With quicksilver slivers of the Scheme’s great jigsaw hot on his clawtips, he obsessed to possess the rest. He declared war on the white areas of his map; no territory would remain Unknown. All levity left him. No longer was there time to stroll with Komodo out by the lurching precipices of Past Due Point. The reptile’s every instant was hostaged to Budd Hazard’s consuming wigstretch.
“Come to bed,” Komodo would say, bleary-eyed from the seemingly endless clocksweeps of transcription.
“Not yet,” came the reptile’s breathless reply. “I’m on the edge of a great breakthrough concerning the progression of Beamic knowledge relative to the development of a full Bunch as opposed to the individual within the Bunch. Can’t you see? We’re about to shoot the definitive hole in the theory of the ontogeny and phylogeny of consciousness.”
“Perhaps this is the question of a philistine,” Komodo ventured, “but is it possible to know too much?”
“
Know too much?
I thought you fancied yourself a man of science—a philosopher! How can you know
too much
until you know it
all
? You want a Universe mottled with pocks and dings? Don’t you want the perfect sphere?”
Gojiro told Komodo he could go to sleep, if that’s what he wanted to do. “From now on, worldview constructing goes on twenty-four hours a day around here—just like the world. Get your forty winks. I’ll put the transcriber on automatic.”
The behemoth grew increasingly withdrawn, solitary. Subtle neuroshifts occurred inside his burgeoning brain. No longer did he have to summon up Budd Hazard. The Muse became a constant, a macro to his program, always there, defining, refining, pumping up Cosmo and more Cosmo. It was as if the reptile had merged with his drug, and it with him.
Then, one night, Gojiro called Komodo into the ’cano. The two friends hadn’t seen each other for days. Tension ruled.
“I want to discuss a matter of the utmost magnitude,” Gojiro intoned, circles around his red eyes, his leathers sagging. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for weeks.
“Yes, my own true friend,” Komodo said tentatively.
“It concerns the Triple Ring Promise,” Gojiro monotoned, as if he were reading a year-end report. “Recent Budd Hazard visitations indicate this proposition has reached a superannuated circumstance. It exists only within the context of base sentimentality and therefore is meaningless within the evermarch of the Endless Flow. It must be subject to major revision.”
“Excuse me,” Komodo said, stunned. “Are you really talking about
our
Triple Ring Promise?”
“Yes! In its current form it is hopelessly primitive. We must modernize it, update it, bring it more in line with the current state of Evollooic Thought.”
“But . . .” Tears beaded up in Komodo’s eyes. “Update our Promise—how is that possible? When we swore it, it was for . . . forever. How can you modernize forever?”
“We must jettison juvenilia!” the huge lizard shouted. “The Boy’s Life is not eternal; no moment is frozen in amber. Who are we, anyway, all-for-one, one-for-all fops on a candy wrapper? Later for Puff the Magic Dragon. We must take a more mature view. Would you have our world continue some ‘a boy and his lizard’ show?”
“It’s just as much ‘a lizard and his boy’!” Komodo shot back. Then he was crying. “I’m sorry . . . it’s just that the Triple Ring Promise . . .”
“I know,” Gojiro replied, his manner melting. “I know how you feel—that’s how I feel too. But the Triple Rings, what do they really mean? Please, tell me the parameters of our Promise, as it is today.”
“That we are together,” Komodo stuttered, “that the answers you seek are the answers I seek.”
“But what are those answers?” The monster was weeping now too. “Tell me.”
Komodo could not. His thoughts had never ventured beyond the marvel of their mutual self-discovery, the ecstasy of their friendship.
“Don’t you see?” Gojiro pleaded. “We are allowing our Promise to stagnate, to signify nothing more than the faded loyalty of an old school patch, something to be kept in a drawer—a memento of passed youth. I say our Promise is worth more than that! Deserves better than that! Think of it:
who we are
. . .
where we come from
. . .
what we will be
—these answers will not simply come to us. We cannot sit and wait, falsely secure in our blithe dreamworld. Trust is not enough when one craves Light!
“We must seek, set forth on a great quest. And where must this search begin? I submit the starting point rides right upon our own chests. Yes, the Triple Rings! They are our center, the core of all we are. We must
penetrate
our solemn Oath—explode it if need be and bring it back reborn!”
