“The forehead.”
“You’re gonna stick that knitting needle in my head?”
“Just under the skin. It would be a three-way process, a line between the Goldplate Pill, yourself, and this machine.”
“What’s that?”
“This is a radio. Quite an old one. It was designed by my father, in Hiroshima. He believed it might enable him to speak with other species. I am not certain if he ever achieved his goal. I think not. He bequeathed it to me before his death. However, some time later, I lost it. It has only recently been recovered. Ms. Brooks, nothing remains of my friend save a single neural coupling. The function of that coupling is to receive cries for help. Supplications. There is one supplication, a special one, the one you wrote at the bottom of your letter summoning us here, that I believe is essential to my friend’s survival. I think this machine contains unique properties that will enable you to reach him.”
Sheila Brooks ran her stark white hand over the box’s singed surface. “Your father made it?”
“Yes, he was a great inventor. I am but a mere shadow of him. I feel by using his invention in this way, I am satisfying his quest.”
Then she looked away, to the monitors. “But what about
my
father? What’s it gonna do for him?”
* * *
She made a joke before it started. “Kiss a sleeping lizard on the lips, make him a prince? Why not? It’s all in a day’s work for the Hermit Pandora of Hollywood.” Then she lay down on the White Light Chamber floor, alongside Komodo’s father’s radio and the vial containing the Goldplate Pill.
“Are you ready, Ms. Brooks?” Komodo asked, handing her the stereopticon. She nodded, squeezed his hand. How he wished to embrace her then. But there was no time. As soon as she glimpsed the image inside the viewer, the vision started up.
Komodo was at the Dishscreen, checking for signs of Quadcameral activity, when he heard it. His father’s radio—its crystal connections were hissing, spitting. One after another the heavily corroded inner workings began to pop. The stress was too much for the old transmitter. It was burning out.
Sheila Brooks’s vision was starting. “Mom! Dad!” she shouted, her face a mask of familiar terror. Stunned, Komodo watched the smoke pour from his father’s radio. Should he unhook her from the box now, right in the middle? He couldn’t decide. On the Dishscreen, the 90 Series neuron was becoming unstable once more. Komodo tore at his face. “I’m going to kill them both!”
But then he felt the heat. The Triple Ring grillework he’d reaffixed to the radio’s speaker was starting to glow. Komodo peered at the fiery concentrics, stood in their light.
It came back to the Triple Rings, as everything always did.
It was a funny thing, too, because when they left Radioactive Island to come to America, Gojiro asked Komodo what he would do should they be unsuccessful in their quest to fulfill the Promise. “Like, if we don’t get Identified, and after I’m snuffed.” Komodo thought for a moment and said likely he’d enter a life of contemplation.
“Just think? About what?”
“About the Triple Rings,” Komodo said forthrightly.
It was a vocation Komodo sometimes considered, disappearing deep within Asbestos Wood to become an itinerant monk. It would be a quiet but fruitful life, he imagined, meditating upon the Evolloo and the role of the Triple Rings within it. Now, however, he rejected this option. He could never allow the Triple Rings to recede to mere abstraction. He needed those perfect arcs alive. He needed them raw, savage, burning into his flesh.
The Triple Rings opened an aperture amid the gloom of that White Light Chamber. Komodo peered through. Again, he saw what the Beam had shown him—what happened on that clear, warm morning when his parents put him in the hole. He saw it again, and this time understood what his mother meant when she said, “Long be your line, my sweetest son.”
The Triple Rings told him what he needed to know. They told him he’d done more than survive that exceedingly bright morning the Heater ripped through all continuity. When those Rings flew toward him, they brought a new logic, another way to be. No wonder he’d slept all those years. Transfiguration can be arduous, it takes time to assimilate.
The words passed Komodo’s lips: “I am a Quadcameral. I have always been. Quadcameral and Throwforward.”
It would, of course, change everything. It already had.
Then Komodo bowed to the Triple Rings. He thanked them not only for the revelation of his destiny, but also for the repose with which to perceive it. For no matter how byzantine and beleaguered the antic Cosmo became, the Triple Rings remained the center of the cyclone, the crystalline, unshakable eye, steadfast against the encroach of Chaos. To return to them was to touch home base, affording the assurance and courage to go on.
