Gojiro (24 page)

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Part Three
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Alone in Hell

T
HE DESERT SUN WAS EDGING ABOVE
the red cliffs when Komodo walked out into the Valley. Rock gave way to sand and then to a sheet of glass, a greentinged sheen stretching for hundreds of yards in every direction. It was the Heater’s legacy, Komodo knew, the glass cracking beneath his feet like the brittle bones of a past made forever obsolete.

Up ahead, a dark ghost shimmering in the rising heat, was Joseph Prometheus Brooks. Joseph Prometheus Brooks! Komodo fixed his path toward the blackclad figure, did not waver from it.

With him, he brought only the
fumetti
. It was a gift, a token of esteem. “We cannot approach him empty-handed,” Komodo told Gojiro back inside the White Light Chamber. Not that the
fumetti
could be compared with a fountain pen, or even the key to Radioactive Island. It was just a twenty-eight-page aggregate of thick-grained snapshots festooned with bulbous dialogue balloons in the manner of an Italian comic book. Still, Komodo considered it the perfect offering. It represented Truth—at least a certain kind of Truth.

“Our
real
story, told by us.” That’s how Gojiro referred to the
fumetti
in the frenzied days immediately following the discovery of Shig’s skullduggery regarding the King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms movies. The monster’s original intention was to restage the events of their lives, from the founding of Radioactive Island to the creation of the Cosmo, up to the current scene. Bound on full disclosure, the reptile rejected Komodo’s proposal to show the story in a series of abstract drawings. “The whole Truth and nothing but,” the monster demanded, insisting on photography. “No touch or retouch.”

Gojiro’s plan was to print up a limited number of
fumetti
—five hundred, a thousand tops—then place them in strategic positions around the globe, one in a telephone booth on Forty-Second Street, another in a bush at the Everest tree line, a few shoved into crannies in the Great Wall, etc. Publishing millions, muscling them onto every newsstand, all that smacked of the official denial, the monster declared, the totalitarian and parental. That was no way to dislodge Shig’s narrative from the impressionable minds of G-fans. Truth could not arrive blustery and bullying and expect to be accepted; it had to creep subversive, like rumor, legend.

The scheme, however, was never executed. The 90 Series headed it off. Everything got put on the back burner after that. So there was only one
fumetti
in existence, the paste-up prototype that Komodo now held in his sweating hands as he walked across the Encrucijada toward the slate-roofed house where Joseph Prometheus Brooks stood.

The
fumetti
would help, Komodo thought, the early morning sun already hard upon his forehead. It contained the only existing photo of the King of Monsters and Coma Boy together, a shot of the two standing on Corvair Bay Beach. Showing it to Brooks, Komodo thought, would immediately make the predicament clear. Every moment counted; the vicissitudes of the Triple Ring Promise had to be presented as quickly as possible. Mastering the rudiments of Quadcamerality, deciphering the mysteries of Reprimordialization would likely be child’s play for someone like Joseph Prometheus Brooks, Komodo surmised. But then again, who could predict the workings of genius? It operates on its own schedule, does not square with the nine to five. All he could do, Komodo thought as he made his way across the giant Valley, was to impress the urgency of the situation upon the great scientist.

He got within a hundred yards of the house before the image became clear in his mind. The way Brooks stood there, gaunt and stiff in his worn parson’s coat, his huge hands thrust out before him, palms up, spiny fingers spread as if he were cradling an invisible sphere—it was identical to the pose in Leona Brooks’s X-ray portrait. It was as if the picture had come to life, right there in the middle of the Valley of the Crossroads.

The recognition wobbled Komodo, made him weak. For a moment he thought he’d pass out, faint right there on the Heater’s greenish sheet, but he gathered himself up, pushed on.

“Mr. Brooks?” he called into the parched air. “Please forgive this oppressive intrusion. I am Yukio Komodo. If I may approach and speak to you, I will restrict my altogether insignificant questions to the barest minimum.” Brooks offered no acknowledgment of Komodo’s presence. He just kept looking, staring out into the Valley. It was just a matter of asking the perfect question, Komodo thought, bulwarking himself. If only he could frame the exact right query in the exact right way, the incisive force of the interrogatory itself would compel Brooks to reply as any great man-of-science must when confronted with a problem worthy of his mettle. But what was that question?

