Komodo wept too. “We can’t allow ourselves to think in this manner. We cannot be self-pitying.”
“Don’t worry about helping me. Help yourself.”
“There is no me without you.”
“Don’t put that kind of pressure on me.”
“Please!”
“Stop it. Leave me be.” Gojiro turned away. He couldn’t stand looking at Komodo, knowing that the earnest Japanese thought their every shortcoming to be his fault. He piled their sorrows on his back, humping them up like Quasimodo. It wasn’t fair! Komodo did his best. Komodo was blameless.
It could not go on.
One more look at Komodo—sad Komodo, kind Komodo—convinced the reptile. For so long they’d pledged undying loyalty, a united front. But it was useless; the battle was already lost. Together they were stymied, they dragged each other down. Better that one of them should carry on, and that one should be Komodo. But what chance would he have with a massive Zardic albatross around his neck? On a journey to the end of the night, you’ve got to travel light.
The clarity of this perception renewed the monster’s resolve. If he could shut out Komodo’s love, he could do the same with whatever moldy impulses conspired to confine him to the gnawing prank that was his life. Without warning he lurched upward, a great green swell inside that close rubber cone of his volcanic home. Goodbyes would be brief, better that way. “Farewell, my own true friend!” he shouted, brave, without doubt. Death was just a breath away.
In the split second it took him to realign the enhancing mirror, Komodo managed more. Gojiro first saw him in that reflector, fifty times his normal size. But the amplification was not necessary. One peek at Komodo made the giant lizard feel shabby, paltry. Komodo didn’t need mirrors to prove his purity.
“Ahh,” Gojiro gasped.
Down below, Komodo had ripped open the top of his black pajamas, exposing his pale, hairless chest. “A ghost’s skin,” Komodo sometimes laughed, saying if he’d been a normal Jap he would have had steady work in No plays, driving evil lords crazy. The monster looked down, saw the rings—three concentric circles, burned into Komodo’s chest as if with a branding iron.
The Triple Rings!
Komodo had already drawn blood. It trickled down, over the circular scars. He held one of those swords Shig walked around with whenever he wanted to look extra cool. Shig was full of that Bushido: sunglasses and steel! But Komodo held the sword like a master, without flinch or flourish. He positioned the point at the exact center of the smallest ring; the weight of the sword alone was enough to pierce his skin.
Then Komodo spoke, his voice resolute and honest, without melodrama. “My own true friend,” he said, “I call on you to honor your most solemn Vow. I invoke the Triple Ring Promise.”
The Triple Ring Promise, Amended
I
F YOU WANT TO FIGURE AN ABSOLUTE ZERO
to all this, those loathsome negotiations concerning what came to be called the Triple Ring Promise Amendment would be the pit to plumb: Komodo and Gojiro poised at the brink of life, ready to cast themselves into the abyss with their own hands, neither willing to back off.
“I won’t stop until you do!” Gojiro screamed, holding back a blurt of Radi-Breath.
“You first,” Komodo retorted, his sword digging ever deeper.
For Gojiro, the sight of Komodo’s drawn sword turned the scene on its hinge; the gleaming blade slashed through the monster’s self-possession. Komodo killing himself, too? This was unacceptable. The monster sought death so Komodo could live to seek his destiny unencumbered, not so the two of them could be found, their bodies draped across each other in a manner that might lead a red-faced cop to report “a sordid, interspecies suicide pact.” Gojiro would rather die a dozen times—or worse yet, stay alive—than see that happen.
“Don’t you get it?” the monster screamed. “I’m supposed to be dead and you’re supposed to be alive!”
Komodo tightened his hold around the sword. Blood was gushing now. “Our fates are intertwined into a common Identity. One cannot proceed without the other.”
Gojiro gulped. “Wait a minute. Let’s talk this over. I know we can work something out here.”
The Triple Ring Promise Amendment is what they came up with. They swore it as they once swore the Promise itself, in fire and blood.
In short, the Amendment specified that if the tenets of the original Promise were not fulfilled to the satisfaction of both parties within one year’s time, the whole deal was off. The Triple Ring Promise would be null and void. They would be released from everything they ever believed was between them. An extra clause provided that “should, after the one-year period elapses, one of the parties choose to end his life, the other, in all good faith, must attempt to aid him in this endeavor.”
“This is gonna be great, you’ll see,” Gojiro said with attempted animation.
“Yes,” Komodo murmured, forcing a gruesome smile. “A fresh start.”
“A clean slate!”
“As if none of this had ever happened.”
“Yeah! It’ll be like we never met!”
“Like we never had met.”
Then they looked at each other and wailed. Wailed and wailed. For the longest time, neither could speak.
Finally Komodo brought his face near the folds of Gojiro’s hyoid. “Oh, my own true friend. How has it come to this?”
* * *
How had it come to where two friends had to bargain each other from suicide?
Gojiro locked himself in his joyless burrow, tried to get a handle on the situation. The grim volcano offered his only privacy on the whole Island, not that being down there was a party. It was a lot more depressing since the renovation. It was the work of those misfit Atoms, based on a picture they found in an old
Playboy
. “A real bachelor pad,” the well-meaning but hopelessly damaged children chimed, every eye in their pinnish heads swirling as they installed the chrome, the overheated jacuzzi, and two-hundred-foot-wide revolving bed.