Komodo went on. He looked at the singed hulk of the radio his father had made and smiled. The gray box had come a long way, but now its work was done. Gently, Komodo moved it from its spot and lay down in its place. Then he took the two wires, one that led to Sheila Brooks and one attached to what remained of Gojiro, and forced the strands into his forehead.
Three Rings
W
AS HE DEAD?
Was death what the Goldplate Pill dealt? The monster couldn’t say. He had no claim to know dat about Dis. Sure, the poster nailed on the sheriff’s wall says “Wanted: Dead or Alive”—no paying off on in-between. But who’s to tell where one stops and the other starts? Is the demarcation hard and fast, so that a degree either way—212 or 32—pushes you to water, steam, or ice? Or is it possible to be in several states at once, like a zard poised at the fourcornered point where Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona collide, a claw across every line? Could it be that “living” and “dying” are just bureaucratic shorthands, syntactical shams invented by quota-driven medics itchy for the bag and tag? Tell me: They slam the morgue drawer behind your head, does that mean you’re dead? Who knows? Bigger than Life, Death, hard to get the specs on.
Not that the monster had wads of time to spend on these questions subsequent to submitting himself to the Pill. The reaction was too rash and blitzing, a sensurround to shock every scope. It’s a bit o’ schizo, okay, tom peeping at the Big Bang of your own self. The reptile saw the ever-expanding array and said, “Geez, a Milky Way of me.”
It didn’t hurt, not a bit. Throughout his molecular diaspora, all Gojiro felt was release. Indeed, if a mutant’s nothing but an endless stalemate on Mendel’s tic-tac-toe board, the Goldplate Pill took the role of a tentyard preacher; it broke the crutch of yesterday’s paralyzing paradigm across a knee and screamed, “Walk!” To long, skinny molecules mashed flat and coughing in the sootcaked smokestacks in Birmingham, it said, “Run free!” To particles shackled white and glossy within PR sheets handed out by flacks, it shouted, “Liberty!” To polyester nodules needlerammed in the sweatshops of Guatemala City, it said, “Don’t look back!”
“
Adiós
arm,” the monster remarked with particular detachment as his withery upper-right appendage vanished from his ebbing torso. “Check you later, leg.”
It was easy, letting go. What else was he to do? Ride herd on those fleeing elements, hound them back into his in-no-way-OK corral? He had no right, no claim. Unbolted from that Superfortress of his unending misery, those atoms became free agents. He could not deny them what the Goldplate Pill offered: the clean slate, the new deal.
Going, going, but still not gone. Because, really, what’s the big deal to lose a body? Nine out of ten spiritual professionals agree: The body is the rent-a-car of life. Crash it into the side of a semi-truck, leave it in flames, who gets bent out of shape? Hertz? No. It’s the soul—the soul you got to shake! The soul’s the Continuum’s Krazy Glue. You want to bust the bearings of samsara’s ever-churning treadmill, you’ve got to take the soul off the Line.
Except Gojiro didn’t believe in souls. Never did, wasn’t about to start now. Still, looking through nonexistent eyes and seeing nothing, he wondered: Why am I still here? Something was holding him, lashing him to his next-to-defunct self. But what could it be? What part of himself would cling resolutely to Life when the rest was so pleased to leave?
Suddenly, he was moving. Being pushed. Back. That Beam! The monster didn’t get it. How could the Beam take hold of what did not exist and hurtle it back through time yet again? Then he heard the thump; a heartbeat across Eternity. Thump. Thump. Thump.
“Mom!” He was inside that egg again, hatching out, burrowing up . . . But wait, there were others there beside him—two others! One on either side, fighting through the blackness with him, fighting to the light.
And then he heard that Cry. The Cry that pierces sleep, that can’t be shut out. But not one . . . three! Three cries! “Waaaa!” Three Freshout Cries together!
Someone was talking now. “Ms. Brooks! Can you see yourself?” It was Komodo, again in Hiroshima, again being born. But what was he doing talking to Sheila Brooks?
