When he turned back to the television, the Heater filled the screen. At first, he thought it was part of the born-again show. After all, wasn’t the Heater the biggest bailout those revelation-mad brimstoners ever got, the government-subsidized cornerstone of their pitch? But then he realized that his tail had accidently brushed that remote control Komodo jerryrigged for him. This was another station altogether.
A Heater station? A station that played only looped billows of mushroom clouds twenty-four hours a day, like the yule log?
Gojiro stared at the cloud on the television screen, wondered which Bomb had made it. Once he’d been on a first-name basis with all Heaters. Mike from Eniwetok, the Russian Joe, he knew them all, the Fat Man’s rock and Little Boy’s roll. Every Cloud had its quirks, was dense with its particular psychic marrow; none could be mistaken for a nimbus any idiotgrin weatherman ever slapped to a plexiglas map of the lower forty-eight. For Gojiro, shroomic recognition went beyond run-of-the-mill iconography; it was interior, congenital, imprinted like a duck. Once, as sick fun, the reptile got Komodo to project a series of random Cloud configurations on the ’cano wall. Gojiro shouted out his immediate impression of the pattern, Rorschach style. “The spirit of an evil count rising above the smoking ruin of an ancient castle,” he screamed. “A manta ray with a thorn in its paw” . . . “Bicarbonate run amok” . . . “Julius Erving’s hair.” He saw everything in those Clouds. It was like stumbling through the most impenetrable of jungles to come upon a squatting holy man holding a seemingly harmless fungus between his dirty fingers. “Come,” the man beckoned. By the third bite the world was white.
It killed the monster, this love-hate relationship he maintained with nuclear holocaust. He wanted his hatred of the Cloud to be complete, palpable. But couldn’t hate the Cloud. It was too much a part of him. The Heater, it pulled you by the short hairs, put on you the long stare.
Enola Gay
, the kiss you gave, will it ever fade away?
As it was, the Heater playing right then on that TV wasn’t any humdrum cog in the national defense. It was the very first. The Trinity. The Cloud faded away to an old file film taken from an airplane. Below was a large, desolate crater. It might have been the moon. There was nothing much around, just some somber outcroppings of red rock strewn about the scooped-out floor. Gojiro blinked. Where was this place?
A voice-over started up, reading portentous copy about how “this barren, inhospitable stretch of high desert was, for a single yet permanent moment, the center of the world.” They flashed a couple of stock photos of the scientists. Brooks was there, Victor Stiller and that Colonel Grives too, the whole crew. “After these cataclysmic events,” the voice, now recognizable as that of a local newscaster, continued, “this place faded back to anonymity. For the last three decades the army has used it largely as a weapons dump. But now, a potentially far-reaching lawsuit concerning the title to what has been called one of the most uninhabitable stretches in the world has arisen.”
They cut to a decrepit-looking Indian standing in front of a motel by the interstate. Tractor-trailer tires whined in the background. The Indian squinted into the camera. Off his looks, he could have been any age over a hundred. His forehead was deeply lined; the skin on his cheeks hung like mailbags slung over the back of an exhausted pony. A fly buzzed around his head. The unseen newscaster kept talking. He said that Indian land claims on federally held territory were nothing new, “but this one is different due to the historical significance of the land in question and the fact that this man, Mr. Nelson Monongae, is the only living member of the claimant tribe. The only one.”
“I am the Echo Man,” the Indian said in a timbreless whisper. “Echo Man is the last one. Only he knows what has been known.”
Now they showed the newscaster, a pleasant-looking young man whose trench coat blew tight against his body in the wind. “Yes, that’s very interesting, Mr. Monongae, but you’re just one person. You’re claiming more than ten thousand square miles. Why would you need such a large space?”
The Indian’s face was full of twitches. “Because I am the Echo Man. I speak for the People. This land is the sacred Land of the Monongae Clan. I speak for all the Monongae Clan. I do the will of the Monongae Clan.”
