Gojiro (29 page)

Mall Darters

S
HE SAID SHE WAS SORRY ABOUT THE SPEED.
She had to go fast, keep the scenery blurry, imprecise. It was part of her therapy. A single sharp image was enough to trigger the Dystopic Reflex. Then Wilmington oil refineries would be transformed into pestilence-crammed flotillas of black freighters sailing into frightened harbors. Empty meadows would clog with shabby condos, power lines falling on the flat tar roofs, sparking electromagnetic plagues. Speed was the only remedy—velocity and those blinder goggles.

“My dad used to let me drive,” she said, pushing the little red Corvette up past eighty. “He’d sit me up on his lap, put my hands on the wheel, let me steer. Except sometimes he’d fall asleep. I’d be driving the car for real. It was crazy, only three years old and driving. That was before interstates, too. It was just those skinny blacktops, big trucks coming the other way. But then Dad would wake up and smile. He said it didn’t matter, because I was a good driver.

“We slept in the car. We’d park in a grove of trees, or under a railroad trestle. He let me sleep with my head in his lap. Then he’d wake me up, say we had to go. They were after us again. They were always after us. We never could rest. He said we were wanted in forty-eight states—every other country, too. What did we do, I asked him, rob a bank? He laughed, told me not to worry, because we weren’t guilty. Not like
they
thought. It was hard to understand, he said, but someday I would know. Then he’d stop the car and play his clarinet. My mom really liked that, he said.”

Komodo gripped the door handle, tried to keep smiling. Maybe in the Encrucijada, Joseph Prometheus Brooks remained a brooding, unrevealed symbol, but inside that speeding little red Corvette, the famous worldshatterer was a gently grinning man who took his daughter to Daffy Duck cartoons, pushed her on swings at the state fair, won a panda bear.

“Ms. Brooks . . .” Why couldn’t he speak? What was this autism that overcame him, precluding straightforward elocution? “Ms. Brooks, there is something I must tell you . . .”

But she kept on, explaining how this wonderful man always stopped at Perkins’ Pancake houses because it was her favorite place, especially the peach rollups, how he let her have seconds, even if he never ate a thing.

The shame of it!
Why couldn’t he simply say her father was not dead but standing in the middle of that same Valley that haunted her dreams? What a coward! “Ms. Brooks . . . ,” he’d begin, only to stop once more, slump back into his bucket seat, sit watching her. How smoothly she piloted the sports car, deftly darting in and out of the freeway traffic, her spindly arm hard on the downshift. Brooks was right: She
was
a good driver.

Tell her now, he screamed to himself. But he couldn’t bear to break the mood. Had her hand lightly brushed his? He stole a glance. Were those thinnest of lips formed into the faintest smile?

Back at the Traj Taj, after Ebi’s thinker fell in, he tried to tell her. They were in the kitchen, waiting for the tea to steep. Recalling the scene was torture. Why did he have to pull that packet out of the pocket of his black pajamas, pour the contents into the steaming water? Couldn’t he have guessed how silly it would seem, those massive heart-shaped balloons flying out of the tea cups like some Lawrence Welk extravaganza? “Magic flavor crystals,” he called them, with an asinine giggle. But he couldn’t stop himself. The sunlight was streaming through the calico curtains of the breakfast nook, spreading across the wood plank table, and Ebi was sitting there between them. The glorious normality seduced him, sent him into a revel of domesticity. A kiss on the cheek, out to work and play, presents under the tinseled tree. Husband. Father. The words themselves made Komodo weak.
The shame of it!
Sheila Brooks—another man’s wife, a married woman!

What was Ebi’s role in this, Komodo wondered. Who else could have concocted a walk through the Insta-Envir guaranteed to lead them past that brand-new growth of giant roses, which just happened to burst into full bloom as they approached? What scenario was Ebi attempting to arrange in her supposedly guileless head?

Komodo looked at the kudzu-banked freeway and replayed the day, his confusion mounting, turning to dread. How could Ebi know? How could she have remembered what happened that awful day by the Cloudcover? He’d been so careful to keep the horrendous events from her. Yet there was no doubt—Ebi knew! The reference to being surrounded by “water everywhere”—that might have been a guess, a poetic invocation of the womb. But what of her insistence about being born offshore and the description of going around and around? The details were there.