“Wait a minute,” Gojiro called. But there was no waiting, no stopping. He could feel himself slipping down, coming out, then looking up, through blurry eyes, and seeing faces above him. Smeared and blotched at first, but then clear. Brooks! Joseph and Leona Brooks, smiling down at their daughter!
Then there were more voices, dry, authoritative. “To the New Era!” Victor Stiller said, a champagne bottle exploding in his hands. The rest were cheering now, those European faces—wintery even here in the desert, in the middle of July. They all wanted to see the baby, the child whose entry into the world came at the stroke of midnight of such an auspicious day, to such auspicious people.
After that they went away, because they were very busy. There was so much left to do, so little time in which to do it. Just the two of them remained. Brooks (had he ever been that young?) and Leona, the great pitch of reddish hair framing her green eyes. “Sheila,” she said, her voice both soft and thunderous.
Her name! Hearing her name for the first time!
“You’ve come in time. You will see . . .”
Then it was dawn and they were standing in the desert chill. Leona was wrapped in her bloody sheets, barely able to stand, and Sheila, in her father’s arms.
Cradled in her father’s arms.
They were walking across the Valley floor, to the dark tower ahead, the gadget hanging down.
“Get those people out of there!” came the call. It was Grives, screaming in terror. Then another shout. “Sir! It’s Mr. and Mrs. Brooks . . . they’re leaving the forward bunker.”
Grives again: “Brooks! You’re crazy! Get out of there!”
And Victor Stiller: “Leona! Joseph! What are you doing? Go back! . . . My God! They’ve got the child out there with them!”
She remembered it—now it all came back!
She looked up into her parents’ faces, what bliss. What was all the shouting about? Wasn’t this the most normal sight she’d ever hope to see: her parents kissing, embracing, looking down at her with pride? She was only six hours old.
She remembered it!
The terrible wind across her face, the fire, her mother’s eyes raising up, a tremendous glow upon her forehead. “Yes . . .”
Gojiro tried to turn away, but there was no choice. He was in her body, he’d have to see what she saw: her mother walking, stumbling ahead, forward to that seethe.
“Leona!” It was Brooks’s voice, shouting after her. “It’s
wrong
! That’s not Him, not Him at all!” Then the monster felt Brooks’s arms tighten, trying to pull his daughter’s eyes away. Away from It. Away from Hell.
But the shock knocked him backward, his grip slipped. She flew up, out of his arms. It wasn’t more than a second before he grabbed hold of Sheila again, managed to shield her eyes. But she’d already seen too much. She saw her mother walking ahead, into the flash, a melting silhouette.
“Mom!”
Hers to relive again and again.
“Mom! Dad! . . . No.”
Then there was only the Cloud, billowing up. The Cloud, and the weeping. But that’s not where it stopped. Not that Beam. For, right then, it rolled back once more, back and back, to the day that Valley was born, to that smoking comet, the saurs falling in its wake. And again, Gojiro was inside the body of that tiny lizard, traversing the killing fields. That’s when he understood who the Varanidid was and what he did. And why the memory of his Great Deed was lost in the faded mists. After all, the Varanidid wasn’t a fierce and powerful T-Rex, or even Radi-Breathing star of stage and screen. He was just an ordinary zard, a funky-looking one at that, and his only act of heroism was the commonest of acts. He followed the pheromone, kept himself alive until he found his mate. And together, amid that Death, they forged the first link of the Line.
It was the most monumental of destinies, easy to confuse, claim for yourself. Gojiro, a lonely mutant, had succumbed to the lure, imagined himself to be what he was not. He went ahead, caused that terrible whirlpool. The Echo Man, his people dying out, made the same error. But this time there was no mistake. This time it was as it was meant to be.
“Sheila!”
“Yukio!”
Twisting, writhing stegosaurs fell beside them, but it mattered not at all. Their mission was singular, without provision for detour. The straightest path to the purest goal.
“Yukio!”
“Sheila!”