Then, his reverie done, Gojiro looked down and saw that Komodo wasn’t crying anymore. Instead,
that look
was on his face. “Yes,” Komodo said with quiet emotion, “you are right, my own true friend. This is what we must do.”
* * *
“Paradise? Here? Now?” Thinking back on these fifteen-year-old events, Gojiro could only shake his massive head. Was there no end to paying for the smallest optimism in this reproachful world, he groused, the phosphor gray Dish light playing over his lax body. All he’d ever hoped for was a degree of meaning, some measure by which to understand what had happened to him, how he’d come to be this thing he was. That didn’t seem much to ask, did it?
Yeah, they
penetrated
the Triple Ring Promise all right. They broke right through those pristine diameters with the wrecker’s ball of their antic intellect, dissolved the guileless design with a presumptive onslaught more corrosive than any blast of Radi-Breath. Now, far too late, it was easy enough to trace the swath of grievous miscalculation, how so many hot flashes succeeded only in lashing an icy noose around their necks.
The crazed notion that Radioactive Island might be reincarnated as a latter-day, post-Atomic Utopia, happy home to a New Bunch fused with a New Beam, a nirvana in which a mutant lizard and the Hiroshima Coma Boy might glimpse their true Identities—all of it was beyond anything a benighted kabbalist in pointed hat festooned with whirling stars and planets could have conjured. Yet these became the new terms of the Triple Ring Promise, the only conditions by which the updated version could be fulfilled. Just thinking of it ravaged Gojiro. They tossed their Vow into the raging concoctions of Cosmo’s test tube, larded its simple beauty with impossible clauses and conditions, and when the fateful bun was out of the oven, nothing remained but that loathsome Amendment.
Swaddled deep inside his melancholy volcano, the whole leapfrog of events weighed on the monster. He thought of Budd Hazard and called out, “Hey, Budd . . . Budd baby. Where you at, man? What’s the matter, you don’t got no advice for me? No cosmogonic council? No music for a theophanic string quartet? Not an ontological crumb for the hungry heart? Hey Budd—fuck you!”
Of course, there was no reply. There hadn’t been for years. Had there really ever been a Budd Hazard? Or was the supposed Muse nothing more than a smirking demiurge, a prank of philosophy perpetrated by one north forty of his mammoth cogitator against another? “Should have known,” the monster grumbled. “Jive won’t get you Zen.”
So many times Gojiro attempted to renounce the Triple Ring Promise, quietly resign. “Maybe there’s still a chance for Radioactive Island to become a place of joy and warmth, like Angulome City, Houyhnhnmland, or Mount Daumal,” he told Komodo as tenderly as he could, “but it can’t happen with me around. I’m a five-hundred-foot-tall cancer! You got to cast my raggedy fate to the winds.”
“No!” Komodo shouted, his face wild, his tears flying. “I won’t allow it. I won’t let you renounce all we know to be so.”
“Don’t you see where all this crazy Cosmo has got us? Cosmo’s Hell’s own soldering gun, cementing us in this cell forever and ever. Screw Cosmo. Get Leo G. Carroll in here and cancel his goddamned contract! Don’t you get it? We killed our Promise, we overloaded its circuits and blew it out with bullshit.”
Komodo would not be moved. “The Triple Ring Promise is what it is. Whatever it says, we shall seek to fulfill it. And fulfill it we shall.”
“But we got to face facts,” the monster wailed. “We’re just two pathetic mutants, victims of an arbitrary force that doesn’t care about any kind of aspiration one way or another. The Heater, that’s our God, the burning center of our little system. We’re nothing but distantly orbiting bits of dust, points in space, remote from the Endless Flow, unconnected to anything, part of no Beam or Bunch . . . Never destined to be.”
Komodo’s eyes grew wide, full of fury and sorrow. “I refuse to accept that!”
* * *
That was worst of it, Gojiro told himself, the way Komodo continued to believe. Even now, a week after the hideous near double suicide, he was down in his lab, cooing to those funky chickadees sitting on the branches of that glassed-in Fayetteville Tree. It was crazy how much time Komodo spent codifying the behaviors of those mat-feathered fowls, checking on their manic reproductions, trying to isolate the Instant of Reprimordialization.