Fool! Komodo berated himself. How his previous sins returned to mock his current ones. Why hadn’t he told Ebi? Would it have been so difficult to drop the guise of the overbearingly cheerful benefactor, to tell the Truth, allow her the joy of calling him Father instead of that tortured Mister? A decade of useless, heartless deception, only to find out that she knew it all along. Recalled every last bit! She remembered her mother’s face . . .
Kishi’s face.

“You okay?” Sheila Brooks asked, throttling to eighty-five.

“Some dust has flown in my eye.”

Could Ebi actually remember her Freshout Cry? It seemed impossible, but she wouldn’t say a thing like that unless she believed it to be true—unless it was true. Ebi was a scientist, a follower of the most precise of disciplines. She cared little for illusion, less for fantasy. Yet to remember one’s own Freshout Cry, to be able to summon it at will, to know exactly who you were, from the beginning to now—Komodo staggered beneath the immensity of the idea. “Waaaa!” How long had he searched for the merest hint of that same scream?

The Freshout Cry!
The yelp from a blueskinned child, held upside down, slapped on the backside, the shriek of birth across the savannahs—the bugle blast of all beginnings, the clarion of Life itself. The most sacred of sounds. That’s how Budd Hazard described the Cry all those long, long, and lonely nights ago. Except that the Muse spread his net wide. According to Budd Hazard, the Freshout Cry was the Evolloo’s clapboarding cue, the common squawk that announced the fuse of Beam and Bunch, the confluencing clamor of which every baby’s first shout was nothing more—or less—than a celebratory echo.

To Komodo, the Freshout Cry was the soundtrack of Reprimordialization. He bugged the Fayetteville Tree branches with multidirectional mikes, pressed his stethoscopes against the curved glass enclosure. “If only we can record this Cry and gain the means to reproduce it,” he told Gojiro, “it might prove a tonal beacon, an aural clue toward the fulfillment of the solemn Vow.” He didn’t know what to expect. Who knew the tenor of things inside that crease in Time and Space—that Instant where Beam and Bunch came together and only Throwforwards dared to tread? Komodo was forever refiguring his gains and gauges, running them through oscilloscopic speakers so no woof or tweet would remain unexamined. Anything to catch Blip One. But, just as his cameras failed to grasp even the merest phantom of Change, Komodo’s tapes stayed blank. “Just one more tree fell in the forest we know not where, huh?” Gojiro commented one morning after still another newly minted Bunch of chickadees sat preening in the Fayetteville Tree. To which Komodo could only nod sadly.

Yet, inside that thinker, Ebi screamed “Waaaa!” Furthermore, she said she could do it “anytime”—that Sheila Brooks could do it too!
Absolutely
she could, Ebi said.

Komodo looked over at the Hermit Pandora. She was still talking about her father. Except now her mood was anguished, wrought up. Her words came in gulps, halting spasms. “Then they were after us, closing in. It seemed like every time we turned around there’d be that car, the gray one, following us. That’s when Dad started to get strange. Days went by, he wouldn’t talk, not a word. I thought he didn’t like me anymore. Then he said we had to go to Wisconsin. He had to see what was left, if
anything
was left—that’s what he kept saying, over and over—he had to find out if there was any trace. It was fall, nearly winter. I was so cold. He wrapped me in blankets, told me to be brave. We drove up icy roads, farther into the country. It was where he was born, he said, where he grew up—before they found out he was a genius and sent him to Europe.

“Finally we got to this overgrown field. He stopped the car and got out. It was real early in the morning. Dad just stood there, not saying a word, looking at the field for hours. ‘What are you looking for?’ I asked him. He turned to me with the saddest look on his face. ‘Nothing to offend His eyes,’ he said. ‘Nothing for Him to see. As if we’ve never been here at all.’ He told me that’s what his father always said. Then he started tearing at the weeds. Ripping them up. It was awful, I thought he was going crazy. Then he picked up this charred board, held it in his hands, and started to cry.”

She turned toward Komodo, her mouth twisting beneath her grotesque glasses. “He killed them . . . my father’s father. He killed his family. He did it because he thought God was disgusted with the world—that we didn’t belong in His sight! He burned the whole place to the ground so it would seem like they’d never been here, not even a trace. That’s crazy, isn’t it? That’s wrong, isn’t it?”

