It was the “ascendency of the easily accessible Image,” the monster declared, that robbed the sapien of his ability to be both objective about the past and poetically intuitive about the future. “Check it out. Say you got some raggedy-ass tribesmen in New Guinea, and for two thousand years they’ve been nursing along some stick figure solar trope about a giant bird hauling a glowing stone up into the sky with its beak. Sure it’s weak, a subsistence sort of creation riff, but at least it’s theirs. So what happens the first time they see “I Love Lucy”? Little Ricky blows that glowing stone straight out the back of their heads. Their whole world is common denominated to a Havana nightclub. You’d figure they’d catch on. Don’t sapiens know Bad Art is like a flag flying upside down, mayday for the Beam-Bunch? But no. They just keep on. Devaluing and devaluing. Grinding those cathodes until they get to the Big Signoff.
“The worst of it,” the monster screamed, holding up a lobby card announcing the Midville Manyscreen’s showing of
Gojiro vs. the Casey Kasem Beast on a Journey to the End of the Dial
, “
is
that we’re part of it! Right there in the white-hot center of this infernal process!” Then Gojiro stopped talking. He couldn’t go on. As cynical as he’d tried to make himself over the years, he couldn’t tolerate his own Image, pirated or not, being the consort—the henchman!—of the Heater. It was too bitter an irony.
* * *
Yet here, bellydowned on that beer-can-flecked freeway median, watching those ragtag ’tile-o-files, Gojiro felt a shift. Suddenly, it was like that horrible night up on Dead Letter Hill, when he stood beside that oppressive spire.
“Who’s it on?” the monster had asked, confronted by the detoured 90 Series’s seethe and roil. “Who’s got to take the weight?” Komodo shook his head then, said the weight would fall on whoever was prepared to bear it. And the monster wailed, ’cause he knew: face-to-face with all that pathetic longing, the Varanidid wouldn’t have turned away. The Varanidid would have gone forth. Because what does a Hero really need . . . but Need? Wasn’t all the Need in the world right there, leeching into the ground on Dead Letter Hill? Wasn’t that same Need present right now, amid that scrapbook-carrying horde that came to sit at the foot of the big picture in the middle of the blank desert night? “Who’s it on?” The question pulled at him, yanked like a billion umbilical cords. It was his Image up there! It didn’t matter by what means it got there. It was still his picture. Him.
There was no choice but to come clean, he decided. He would go back into that limo and make Komodo reverse the shrink ray. He would return to his normal size, then break through that Image and expose the real Gojiro. He would tell it all. The Truth.
And what was that Truth? That he was a coward. A fake.
“I ain’t tough. I’m a wimp. A coward,” he screamed out, still beside the roadway. He’d tell those zardpards everything, set them straight on how the movies were shams, how those supposed epic battles were nothing more than setups, tank jobs, fixes. Hero? Bully was more like it. After all, those supposed deathless Opposers weren’t even real Beasts. They were nothing but animatron messes of recombinate slime Komodo fudged up in plastic molds. Those sludgicles didn’t have a single thought in their pseudocellulose heads, much less a diabolic design on how to subjugate Radioactive Island’s carefree little crew. Even so, the reptile feared them, quaked before them. He’d cower in his dressing room afraid to come out. Komodo would have to slip him a pill, stick him shivering on his chalk mark. Sometimes the reptile would make Komodo reconfigure the sludgicles on the spot, lop off a head or two, anything to make them less frightening. But then, when he finally did summon the nerve to face the tox-o-masses, he’d whale on them, beat on those bland slabs as if nothing pleased him more than the sound of his fist against insensate chlorophyll.
It was an ugly story, but one that had to be told, Gojiro decided. His fans needed to know all of it, the whole reeking enchilada verde. They needed to understand why he’d turned away their supplications, why he could never be this
thing
they wanted him to be. He was no King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms. He was a reclusive mutant, a vain, spouting, lonely fool. He would tell them every last bit. Then he would throw himself on their mercy. If they felt they should rip him apart, he would allow them to do so. It would be the only decent thing he’d done in his life.
However, as he turned to begin the execution of his plan, Gojiro looked back up at the screen. They were playing the scene where, guided only by the sound of Johnny Hodges’s solo on “Star-Crossed Lovers” and the Atoms’ mass reading of the retard parts from
The Sound and the Fury
, the monster breaks through the squid’s obscurantistic fog, letting there be light. Always kind of liked that part, Gojiro thought. It seemed a shame to interrupt a scene like that. If he was going to set straight the swindle he’d wreaked upon his wretched fans, the apologia’s timing had to be precise. There was no need to be hasty, jump the gun. “Give them this last moment of illusion,” he said to himself.
