Things were out of control, going by themselves. They kept showing that overhead shot of the Insta-Envir, commenting on the “bizarre pattern.” It was bizarre, all right; the way he saw himself posed, vigilant, in deep mantis stance, Gojiro might as well have been looking at one of the Atoms’ potholders. Except that this was no foot-square rag easily held in a single claw. It was real size, an image sculpted into the Insta-Envir, visible only from above, as if it were the work of a wretched agri-tribe trying to catch heaven’s eye. In all taxonomic history, there was no record of the Insta-Envir simply
growing
like that.
Luckily, it was at that point that the Dishscreen unhinged its vertical hold once more. When it came back, “Mister Ed” was on. That prattling gluepot! Once, under the banner “Down with Dolittle and Frances too,” Gojiro had declared war on the chatty palomino, along with every other talking animal. “A Dom plot!” he blustered. “Who are they to stuff delicatessen slang in the mouths of chewy equines?” Now, however, the reptile gave thanks at the sight of the wheedling nag. Mister Ed was having trouble reading the fine print on an insurance policy, prompting his keeper to suggest he wear glasses. Vain, Mister Ed refused. “Contact lenses, Wilbur!” he kept demanding in his anthro-implanted baritone.
“Some funny shit on here,” Gojiro shouted to the bereft Komodo. “Really! It’ll cheer you up. Haw, haw, haw.”
A moment later, the reptile felt a presence at his shoulder. He thought Komodo had stopped his sobbing and come over to laugh about a horse who wanted contact lenses. But it wasn’t Komodo. It was Shig.
“A package has arrived,” he said stonily. Freshly turned out in crisp white linens, showing no sign of his wounds, the austere boy stood next to a steel-mesh shopping cart. Inside was a squarish object covered in coarse burlap. “It came to the former residence, brought there by one Ms. Wilma Crenshaw, mother of Trumaine, controller of Gojiro Crystal Contact Radio #2766669. She had been holding this parcel in trust for Mr. Komodo.”
The monster rose, slackjawed, and looked down at the package in Shig’s cart. A handwritten note was pasted to the side. “Keep for Yuke the Nuke.”
Komodo nervously cut through the burlap with his pocketknife. Inside was a steel gray square, a foot and half around. Komodo stepped back, wiped his brow.
“It is the box! The one Walter wished me to have that night! The one that fell into the surf!”
Eyes big, Komodo reached into the cart. But the cube was too heavy. It slipped from his grasp, just as it had all those years before as he lay across the bow of that Korean’s fishing boat. “Oh, no!” The box crashed to the Chamber floor, cracked open.
Gojiro was aghast. “Shit! It broke!”
“That is only the casing,” Shig said sharply.
Then they heard the sound of metal scraping across the stone floor. A rounded piece had come loose from the box and was rolling on its edge.
It stopped right at Komodo’s feet. He picked it up. It was round, three concentric circles welded together by a thin connecting rod. Komodo grasped the metal bands, held them up in front of his face. Then, without speaking, he ripped open the top of his black pajamas, exposing his hairless chest and the three rings emblazoned on it. He laid the metal circles over them.
“
My own true friend!
”
Inside the Box
T
HE TRIPLE RINGS!
Komodo and Gojiro were struck dumb. Could that cracked cube sitting on the White Light Chamber’s killing floor actually be the wellspring of their Promise?
“Looks like an art deco boom box,” Gojiro nonplussed.
“A radio of some type, certainly. Here is the speaker.” Komodo probed the malleable surface stretched across one side of the lead parcel. The mesh was blackened, fire-singed. At its center, like a negative’s shadow, lay the bleached outline of three concentric circles. Komodo picked up the metal rings he’d held to the scars on his chest, pushed them against the mysterious markings. They aligned. “These rings appear to have been originally constructed as a decorative grillework for this machine.”
“Grillework . . . geez.” The monster had never let on, but blazing those concentrics onto his own chest had been no simple grin-and-bear waterfront tattoo job. He never felt a thing, of course, but the look and smell—the charring leathers, the curl of branded flesh—it was all he could do not to shout out, faint dead away. How then could it have been for Komodo, who had no two-inch-thick hide, no pony express ride between nerve endings? Mercifully, Komodo did not recall. He recollected almost nothing prior to the moment in Okinawa when Gojiro’s voice came into his head. All the rest was lost to him, blotted out and gone.