“But what happens when you die?”
“When I die, nothing matters. Now I am still the Echo Man of the Monongae Clan.”
“Monongae . . . Does that have a literal translation?”
The Indian craned his weatherbeaten neck. He seemed to be having trouble paying attention. Every so often, as a kind of twitch, the mottled fingers of his right hand reached up to grab hold of a blackish vial that hung from a loose necklace down to the middle of his chest. “Translation to what?”
“English.”
“Yeah. Called in English ‘lizard.’ Lizard Clan. Monongae is lizard. I am the Echo Man of the Monongae Clan.”
Gojiro had been about to switch the stations after the Trinity Cloud faded. Only the pictures of Brooks and Stiller had kept him watching. Now he widened his every lid. There was something about that old Indian. A look. It drew the monster in.
Nelson Monongae was twitching worse than ever now. He kept grabbing at the vial strung around his neck. It was black, whatever was inside that vial. Blacker than black. “Monongae Clan people was led to the Valley by my great-great-grandfather, who said, ‘The Heart of the World is here. The Blood of the World runs from here.’ I am the Echo Man, I must reclaim the Land before there is no memory.”
Gojiro drew a deeper breath. “Hey, come look at this,” he yelled to Komodo. On the screen the newscaster was stating some charges local residents were making concerning the land case. “People say that you’re being used, Mr. Monongae. That, in fact, you have been known to have spent a good deal of the past several years in the county drunk tank. What about that, sir?”
Before the Echo Man could answer, however, a well-tanned man in a silk suit interceded. “Mr. Monongae does not have to reply to these rumors. His case is just and lawful under the Return of Native Lands Act. He will win it. Thank you.” With that the man hustled the Echo Man into a gray Mercedes and roared away. Maybe there was some time to kill or something, because the newscasters decided to stick a little coda on the report. Once more cameras panned the redcliffed Valley, the newsman saying, “Here, years ago, time stood still . . .” But he was drowned out by Komodo.
“That’s it! The place she saw!”
Past Berdoo
G
OJIRO ALWAYS WANTED TO SEE THE USA
in a Chevrolet. But when he and Komodo left the Traj Taj, they had to go in that fatassed limo. It was Shig’s idea and there was no way out of it. Ever since Sheila Brooks’s unexpected arrival at the Traj Taj, the severe neoteen had kept an exceedingly close eye on Komodo. So, shrunk down to four feet and peeved, Gojiro threw himself into the wonderless plush of the limo’s ample back seat. This didn’t figure to be fun, he decided.
It got worse as they pulled down the dusty path to the Traj Taj gate. Ebi was there, digging by the side of the road, collecting her specimens, making her identifications. She was so busy, then. Every day, it seemed, another sector of the Traj Taj grounds erupted in aerobic and/or anaerobic bloom. Turn around and a dozen new phyla splurted from the sandy soil, came cracking through the mansion walls. One afternoon three separate varieties of barbed-wire vines
(Razorcoilus brentwoodus)
latticed across the back section of the house, cocooning the old servant’s quarters with a tighter weave than the gauze across the face of an invisible man.
Ebi was constantly on the go, taxonomically taxed. No sooner would she identify a specimen when two others would begin the herbic creep. She was out in the thicket at sunup, didn’t return to the house until dinnertime. Then she’d toil by moonlight on nocturnals.
“It’s almost as if she’s trying to get it all in before . . .” Gojiro said to Komodo, unable to finish the sentence.
Ebi waved as the limo sped by. Gray dirt smeared across her face, the way it always did. Gojiro loved how, no matter how freshly she’d turn out in her striped party dresses and patent-leather shoes, there would always be a tiny daub of her beloved soil beside her eyebrow, or a slight smudge on her elbow. Komodo pointed it out quietly, unobtrusively, so she would never be embarrassed. He’d wipe the spot away with a moist cloth. Then she’d look perfect.