But then, as quickly as it had come, the desire to confess fled. What would be gained from it anyway? Would it bring peace of mind to anyone? His sins were beyond any simple act of contrition. Besides, what was the assurance that his fans would accept his word? Why should they? They could take him for an imposter, ignore him, leaving him to twist slowly in the night wind like some moldy warmup act. That would be great, really super. But worse than that—much worse—was that he’d succeed in convincing them he was a fake. Then what? If there was one thing certain as far as those luckless clutchers of Crystal Contact Radios were concerned, it was that Gojiro was the center of their botched universe. What gave him the authority to pull the sun out of their system, just because he happened to be very same merry ole sol? It would be like snatching the last pastry off the plate of a motherloving French memorist, feeding it to just anyone in the street. Where would be the greater good in that? Maybe the zardpards were a dismal bunch now, worshipers of a crooked icon, but to wrest even
that
from them was to remove even the chimera of Hope.
It was an impossible situation.
That was when he heard it: “Please come in.”
And again: “Please come in, Gojiro.”
It sounded like it was coming from the screen. The monster turned, did a double take. “Can’t be!” That great Image was staring down at him, beckoning.
Beckoning to him!
“Please come in, Gojiro! Please heed this humble servant’s plea.”
“I must be going crazy.” The picture was shifting now, closing in on the behemoth’s head, drawing a bead on the parietal. Gojiro squinted. He didn’t remember that shot. Shig cut stuff out, sure, jumbled it up, but he never refilmed anything. A zoom shot! There weren’t any zoom shots in that picture! Cinematically, Komodo admired Ophuls, von Sternberg, early Skolimowski—his
mise en scène
was fluid, sumptuous, eschewing cheap TV effects. Yet there it went, in and in. Closer and closer until the parietal seemed to be right in front of the monster’s face, a swirling psychic peristalsis. “Come in, Gojiro . . .”
It was insane, but right then he could have been back on Lavarock, staring down at his reflection in the Black Spot.
“Please come in, Gojiro. Please heed this humble servant’s plea.”
“I’m thinking about it!” he screamed back at the screen. He wanted to. Bad. He wanted to hurl himself through the air between him and that creature on the screen . . . but there was all that
space
between. He’d have to vault over the rumbling traffic, the wideslung hurdle of the GOJIRO VS. SQUID marquee, a thousand fans in vans—but that would be no problem for a monster who could jump as high as a moon. This was a different kind of space.
“Come in, Gojiro. Please come in, Gojiro,
Bridger of Gaps, Linker of Lines, Nexus of Beam and Bunch, Defender of the Evolloo
. Please heed this humble servant’s plea.”
“Wha?” Suddenly Gojiro realized the sound wasn’t coming from the screen at all. It was closer, right next to him, the voice of a boy. A wild, sun-baked boy. Billy Snickman! Gojiro knew it instantaneously, instinctively. After all, he’d
been
Billy Snickman! He’d lived in the same foster homes, hidden in the same car trunks, eaten out of the same garbage cans. He’d been inside Billy Snickman’s head, and Billy Snickman had been inside his.
That night! That terrible night on Dead Letter Hill. “I only got one question,” Billy Snickman had said then. “
Who are you?
” Goddamn! What kind of question was that? That question should be banned from speech!
Gojiro reeled about feverishly, trying to get a better look at this boy whose voice he’d sought to avoid for so many years. In the screaming headlights Billy Snickman appeared as a mad, mall-age Moses. His hair was matted and flung itself away from his head in great plaited slabs. His clothes were shredded, the tatters spreading in the wind like flames. He lived in the hollow of the freeway underpass, inside a skeleton of sticks and stretched green garbage bags. It was easy to see why he’d chosen that particular place: The sightline to the giant drive-in screen was perfect, unimpeded. Never once did Billy Snickman take his eyes off that massive Image. He just sat there, repeating that supplication, over and over, into the cool night. A mantra, that’s what it sounded like. Billy Snickman, the author of “Forget That House,” poet of dislocation, had become a crazed sitting sadhu out there on that freeway, putting his every rhyme and reason into this one unremitting petition.
“Enough!” Gojiro screamed. He couldn’t wait another second to find out what Billy Snickman wanted of him. He resolved to confront the boy then and there. But, before he could move, Komodo grabbed him.
“My own true friend!” Komodo shouted through the raging night. “She has been here!”
“Who?”
