“My friend,” Gojiro ventured, “do they hurt you?”
“Excuse me?” Komodo answered, lost in thought.
“Those scars on your chest, those circles. Do they cause you . . . great pain? They’re . . .”
Komodo grinned, showing his sharp teeth. “Grisly?”
Gojiro was embarrassed. “They do look kind of bad.”
“No, my friend, they don’t hurt a bit.”
“Must have when it happened.”
“I would assume,” Komodo sighed. “But I have no recollection. I don’t remember any of it.”
“I don’t remember nothing of what happened to me, neither. Just that I used to be one way, and now I’m like this.”
“Yes,” Komodo said, his voice veering off.
Truth was, Komodo did recall some of his days before he came to Radioactive Island. Every so often, tiny snatches of his life in that Okinawa infirmary would return to him. He remembered the constant stream of fake earnest officials, each anxious to have his picture taken placing a small toy by the bedside of the famous Coma Boy. There was also the conversation of doctors, distant whitemasked men, discussing him as if he weren’t there at all.
“What do you make of these marks here?” one doctor said to another, poring over Komodo’s torso.
“Yeah, those circles,” the other drawled. “Search me. He looks like he’s a branded steer off the Triple Ring Ranch.”
It drove Gojiro crazy when Komodo told him that. “Cracker navy scumbags,” the monster railed. Making jokes over who the Heater marked! Still, the term stuck.
“These Triple Rings,” Komodo said wistfully, “ride upon my chest like a question mark. I sense a great mystery about them. Sometimes I think if I were to find out what they meant, I might learn many things.”
“Like what?” Gojiro asked as he hoisted Komodo onto his supraocular ridge, where the thinlegged Japanese liked to ride. From up there he could see over the ragged timberline to the turbid sea.
“Oh, I don’t know . . .” Komodo shrugged, his head piercing the dense haze. “Who I am. Where I came from. How I came to be here with you. What we will do next.”
“Little things like that.”
“Little things like that,” Komodo replied with his high-pitched giggle.
The next morning, the heat woke Komodo up. It was like a blast furnace against his face.
“My friend!” Komodo screamed. “There is a terrible fire! We must put it out!”
“No danger, my friend,” Gojiro said quietly. He was standing close to Komodo, his back turned.
“But it smells like . . . something from the past. It frightens me.”
“Don’t be afraid, my friend,” Gojiro said. “It’s all done, now.”
He did it with the growth rings from a crosscut section of a giant metalfibrous tree he pulled from the ground beyond Reterritorialization Bay. He was careful to make sure he had the perfect trio: one big, one middle-sized, one small. He heated them with his own breath. That was a surprise. He knew something had happened to his throat, but he didn’t suspect he’d retained the Heater’s fury inside his lungs, that with one bellow he could hurl a city into flames. He held the rings between his claws and roared until they turned white-hot, then he pressed them to his chest.
“My friend!” Komodo shouted, drawing near.
“It’s all right.” Gojiro turned to Komodo.
“Your chest . . .”
Gojiro’s gaze did not waver. “The answers you seek are the answers I seek. This world you live in is the world I live in. What we’ll do, we’ll do together.”
“Yes,” Komodo said, “my own true friend.”
* * *
That was the Triple Ring Promise. Then.
Those were the Glazed Days, the onset of it all, when they stood on the bonewhite sands of their beach, peered out to the seething Cloudcover and knew: Out there was another world, a kingdom that held itself apart from them. Who and what ruled out there made them exiles, fugitives in the countries of their birth. But here, in this dark and ashy tract, they found refuge. Here they were safe. Safe and together in a realm where a twelve-year-old boy and a five-hundred-foot-tall lizard could pledge themselves to each other and be friends.
That’s what the Triple Ring Promise said, then.
Could it all have been so simple once, so innocent, a perfect democracy of youth? Or was it just another chimeric “memory,” tricked up by nostalgia’s ruthless hand? How long did those Glazed Days last, Gojiro wondered, when he and Komodo ran free to spin the full 360 ’neath the stiffblown banner of the Triple Rings?
Two years, three, five? When did it begin to dissolve? At what point did their Promise begin the creep toward that grotesque Amendment? Gojiro’s head ached. The condemning evidence was so exhaustive, the steely finger of accusation pointed so firmly in his direction. His sins were manifold, his record longer than a Nazi’s arm. But the litany of iniquity was pitched on a grander scale than any simple rap sheet. The fact was, Gojiro knew, that the Triple Ring Promise had been cosmologized from existence.