Reprimordialization—it was Budd Hazard’s central point, and his most perplexing. According to the long silent Muse, Reprimordialization was the “engine of the Evolloo,” a continuous, unending series of “invisible Instants” during which Beamic energy cleaved to create new Bunches, thereby springing forth “more life, different and unique.” It was in the space of these mysterious Instants, which Budd Hazard called the “realm of Change,” that Komodo planted the flag of the Triple Rings, where he sought to fulfill their Promise. In the early days, Gojiro was often moved to tears whenever his friend spoke of Reprimordialization. But now, watching Komodo attempting to isolate the moment when one species of chickadee transformed into another, the reptile saw it as just one more lie of the mind, another cheap trick.
“Cheep, cheep,” those crappy birds called from Komodo’s lab. The monster hated the sound! Just as he hated it when Komodo would parrot back Budd Hazard’s other shopworn koans. “Going on is all! To stand still is defeat! The Evolloo is a vast river, not a mordant lake. A rich man can build a fence around a lake, claim it belongs to him. But no fence can be built around a river. A river is Freedom!” How many times had Gojiro heard that one? “Sure,” he’d scream back at his friend, “maybe once we rode that river, that homeboy’s Mississippi—but now the silt’s built up, the Army Corps of Engineers stabbed their stark white dams in the magic places, and there’s no way for a raft to reach the delta where the deep blues play.”
Gojiro felt miserable knowing Komodo would never give up, that he’d grow old and gray—he was already past thirty,
a boy no more!
—trying to make sense of the ever-elusive Instant of Reprimordialization. But that’s Komodo for you. Most so-called men of science put their faith in the physical, give allegiance to what can be shown and known. They lay a telescope on Uranus, so they know Uranus “exists.” Ditto for Pluto. Komodo does that too, he’s no metaphysic pisser in the wind; his houses aren’t made from straw or wood, he uses brick, lays them one at a time. That’s what he loves, to see how things fit together, how they work. But that doesn’t mean Komodo believes in things just because they’re there and he made them. That’s not how Komodo defines belief. Instead, he follows the chain of logic to the point where it breaks down. Then he looks into that Void, and says, “I believe in this.”
That’s how it was with that invisible Instant of Reprimordialization. The more Komodo failed to understand the workings of the mysterious zone, the more he revered it. All he needed was “the new stim.” With the new stim, Komodo claimed, what could not be known would become known, what could not be seen would be seen. Komodo talked a lot about the new stim in those desperate days after the swearing of that hideous Amendment. It became his grail, that single as-yet unglimpsed idea that could jumpstart the dead-in-the-water Cosmo. Every night he’d be down in his lab, making with the beakers and bunsens, hothousing inventions at an unprecedented rate. They were marvelous items too, but when Komodo surveyed what he’d made, his face, once bright with prospect, drooped. “Not what I intended . . . no business being invented, none at all.” Then he’d begin again.
Gojiro rued Komodo’s disappointment, but he was powerless to help. After all, how easy was it to come up with something completely new, a truly original idea? An old idea throws a rod, you can tow it by the body shop, let Vito swat the fenders with his mallet, beat it to a different shape. Tell him it’s a rush job, no problem, he’s wild for the overtime. But a new idea, an absolutely new idea? Get out your butterfly net and clear every calendar. A new idea demands Inspiration, and you could wait a thousand years for that. But they didn’t have a thousand years. They had less than one. No, the monster moaned inside his gloomy volcano, there was no chance. He was fresh out of new ideas.
He was paralyzed, smothered beneath the lassitude of crumbled dreams. All hope was a shell game. That being the case, when Komodo came sliding down the ’cano pole with that strange letter in his hand, the leviathan was not prepared to put much stock in it.
The Letter
W
HEN KOMODO FIRST PULLED THAT LETTER
out of the pocket of his black pajamas, Gojiro figured it had to be a joke, a warped bid to lighten the heavy weather. That would have been all right; the giant reptile hadn’t had a good laugh since he stopped his career as “the Atomic Comic, the world’s tallest stand-up.”