“What? No red vinyl?” Gojiro snorted when he first saw the job. “No hookers in the bathrooms?” It didn’t help that he threw up the first time he lay down on the whirling bed. His stomach couldn’t take the rotation, which was revved faster than a centrifugal amusement park ride. “I got bedsick,” he complained, “I vomited in Lucky Luciano’s sheets!”
It was the thought that counted, Komodo suggested.
“Tell them not to think about me! I don’t want them down here again, neither. From now on, this is off-limits.” Then Gojiro trashed the place. He kicked through every mirror, twisted all the chrome, ripped the pinstripe wallpaper, swallowed the Pepsi machine whole. The one thing he didn’t touch was the massive wraparound Dishscreen. He just sat down amidst the rubble and began to watch.
That’s what he did the night he and Komodo swore the Triple Ring Promise Amendment, too. He watched the Dish. One year of life left, he might as well spend it with Felix and Oscar, Starsky and Hutch. It was a pretty typical night of viewing: “Have Gun Will Travel” reruns from Kuala Lumpur, gavel-to-gavel coverage on the Albanian politburo, a couple of hockey games with everything but the goals and fights edited out. The programs on Komodo’s hook-up were nothing if not eclectic. Commercials came from everywhere. Just then a harried young woman was walking down a forbidding city street when three thugs jumped from the shadows and beat her unmercifully with truncheons. “Bitch!” they screamed. Then a bland but jovial announcer’s voice came on. “Tired of the wear and tear of city life? Then move! Up to Sherwood Forests! The
MODEL
model condominium development!” The young woman reappeared, standing in front of a monolithic refrigerator, kissed her husband goodbye, sent her children off to school. “Move up to Sherwood Forests,” she said. “I did!”
“Sick,” Gojiro commented, restraining himself from Radi-firing the Dishscreen. Years before, after hearing how Elvis regularly pumpgunned Graceland tubes, the monster got a little rough on his receptors. After a stern lecture from Komodo, however, he agreed to cut down. It wasn’t that hard a promise to keep. Once, the reptile considered himself a merciless critic of the tube-dominated psychoscape. He was always holding forth, making comments like, “Mary Hart! Dixie Whatley! Who are they but jackboot dupes of the culturato-narcoleptic horde! Down with Trapper John!”
But now, he admitted with a grunt, “I just watch the stuff.”
How had it come to this? Gojiro thought back, to the earliest of times, the beginnings of what was between him and Komodo. Had there ever been a more remarkable meeting? Komodo, swathed in sheets, stark lights upon his sleep-struck face, in that dismal hospital room in Okinawa. Gojiro, cowering and cold, casked up inside a dead volcano’s basalt vault. The two of them so dreadfully alone, forever severed from all they knew, all they were
meant
to know.
Then—across all time, tide, and taxonomy—came Gojiro’s plea. Even now it seemed impossible, drawn from mystery’s deepest well: “Come in, please come in! Anyone!” A voice in the night, the monster’s mayday dot and dash skimmed the stormswept Pacific to be heard only by a single boy in a hospital bed.
“Please to speak again?” These were the words Komodo spoke, his lips never moving, the only sounds in his melancholy room the blips of machinery and the squeak of rubbergloved hands on his skin. “You are a lizard? You are stuck inside volcano—in a place that is not your home, in a body that is not yours, and you think through a mind of which you cannot conceive? You are lonely and afraid? You have no friends?
“I am a boy. I live in a hospital. There is no one here that looks like me. I will be your friend.”
More than two decades later, in front of the droning Dishscreen, Gojiro wondered—could it really have happened like that? Did a conversation actually take place between a fifty-ton lizard and a ten-year-old boy dug out of a hole in Hiroshima, a boy who hadn’t said a word or moved a muscle in nine years? And, did that boy—that Coma Boy, silent icon of a most anxious age—snap free from the slumber that enveloped him, hoist himself from his bed, leave that hospital under the cover of night, and make a most treacherous journey across two thousand miles of sea to where that lizard was?
Or was this just another installment in the series of mental forgeries, one more dollop of bogus history? How to tell? The monster didn’t know. Maybe that was the real bond between him and Komodo: a dialectic of lunacy. Whole so-called civilizations had been founded on shared psychosis, why not Radioactive Island?
The monster dismissed these doubts. Komodo wasn’t crazy, a liar, or a fool. If Komodo said he escaped his whitecoated warders by crawling out a laundry-room window, and then hopped a tramp steamer going south, eventually reaching Radioactive Island in that small rubber boat, using only a sanitarium sheet as a sail, then that’s how it was. If all the rest was madness, at least this was so.