Is it the pheromone that directs hearts, or hearts that drive the pheromone? They didn’t know, just pushed ahead, closing distance. They came as they had under Albert Bullins’s smoky tent, as they had out on the freeway median. They came like two elegant butterflies living deep in a jungle no saw’s ever seen. They came the same as two roaches in a kitchen, knowing that they alone possess that one confounding gene to set back pest control another ten years. They came like Mall Darters in a derelict shopping center, like so many chickadees on the branches of a glassed-in Fayetteville Tree. They came like every pair of Throwforwards who ever homed to that unremitting cry: “
Adapt! Adapt or Die!
” They came like all who would make New Life must, shining, full of Hope.
They met on top of the smoking Comet, the stone that dropped from the sky to announce the passing of an Age. It didn’t matter if their feet got hot. They lay down and made love right there. They made love through the ages, through sixty-six million years of time, until the Comet turned to dust and there was nothing there in that Valley but themselves. They made love until the Heater came and turned the world to white. And when it was gone, they were still there, making love.
* * *
It was about that time the monster heard that shout echo through the void of the Goldplate Pill. “Come in, Gojiro!”
“Wha?”
“Come in, Gojiro! Please come in!”
The supplication? What was it doing inside this place where even Bird’s solo didn’t sound?
“Come in, Gojiro! Please heed this humble servant’s plea!”
“An afternoise,” the monster supposed. “Residual electricity. Like what makes Frank’s chickens get up and dance funky in the grocer’s bin even though they got no heads.”
“Come in, Gojiro! King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms, Bridger of Gaps, Linker of Lines, Nexus of Beam and Bunch, Defender of the Evolloo. Please heed these humble servants’ pleas.”
It occurred to him to deny. Dummy up, ignore the call, as he had every other 90 Series supplication, except for that one crazy moment with the wolf boy, Billy Snickman, out by the spire on Dead Letter Hill. But the chant kept on, louder and louder until it sounded like a billion voices, a booming noise to shake the stars, tear the plaster from the walls of space.
“Can’t you see I’m dispersed? Gone.”
Again the supplication came. Again and again.
“I can’t. I’m afraid!”
Then, amid that gnawing tumult, the monster heard his friend’s voice, sweet and reassuring as ever, whispered in his ear just as if the two of them were about to cuddle in their burrow during the earliest of times. “Be
Gojiro
,” Komodo said, “then you won’t be afraid.”
“Gojiro . . . I
am
Gojiro.”
That’s when he saw the foot, floating down there, where before there was only dark. A familiar-looking foot. A foot with a gnarly tuber, the result of a hundred stubs against the doorstep of a vulcanized volcano. A zardish kind of foot. His foot, that floppy old size two thousand.
It was the supplication that summoned back those parts of him. The words themselves: “Come in, Gojiro . . . Come in.” Each syllable wielded its own specific gravity, its own particular pull. From behind the moon came his craggy dorsal plates. From south of Saturn, his belly hit him like a medicine ball. Those arms, which he always cursed for being too short to change a channel, boomeranged back, fused to his sides. The great tail came twisting through the black, the supraoc, too. Then he sensed it, far off at first, a tiny speck in the black—his face. His face coming across space. Fast. Bigger and greener and closer until: Clang! Clang and clamp, the screws tightening down with airgun squeals.
* * *
Then he was back, all of him. But it wasn’t done. Not yet.
Komodo was right. Reprimordialization is no walk in the park. Identity is not handed out by a gruff man with the nametags behind the Ellis Island counter. It is will, decision. You’ve got to declare it, you’ve got to
want it—Leap into it!
So the monster listened as the supplications came in. Millions and millions . . . Dick from Londonderry, someone put a bomb into his daddy’s car, Okoye from Tanzania, whose truck was buried in a landslide, Pablo from Peru, they took away his brother in the night . . . Denise from Pittsburgh, Ali from Dhaka, Anatoly from Kazak, Mzwakhe from Soweto . . . Loud and clear they came, their yearning echoing through the Quadcameral.
More and more . . . until he was ready. Then he schagged himself up and broke through the confines of that tiny Pill, shattering the stifling bonds of his own ambivalence.
“Yes!” came his shout, sonic cross the heavens.
“I, Gojiro, King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms, Bridger of Gaps, Linker of Lines, Nexus of Beam and Bunch, Defender of the Evolloo, am here! To do what I must!”