“Look at this,” Komodo motioned to Ebi, indicating the layer of dried toxi-waste on the pig’s swollen feet. “Slops—the animal’s feed has embedded in its hooves and the residue has somehow taken root here.”
Ebi immediately recognized the danger of the situation. “Why, if this is so, we will be guilty of loosing invader species! These forms are adapting to the host landmass.”
Komodo was alarmed. “If the Envir can spread this quickly, it will likely engulf the entire state of California!”
* * *
Gojiro found no small irony in the circumstance. He remembered the time, back in the earliest of the Glazed Days, when the flotjet first swarmed the beaches of Radioactive Island. “What’s that,” he asked Komodo, sighting a mass of plastic bags, “jellyfish with their guts ripped out?”
“I don’t know,” Komodo said, poking at the items with a stick. “But someone keeps sending them.”
That was, of course, just the beginning. From that point on, it seemed like every beer can ever thrown from a speeding pickup, each pack of Kools crushed ’neath a smack freak’s sneaker, all the wallboard from electric field-infected timeshares had been issued a one-way ticket to Radioactive Island. Each morning more refuse was on the horizon, flowing in on the tide, then clumping hard and solid on the shorelines, like yesterday’s Dodge Dart pressed inside a wrecker’s tight square.
There was nothing to do but sit and watch. “It’s like everything they don’t want, they’re palming off on us,” Gojiro said, demoralized.
Komodo looked up. “Perhaps you have something there, my own true friend,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Do you notice how these objects, which otherwise would remain distinct from other objects—never blending in—as they are made almost exclusively of nonintegrative, unbiodegradable materials, are actively meshing together on our shores? It is almost as if what no longer fits into the world beyond has come here to find refuge.”
“Oh, great,” Gojiro groaned. “You saying we got an Ellis Island for the exhaust of the modern world going here? Like we should offer political asylum to every recapped tire or something?”
Komodo was suddenly filled with emotion. “I can only think of my own journey here,” he began, his voice quivering, “how I was driven by some inner compass, synchronized to the beat of your heart. It was amazing to me that some nights, when I no longer could keep my eyes open out on that raging sea, I’d awake and not be hopelessly lost. I was only closer—closer to this place, to you. It was as if there was nowhere I belonged but here. Until I came here, all around me I felt nothing but rejection. Rejection by those men in the hospital. Rejection by the ships that passed and somehow refused to see me. Rejection even by the clouds, and the sea. But here was acceptance. Perhaps that is why these things come here. To be accepted. I feel we should welcome them to our land.”
“Welcome them to our land? Look around. They
are
our land!”
It was so. Rather than simply washing up and littering the beaches of Radioactive Island, the flotjet had merged with the existing structures, knit itself into the various chains of being lurching into motion on the previously ash-strewn and empty tract. It didn’t look like any jungle Sheena ever swung in, that was for sure.
Gojiro couldn’t take it. “I can’t watch the sea no more,” he screamed. “It’s like looking into the wrong end of a cornucopia.”
Komodo was not dissuaded. The next morning he was striding into the incoming surf carrying a sign saying “Welcome to Our World, Unindigenous Deconstructions.” Gojiro refused to participate. He hung around singing mocking songs, such as “This land is our land, this land is your land . . . Pieces of crap.” He steadfastly refused to allow that a waterlogged leisure suit had as much right to his world as he did.
But then, of course, the first of the Atoms were on the horizon, and nothing was the same again.
* * *
With this in mind, the monster could not resist a hearty “go around, come around” as he watched Komodo fret about the potential mass introduction of so-called invader species to the scenic Los Angeles County ecoscape. So what if constricting
Velvetinus vinus
number seventeen reblocked the Brown Derby? Those burgers were never what they were cracked up to be anyhow.
It turned out to be a false alarm of sorts. A speedy survey revealed that while the Radioactive Island-type Insta-Envir held sway within the Traj Taj grounds, not one instance of perimeter spillover could be authenticated. After some deliberation, Komodo and Ebi attributed this phenomenon to what they called the “precondition” of the Traj Taj grounds. Pointing out that even though widely disparate sectors of unreal estate—some bloodstrewn battlegrounds so small as to only accommodate a barrel cactus and stripmined tracts dozens of square miles in area—had managed to pierce the Cloudcover over the years, these pieces of tortured land had one thing in common. They were all previously part of a coastline somewhere, whereas the Traj Taj lay in the hills, several miles from shore. More than likely because of its cheerless history, that old producer’s spread was probably ticketed for Radioactive Island integration, Komodo contended, but its landlocked geography prevented disassociation from the mainland.