“We must get inside,” Komodo said breathlessly, pulling a longstemmed screwdriver from the pocket of his black pajamas. “We must see what is within.”
“Yeah, within . . .” A foreboding overcame Gojiro as he watched Komodo work to loosen the rusted screws. If the contents of that box were to be a revelation, suddenly the monster had no desire to witness it. What a foul, incognizant thing he had become, he thought, fighting the urge to turn away. It didn’t seem so very long ago that he wished only for more perfect eyes to lead him about a world where there was ever more to see. That was when unknowing was polemically equated with slumber, and lethargy a sin. But those days were long since past; now Sominex was the only shot the reptile craved. Sheila Brooks had the right idea with those blinder glasses, he thought. After all, what was the big bitch against repression? Repression seemed one of the singular triumphs of so-called civilization. Why should anyone be so concerned about where they’d been? Did they suppose it was less dreary than where they were going? Memory’s an elephant in the china shop, only amnesiacs are truly free, the lizard thought, stewing that funky chestnut about not forgetting history so as not to repeat it. It was exactly the opposite. In a world paralyzed by dumb choice, to remember an event was likely to imbue it with the force of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Let sleeping traumas lie, that’s my motto, Gojiro decided.
Komodo was grunting now. He had a wrench, had braced himself with his foot, was pulling like Dr. Pain, and later for the Novocaine. What was next? A jackhammer? Depth charges? The monster was assaulted by a fresh attack of doubt. Opening the box suddenly seemed profane, a spiritual suicide. Weren’t the Triple Rings the spokespinning hub of their creaking conception of the Wheel of Life? Didn’t they represent the perimeter of Cosmo’s last stand, the arc of wagons pulled tight against the Unknown’s remorseless reclamation? The Triple Rings were Symbol, encoded by an anonymous author, their origin lost in the primal mists, untouchable, immune to despoiling consciousness. That was how it was! How it had to remain! What was Komodo doing, opening that box? What was he hoping to prove? Why not just dig up Christ’s Cross, rip it from its place inside a billion souls, slat it to a suburban deck? Wood’s wood, right?
But what choice was there? That box was sitting there on the White Light Chamber floor, tangible in all dimensions. It couldn’t simply be ignored, turned into a planter or smallish coffee table. This was the very object Walter Crenshaw deemed so crucial that he dragged it into the surf that night on Okinawa. “Take this,” Walter screamed even as the MP boats approached. “You got to have this!” For years Walter carried the box around, protected it in cheap hotel rooms against shivs, zipguns, and worse. Walter believed in this box. He held it apart from Stiller and the rest, let them drive him mad rather than reveal its location. He made it his legacy, entrusted it to Wilma and Trumaine. There was no way Gojiro could turn his back on that.
“Uhhh,” Komodo strained as he slid off the top of the box, sending it clattering onto the floor. He hovered there for a moment, not speaking.
“So?”
Komodo’s incredulity turned to excitement. “Amazing! It is a transmitter and receiver of the crystalline type. Yes . . . a crystal-based radio . . . with four distinct elements . . . Oh, my God.”
* * *
A haiku occurs, about a painter of perfect pictures who is never happy because none of these pictures was the one he wanted to make. The painter dies, made crazy by the painting he never could paint.
So often Gojiro feared that might be Komodo’s fate. For years the monster watched his friend toil over the beakers and bunsens, only to turn crestfallen, proclaiming his beautiful creations to be worthless, having “no business being invented.” What woe it was to think that the one invention Komodo really wanted to make was the one that remained beyond his reach. Yet here, down in that forlorn White Light Chamber, Komodo was pointing at a water-damaged box and whooping Eureka! “Finally! After all these years!”
“Lemme see!” The lizard lurched forward. It figured, he exulted. He and Komodo were in the biggest of fixes, that Amendment’s razored pendulum swinging low above their heads like a not-so-sweet chariot—and who comes up with the last-second save by the railroad tracks? Walter! Walter Crenshaw, Pfc.! This was some kind of high-five from beyond the grave, okay.