“Sheila Brooks! I have found this in the sand.” Komodo held a small gun. A derringer. “It is hers,” Komodo said, his face flushed. Engraved on the barrel, faintly visible in the headlight glare was “From Albie B. to Sheila B.”
“A present from Mr. Bullins,” Komodo yelled above the traffic roar. “It is identical to the one she had the other night.”
Gojiro looked over at Billy Snickman.
Gojiro vs. the Enigma-Inking Squid at the Rock of Knowledge
was over. The last of those phony credits rolled by, the screen grew dark. But obviously Billy Snickman did not consider his evening finished. He kept on, reciting his supplication. Vans and pickups rolled by, heading, no doubt, for squalid dwellings all over the desert country. None of them seemed to notice Billy Snickman. If the boy was a prophet, his message went unheeded by its natural constituency.
Gojiro kept watching Billy Snickman until he heard Komodo once more. “Something has happened in this place. Her gun, it has been fired!”
Into the Valley
T
HEY KNEW THEY WERE CLOSE
when they pulled into an all-night Fina station and saw the wizened attendant sitting four inches from a television showing
The Day the Earth Stood Still
. The gas station was “For Sale,” the house behind it was “For Sale,” the half dozen rusting cars off to the side were also “For Sale.” In fact, everything around the station was “For Sale”—even the dog, which was a surprise, since it looked dead. It seemed about right for a place called El Callejon sin Salida, which, according to a shredded billboard out on the blacktop, was “the town closest to the site of the first A-bomb explosion.”
Even so, they still had a goodly portion of Big Panghorn Missile and Bombing Range to cross.
KEEP OUT
said the tedious succession of signs posted every few feet along the horizon-piercing stretch of cyclone fence.
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
. Shig drove the perimeter, then stopped at a shot-up wooden building that had served as the world headquarters of the Deviants MC before that shoot-out with state troopers. They hid the limo behind a lava mound and crawled under the barbed-wire fence. From there they’d have to walk; it was miles to the Valley edge.
In the moonless night, even with Komodo’s nite scope strapped to his snout, Gojiro’s underneaths were stuck with so many cholla needles he felt like a dimestore voodoo doll dangling from a rearview mirror. “If I knew it was gonna be like this, I would have worn a steel bib,” he complained.
Four hours later, they reached the Valley’s lip and peered down. Spreading out before them like a vast black sea, the hole was immense, seemingly without bottom. The vista, so huge and hidden, took their breath away, weakened their knees.
The name told it all. El Valle de Encrucijada—Valley of the Crossroads, or Valley of the Ambush, depending on which meaning you took. The monster saw them as the same: To a mutant, every crossroads is an ambush. “Went down to the Crossroads, tried to flag a ride,” was how the cheerless song went. “Down the Crossroads, tried to flag a ride, didn’t nobody seem to know me, everybody pass me by.”
The crossroads was the preserve of the sly and smiling Trickster, sitting on a fence, chewing on a reed. The tired traveler comes up to the crossroads, says, “Hey, you there, sitting on that fence, which way to Chicago?” “Chicago? Been there a hundred times,” the Trickster says, pointing. “You got to go that way, you want to get to Chicago.” And there you go, down that road, never to feel the wind off the lake on your face, save the gales of Hell. “Went down to the Crossroads, tried to flag a ride, nobody seemed to know me, everybody pass me by.” The Heater ruled the crossroads down in that dark pit stretched out in front of him, Gojiro knew. The Heater that tricked a world, turned it to a negative, a ghost didn’t nobody seem to know, everyone pass it by.
“Down there,” the reptile said, his voice an awed whisper, “that’s where it all began, huh? The womb of the Modern World.” Komodo nodded. Tears were in their eyes. Standing over that Valley—there was a solemnity in it.
Just then a helicopter came racheting, spraying light across the Spanish bayonet and yucca. Shig grabbed Komodo and the two of them hit the ground beside Gojiro. “The one o’clock patrol,” Shig said, as a matter of fact. “In two hours they test the newly commissioned Eleggba III not far from here. The safety zone for this system has not yet been established; it is very erratic. To linger in this spot might be dangerous.”
Shig motioned left. “Please come, I have prepared accommodations for the night. It is not far.”
* * *
Maybe once it was nothing more than a cave, a guano-splattered bat haven, but now the cavern’s mouth was a metal door that screwed open with the perverse squeak of an urn lid. Inside was a latticework of rusting catwalks that threatened to give way at any moment. Down and down they went into the consuming gloom, until they reached bottom and walked out into a huge underground room.