Coffee, tea, or milk? Chaos or Cosmo? That was the old joke round the ’cano, back in the days of what came to be called the Budd Hazard sessions. Good ole Budd Hazard! Gojiro liked the ring of the name. It had a downhomey touch, the smell of fatback frying up ’longside the Mahayana. A private gag of a tag: a greenneck called like a redneck, trancing out like a yellowneck. And, during those dark times, before Radioactive Island even had a sun to separate night from day, Budd Hazard filled a need: He pumped up the Cosmo, forged Design.
“Be Budd Hazard,” Komodo would say as they clung together in the ’cano’s deepest well, the sludge squalls raging outside.
“Okay,” Gojiro replied, drawing a breath. There was no effort to it, no psychic’s writhe and roil, no incanting exorcist’s gory pliers to pull pseudoverities from a recalcitrant beyond. All the monster had to do was open his mouth and Budd Hazard came out.
The wealth of information! The generosity of cognizance! First came tales of life on Lavarock, details to fill in Gojiro’s misty recollections of his former Hallowed Homelands. Legends and practices of the Zardic Line upon the Precious Pumice were copiously enumerated. Komodo could never get enough. So thoroughly cut off from his own previous existence, he reveled in the summoning of Gojiro’s past, illusionary or not. He sat rapt as the monster spieled out uninterrupted sagas of the hunt, whether it be the brutish rush against the foreflanks of a snorty tapir or the intricacies of tonguespearing a hingehung insect from its gossamer web.
“What a paradise,” Komodo marveled.
“That it was, that it was,” Gojiro said, leaning back, bathed in light and glowing, “a world like no other.” But then pain shot through him. “Except it’s nothing now. Atomized, blown apart. Wiped from the face of the earth. I alone survive to tell thee, Jack.”
In the beginning, Gojiro thought that was what Budd Hazard was about: an afterimage of a life forever lost, a message in a reverberating bottle somehow wedged inside his malformed ear during the Heater’s storm. But it quickly became apparent that Budd Hazard was much more than a dry lament. Recollections of Lavarock were the merest germ of what he seemed to know.
There was the night when the fission gales grew fierce and Komodo and Gojiro huddled together inside the volcano of their as-yet unnamed island. “Be Budd Hazard,” the frightened Komodo entreated, seeking comfort against the tumult.
“All right,” Gojiro said, swallowing hard. The monster closed his eyes and moaned. “The scheme of the Universe,” he began, “is embraced within an all-encompassing System called the Evolloo. Everything living, everything that has lived, everything that ever will live is contained inside the unimaginable parameters of the Blessed Blueprint. It is a Vast Flow, a Miraculous Spine of Energy and from it, like the tributaries of a Great River, spring all forms of Life. Those who are Honest and True must learn to walk these Paths so that they may come to know their own Identity and place within the Great Plan—for this is the Order of Things.”
Then, snapping from his trance, Gojiro looked at Komodo, saw how the sweat poured from his friend’s startled brow. “What I say?” the reptile asked.
Komodo repeated it as best he could.
“Geez . . .”
From that point forward the Budd Hazard sessions took on a new gravity. Now they weren’t just to pass the time, but rather to create the very meaning of Time. It no longer seemed fit for them to receive Budd Hazard’s messages walking on the beach or swimming out by the Cloudcover, a half a mile from shore, Komodo balancing himself upon Gojiro’s snout. A special section of the ’cano was set aside, decked with fluoro-candles calibrated to best approximate a guru’s most conducive thinktank.
Gojiro lay on a massive pile of paisley cushions, with Komodo hovering, poised to record whatever was spoken.
“I can’t,” Gojiro said as they were about to commence. “I can’t find him.”
“Concentrate,” Komodo said.
“I never had to concentrate before. I’m just nervous, I guess.”
“Me too,” Komodo confessed.
Truth was, they were more than nervous. They were filled with dread. Budd Hazard beckoned them to a mysterium of obscure Flows, great Forces of Energy extending through Eternity—an Unknown place where they imagined, in their battered, eager souls, they would find the Sacred. At this threshold they faltered. Everything about them—their world, that dank and spewing Island—was without form. By what license did they feel they could even hope to bring shape to that forsaken nothingness?
“We can’t,” Gojiro tensed. “We are not sufficient.”