The monster’s comedy career was another of the little “rainy day” activities Komodo whipped up to keep those nutty Atoms from killing one another during inversion season. The reptile would clamber onto the rec-hall stage, wring his withery front claws together, go into his spritz. “Hi ho, neutrinos.
Parlez-vous
protonese?” Then he’d lay a spew of ’tilic titters on the dyslexics. “Okay, okay . . . these two triceratopses go into a bar, see . . .” But it was ridiculous. The Atoms, denser than ingots, thought his every hunk, whether hip or dip, was a riot. “I blow my nose and they’re on the floor,” Gojiro complained. “Might as well play Bellevue. Laughing-house laughs are no laughs at all. Let ’em go back to pulling wings off flies. I’m finished.”
The monster only glowered when Komodo mentioned that in his modest opinion, watching the great reptile blow his massive snout was actually quite humorous.
But the tight expression on his friend’s face told Gojiro that the letter was no joke. “We have an offer to go to America,” the blackhaired Japanese said quietly.
“Yeah? We win another contest? I told you never to send back those forms, it only encourages them.”
“No. This is an offer for work. To make a movie there.”
A movie? Gojiro couldn’t believe his earwhorls. The mere mention of making movies had been banned for years, ever since Shig’s treachery became known. Go to America to make a movie? Had Komodo finally flipped out, blown his every cookie? “I’m retired from show business,” Gojiro snapped. “Tell ’em to get themselves another monster.”
“I would never burden you with these matters,” Komodo blurted, “but this letter . . . I sense a relevance about it, a potential impact on our Promise.”
Gojiro tried not to listen. He glued his eyes to the Dishscreen. That desultory blue-gray light was his refuge; it raised no expectations, supposed no soon-to-be-dashed desire.
“This letter—it is from Sheila Brooks.”
Komodo’s skin looked ashen. “Yes. She is offering us an opportunity to come to America to make a film entitled
Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision
.”
* * *
Of all the madness inherent in the outlandish notion that he should go to Hollywood and share top billing with Joseph Prometheus Brooks, the thing that drove Gojiro to the greatest distraction was Komodo’s insistence that it was a good idea.
“But my own true friend, he is a great scientist. One of the most brilliant men ever to live. If there is one person who might fix us, it would be him.”
“
Fix us?
” Gojiro spat back. “Don’t you think he’s fixed us pretty good already?”
“That’s just it. It was Mr. Brooks’s creation that brought us to this state, so perhaps he might be able to devise a method by which we could escape it.”
If a stray planet had happened to be passing within Gojiro’s grasp right then he would have snatched it from its orbit, bearhugged it to dust. Joseph Prometheus Brooks! The inventor of the Heater itself!
Gojiro looked at Komodo in disbelief. It hadn’t been all that long ago that the monster had convened a Great Tribunal of the Anti-Speciesist League for the express purpose of putting Brooks on trial, in absentia, for High Crimes against the Evolloo. The meeting ended inconclusively after the two friends engaged in a terrible argument, nearly coming to blows. It was Komodo’s refusal to endorse the necessary extreme prejudice that infuriated the giant lizard.
“We cannot condemn Mr. Brooks until we have the complete evidence,” Komodo said, acting for the accused.
“You want
proof?
Look at these feet, look at these dorsals, look at these . . .
flanks
, which, thanks to your pal Pro Brooks will never know the sweet rub of a female’s leathers. Look at yourself, why don’t you.”
Komodo would not be budged. “We can’t condemn what we don’t fully understand. Perhaps Mr. Brooks had no control over events; rather, it was the workings of his unique mind that caused him to act as he did.”
“You trying to cop a temporary insanity plea for this fuck or something? Like ‘hey, I didn’t mean to grab the Universe by the balls—it’s just some cupcake I ate.’ ”
“I am saying that in Art and Science there are ideas that, once created, take on a life of their own.”
“Oh, the old Art and Science riff, huh? The old technically too-sweet excuse! Give those willowy boys with paintbrushes the whole canvas, but later for us scufflers down here in the street. I can’t believe you’re trying to absolve Brooks. I suppose the Heater just sprang from his head, a fullblown, kicking Athena, and all he did was throw the plutonium through the bars at feeding time.”