“Give it a chance,” Gojiro spasmed upon hearing what he took to be another of Komodo’s far stretches. “If what you say is true, it won’t be long before whole districts of Paraguay and Afghanistan come crushing up on Corvair Bay Beach. Just because they’re inland today don’t mean they got to be tomorrow. When them Bomb-boys get to gerrymandering, there ain’t no subdivision that can’t be made.”
“Oh, Gojiro,” Ebi said, giggling in her perfect way. “You always look so funny when you’re mad.”
That stopped the monster’s tirade. One smile from Ebi and he’d get goofy, start swinging his leg, aw-shucksing all over the place.
So, at least for a moment, things felt nice and easy around the Traj Taj—just Komodo, Gojiro, Ebi, hanging out. Until, that is, they noticed Shig standing there. He always seemed to come out of nowhere.
“An invitation has arrived,” he said, formally.
Under Albert Bullins’s Big Top
I
T WAS WITH HIS HEART IN HIS HYOID THAT GOJIRO,
holding steady at six feet and snuzzled within the silk sheets on that old producer’s bed, watched Komodo fumble with his cummerbund. Poor Komodo! He’d been on edge ever since Shig brought around that invitation to Albert Bullins’s sixtieth birthday party, and this monkey suit wasn’t helping things.
“These people are very sophisticated,” he said, attempting to straighten his black tie. “I am certain they will immediately sense I am not one of them and shun me.”
“Who the hell are they?” Gojiro blustered, trying to set his friend at ease. “Nothing but a passel of trickledown dysfunctionates, the spawn of squint-eyed Okies and smarmy rag hondlers. You think
they
know which fork to use?”
Komodo continued to tug at his tie. Gojiro had never seen him look in the mirror so much. It was ridiculous! As far as Komodo was concerned, the proper attire for this affair might as well have been a bubble helmet and suction shoes. Albert Bullins was president of National Pictures, last of the major Majors, and his soirees were stone legends. According to the columns, this one was the biggest A-lister of the year, with thousands of H-wood’s sharper articles booked in solid. No wonder Komodo was sweating. Talk about a coming-out party, this was some kind of a scene to make a Bunchic debut! Gojiro shuddered at the thought of Komodo in that alienate habitat, sans a playbook, with only the vaguest input on the native Emily Posts.
But there was no way they could have ignored that invitation. Embossed with florid goldleaf script, it had been taped to the Traj Taj gate, crammed in a plain, unmarked envelope. Scrawled across the card was a single word—“Please!” It was in the same handwriting as the supplication at the bottom of the letter Sheila Brooks had sent to Radioactive Island.
“She continues to attempt to contact us,” Komodo said severely. “It is almost as if she does this against her conscious will. I must speak with her. She
knows something
, I can feel it.” He was splashing on half a bottle of cologne, for chrissakes.
The monster grunted. The Old Spice fumes were near to blowing out his olfactory bulb.
Knows something
. Gojiro lived in dread of what Sheila Brooks knew. To tell the truth, until they reached that gloomy Turret House, the monster had held out a wan hope that the appearance of his lamentable reply to Billy Snickman’s solitary supplication at the bottom of Sheila Brooks’s letter had been nothing but a mad coincidence, still another puckish hoax engineered by his ever-mischievous Quadcameral. However, one look at the Dreamer of the Sad Tomorrow and the monster knew: He was in deep shit. Who knew what calamities cultured behind the macabre mask she wore? Hermit Pandora indeed! Why not lock her up in her own box, toss it in the river, and cordon it round with cops to keep the Houdinis away? It would be a public service, saving the world from those sunblasted Brooksians, lounging in their fey bars, passing their coarse Apock Visions to the right like some twisted bridge game. What card would Sheila Brooks slip him, the reptile wondered. No way it wouldn’t be the Hangman; there seemed to be none other in the short deck she played. Maybe once they needed four horsemen to herald Kingdom Come, but now there was only Sheila Brooks, a most singular National Velvet.
Know something?
Of course she knew something.
But how could Gojiro tell Komodo that whatever that might be was the last thing he ever wanted to find out?
Still, the monster attempted to keep an upbeat posture concerning Komodo’s attendance at Albert Bullins’s party. What with the downward tick of that merciless Amendment, the reptile felt compelled to take the long view concerning his friend’s future. I’ll soon be dead, Gojiro told himself, but he’ll have to live on. A dim prospect, to be sure, but it was possible that these people—these fastmouth, sleekgeek cine-scum—might turn out to be Komodo’s Bunch after all. If that was so, then he better start getting used to them, hadn’t he.
“Knock ’em dead,” Gojiro exhorted, maintaining that the Bullins party would be an excellent learning experience.
“Yes,” Komodo answered, buffing his shoes, “I am sure there will be many fascinating people there.”
