Gojiro (21 page)

There was only one time anything about that box came up. It happened during a period soon after Walter seemed to be doing better, when he went for a job interview at a hospital in San Diego. Walter was excited about “getting back to my proper line of work.” But it was a disaster. “They blocked me right out, Yuke,” Walter commented later that night. “Said they knew all about me.” After that he seemed more discouraged. He bounced around—to Oakland, up to Seattle, back down to Frisco. His communications were often drowned out by the background babel of Greyhound departures and arrivals. Then one night in a fleabag hotel near Delano some migrant onion pickers broke into Walter’s room, tore the place apart. They heard he had a machine that talks to dead people; they wanted it. Komodo and Gojiro heard the scuffle, the high-pitched Spanish screams, the ripping of skin with knives. A few hours later, Walter came back in. “They didn’t get it, Yuke,” he said wearily, all beat-up. “I wouldn’t give it up. I never will. Don’t worry. I don’t regret nothing.”

Hearing that threw Komodo into hysterics. The idea that Walter was still protecting him, still trying to hold that mysterious box for him, was more than he could take. But that was the last time they ever heard from Walter. Within months the 90 Series began to crash the Quadcameral. When Gojiro forced Komodo into the fourth chamber to cut out those supplications, Walter’s voice was swept away, along with the rest.

* * *

They figured it was a long shot, going by Wilma Crenshaw’s house. Once they’d lived together, Walter and Wilma; but then Walter would have a breakdown, wind up on the road again. It broke Komodo’s heart to think Wilma’s love was still another thing Walter had lost in the aftermath of that fateful evening in Okinawa. Still, amid his wanderings, Walter would come visit Wilma. During those times, with respect for the couple’s privacy, Komodo and Gojiro tried not to listen in, but there was no controlling what the Quadcameral overheard. Sometimes yelling and screaming filled their ears, but there were tender moments, too. However, if they were to see Walter, it was worth a try. A quick perusal of the telephone book revealed a W. Crenshaw at 125990 Pollsmoor Boulevard. When they called the number a recording said that the phone had been disconnected. Going over was the only way.

They turned off at Normandie, tooled into the city’s outlying regions, watching the color of people’s faces change. Walter always said that West Coast ghettos were the worst, since they didn’t seem that bad on the surface. You’d get in deep, then it’d be too late. Walter feared this place, Gojiro always felt, and that upset him, the idea of having a home and being afraid of it.

The limo got some attention when it pulled up in front of the house. About twenty or so locals were milling about, debating the alleged intent of such an august vehicle in their sullen neighborhood. When Komodo got out, half the crowd offered to watch the car, for a fee. Shig put the scotch to that, though, slicing his sword through the turbid air faster than any eye could see. “Damn ninja!” was the fleeing cry.

In contrast to the rest of the house, which was an amalgam of mismatched siding patterns and chipped paint, the screen door of 125990 Pollsmoor was a spanking-new affair. A wrought-aluminum
C
in its lower panel gleamed in the raspy late-afternoon sun. After three knocks, the inside door opened slightly and the face of a boy on the insolent fringe of teenagehood appeared. Resting his chin on the latched chain, the boy said, with no small belligerence, “My mom’s not home.”

No doubt this was Trumaine; Walter had mentioned him from time to time. “Bright boy, but he got no frame on the reference.”

“I am looking for Mr. Crenshaw,” Komodo said, after bowing deeply.

“Ain’t no
Mister
Crenshaw. Just be me and my mom.” Trumaine’s eyes shifted. “You from the government?”

“No. I am a friend. Once, long ago, I knew Mr. Crenshaw in Okinawa.”

“My uncle told me about people like you. I know my rights. Let’s see your badge.” Gojiro peeked out from where he was hiding, in severely diminished form, under Komodo’s collar. His eyes immediately went to the back of Trumaine’s hand and he felt ill. What had the boy used to gouge that symbol into his flesh—a can opener, a corkscrew? The job was grisly, but there was no mistaking the pattern: three concentric circles. Trumaine Crenshaw was a G-fan.

Komodo didn’t notice. “But I am not from the government. It is as I told you: Once your uncle was very kind to me. I just want to thank him.”

“That what them flowers about?”

“Yes.”

“Sure you ain’t got no badge?” Trumaine asked, now with some disappointment. Then he said, “Well, don’t matter. My uncle Walter’s dead. You from the government, you know that.”