The Tribunal broke up amid Gojiro’s charges that Komodo was a “class-worshiping house mutant” who harbored serious and lamentable speciesist tendencies, which caused him to sling the same “presumptive Ptolemaic sludge” as the rest of his “rapacious former ilk.”
Now, however, Komodo was going too far. Claiming Pro Brooks, the inventor of the Heater itself, might be a key cog in a potential satisfaction of the Triple Ring Promise—it was enough to make the monster hurl the ’cano toward the Cloudcover like a rubberized snowcone. Except he didn’t. He collapsed on the floor instead. Maybe he was right in the beginning. Maybe it
was
all a joke. What else could it be? Talk about your high concept—what comedy could be blacker than
Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision
? The lizard’s mind reeled. No doubt about it, if he was to make another of those hideous movies,
Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision
would be one heckuva comeback. “A perfect climax to my moth-eaten career.”
Yeah, the monster thought, chewing over the possibility. Beep that creep Shig, have him line up a meeting posthaste. Get Brooks on the reddest eye, touch him down on Corvair Bay Beach. Pitch a Cinzano umbrella in the cinderfield over by Melanoma Meadow, make it very nice and polite, skimmers on the heads of all the principals, seersucker suits, sprigs of mint in tall glasses, hammer out a humdinger of a deal. Then: Get ready to rumble!
Gojiro vs. Joseph Brooks.
How long had the monster itched for that match-up? Prayed for it! How long had he snarled what he’d do to Brooks if he ever got him alone, without his B-29s and his white lights? No, forget conditions, ax the handicaps. Let him bring his fissions and fusions, his Super this, Super that. His every exponential pile, the whole militaryfuckingindustrial complex if he wants. Don’t matter. “Stick us in a steel cage, Texas Death, no time limit. I’ll meet him . . . mess with him!”
Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision.
What kind of heart of darkness trip would that be, meeting your maker with the cameras churning?
There was only one small hitch. “He’s dead! Brooks is dead!”
The monster’s hysteric laughter echoed through the ’cano. “The bastard’s dead!” he cackled like a more deranged Renfield. “Deader than doornails.” It must have been his hate that made him forget Brooks was dead, had been for twenty-five years. The kind of hate the reptile had, you couldn’t focus anything that intense on a rotting box of bones. “Ain’t no dead man gonna help us solve the Triple Ring Promise.”
Komodo leaned back in his chair, rubbed his chin. “That is so. Mr. Brooks is dead. He cannot help us. But this letter gives me an idea.”
“What kind of idea?” Gojiro felt a twinge in his belly. There was something funny about that letter in Komodo’s hands. Eerie. Was it the strange, lime-green stationery? The monster couldn’t put a finger on the feeling.
“I thought, perhaps,
she
can help us.”
“Who?”
“Why, Sheila Brooks.”
“What are you talking about? I thought you said Science was gonna save us. Sheila Brooks ain’t no scientist. She’s some sleazebag movie writer.”
“She is Mr. Brooks’s daughter.”
“Big deal. She probably wasn’t even born when all this started up.”
“Actually, my own true friend, that is not exactly so.” Komodo gave a quick smile and opened the thick book resting on his lap. The volume,
Who’s Who in the Culture Industry
, had just washed up on the shore beyond Past Due Point. It squished as Komodo turned the waterlogged pages. “The most recent edition—a very fascinating work. I was gratified to see entries under both of our names. Remarkably, our films appear to be very respected in certain critical circles, especially among the French. Why, right here a Mr. Jean-Pierre Camolli says—”
“Never mind!”
“Anyway, according to this book, Sheila Brooks was born on July 16, 1945.”
“Wha?” Just hearing that date knocked air from the monster. July 16, 1945: the day the Heater was unveiled—the very date the planet was forcefed the first dose of what would inevitably land it face-down on a metal stretcher, DOA, in some farflung Milky Way emergency room. July 16, 1945. It seemed the saddest kind of birthday. That is, if you didn’t count Komodo’s. The tabloids really had a party with that one, how when the Coma Boy was found inside that hole in Hiroshima, a card was in the pocket of his satin suit. One year old today, it said. August 6: Happy birthday.
Still, the monster struggled for nonchalance. “July sixteenth, July schmixteenth—don’t mean nothing. Coincidence is thick on the maps of life.”