“Mr. Brooks, I come to you with a serious matter that represents a potentially . . .” The words caught in his throat, would not clear his tongue. Komodo berated himself. To be granted a moment like this, to stand face-to-face with the great and terrible Brooks, to petition his help in resolution of the Promise, and not be able to utter a single intelligible phrase! Not a comprehensible point! It was madness.

“Mr. Brooks, please listen . . .” Those eyes! Dark and glowing from within the deepset sockets of the physicist’s cadaverous face, they appeared to blaze an unassailable path across the empty landscape. Komodo felt himself wilting before those bituminous orbs.

“You see,” Komodo stammered, holding out the
fumetti
, “my friend and I . . . we live on an Island, it’s not near here. In fact it is quite far. We were hoping you might pay the smallest attention to our paltry dilemma . . . Perhaps you might chance to glance at this modest work, so as to get a better idea. . . . Please, Mr. Brooks, there is not much time.”

Then Komodo felt that sudden gust pierce through the previously calm desert air, pulling the
fumetti
from his hands. Caught in an updraft, the old comic first rose straight into the azure sky, then blew across the Valley floor. “Oh no,” Komodo gasped. Then, as if on cue, came that glare. The popping of a flashbulb—someone was taking his picture! And Komodo was running, back across that Valley, away from Joseph Prometheus Brooks.

* * *

Gojiro watched it all on the monitors Shig had set up down in the White Light Chamber. There was nothing else he could do, not after that unfortunate incident following his positive ID of Joe Pro Brooks. “Not dead?” the monster convulsed. The corrective could be applied to that, forthwith, no sweat. “Rarrr,” he roared, long-fermenting bile bubbling up, overflowing. He tail-slammed the Chamber walls, looking for the bust-out. Only Komodo’s quick string and zing of that stun-tipped harpoon stopped the lizard, sending him to Crash Gordonsville. When he woke up he was outraged to find himself trussed like bedlam’s mummy in a straitjacket the size of which no Big and Tall ever sold. But still he promised. He swore he’d stay inside the Chamber and not interfere with Komodo’s attempt to engage the seemingly resurrected Brooks on a high-type scientific plane.

Now, however, Komodo was back in the Chamber, crying. “It was horrible. I couldn’t speak. Then I lost the
fumetti
, and that flash . . . Oh! How shameful. I panicked, I ran away. Mr. Brooks is our Promise’s last chance, and I failed to communicate with him. Can you ever forgive me?”

Gojiro tried to comfort his friend. For sure, he didn’t care about the jerkoff
fumetti
—his only reaction when Komodo pulled the thing from the pocket of his black pajamas was, “Don’t you ever throw anything out?” Besides, who was he to blame Komodo for running away? Komodo was the bravest, truest, most reverent. Clean, too. “Hey, man, anybody would’ve bugged out. Cat’s eerie. It’s scary enough just seeing him on them monitors.” That was so; for a dead guy who suddenly turned up alive, Brooks still looked pretty dead. Talk about your timeslips, what
was
Brooks doing out there, still posing for a picture that had been painted decades before? It was too strange, especially when you considered Brooks was supposed to be six feet under at Arlington. Hadn’t it been giant, Brooks croaking? Gojiro watched the old newsreel at least a dozen times—the flag-draped coffin, slide rule tossed into the open grave, the whole twenty-one guns. A full complement of the rogue’s gallery had been present, Fermi, Lawrence, and the rest, a double row of spaceheads. Victor Stiller himself served up a real heartrending eulogy, his East Euro brogue never smoother as he talked of his “godlike” friend. John Foster fucking Dulles threw dirt on the fluted box, for chrissakes.

Brooks was supposed to be dead. Yet there he was—the dead man, alive, smack in the middle of the Valley of Death.

Gojiro looked at the monitors, studied the unmoving form. “I dunno, maybe he
is
dead, maybe we’re all dead.” Wasn’t Komodo the Coma Boy, and wasn’t the Coma Boy supposed to be dead, expired after “a nine-year fight to cling to a life he hardly knew”? And what about a certain supposedly imaginary five-hundred-foot-tall star of sleazoid screen and cathode ray? “Never alive”—didn’t that add up to the same as dead? Maybe that’s what this so-called Valley of the Crossroads was, the reptile thought, a limbo land, a halfway house for them between states and stations. “I say we blow this popstand. Ain’t nothing here for us.”

Komodo did not reply. He just stood still, watching those snowy Philcos and Admirals, studying Joseph Prometheus Brooks. “Look at his eyes! How they stare ahead. My own true friend, what do you suppose he’s looking for?”