Komodo’s breath stopped. “Dead?”

Trumaine watched Komodo intently, without speaking.

“How . . . ?” Twenty years of grief pressed down on Komodo. His knees buckled.

“Just passed on. About two years ago, right around now.”

Komodo bowed unsteadily. “I am deeply sorry and offer my most profound condolences.”

Trumaine’s face tried to stay hard, but it couldn’t. “My mom, she’s sorry.” Then, swallowing, he added, “Me too.” It seemed that Trumaine had given up believing Komodo was from the government, because, without being asked, he told Komodo where Walter was buried.

It was no more than a twenty-minute ride to the graveyard, but it might have taken forever, the misery they felt. The cemetery wasn’t far removed from a potter’s field. Pitched on a hill behind a giant billboard, it was nothing more than an overgrown array of irregularly sized flat stones sticking from the ground like a stegosaur’s plates. An eerie smogfilm hung densely over the graves as mist might cling to a heath in another time and place. On the low margins of the pocked sky, a hardpressed sun plied its lurid wares.

Some of the headstones were inscribed with magic marker, but Walter’s was better kept. The top line of his engraved stone said, with a kind of quiet defiance, “Crenshaw—
Husband.”
Beneath that: “He fought for his country. Peace at last.” Neither Gojiro nor Komodo spoke as they laid a single rose upon the tombstone’s jagged top. The rose would bloom for a long time. It was one of the hardy perennials plucked from Ebi’s special garden in the Insta-Envir; those things never wilted. As they turned to go back to the limo, they nearly ran into a stout woman dressed in nurse’s whites. She carried flowers of her own. This would be Wilma, they knew. They watched her go over to Walter’s grave, kneel there. Then she turned and looked at Komodo a second before going back to her silent prayers. Komodo started to speak but couldn’t. They’d already intruded enough of Walter and Wilma’s private moments.

When they got back into the limo, they just cried. Walter: dead. All the sad horns should be playing.

* * *

They went past Berdoo, out to Indio. America gave way to its once and future self. Beyond the Twenty-Ninth Palm there was only desert. Even inside that limo, the arid emptiness could be felt and smelt. “Nothing out here, man,” Gojiro remarked. “Nothing at all.”

“Actually, my own true friend, the desert is full of life,” Komodo remarked, attempting animation. “Many interesting species have carved niches in these harsh environs. It can be a subtle and deceptive place. If one is keen to its every nuance, the reward is bountiful.”

The monster rolled his eyes. He hated when Komodo went PBS on him. Besides, the reptile wasn’t about to concede that a brace of gnarly Joshua trees and a couple of frightwig ocotillos silhouetted against the pinkish sky amounted to any kind of bounty, except to raise the ante of the one Fate had conspired to place upon his head. The night came up fast, took its big gulp with striking suddenness. The blackness assaulted, laughed out loud. Go ahead, it seemed to say, cocky and aloof, fill me up . . . if you can.

Wasn’t that the riff when you stared into a vacuum—that there’s something in the Universe that can’t abide a blank? Certainly it had been so back on Radioactive Island, before their sun, their moon, before Budd Hazard. And how magnificent it had been to respond to that emptiness! To forge, out of nothingness, somethingness. A pure act, as if the creation of Cosmo was reflexive, instinctive, involuntary, Prewire.

But this wasn’t Radioactive Island. This was the Mojave, the Sonoran, the Sangre de Cristo. This was a cavity of another kind, a mocking, foreign void. It enveloped that hermetic limo, flaunted its emptiness. Gojiro glanced over at Komodo. He was sitting there, jotting in his diary, the shadows playing across his sad countenance. The monster was beginning to worry about Komodo; how long could he keep dredging hope from despair, how long would his faith continue to fly in the face of fact? What, really, did he expect to find out here in this alien night? Even if Sheila Brooks had seen something in Komodo’s stereopticon, what effect could it have on the Triple Ring Promise? Their great Vow grew from Cosmo, was defined by Cosmo, could only be consummated in Cosmo—Radioactive Island Cosmo. How much could Budd Hazard’s philosophy be worth here?

Gojiro looked out the window again, shivered. Sure, they say Ideas spread like wildfire, that there’s no containing them once the fever starts. But think about it: How much hay would those padres have hoed without the clank of armor and the come-on of capital’s dropped handkerchief? How deep into the heart of Asia would the sultans have swayed sans the scimitar? No, man, the only way to get a square peg through a round hole is with an M-16, and that don’t even work most times. Maybe Helen Gurley Brown is coast-to-coast, but Cosmo, stripped down to Thought and Thought alone, don’t travel, first class or otherwise.