“Perhaps,” Komodo sighed. He put the book down, got up, walked around. When he sat down again, he was holding that stereopticon. He must have had the old-time photo-viewing machine tucked deep in the pocket of his black pajamas. He sat on the edge of Gojiro’s round bed and looked at the picture inside.
Gojiro turned his head. Whatever happened between Komodo and that stereopticon, it was private.
* * *
The monster remembered the day the mahogany photo holder washed up off Pre-existing Condition Inlet, seemingly just another deconstruction amid the flotjet flow. They’d been foraging along the shoreline, looking for electric-blanket remnants to weave into a thermoregulatory quilt, when they spotted the enameled case. From the delicate silk scarves in which it was wrapped, Komodo concluded that the antique viewer had once been the property of an elegant and proper lady. The magnifying lenses that made the 3-D effect possible were still intact, after who knew how long at sea.
“It’s got no picture in it,” Gojiro noted, about to toss the viewer back and move down the beach to better pickings.
Komodo stopped him. “It is an old item, from another, more genteel time. I will keep it. Someday we may find a fitting image to place within it.”
It wasn’t until a few days later that those snapshots tumbled in on the red tide. Spring cleaning from a hundred Fotomats, the pictures were shoved in plastic bags tagged “Unclaimed.” Gojiro opened a sack with a razored claw and out flew a ya-hoo blizzard of Bermuda shorts posed in front of shiny Buicks, garden hoses squirting, heads cut off. But there were other pictures too, better ones, ones of young couples and families, that looked to have been taken by professionals with waiting rooms, a choice of backdrops, and lollies for the kids. Gojiro imagined that these photos had once sat proudly on the desks of hard-smiling executives or had been pinned to the dashboards of immigrant-driven taxicabs.
Sapiens were so bizarre, the reptile thought, bleary from focusing on the tiny squares. What was the depth of their insecurity that they felt it necessary to record even the most mundane of their insignificant doings? The mountains of photos bugged the monster. He thought of all the times Komodo would pick up a stray magazine, point to a smartly dressed couple in the front seat of a sleek automobile, and sigh, “Do you think my parents could have looked like this?” How horrible not to know what your mother and father looked like, whose eyes you had, whose mouth. Poor, sad Komodo! Reduced to scouring slickpaged advertisements for a clue to his heritage, wondering which of the dowdy models in the Sears catalog might embody qualities of those who gave him life. It wasn’t fair, Gojiro thought, kicking his way through the drifts of photos piling up on Past Due Point, that these clods—half of whom couldn’t even get their hammy thumbs out of the way—could point and shoot their thirty-six dismal exposures, get them processed in an hour. Why should they have such voluminous documentation when Komodo had none?
Then, one day, as he clawthumbed through Kodak’s bland emulsions, the monster came upon those strange photos, anomalies among the myriad visits to Knott’s Berry Farm. Side by side on a thick card, the next-to-identical pictures were old, real old, black and white and silvery. Maybe they were daguerreotypes, Gojiro couldn’t say, he just sat there looking. They were Japs, the people in that picture. The woman was beautiful, stylish yet inviting—how wonderfully hopeful she looked! The man’s eyes were bright, resolute, but kind. A keen mind resided within that handsome head, there could be no doubt of that. The setting was ideal: a lush hillside, beside a crystal lake, in front of a towering mountain with a diamond sparkle of snow on its crowning top.
The next night the monster slipped the photo into the stereopticon, left it on Komodo’s tiny desk. Then he waited, worried. He wondered if he’d made a mistake, assumed too much, insulted his friend. It was only after Komodo showed him that little film that was later canonized as the “Opening Sequence” that Gojiro could be sure that his friend was pleased with his gift. For, in the original picture the Mom is not yet a mom, the Dad not quite a dad. Soon they will be, that’s obvious enough by the swell of the woman’s belly beneath her kimono. It was Komodo who added the rest, the rosecheeked child, the schoolboy with his books wrapped in an elastic strap. He put himself inside that picture, birthed himself to that unnamed couple from the past.
Now, though, so many years later, Gojiro watched Komodo stare into his stereopticon and worried again. “You okay?” the monster asked in a hushed tone.