The effects were next to immediate. Whatever adhesives had kept Komodo so tightly wrapped all those years began to unstick. Faces smeared sideways, the grass beneath his feet turned over a new leaf, and the striped tent above his head swirled like a hypnodisk. The next half-hour or so was a bumper-car tour, the liquor insulating the rebounds. At one corner of the tent, a purplenosed man told him Jimi Hendrix wasn’t dead but was actually a gardener at Graceland. Then a tweed-suited matron with a wide, musky mouth took Komodo aside to point out another, younger woman, who was affecting an extra-snooty carriage. This second woman, Carrie Coast, whose name Komodo was supposed to know, had recently sued her husband for divorce, asking millions in alimony. “She hires linebackers from the Rams to throw her down the steps and then, one time, Jack raises his voice and he’s slapped with an extreme cruelty. It’s a disgrace,” the woman reported, with a phone operator’s bland whine. Komodo didn’t know what to say. It was still another stim for which he had no ready react. “A scandal,” he finally responded, full of outrage, but the woman was already gone, telling her tale elsewhere.
It didn’t matter. Hardly anything did. The booze and the women—so many women, their smells and skin so deliriously close to him—had him floating, vortexing left, right, all in time to bombastic rhythms laid down by that 175-piece Stan-Kenton-from-Hell orchestra. The tent was crowded now, a teeming hive of life’s own glitter. Everywhere were cyberslouching men in loosefitting retro clothing speaking in a military/corporate patois appropriate to certain frat hip off-world colonies. It didn’t take long for the word to pass as to who Komodo was. Burnished gladhanders angled toward him, beadeyed to slice off a corner for themselves. Turk Mincefeld, the producer, came over to ask if Komodo was interested in a certain Kafka property he “owned.” “But forget Czechoslovakia,” the epaulet-bedecked Mincefeld said. “Cold weather is no-go. I say we put it in Phoenix.
The Baileys and the Bug
—is that delicious or what?” Komodo nodded, said he found it a challenging concept.
The attention wasn’t
that
surprising. After all, as Gojiro himself often noted, with a sick pride that instantly mutated to disgust, hardly a week went by that several of “his” pictures weren’t in
Variety’s
top fifty at the same time. Not that they were ever number one or anything like that. The rungs were reserved for the Brooks-Zebers of the industry. Number twenty-nine, number thirty-two, that was more like it. But they were
always
twenty-nine, thirty-two. Worldwide, that was a lot of repeat viewing. “Gojiro has hydralegs,” the trades said. The pictures might close in Bandung, but a week later they’d be giant in the Sulu Sea. What exactly Shig did with all the money wasn’t a question either Komodo or Gojiro had worked up the gumption to ask.
Yeah, Komodo got asked to lunch, more lunches than he could eat in a year. Komodo’s not that big an eater, you know. A crisply diagonaled sandwich perhaps, a few grapes, that’s about it. Meanwhile, the warming, lavalight-like slog of the liquor (he quickly mastered the seemingly essential behavior of snagging drinks off passing trays) kept him earnestly shaking hands with all these would-be partners, thanking them with an embarrassed smile for their interest.
Others threw faster-breaking curves. “So, tell me, what’s the monster to Komodo and what’s Komodo to the monster?” asked a widebellied, blackmopped man. The pocked face was not unfamiliar. A pinchy Brit; his “critic” hustle—billed as rapier wit, but actually nothing more than a cache of re-gimmicked public-school rankouts—often turned up on the Radioactive Island Dishscreen.
“Excuse me?” Komodo replied uneasily.
“You heard me,” the critic bellowed. “We are confronted by some variety of monster here, are we not? I only seek to ferret out exactly what variety of bugeyed thing it is. You are his creator, you ought to know the brand of the beastie. Is he the guilt-ridden Lugosi who lies awake through the daylight hours staring at the inside cover of his coffin, racked by the consequence of his crimes, or is he the stoic, clumping Karloff?”
“Well . . . he’s more of a monitor. A varanid, actually.”
“Ah! Not mineral, not vegetable, but animal! A reptilian. A Moby Dick with scales.” The critic winked to a sallow, bleach-headed woman. Watch me work, the look said.
Komodo swallowed a mouthful of vodka. A tense grin came over his face. Moby Dick wasn’t exactly unknown to him. Several Cliff Note paraphrases of the venerable allegory had washed onto the island over the years. It remained a firm favorite, Gojiro often springing surprise quizzes based on the text during his Anti-Speciesist lectures, even if he felt the author missed the boat by not telling the story from the point of view of the whale.