Drawing a breath, Gojiro peered into the battered box. Immediately, elation became confusion. “Wait a minute, this ain’t nothing but a couple of corroded connections. It looks like a Crystal Contact Radio. In fact . . . it is a Crystal Contact Radio! A crappy old Crystal Contact Radio.”
Komodo’s joy continued. “So many times I imagined this very device, and now here it is: all I ever hoped to attain.”
“A Crystal Contact?” Gojiro was enraged. To have his hopes dashed like this was near to unbearable.
Komodo was weeping. “At last . . .”
“It’s the Rings,” Gojiro sputtered, “seeing the Rings. Yeah, that’s what got to you. You’re just honked, strung out, too excited.”
“No!” Komodo shouted.
“No?” The uncharacteristic vehemence in Komodo’s retort took Gojiro by surprise. For a moment he felt like grabbing his friend’s head, bouncing it off the steely box. “But this is a goddamn Crystal Contact Radio, the same shit Shig sent out all over the world to drive me insane! You said so yourself—they didn’t have any business being invented!”
“This is different!”
“Don’t look no different to me. How do you know it’s different? You ain’t done no schematic, no shakedown. It’s a Crystal Contact. A five-dollar hustle, like a million others!”
Again, Komodo did not appear to hear the reptile. “Walter must have known. . . . Somehow he knew . . .”
“Knew what?” Gojiro’s brain was too-tensing, seizing up. “What? What did Walter know?”
Komodo opened his mouth, was about to say something, but the reptile never heard it. For it was right then that the whooshing Beam once again invaded the Quadcameral.
“Ohh . . .” Gojiro moaned as he felt himself beginning to be thrown back through time. He staggered about the White Light Chamber. The last thing he saw was that box, closer and closer. He fell right onto it, its sharp corner crashing through his parietal.
* * *
It started like always. He was hooked and yanked, slingshotted headlong through innumerable diurnals, as many nocturnals, back through the increasingly familiar blur of bygones and bygones. Zam went the mastodons, zim went the sabertooths. Goodbye Cenozooey . . . hello Mes-o-zo!
When Gojiro opened his eyes, however, he wasn’t one step ahead of an encroaching glacier or in a Sauric killing field. He was on a lush hillside, beside the bluest lake, before a towering mountain capped with snow gleaming like diamonds. Stretched out below was a magnificent City.
“Smile!” someone called.
Straight ahead of him, Gojiro saw a man focusing a camera, his face obscured beneath a black cloth. What kind of double-wirecross was this? That crazy Beam had catapulted him into the Opening Sequence!
But right then Gojiro heard, “My own true friend, can this truly be happening?” Komodo? What was he doing here?
“Smile!” the cameraman said again. Then he emerged from the dark cowl, started forward. The monster gasped. The man—a Jap!—was running toward him, reaching out to straighten his school tie, telling him to look into the camera. And on the other side of him, Gojiro heard the soft rustle of satin. The monster turned to the sound . . .
But he was carried away, moving again . . . to a field of brown grass. “Look!” Komodo’s voice again!
The man who’d taken the picture was in the field, pulling a cart over the rough terrain. In the cart was a leaden gray box . . . the same box with the Triple Ring grille that sat even then upon the floor of the White Light Chamber, its corner jammed into the reptile’s head! The man pulled the cart into a grove of trees beside a river. He stopped, plugged in a wire, and began speaking into a microphone.
“Come in, birds! Come in, trees! Come in, snakes! Come in, sky! Inishiro Komodo calling. Please come in! Inishiro Komodo calling. I am human. I wish to speak with you, for you to tell me of your lives. We are all alive in this world! Come in, please!”
Gojiro heard Komodo’s voice, all welled-up. “My own true friend . . . it is my father.”
The picture scrambled, reassembled in a small bamboo house. The man Komodo said was his father was standing beside a young woman wearing a maroon kimono. Gojiro didn’t have to be told who she was. Her skin was fair, like a china plate, her hair jet black. They were huddled together, Komodo’s mother and father, clutching each other. There was a crash. That box! It was falling, knocked from a wooden table, hitting the floor.