“Some brilliant minds.”
“Some truly sensitive artists.”
“Without doubt!”
“Do I look all right?”
“Great! Fabulous! Molto debonair,” Gojiro answered, swallowing hard.
It was terrible to see those gray hairs intermingled through Komodo’s lacquerish crew cut. They were a desolate reminder of all those years lost on Radioactive Island, years spent pretending to be a boy, when he was nothing but a man. Even so, it was no lie, he
did
look good, as good as any headwaiter at the Osaka Hilton.
Komodo held it together until he heard Shig rapping on the door, announcing it was time to go. Then he grasped Gojiro and began to weep. “But my own true friend,” Komodo sobbed, “I’m afraid.” Gojiro held his friend close for a while, scouring his Dish memory for potential behavioral tips. But they’d already seen
Valley of the Dolls, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,
and
Way Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
. What else was there to know? So the monster said, “Look, if you get in a tight spot, go Jap. Right to
The Nutty Professor
. Give ’em the teeth. Buck ’em out big. It never misses!”
Komodo mustered a crooked smile. “Oh, my own true friend, what would I do without your suggestions?”
* * *
The Bullins party was to be held in a voluminous yellow and white striped tent set up out back of the studio head’s digs overlooking Sunset Boulevard’s seaward snake. Komodo, with Shig posing as his private secretary, got there way too early. But how was he to know? The invitation didn’t specify a time, and since all the doleful birthday parties he threw for those decomposing Atoms always began at seven o’clock, he assumed this one would too. The tent was empty when he got there, except for several slight, taciturn young men nestling pink linen napkins into crystal glasses set on the two hundred tables fanned across the lush grass.
Komodo was almost about to leave when a large antique automobile entered the tent and sped toward him. “Duke!” the man behind the wheel was yelling. “Duke Kalalau!”
It was Albert Bullins. Komodo recognized him from his tabloid pictures. Infinitely more picturesque than the current clean-and-sober, snap-in, snap-out number-crunching studio head, Bullins was not shy with the sleaze shutterbugs. The limelight was his life. He was the son of Sam Bullins, an original Hollywood privateer who was famous for swearing he’d live to spit on D. W. Griffith’s grave and doing so. With this bloodline, Bullins played the oldtime mogul number to the hilt. In a town of mineral-water drinkers, he was the only one fat enough to pull it off. A lifetime in the business, he showed no signs of slowing down. Rain or shine, he stuck to his regimen of couching six starlets a day in his massive office, then swimming a lap. The item that caught Komodo and Gojiro’s attention, however, concerned an award Bullins once received from the National Large Caliber Stalk and Kill Association attesting that he had shot to death the last white rhino in Sumatra. There was a picture of him chowing down at the Extinction Certification dinner. The caption read, “Wouldn’t want to eat it every day, guess now I won’t have to.”
Dressed in tuxedo pants only, Bullins continued to call out from behind the wheel of the massive car. Obviously, he had mistaken Shig for the famous Tahitian surfing champion, Duke Kalalau. Shig turned around. He was wearing those special mirrored contacts that automatically revealed to the reflected individual the most despicable aspect of themselves, the one they always sought to conceal. Komodo, utilizing rosy fibers, had been trying for exactly the opposite effect when he first made the lenses; he threw them out when he recognized his mistake. Shig, however, never dull to an opportunity to further his forbidding affect, pulled the contacts from the trash and stuck them in his eyes. Boy, he could bale. At the gate to Bullins’s house, a single glower turned the hardcase sentry, a practicing Sicilian, into a tearful hulk. Apparently he’d been cheating on his wife and now felt the need to confess his sin to whoever would listen. Bullins, however, had no trouble looking at Shig. Obviously, whatever conscience he once possessed had long ago been loaned out, subleased, or diversified so as not to be a factor.
“Love your ’tacks, Duke baby,” Bullins said to Shig, grabbing his hand, putting the old pumperootie on him. Shig growled. He hated to have anyone touch him.
“So, Duke-o, how’s it hanging? All ten of them, huh? We really laid down some pipe with those bobbysoxers that time over in Wiamea, didn’t we?” It was only after Shig tensed his hand around his razored saber that Bullins realized his misidentification. “Whoa! No small sticker you got there, Pancho,” he said, jumping back, his bared, ample stomach heaving. “But if you’re not Duke, who are you?”
It was Komodo who answered. “I am Yukio Komodo. This, sir, is Shig.”
“Just Shig? What, you only got one name, like Mantovani?”
“Excuse me, sir, but he prefers to be known that way,” Komodo said.
“Whatever,” Bullins said, losing interest. He perked up again when Shig barked, by way of a more formal introduction, that Komodo was the director of the Gojiro—King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms series.