“What’s this joint, Usher’s confessional?” Gojiro murmured. The place was enormous, the strange sheenlike floor at least three hundred yards across. Rocky walls vaulted up as might those of a Gothic cupola, to a ceiling lost in the shrouding darkness. The only available light came from the numerous clusters of candles, their wax dripping down upon multiarmed twenty-foot-tall holders so typical of Shig’s interior decoration. A high-pitched sound could be heard, its timbre resembling that of a massive pipe organ set on the sopranomost stop.
“Hey!” Gojiro said with a start. “What you wearing that stuff for?”
Komodo had donned an odd Saran Wrap-like see-through robe. On his head he wore a visored helmet. Shig was outfitted in a similar fashion. “These are special garments,” the pitiless boy answered. “There are high levels of certain potentially corrosive elements here.”
“Corrosive elements? What are you talking about?”
“This large cavity has been used extensively for underground nuclear testing. Right now it suits our purpose.”
“
A White Light Chamber!
We in a White Light Chamber?”
Komodo hung his head. “Yes. It seemed the best available shelter.”
The monster was incensed. “Shelter! How could a White Light Chamber be shelter from any storm? The Beast’s own belly—and we got to jump right in it! Auschwitz all booked up or something?”
“I am sorry for the great offense, my own true friend, but there was no alternative. I fear that the shrink ray has proved to be unfortunately unpredictable. I am afraid you can no longer be maintained at a specific height or weight. Here you can be accommodated even at your full dimensions. Please accept my apologies.”
“But what if they decide to bust one open down here?”
“My own true friend, have not the Great Powers signed a treaty forbidding such things?”
“You fall for that shit?”
Komodo sadly shook his head. “In any event, it would not happen here. This site has been abandoned for more than ten years. Shig has double-checked these facts with records secured from the Defense Department.”
“Damn.” How did Shig “secure” information like that? No doubt much intimidation and stealth was employed. The reptile looked across the huge Heater-induced ulcer and saw the whitesuited neoteen running a forklift, moving several crates around. “Now what’s he doing?”
Komodo shook his head. He didn’t know either.
* * *
Originally, the plan was just to stay the night. Until dawn. Then they would emerge, look down into the Valley. “Whatever Ms. Brooks saw happened at dawn,” Komodo told Gojiro. “ ‘Dawn light,’ that’s what she said. If we are to illuminate her secret we must attempt, inasmuch as it is possible, to see what she sees.”
The monster could only grunt. He didn’t feel like arguing the point. There was still most of a whole night left to spend in the Heater’s haunted house. “Mind if we cuddle up?” Gojiro asked Komodo. “I’m feeling a little . . . on edge.”
So they made themselves a makeshift burrow over in a corner of the abhorrent cavity, pushed themselves together, leather to skin, skin to leather. “Kind of like old times,” Gojiro said softly. Back in the Glazed Days, they always slept close, a boy snuggled within the soft hyoid of a massive lizard. It was only after Kishi arrived that they took up separate quarters. “I guess I missed this.”
“As did I, my own true friend.”
They held each other tight. Then Gojiro said, “I know this is lame and all, but I was wondering if you could read to me, you know, like you used to.”
Komodo said he would be more than happy to grant Gojiro’s request, but he had none of their favorite books.
“It don’t got to be nothing special. Could be anything, I just miss hearing you read.”
“There is only this.” It was a handout Shig had picked up at the gas station: “Prospector Pete’s Get-Rich Guide to Panning, Wildcatting, and the Semiprecious Metals of the Jornada del Muerto and Big Panghorn—Revised and Up-to-Date Edition, with Special Section on the Encrucijada.”
“Guess that’ll have to do,” Gojiro groaned.
Prospector Pete’s publication, which emanated from 23 1/2 Sospecha Street, Socorro, New Mexico, had the old-timey look of a roadside restaurant placemat, thick with rope letters and rudimentarily rendered Yosemite Sams on the cover. However, a close reading of the smudgy, rexographed pages revealed more than a few salty tales of yesteryear and hobbyist lore. Prospector Pete, who signed every item with his imprimatur of crossed pickaxes, was a polemicist of no small obsession. This was most apparent in a front page “editorial” entitled “More Double-Talk in the Encrucijada.”
“I’m sure all you have been following that big stink the Indian Nelson Monongae’s land claim is raising,” the editorial began. “Now, the ole Prospector don’t have a single thing against a Native American reclaiming what’s rightfully his. What sticks in my craw is how, ever since federalizing the land for the Bomb Test, the government has always refused to allow the independent wildcatter a fair chance on sinking a well out there on the Big Panghorn. You ask me, there’s some
very serious funny business
going on in the Valley.