“Talking to birds again! Dreamer!” It was a man in a uniform, screaming. He was squat, strong, terrifying. Behind him were more soldiers, rifles cocked and ready. “You have not been at work! The war grows more difficult every day. Japan needs aircraft.”
Komodo’s father drew himself up to his full six-foot height. He was young, proud, indomitable. “I am a scientist. I struggle forward accordingly. My work is for the living, all that have lived, all that will live.”
“I remember . . . I remember this.” It was Komodo talking. Just as the monster had been inside the far-off heads of a thousand supplicants, their distant troubles suddenly becoming his own, the process was repeating with Komodo. He saw through Komodo’s eyes, the eyes of a child cowering in the corner of a paper house.
The soldier hit Komodo’s father, drove him down to the floor with a wooden stick.
“You can beat me, but I will not give up my search! I will not make planes for men to die in. I dedicate myself to Life!”
The soldier hit Komodo’s father again. His mother’s screams filled the room. Gojiro could hear his friend crying. And crying.
They were moving again. Gojiro could feel it, that decisive closing push.
Darkness now. Tears and darkness. Screams and tears.
Thump . . . Thump . . . Thump . . .
“Mom!” Gojiro sceamed. He was inside that egg again!
Thump . . . Thump . . . Thump . . .
“Mom!” Hatching out! Coming alive . . . burrowing upward . . . to the light! Except he wasn’t alone. Someone else was bursting from the same egg, the two of them hatching out together, straining toward the light.
“MOM!” Did he hear an answer? Finally, an answer? An affirmation? His own mother, answering his call?
But it wasn’t his mother. It was Komodo’s—his mother’s screams and tears. And his father, shouting too, exhorting her. Their faces came into view, blurry, wet. Then, clearer.
And there was a cry. “Waaaa!”
“My own true friend!” Gojiro heard Komodo shout. “I am being born!”
“Waaaa!” It was the Freshout Cry, Komodo’s Freshout Cry!
And, at that exact instant, that lizard burst through, saw light.
“Waaaa!” Gojiro heard that same cry he’d heard before, the beginning bleat of a tiny lizard, sixty-six million years ago.
“My own true friend, we are being born together!”
A lizard and a boy, who so longed to merge themselves, had finally succeeded. A lizard and a boy were born, sixty-six million years apart, yet together. “Waaaa!” The sound of their Freshout Cries converged into a common squawk, a harmony across all Time.
* * *
But then they were being pushed again. Forward this time.
To that hillside, beside that lake, with a gleaming snowcapped mountain behind. Now, however, that hum was in the sky. The hum that becomes a buzz. A drone, a dull gnash, a ripping, tearing sound. But it wasn’t the same . . . no. The boy’s eyes don’t go up.
Remember? . . . in the Opening Sequence, how the Mother and Father stand still, looking ahead, smiling, never knowing?
(He worked on it for days!)
But the Boy’s eyes go—up into the sky?
Well, that’s not how it was, not this time. This time it’s the Boy whose eyes stay straight ahead, smiling, never knowing. The Dad’s the one who peers up into the sky, sees the Superfortress. Then he turns back to the Mom, and they both put their hands on the Boy’s shoulders . . . the Boy, smiling, never knowing.
Then they were running by that same brook where Komodo’s father tried to talk to every other living thing in the universe, carrying the boy in their arms. They ran into their house, pulled aside a straw mat, threw open a roundish trapdoor.
The boy was crying now, holding his mother tight. She grimaced, gripped his body, held him away from her. Her arms were thin but strong. “My son,” she said. “Someday, in another world, perhaps you will succeed where we have failed. Long be your line, my sweetest son.”
Then the rope was around Komodo’s waist and he was going down into the hole. It was like a well, narrow and deep. Round and round Komodo went, down and down. It was like looking into the opposite end of a telescope, his mother and father growing smaller in the pool of light above. Then he heard a scraping sound and that light began to disappear, like the waning crescent of the moon.