fervor was an endlessly attractive option, but it wasn’t as if you wanted to
look bad
doing it. You didn’t want to sign up for an all-encompassing creed then read the fine print and find out you had to wear bell-bottoms and tie-dye. No, man, for the Hip zard, it was an intractable dilemma: how to believe and be Cool at the same time.
Depended on your definition of Cool, the reptile always thought. You could be a rigorless nihilista, forever flattening your affect in dim-lit formica lounges, cementing your cute shoes in the staid permanency of the avant. But where was that at? Walking the walk, talking the talk—it’s all for sale these days, pick ’em up by the checkout counter, one size fits all. This wasn’t to say Gojiro eschewed the facile, that he didn’t think someone who dug Clifford Brown wasn’t intrinsically a more worthwhile individual than someone who did not. Hip is a constantly whirling Rolodex; one can never neglect the power of the surface. But that didn’t mean you should make a talisman of it. You had to go deep.
Seek. Find. Accept. Believe. That was the regimen of the Hip zard. But that was also where the process broke down, in the believing part—that final step. “Be Cool, don’t drink the Kool-Aid” had always been the monster’s motto. Even throughout his most strident declarations of fealty to the Evolloo, with Budd Hazard inside his head, there was something in him that flinched at the mantle of True Belief. It seemed so final, so unequivocal, so anti keeping one’s options open. It was one thing to polemicize, to propose and propound, even to die for an Idea. But to
believe
in it? All of it smacked of goosesteps, crashing kristall in the night.
“I think we are dealing with two visions here, not one,” Komodo cried from the other side of the room.
“Huh?”
“She called out twice. First for her mother and father. Then, after a discernible pause, for her father and you, my own true friend. Two related but distinct visions. It is almost as if the first triggers the second. I must note that. It could be a crucial factor. What do you think?”
“Yeah, two visions. Triggered. Very important,” Gojiro grunted. Two visions! Why not four? Four hundred visions. Why not four million shards of visions, throw them in a pile, get all the king’s kabbalists to stick them back together again? Komodo was going to drive him crazy. The monster wondered: When he finally cashed in that odious Amendment, would it still be listed as a suicide? Probably. There were all kinds of suicides available, whole showcases full of them. Sometimes it’s just an open window, a total impulse buy. But most, the monster decided, were drawn out installment-plan deals. Wait it out, he told himself, sit tight.