“Let me explain myself. Probably you heard about that conference down at the state college about mass extinctions of the dinosaurs. Of course, it ain’t exactly news to us rockhounds that the so-called experts have come around to the idea that the earth was hit by an interstellar object of some type approximately sixty-six million years ago, which might have had some hand in the reptiles’ demise. What was news was a report read by a professor that there’s no place in the world with a higher concentration of iridium at the Cretaceous level than right here in the Jornada del Muerto. As any amateur geologist knows, iridium is the sure sign of celestial intervention—meteorites and so forth. All of which led these experts to conclude that this comet, or what have you, may have come to earth right here in our own backyard!
“It made a lot of sense, since any longtime sandpanner working the outskirts of the Big Panghorn doesn’t need a conference to tell him that the Jornada del Muerto has one of the widest assortments of dinosaur fossils in the world. You want triceratopses, we got ’em. Allosauruses? You name it. Well, Prospector Pete got to putting all this together back at the ole assay shack. I did a little checking and found out that the Encrucijada Valley itself—which is really no valley at all but a meteorite-type crater—has an iridium count
more than one hundred times higher
than the already high surrounding area. Which leads me to go out on what I feel is a very short limb and say the Encrucijada Valley is the actual site of the comet fall!
“Now hold your horses all you panners and wildcatters. Maybe you think the Prospector’s gone off the deep end with all this talk about comets and dinosaurs. I just want you to ask yourself one question:
What’s fossils mean but fossil fuels????!!!!!!
Let me tell you, if that comet really did hit out there in the Encrucijada, don’t that make it potentially one of the richest fields ever? And let me say one more thing: I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one who ever came to this conclusion. Fellow rockhounders and roustabouts: How long are we going to let the federal government and Big Oil tell us we can’t seek our fortunes in our own backyards on account of they once shot off an Atom Bomb out there?”
When Komodo stopped reading, a shocked silence enveloped the White Light Chamber.
“Shee-it,” Gojiro finally whistled. “He saying that the saurs bought it right out there, in the Encrucijada?”
“That is what Mr. Pete seems to intimate, yes.”
The monster shook his head. “The Heater born in the same place where the saurs died . . . that’s heavy.”
“It would be a remarkable coincidence, an astounding confluence.”
Gojiro shuddered. “Talk about your fearful symmetry.”
“It is an eccentric notion to be sure,” Komodo said tentatively, rubbing his chin. “Yet . . .”
“Yet what?”
“Oh, it’s probably nothing, but seemingly unrelated items synchronate in my mind. The first, of course, is Mr. Monongae’s contention that the Lizard Clan came to this spot because his great-great-grandfather felt ‘the blood of the world’ was here. Secondly, there is Ms. Brooks’s mother’s portrait. That X-ray pattern, it’s so . . . paleontological. Then there’s Mr. Zeber’s statement that she insisted the Trinity Bomb be exploded here and nowhere else.”
Gojiro gave Komodo a sidelong glance. “What are you getting at?”
“Oh, I don’t know, it’s probably silly,” Komodo sighed. “It’s just that I was recently reading a book that touched on the discipline of geomancy. The author, in an unfortunately unscientific manner, expressed the belief that there are places in the world—he referred to them as power spots—where extraordinary events seem to occur over and over again. I only mention this now because if this Valley proved to be one of these power spots, then perhaps more extraordinary events could transpire here—which gives me renewed hope in regard to our Solemn Vow.”
The monster was feeling sick now. “Hey look. This is giving me the creeps. You mind if we don’t talk about it right now?”
Komodo nodded sharply, the animation draining from his face. “Of course, we must get our rest. We must be up at dawn. Tomorrow is potentially a most consequential day.” Then Komodo extinguished the last of the candle clusters, plunging the White Light Chamber into darkness.
* * *
He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop his mind. Listening to Komodo’s quiet breathing only made it worse. For the millionth time he felt he didn’t deserve such a loyal friend. That loony riff about the Encrucijada being a power spot, whatever that meant—it just proved it all over again. Maybe Komodo was a terminal pollyanna, forever naive, but at least he was throwing his heart and soul into their sworn quest to fulfill the Triple Ring Promise. How the monster despised himself right then. So he didn’t believe for a minute that business about Sheila Brooks having a secret—wasn’t it still his duty to offer Komodo more than flaccid, reluctant assurances of support? The Triple Ring Promise was pledged between them, ostensibly of equal importance to them both. Yet as Komodo scoured the landscape for every clue, however unlikely, what did Gojiro do?