“Ebi!” Gojiro shouted, pressing himself to the heavily tinted windows, but she never even heard him, the big car soundproofed like a tomb.
* * *
They went out the Santa Monica Freeway, through the neon and the neon, the money and the money, the Alpha-Beta and the Alpha-Beta, and the Thrifty Drug too. They traversed the choked inner suburbs, rode past freeway walls covered with the glyphic jumble of bellicose invocations of ethnocentricity and metal bands. “Iran Maidan!” Gojiro squealed. “Morons! Can’t they just copy the words off their T-shirts?”
Shig drove the way he always did, fast and reckless. Not that he was alone. The road was full of maniacs. “Asshole!” Gojiro screamed out the window at a Porsche as it whipped in front of the limo.
“Please, my own true friend, get down, they’ll see you,” Komodo said nervously.
“That bastard cut us off! That one there, the jowly one with silver hair.” Then, out the window: “Yeah, you, I’m talking to you. You: Kenny Rogers scumface!” Gojiro could only cackle when the Porsche, its driver stunned by the sight of an accusing lizard hanging out a limo window, skidded into two Ferraris. “And stay over, asshole!”
“Restrain yourself, please!” Komodo shouted in his sternest tone. He pushed the automatic window closed.
“Hey! That hurt!” After this, Gojiro lay in the back of the funereal car, watching the town go by. Really looks like shit, the whole joint, the reptile thought to himself, checking the dense petrochems gumming the horizon. Was this the best the sapiens could do for themselves? Was this their shining City, this pastel smudge? Bah, Gojiro scoffed. Bah and double bah. “Be better if this place was smashed flat,” he muttered.
“What?” Komodo asked. A Lamborghini semi-truck swerved into their lane, nearly running them into a Maserati step van.
“Nothing.” Komodo wouldn’t understand. He’d come swarming with his suffocating Saint Francis dictums about how hate comes from fear and how you have to conquer both. That stuff just made the monster mad. Wasn’t it fair to hate them for making you afraid? Looking out the limo window at the line of mirrored buildings (
mirrors!
Why do they need mirrors on the forty-seventh floor? Do they think the birds are as vain as they are?), Gojiro decided there wasn’t anything wrong with the town that a little radicalized urban renewal wouldn’t cure.
Where to start? Hmm . . . there were any number of squatty award-show venues that would fit neatly underfoot. How about the Capitol Records building—sure would be a gas to see the faces of those greed-chiseled bad taste purveyors as they watched that payola-layered tower ripped from the ground and played like an accordion. Century City, that could go, left hook followed by a right. Melrose, too, a thousand caterers and their spindly cuisine microscorched: watta outage for the power lunch! And what might a brace of well-placed kicks do to the lowslung “charm” of so many wicker-decked hotels? The habitat loss would likely send the burnished clientele jumping back and forth over sagging tennis nets, like mainframe-blown replicants at last having their long-deserved day on the court. Then, just for fun, he’d grab giant donuts from the tops of fastfood joints and ring toss them ’round the Watts Towers. He wouldn’t bust off the points; those steeples were about the only structures in the whole benighted burg Gojiro could tolerate.
“Yes!” the monster guffawed. He’d pry the stars right out of that jerkoff Walk of Fame, sharpen the points, send ’em whirring in through the windows of every morning meeting, really let some heads roll. Could there ever be a name more fittingly up in lights than that Hollywood sign ablaze with Radi-Breath? And who knew, a perfectly placed stomp might jumpstart the ole San Andreas; a little press on nature’s reset button. Why the heck not? The place been going downhill since Gondwanaland.
A seethe of excitement came over Gojiro. To be bad! To be really bad. To show the sapiens once and for all. To burrow up through the million sediments of their frenzied yet futile repression, to burst loose from the suddenly unquiet graveyard of their past and stand before them: a
true
monster, a destroyer without conscience, a dark shadow across landscapes, dorsals silhouetted in the flaming destruction he wreaked, immune to weapons, beyond the reach of fevered prayers, remorseless, unstoppable. A killing machine, tearing ships from the sea, breaking buses in the streets, ripping bodies between his cutting jaws.