“That so?” Bullins remarked, his brown, bagged eyes bulging. “Hey, my grandchildren are bugs about . . . what’s his name? Gogyro?”
“Gojiro.”
“Yeah. Just bugs about that Gozero. And those headphones . . . what you call them?”
“Crystal Contact Radios.”
“Great tie-in. Like I said, my grandchildren . . . they’re just bugs.”
With that, Shig dug into a leather sack he carried and handed Bullins one of those supervulcanized models of Gojiro in deep mantis stance. Back on Radioactive Island, these replicas were the subject of much controversy. “Great,” Gojiro railed when he first saw the models, “now he’s putting out blowup dolls of me, just like any other porno star! Does it come with any vibrating parts?” Komodo was deeply embarrassed by such talk, and he attempted to put a stop to the production of the dolls, to no avail, of course.
“Give it to those who love him,” Shig said sternly, shoving the toy into Bullins’s girth.
“Yeah, sure,” Bullins said, opening the front door of the gleaming automobile he’d driven into the tent and tossing the Gojiro doll onto the cut-velvet seat.
“So how you like it?” the mogul chortled, tapping the car’s rich maroon hood. “Bearcat, nineteen thirty-six. Thought I’d show it off a little. You know, sort of a centerpiece for the party. It’s my new little treasure. Didn’t cost me shit either! Just traded Prince Baggala a pair of Joan Crawford’s old panties. Can you believe that? I still got two pairs left. Ann Sheridan too, if you’re interested. That Baggala, what an idiot. Just between you and me, you can take the burnoose off those guys, but they’re still a bunch of blanketheads. Know what he had under the hood of this baby? A Ford four thirty-seven. A Ford! And he calls himself a sportsman.”
Bullins stopped and put his arm around Komodo. “So . . . what’s your first name again? Yukio? Where you hail from, Yukio?”
Komodo was about to say Radioactive Island but stopped himself. It wasn’t a conversation he was prepared to have. “Well,” he said, shakily, “I was born in Hiroshima.”
“Hiroshima!” Bullins bellowed. “That a fact? I was out that way once. Picked up a Zero over there. Gora K-44 Sacred Blossom, too. Not too easy to find a kamikaze in cherry condition, let me tell you. The people I got it from though, those bumpkins, they were using it as a planter, chrysanthemums growing right out of the cockpit. Took me weeks to get the dirt out of the upholstery. Good little buzzbomb, though. I’d like to take it up, strafe the VA hospital, give those old boys a heck of a flashback. So, you’re a Hiroshima man. Mind if ask you a personal question?”
Komodo was wishing he hadn’t tied his tie so snugly. “Yes, certainly, Mr. Bullins.”
“Please—Albert! Now, tell me, how come Hiroshima gets all the ink? It’s always Hiroshima this, Hiroshima that. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Nagasaki took quite a hit too, didn’t it? I’ve seen the films. Burns, peeling skin, the whole burrito. But you never hear anything about it. You’re a Hiroshima man—how come Nagasaki always gets passed over?”
Komodo was bollixed. Yeah, maybe he should have hauled off and slugged Bullins there and then. Except that wouldn’t be Komodo. It was a longstanding problem, his inability to get mad over the horrors of his past. There was the time he quietly asked Gojiro if he would please refrain from taking Radi-Breath practice on a crosshaired blowup of Harry Truman. Truman’s decision had been complicated, Komodo claimed; you couldn’t condemn the man without knowing all the facts. Hearing that, Gojiro flipped out, screaming that Truman was nothing but a pipsqueak trying to show Stalin he had an atomic weenie. Nevertheless, following the incident, the monster had trouble working up the same hatred for the doughty little haberdasher. The fun went out of it. He had to substitute pictures of MacArthur and Tibbets. From then on, except for disputes concerning Joseph Prometheus Brooks, Gojiro abstained from conversations about Bomb-related celebs with Komodo. He didn’t want any more of his targets taken away.
Forcing a smile, Komodo turned to Bullins. “Perhaps Hiroshima has a better press agent?”
“Better press agent! I love it.” Bullins slammed Komodo on the back. “Let’s get ourselves a drink, what do you say?”
Now Komodo very definitely does not drink. Never did, not even once. In fact, you might say Komodo is viceless. Addiction—and substance-abuse—free. That doesn’t mean he gets as reproachful as a salt-lake Mormon and lays on you the heavy tsk-tsk-tsk. Komodo’s libertarian, he never once got huffed over Gojiro’s rampaging habits. He knows too much about pain and its abatement to point fingers. But still, going with the when-in-Rome schemata, he took Albert Bullins’s highball, grasped it in his sweating palm, and splashed the stinging liquid down his throat.