“Something like Moby Dick,” Komodo threw out, “but there are differences, of course. For instance, Gojiro is green. Moby Dick was white.”
“Yes!” the critic pounced. “White! That royal preeminence of hue! The color of the kings of Pegu! The rulers of Siam! The Caesarian overlords! White of the Prairie Steed, milky chargers with the dignity of a thousand monarchs. White like the northern bear and treacherous shark, whose whiteness only serves to heighten the intolerable hideousness of their brutish nature. White like the Albino! A whiteness that repels men, that sends them away, a whiteness of the world uncharted, a world unknown and never to be known! The whiteness . . . of the Whale.
“As you say, Mr. Komodo, Moby Dick was white!” the critic concluded. “Now, your chum, that large and saggy fellow, what’s his name—I forget. What color did you say he was?”
There was a smattering of snickers from the knot of chiseled profiles. Front-runners all, they gravitated toward the slap of public flogging. And probably, Komodo being Komodo, he would have just let it all go. But the booze was in him. Besides, the way that fatuous jerk was talking, making uncalled-for remarks about the classic fold of Gojiro’s leathers, it kind of ticked Komodo off.
“Green. I said Gojiro was green,” Komodo retorted, geniality masking his passion. “But not the green of the vast unknowable, certainly not. Not the green of the windswept sea, nor the green of the most fertile lichens growing in the emerald forests, nor the green of the sturdy pine. Just the opposite. The green of Gojiro is the green that is too well known. It is the green of the slick left by a malfunctioning motorcraft in a previously pristine lake. The green of the dacron weave, the green of the garish paint chip in a homemaker’s catalog, the curious green of a jungle resurging from defoliation, the green in the faces of those whom cartoonists imagine live on Mars.
“You are right. Gojiro is not the color of the snowhowdahed Andes, their eternal frosted desolateness reigning at great altitudes. His is the color that God never splashed upon the spectrum. He is the green of men. The green we have created.
“That is the greenness of Gojiro!”
* * *
When Komodo was done, he could have been anywhere. Everything was going by itself. He never imagined he would say such things, certainly not in front of the suddenly cheering crowd now gathering around him. It was only when a hand touched his shoulder that Komodo felt his feet on the floor once again.
“A very elegant argument, Mr. Komodo. A lot of people around here wouldn’t have minded knocking the shit out of that asshole.” It was Bobby Zeber.
“Mr. Zeber,” Komodo gasped, bowing quickly. The lightheadedness was gone, replaced by a dull throb in each temple.
Zeber smiled tersely. “I admire a man who arrives in town cold and three days later steals the scene at the hottest party of the year.” Under the halogen floodlights of Albert Bullins’s tent, Zeber looked quite handsome, dashing even, in his evening clothes. The weariness he displayed back at the Turret House was gone. He looked younger, moving with a kind of blasé self-assurance that denoted years of being truly big. “I’ve been trying to call you. But you don’t seem to be staying anywhere. My office phoned all the hotels.”
“We have taken a house.”
“A house?” Zeber frowned. “That sounds kind of permanent.”
Without the booze’s buffer, Komodo was back to square one. He could feel Zeber’s sharp brown eyes studying him. “Please let me apologize,” he blurted. “It was a terrible breach for me to appear at your home unannounced. I can only hope my impetuousness did not cause you or Ms. Brooks any discomfort.”
“Don’t worry about that. In fact, your visit seems to have been a tonic for Ms. Brooks. I came home yesterday and she was cleaning up the house. I nearly died of shock. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen her do that.”
Unsure if this was a compliment or not, Komodo bowed again. “Will Ms. Brooks be here soon?”
Zeber’s face tightened again. “What gave you that idea? Sheila doesn’t come out in public. She hasn’t in years.”
“But . . . she must, I have urgent matters to discuss with her.” Komodo dug into the pocket of his dinner jacket. He would show Zeber the invitation he had received, make clear to him the gravity with which his wife obviously regarded the situation.
His top lip curling, Zeber spoke before Komodo could find the card. “I’m terribly sorry and embarrassed about this, but there’s no way—no way in the world—that Brooks-Zeber can make a film like the one Sheila mentions in her letter. It can’t happen. It’s the last thing that could ever happen. I think it would be better for everyone if we just forgot about the whole thing, okay? Of course, I will more than recompense you and your staff your out-of-pockets and attempt to make right all other inconveniences you’ve incurred.”