“Dread and horror, horror and dread!” the monster’s heated brain shouted. “Lay the black cowl round my shoulders, place skulls and tallow candles upon my bench. Let the bottom of my feet be my heavy gavels. Guilty! Guilty! A hundred years in Hell! A thousand! Justice! Retribution! There’ll be some sentencing done here!”
But then, almost immediately, he felt himself deflate. It was the sprawl that did it, that LA whizzing by: the overwhelming sameness, the diffuse repetition. It dulled all passion, doused every fire. Ever spreading, the city was an amorphous sweep without a vital organ or center at which a determined Destroyer could aim. There were no walls round which to drag the vanquished from the back of a chariot, no flag to capture. There was no Empire State to climb, no Eiffel Tower to snap in half; in what amounted to the perfect defense against exactly the attack the monster envisioned, the town had no cherished emblem of itself beyond its very vagueness. You couldn’t break its will with a swift and symbolic act. No, killing this city was not the job for a Great Avenger bent on the telling gesture. Only an army of forever-canvassing bureaucrats, Chinese likely, could make a dent.
There was one stop to make before they hit the desert. They were going to see Walter. Walter Crenshaw, Pfc., Okinawa medic.
* * *
Walter . . . there wouldn’t be a story to tell without Walter, no windswept journey across two thousand miles of sea, no Radioactive Island, no Glazed Days. Walter was there from the beginning. It was Walter’s dark, hanging moon of a Carolina face Komodo saw in that hospital room when he opened his eyes for the first time in nearly ten years.
“I must go,” Komodo said, through those long-stilled lips. “I have a friend. He lives very far away. He has no one. I must go to him, be with him.”
“I know,” Walter said.
“You will help me?”
“Yes.”
How did Walter know that the poor Coma Boy he’d tended so lovingly had been summoned to an Island no map knew by a terribly lonely giant lizard? Komodo couldn’t tell, never asked. All he knew was that Walter had always been there. That it was Walter who told him about the weather outside his dank room, Walter who rubbed his muscles so they stayed alive, Walter who sang to him, Walter who played him the radio, Walter who slapped his leg when the Say Hey Kid hit a homer. That it was Walter who chased the phonies who came to gawk at the Coma Boy, international freak, Walter who was gentle while the others were brusque. That he trusted Walter, completely.
So that night when Walter helped him from his bed, shoved him through the laundry-room window, put him on a metal gurney, wheeled him down the hallway, Komodo knew it was the right thing to do. Faster and faster Walter pushed him down those corridors; above him, the fluorescent lights blurred against the ceiling. Everything smelled of ammonia. Walter got Komodo into black clothes, smeared camouflage paint on his face. Suddenly they were outside. He could see the stars in the night sky; smells of the sea filled his nostrils. How lush it was, how alive! The sand was between his toes, the ocean too.
Then Walter was waving a tiny flashlight, sending a signal through the fog. The boat came, creaking and shabby, a scow run by Korean fishermen. “Two hundred dollars!” the one in the skullcap screamed.
“You said one-fifty!”
“Two hundred!”
“Motherfucker!” Walter dug into his pocket, pulled out the bills, then lifted Komodo onto the slimy deck. Already the first of the searchlight beams were cutting through the heavy air. Walter was waistdeep in the tide, holding the gray box above his head. Komodo knew that box. It had been in his room, always in his room.
Then the drone of the MP boat filled the night. “Mister Crenshaw!” Komodo called, reaching out.
“You gotta go now! Take this!” Walter pushed the box over the gunwale, but the Korean was panicking, casting off. The box was too heavy, Komodo couldn’t hold it. It slipped from his grasp, fell into the water. Walter tried to shove it back into the boat, but it fell again, back into the sea. Walter dove down, dragged it up once more. “You got to have it!” But it was too late. The cutter was closing, sirens blaring. The Korean revved his engine, jumped ahead.