What a scene it was, the day Komodo’s tiny boat washed up on the headlands of what would come to be called Past Due Point. It wasn’t much of a place then. This was long before the major flotjet influxes and, of course, before the coming of the Atoms. Right then, Radioactive Island was nothing but the ’cano, an igneous lurch from the roiling petrochemical sea, and even that wasn’t as big as it would later become, after Komodo perfected his vulcanizing techniques. The Cloudcover was a lot thicker, though, a peasoup no laser could split. You couldn’t see a claw in front of your face out there, how dense the viscous draped. Primeval as all get-out, Radioactive Island was an unformed, ground-gurgling world in the midst of being born.
“Lizard!” Komodo shouted when he reached the beach, still in his hospital gown. “I am here! I am the boy you spoke to. I have come to be your friend!
“Lizard! I had a good trip. The sharks were no problem after that one time. Please answer, lizard!”
Gojiro did not answer. He couldn’t. It was all he could do to peek his massive green head out of the ’cano’s crater, squint into the murk.
“I am that boy!” came Komodo’s voice. “The one you asked to come. To be your friend.”
Boy?
. . .
Asked?
. . .
FRIEND?
What an oafish Frankenstein he must’ve seemed, mumbling “Friend?,” the words echoing inside the Gothic acoustics of the vast, new-minted Quadcamerality.
“Lizard!”
Lizard?
The monster huddled within the lavaflows, tried to compute the nature of this invader. Dimly, he recalled forms not unlike this
boy.
Were there not boys in his dreams, in that lost and fading world that visited him at night? Bipeds. They made sounds like this
boy.
They threw grass around their scaleless leathers, put bones in their noses, went out to sea squatting in long pieces of wood. There had been reports of them daring to come close to ’tiles, menacing them with sticks. One account actually had them surrounding a solitary basking zard, attacking and killing him. Then they stripped his leathers from his body, threw him in a blackbellied pot, and
ate
him!
“Lizard! I have come. I am your friend!”
What could that boy calling in the fog want? Why didn’t he go away? Stop your calling, the frightened reptile silently beseeched, his head a jumble. Nothing seemed the same. Before, it was all electricity. It buzzed, you did what you did. Now there were these
thoughts.
“Lizard, please, don’t be afraid.”
Afraid?
Gojiro sank lower into the ’cano. Where he came from, there was no such thing as being afraid. Fear had no niche. His kind barely deigned to peer down at the descending links of the food chain. But here—in this place, as this
thing
he had become? Now every step was fraught with doubt. He’d tried to carry on as before, but the great time-honored reflexes failed him. Only two days earlier he’d spotted a small furry thing running through the smoke-filled forest and set after it. It felt good, engaging the ageless predatory geometry, the ever-tightening circle of the hunt. Even the unease of his solitude gave way for the moment. But it turned to disaster. His instinctuals were unfamiliar with the beast’s behavior. Given its dirt-brown looks, the animal almost certainly should have gone with a camouflage-based defense. For millennia mammals of this apparent type had frozen cigarstore still, hoping stalking zards would mistake them for mossy mounds or outcropping roots; it was an old trick, the best kind. But instead, this individual began rubbing itself against a swatch of luminous shrubbery. Every time it stroked the bush, phosphor came off on its fur, accentuating its presence. Now, of course, the Max Factor factor in the taxonomic flora-fauna relationship between the blacklight plant and Flounce Fox is well documented, but then, back then, it nonplussed Gojiro no end. The fox’s extra legs and eyes didn’t do much for him either. Still, he was starving, so he pounced. But the several quick steps he planned turned into one thud, and the furball was crushed beneath his foot, mashed down so as to be indistinguishable from the other little dots stuck between his toe claws. The giant reptile licked off all the spots, but it wasn’t like there was a balanced meal there.
Nothing was as it had been. When he tried to forktongue a snaky caterpillar from a branch, he wound up inhaling the whole tree and picking glass splinters out of his mouth for hours. After that, he hid himself inside the ’cano. He would rather starve than hunt again.
And now there was this boy outside, calling for him. “Lizard! I have no friends either. We can be friends for each other. Please!”
If only he could scream back, tell this boy that he didn’t need him to be his friend, that where he came from there was no such thing. No, the frightened lizard thought, in my world it’s different. Your friend is every other zard, those living and those who have lived, and those who have yet to live. A hundred zards, five hundred, a thousand, all piled up, a carpet of scales, a great quilt of ’tiles, not one inch of ground visible. A thousand zards, ten thousand, a million, maybe more—pressed and touching, closer and closer, so the blood in one as good as runs into another, until they blend into the Enormous One.
That’s how it is, Gojiro thought, where I come from. At least that’s how it
was
. . .
The boy’s shout came again.
And Gojiro screamed, “Here I am. HERE I AM!”
* * *
Gojiro noticed the concentric circles on the boy’s chest as soon as Komodo came into the ’cano. Three rings—the outermost almost a foot across, the inner half that. In the glimmery light they almost glowed: a heart with a target.
For weeks, the monster refrained from commenting on the strange pattern. It didn’t seem right. Komodo, after all, never mentioned
his
not inconsiderable deformities. It was only after a semibucolic jaunt out by Mycotoxin Pond that Gojiro brought it up. Komodo had spent most of the wan afternoon peering into the ever-still waters there, running his fingers over the slight humps of the maroon rings.