Komodo paced the ’cano floor. Suddenly, a wild look came over his face.
That look!
Even then he had it, that naive yet undeniable Jap-Mickey-Rooney-discovering-America look, the crazy exhilaration that throws off doubt and pushes forward through the fear. “My own true friend!” Komodo declared. “Budd Hazard speaks to us because he deems us worthy. To refuse him would be a terrible insult. We must seek to know what he wishes to tell us. It is our duty!”
“If you say so,” Gojiro mumbled. If it had been up to him, maybe, they would have dropped the whole Budd Hazard thing right there. But Komodo seemed so sure. His face was so open, so hopeful. That was enough. The monster closed his many lids and soon the words rushed forth. The session went on for days; nothing less than the Foundations of Thought were laid down.
Foremost among these bedrocking underpins was the Principle of the Inviolate Binary. “There can be no Bunch without a Beam, no Beam without a Bunch,” Budd Hazard imparted, defining a Bunch as “a group of like individuals, what might be referred to as a species.” A Beam was a much more elusive concept. “It is the cohering Energy of the world, sourced from the Mainstem, adapted to the individual needs of the Bunch,” the enigmatic Muse said. It was in the interface of these two entities that the Universe found its design. “A Beam makes a Bunch a Bunch,” Budd Hazard declared. Without a Beam a Bunch would be nothing more than a “disassociated band of biologically similar renegades.” On the other hand, a Beam was nothing but “a misdirected font of energy” without a Bunch about which to focus its all-encompassing, aligning force.
“It is the Goal and Obligation of All Life to seek its particular Identity within the Inviolate Binary structure and to live, as distinct yet interrelated forms, beneath the mantle of the Evolloo,” Budd Hazard pronounced. “The Evolloo is All.”
Gojiro and Komodo listened with an ever-expanding sense of wonder. How sublime it was to hear Budd Hazard’s words forge a scheme amid the seemingly unfathomable murk of their world. To witness that swirling hub of Thought shower light throughout the black maw of emptiness. With each new revelation, their trepidations gave way to a giddy joy. It was intoxicating to be in the presence of all that Truth.
“I’m singing!” Gojiro roared. “Can’t you hear me singing? I’m singing ’bout Budd Hazard!”
“Who?” Komodo rejoined. “Who might that Budd Hazard be? Where’s he been, what’s he seen?”
“Who? You ask me who Budd Hazard be? Where’s he go, what’s he know?
I’ll
tell you what Budd Hazard knows! He knows the present and he knows the past. He knows who be first and who be last. He knows what is green and what is blue, and what goes down in the Evolloo!”
“Tell me more, tell me more! Tell me more about what Budd Hazard knows!”
“More? Why not, there’s no law. He knows the weather, those of a feather, put any words together, and that’s what Budd Hazard knows. He knows the jungle, knows the street, knows what bad smell comes from your feet!”
“Oh, please! My ignorance is no joke, it’s a sad and sorry yoke. Just tell what Budd Hazard spoke!”
“He knows the secret of the Endless Chain, seen it plain. He knows all Love and what it’s worth, and how things work here on Earth. That’s what Budd Hazard knows!”
A passion he never imagined overtook Gojiro then. Ideas rumbled within him, then exploded, spread throughout the land. It was as if the Heater itself had detonated inside, its tempest winds blowing his molecules over every inch of this new world he and Komodo called their own. He felt himself cascade down like heavy rain on the forests of the wretched glassine trees, spreading his essence to the beaches, out to the Cloudcover. His particles pinwheeled from the dank skies, settled on the matted fur of all the furtives dug deep in their burrows and onto the creaky wings of the impossible insects struggling through the gales off Corvair Bay. Again and again he came, with the clockwork regularity all things innately understand as symmetry. In no quarter was he unexpected or unwelcomed. He felt connection with everything in this freshout, untried world.
He was Budd Hazard, ’tile for all times, one of the roughs, one of the smooths, a Cosmozard.
* * *
Was it inevitable, what happened next? Gojiro reckoned so. He didn’t need a goading encounter group of former offenders to tell him that with a personality like his, addiction is not many truck stops down the highway from intoxication. That’s what Budd Hazard bred: total dependency. Just as later it got to the point where he couldn’t get through a half-hour sitcom without firing up a gluey ball of hardcutting 235, he became addicted to Budd Hazard. He became a Cosmo junkie.