That was the last time Komodo saw Walter: in the water, holding that box over his head, helpless in the searchlight’s glare. Then he was gone, lost in the fog. Komodo felt as if he were entering another dark world. What happened next, Komodo never knew. Was it a piece of the boat’s equipment that struck him, a forearm of one of those petrified Koreans, or was he simply washed overboard as that chasing MP cutter caught up? Whichever, he felt himself fly up, then down, hard, into the cold, fast current. He remembered nothing more until he awoke the next morning—or was it a week later, a month?—in that gray lifeboat drifting, drifting . . . until he crossed the Cloudcover and his life began again.
It was years later, long before the invasion of any 90 Series, that the monster heard a strange voice inside the Quadcameral. “I got talking inside my head!” Gojiro screamed. “Yuke!”
“Yuke?”
“Yuke the Nuke! He keeps calling for Yuke the Nuke!”
“Yuke the Nuke?”
“He says he would have called years ago but they finally let him out of the bughouse!”
“Bughouse?”
“He keeps playing ‘In the Still of the Night.’ Damn! Am I going crazy?”
Komodo grabbed Gojiro by the supraocular ridge. “How does it go?”
“What?”
“ ‘In the Still of the Night.’ Sing the song, please.”
Uncomprehending, Gojiro looked at his friend, but then he sang the first few bars. Show-do and showbie-do.
Komodo’s face went pale. “The song he played on the radio! It is Mr. Crenshaw!”
After that, it wasn’t long before they knew the aftermath of what happened that night on the Okinawa beach. He almost made it, Walter said, almost got away. He got off the base before the dogs got his scent, pulled him down from behind, near to gnawed off his leg. They never court-martialed him, not exactly. The way Walter had it figured, they could never really bring themselves to believe it, that a boy who hadn’t stirred in close to a decade could suddenly get out of bed and escape one of the most heavily fortified bases in the world. It was a lot easier to lie, say that Komodo had finally succumbed to his mysterious malaise, stage that phony tearjerker of a funeral. Not that anybody cared much; by then the Hiroshima Coma Boy was a used-up curio, page-eight stuff at best. Besides, the VA needed the bed space.
“They gave me the shocks, but I never told nothing,” Walter said. “Never told them shit. Wasn’t their business why I done it. They said I was nuts. They threw me in a bin.” Listening to Walter describe his life and times, via one of those early generation of Quadcameral external speakers, never failed to send both Gojiro and Komodo into fits of tears and wailing. It seemed that Walter still thought he was an Okinawa paramedic. He peppered much of his talk with phrases like “Well, let’s see what we got here, Yuke” or “I’m telling you, Yuke.” That steady voice, which once had offered comfort amid Komodo’s enforced sleep, now jangled, spasmed. More often than not, he’d speak from a cheap hotel room or while walking down a city street, railing at the sky.
“They have driven him mad,” Komodo screamed in anguish. From then on, he worked night and day trying to refine his Quadcameral devices. The aim was to construct a transmitter, something that could send as well as receive. “We must contact him! We must help him as he has helped us!” But it was not possible. Great strides in Quadcameral research were made; indeed, the prototype for what became the Crystal Contact Radio was devised at the time. But despite hours of screaming, “Come in, Mr. Crenshaw,” Komodo’s frenzied messages were never acknowledged.
As for Gojiro, he continued to listen, overhearing snatches of conversation here, a slice of life there. He heard Walter scorn bill collectors, talk back to the TV. Maybe Walter was crazy, Gojiro thought, but much of what he said rang true, at least from an outcast’s point of view. Once the monster heard him arguing with the mailman, who accused Walter of being paranoid. Walter snapped back, “Man, if you was me, you couldn’t be too paranoid.” Besides, he still played that good R&B. Yeah, in his way, Walter was a social Budd Hazard; plenty of his worldview found its way into the lizard’s lexicon.