“Who knows? Who cares? He’s one zoned hombre. Bonked. Total.”

Komodo drew closer to a monitor, held out his hand, lightly touched its sheer face. “It was awful, being out there. I thought if only I could get his attention, then I could make him understand. But he wouldn’t look at me . . . no, that’s not right. He did look at me. But it was as if he wouldn’t
see
me. He looked right through me, as if I wasn’t there at all.”

Gojiro was up, pacing. “Just what I’m saying. The guy is nuts. Mindblown. Look man, we gave it a good shot, coming here. But it’s a dead end. Besides, someone took your picture out there. This gotta be some sickass CIA shit. Makes my blood run more cold and clotty every second.”

Komodo did not look up. “I sensed that he was searching for something . . . something he
had
to see. Perhaps that’s why he wouldn’t see me. Because somehow, I was . . .
wrong
.”

Then Komodo turned away from the screens, faced Gojiro. “I must go.”

“Go? Where? Back out there?”

“No. To her. She must be told her father is alive.”

“But . . .”

Komodo rubbed his face agitatedly. “I spoke with her about her mother’s portrait. She said she’d never seen it. ‘I don’t want to see my mother’s dreams’—those were her very words. Yet she
does
see what her mother saw.” Komodo reached into the pocket of his black pajamas, drew out his stereopticon. “She saw it in here! Think, my own true friend, of Ms. Brooks’s mother’s portrait. The background is a blaze of white, but there is no detail, no physical features that identify the land. It was Ms. Brooks who provided those details—‘Red rocks!’ she called out. ‘Red rocks and cliffs!’ Oh, my own true friend. Do you not feel the gratitude we owe her? We came to this foreign land hoping she might provide us with an insight into her father’s thinking. Has she not done better than that? She provided
him
!

“Now we must reciprocate. We must seek to alleviate her torment—free her from the spectres that haunt her.”

The monster interrupted with a scream. “I don’t think we should be messing with stuff we don’t know nothing about. Whatever’s happening here—it ain’t our business.”

Komodo frowned at the reptile’s outburst, then peered intently at the stereopticon. “So many times I have wished this photo would spring to life. That somehow these people would step from this holder. But it has not been possible; my prayer has never been answered. Yet, that night, when she looked into this very frame, she saw her father. It was as if by seeing him, she has snatched him from Death.”

Komodo turned to look at Joseph Prometheus Brooks. “Perhaps it is strange to say, but through Ms. Brooks’s vision—it is almost as if my own father has been returned to me.”

A tightness seized the monster. His head felt as if it was about to shoot off his shoulders. It was one thing to propose that a picture in an antique viewer found on the beach of a mutant’s island might somehow qualify as an area of transference, a smallest rectangle where every needy soul might come to petition love, and that the love found there might be interchangeable with all currencies of the heart. But including Joseph Prometheus Brooks in that exchange. Wasn’t that going off the cognitive map? Brooks as Komodo’s dad—as
any
dad—it was insanity. Still, the monster knew there would be no arguing his friend out of telling Sheila Brooks that her father was alive, if not kicking, in the Encrucijada. “Okay, you win. Let’s cut. Don’t want to knock the service, but this joint was getting a little old.”

Komodo looked at Gojiro resolutely. “I feel it would be better if I went myself.”

“What?”

“It would only be for a short while.”

“You want me to stay in this spook house by myself? You crazy?”

Komodo threw some clothing in a bag. “You will be safer in this contained environment. Your thermoregulation has been fluctuating. It will be easier to maintain a proper temperature here. Also, there is the shrinkage problem.”

“Screw the shrinkage, I ain’t stayin’.”

Komodo bit his lower lip. The words were hard for him. “I desire to go to see Ms. Brooks . . . by myself.” The tortured expression on his face begged Gojiro not to protest.

“Oh.”

Fifteen minutes later, Komodo was ready to leave. “This time will pass quickly. Perhaps this separation will be a good thing. As Budd Hazard says, ‘In the pursuit of True Identity, one must sometimes follow his own road not taken.’ ”

Gojiro grunted. Komodo was too much! Quoting Budd Hazard, at this latest date, extrapolating the Muse’s mumbo jumbo about the solitary path to self-knowledge. Not that the monster denied the principle. Even on Lavarock, where each was everyone and everyone each and the Line linked all, there remained a crucial moment when a zardplebe had to walk alone, make his decisive plunge into the Black Spot by himself. But what could these sentiments matter now, inside this fearsome Chamber?