Cosmo was really a small-town thing, the monster thought, a sweaty hedge against oblivion, a fragile conceit in need of perpetual custodial care. You had to know what your Cosmo knew, what it could do and what it couldn’t, never ask it to jump through any hoop it hadn’t jumped through a million times before. Back on Radioactive Island, this was easy enough. The Island was a cosmologic safe house, a closed experiment. It wasn’t like some wildeyed debunker, some revolutionist contra-Darwin, was about to beagle through the Cloudcover spouting heresies at any moment, crack the tablets of Beam and Bunch. On Radioactive Island, a million questionable checks could be written: The piper would never be coming ’round, looking to get paid.

But out here, in this mournful desert pressing toward the Arizona line, nothing was safe. Here there were no stage-manageable questions, only the sixty-four-thousand-dollar kind that can turn even the most well-prepped Cosmo into a cow, a big-bottomed bovine standing walleyed in the onrush of an eighteen-wheeler’s fog lights.

“Duh.”

Komodo turned away from the window. “Did you say something, my own true friend?”

“Yeah. I said duh.”

“Duh?”

“You do it good. Like a regular Big Moose. Duh. That’s what happens when you twist a Cosmo’s arm hard enough. You make it say duh. You turn it into a Duh Cosmo.”

“I don’t understand.”

The monster almost chortled. “You hear that one about those Paiutes. They was from around here somewheres. They looked out on this very nothingness and were spurred to come up with a fully self-sufficient system. They built themselves a millennium over at Walker Lake. Pantheons of gods, the whole scene. Then, zoom, the military-industrial complex is knock, knock, knocking on their bit o’ heaven’s door. Killing their buffalos and worse. And the Paiutes is freaking out ’cause their Plan don’t got a contingency for John Wayne.”

“What did they do?” Komodo asked with concern.

“What else
could
they do? Not exactly like you can change central metaphors in midstream. They went into a state of crisis. They pushed their Cosmo to the wall, made it say something, anything. So what’s it do? It spits out a Vision. A
secret
Vision. It talks through shaman, says dance all night, call back the ancestors, go out the next morning wearing shirts painted white. Then every Colt’s bullets be turned away.”

“But what happened?”

“What happened? What do you
think
happened? They got their asses shot off. They don’t exist no more. They’re out of the picture. Don’t even got a bingo wheel to turn. That’s what happens when a Cosmo goes past the Duh Point: You beg disaster.”

“That’s very sad, my own true friend,” Komodo answered sincerely.

“Sad? I dunno. It’s hard for a Cosmo to keep up these days. The Trans-Amazon be littered with corpses of dead religions. Petered-out cults for days. The Modern World’s a hammerlock. Every hour it makes a million macrocosms sing a screechy harmony of duhhhh. Call that sad? Maybe it’s just in the way of things. You can’t be sad about the implacable.”

Komodo looked at Gojiro with piercing eyes. “What are you trying to say, my own true friend?”

“I’m trying to say you can’t lay the heavy litmus on a bunch of campfire stories. I’m trying to say that we’re out here in the middle of nowhere looking for a needle when we don’t even know what a haystack looks like. I’m trying to say I got a bad vibe about this, like we’re past the Duh Point, heading into big trouble.”

The moonlight was on Komodo’s face now, like through a scrim. He seemed different, far away. “I understand your feelings, my own true friend. There is much truth in what you say. But, tell me, is this land really so foreign to us? What is to say that it is not as ingrained in our souls as Radioactive Island itself? Is it not possible that there are Universal landscapes, terrain that is known by all, whether they have actually dwelled within it or not? Could it not be the same with Ideas? Perhaps there are some Ideas that are not hemmed by time or space or country of origin. Is it not possible that, through the vagaries of history and fate, an idea becomes the Idea, the single Way to Salvation?”

Gojiro narrowed his lids. “I don’t believe in Ideas like that.” Then he turned to look at his friend. Komodo did not return his gaze. “Anyone who does is a dangerous gambler. A potentially crazy man. I think he should think twice before he imagines himself fit to walk on purple carpets, unless he’s ready to unleash a whirlwind.”