“But . . .”
Zeber slitted his eyes, went into his modified Brooklyn street act. He was very good at it, had used it to intimidate a thousand executives. But somehow, this time, it came out mournful, full of hurt. “Look, Mr. Komodo, you seem like a nice guy, but there’s one thing you got to understand. Sheila . . . she’s just not, how can I say this? She’s not like you or me. She’s another kind. Failures of communication, misunderstandings, come up. This letter she wrote you is one of these misunderstandings.”
The orchestra’s upper-register-intensive version of “How High the Moon?” blared into Komodo’s brain. “Mr. Zeber. I must urge you to reconsider. The film itself is not paramount to myself and my friend. There are other matters of great importance that must be addressed.”
“What other matters could there be?”
“As Ms. Brooks says in her letter, matters of life and death.”
Maybe Komodo said that too loud. The tent seemed all ears; any info scrap pertaining to the enigmatic Brooks-Zeber team would be quite a plum to pick. Bobby Zeber noted the encroaching knot of poorly faked nonchalance, unfurled a surprisingly boyish smile. Then, clasping Komodo’s hand, he said, “This isn’t really the time or the place to talk. Why don’t you come by my office tomorrow morning. I really think we can settle this.”
That might have been that, but just then a slim waiter, obviously an aspiring actor hoping to be noticed by the great Bobby Zeber, came over. “The gentleman in sector two, sixth left table, wishes you to join him, Mr. Zeber. He says to bring your friend.”
There were other people at the table, but Komodo only saw the silverhaired old man with bushy eyebrows. “Yukio Komodo, meet Victor Stiller,” Zeber said flatly. Komodo was stunned, amazed. Drawing himself up, he delivered his deepest, most deferential bow. “Mr. Stiller. It is a great honor to meet you, sir. Your work has made a tremendous impression on me.”
Stiller smiled engagingly. There was a playfulness in his dark brown eyes, a look of absolute serenity, self-satisfaction. He looked as if he’d never had a sleepless night in his life. “Only in the most beneficial of ways, I hope,” he said, his well-mellowed Euro accent as comfy as an old fairy story.
“You are a great thinker,” Komodo said with ultimate sincerity, his heart racing. Could he actually be talking to the famous Victor Stiller—the great pioneer of nuclear physics? Stiller was there from the start, from the first battered neutron, the initial accelerating particle; he was a fission and fusion colossus whose fabulous career spanned every critical pile from Ulm to Amos Alonzo’s Chicago squash courts out to that fateful Valley. Komodo felt his palms clam up. What an opportunity this was—to engage the brilliant Stiller in a discussion of the most profound subjects of the Universe!
Stiller creased his sunkissed brow. “Bobby, I like this Mr. Komodo of yours. He has a very refreshing point of view. These days most people barely remember that I ever set foot inside a laboratory. They think of me only as a paperpusher, a colorless bureaucrat.” By this, Stiller no doubt was referring to his more recent fame as a fixture in the cabinets of three different presidents and his authorship of the Stiller Doctrine, a far-reaching policy that was described by opponents as “never too many missiles as long as someone’s making money to make them.” It was this hardline pro-proliferation stance, coupled with the scientist’s astounding rise from a near-penniless physics student, son of a shoemaker from the Bluthgeld ghetto, to his current status as one of the richest men in the world, that often prompted Gojiro to go into the sort of rage the monster usually reserved for Joseph Brooks himself.
These aspects of Victor Stiller’s notoriety, however, were far from Komodo’s mind right then. “I have read your essay on orbital electron capture and beta decay,” the awestruck Japanese told the old scientist. “It was very inspiring.”
“You flatter me unmercifully with this ancient history. But the truth is—and please don’t tell anyone this, Mr. Komodo—I agree with you. Still, I am retired from science. Or was it science that retired me? Who can say? True thought is a vast and uncertain terrain one enters only at the greatest of risks, for very soon even the most promising minds are humbled, humiliated. Inventing an idea is difficult enough, but maintaining it, allowing it to flourish, that requires courage and a very thick skin. Today, I have neither. I am just an old man who finds it amusing to come to these galas and ogle at the beautiful young things.”
Stiller smiled at the couple seated to his right. “May I present Ms. Conapt and Mr. Dance.”