“Ms. Brooks . . .” She was going faster now, almost a hundred. She wasn’t watching the road, not at all.

“Tell me!”

“What?”

“That it’s wrong.”

“Yes, Ms. Brooks.”

“Yes what?”

“It’s wrong!”

“How do we know?”

“Ms. Brooks! Your father is . . . here! Look!” Komodo reached into his pocket, pulled out the page he’d torn from that
Visions in Fission
book. “Your mother painted this. It is exactly how your father stands, even now. Look!”

Sheila Brooks grabbed the reproduction of her mother’s X-ray painting. Instantly her hands came off the steering wheel, flew up to her face. “No!”

“But it is so! It is him.”

“No! It’s wrong!”

“What?”

“My mother saw it . . . wrong!”

There was nothing else to do once the little red Corvette began veering into that pickup with the NRA stickers. Komodo had to reach across her body, grab the wheel, flare the car up that off-ramp, out to that wide and mirthless boulevard. A few missed turns later, they were forced to squeeze left, into the underground parking facility of a huge shopping complex. That’s where they got surrounded by all those demonstrators.

“Save the Mall Darter! Transcendental lies must be thwarted!” the crowd chanted as they snake-slalomed between parking meters in the monoxide-thick garage. One seriously overweight teenager, draped with shawls that looked to be back numbers from Madame Blavatsky’s tag sale, crammed a leaflet through the Corvette’s open window. Skimming the literature, Komodo was quick to recognize the issues in the Mall Darter controversy. Apparently, the managers of the Oversoul Mall, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Transcendental Corporation of the Southland, in attempting to create “an ecospherically correct shopping environment” had stocked the complex’s interior waterway with several varieties of fish, primarily strains of the Mid-American snapnosed scooter and the bluetipped rock tummeler. These two animals crossbred, which caused quite a stir, especially after a team of naturalists validated Oversoul as the lone habitat of the new species, popularly referred to as the Mall Darter, owing to its propensity to lurch in either direction in response to the stimulus of fast-pitched pennies. Initially, this development was hailed by the mall owners. But the prodigious breeding capacity of the Mall Darter soon proved a problem. Cramped in their poured-latex tub, thriving in the chlorinated water, the fast-growing fish developed a cannibalistic trait. The steady accumulation of mauled and bloody darter carcasses kept customers away, resulting in the pullout of several key tenants. When another mall, the Gary Owens Presents, opened just one exit over, the parent company, seeking debt restraint, opted to restructure the property as a dual-use industrial park/pitch and putt.

As shouts of “Maintain the Habitat!” filled the parking lot, Komodo felt his mind wander. He thought of the darkened shopping center, its filtered air acrid with ammoniated floor cleaner, nothing moving save the rise and fall of the gently snoring night watchman’s chest . . . and then, in that undersized pool, a single snapnosed scooter, following an incomprehensible yet imploring compass, moved forward toward a lone rock tummeler. And then—resounding through the silent sneaker stores and shuttered game parlors: “Waaaa!”

Komodo’s reverie was soon shattered, however. Sheila Brooks was pushing a ten-thousand-dollar check, hastily made out to the Mall Darter Must Live Fund, into the hand of a young punker with chain saws tattooed onto his shaved head. “That okay? Can we go now?” she shouted hoarsely.

“Sure thing!” The stunned boy’s eyes bugged. He was beginning to clear a path for the Corvette but then stopped. “Hey, wait a minute. Shit! We got Sheila Brooks here!”

Almost immediately the plight of the Mall Darter was forgotten. Placards were abandoned as a swarm of protesters lurched forward, a crush of black leotards and gypsum cheeks. Everyone in that indoor parking lot had a terrible Apock Vision they wished to convey to the Hermit Pandora herself.

The chain-saw-headed boy tore up Sheila’s check. “Doesn’t matter!” he screamed, his features twisted against the Corvette’s windshield. “What good’s money with no banks? No banks, no stores, no nothing! Year Zero! That’s what I see: Year Zero! Fire and flames! Fire and flames shooting out of eyes like blowtorches! Sheila Brooks, listen! I see the End—every night!”

Her lipstick-smudged mouth was contorted into a frightful oblong. “Go away! What you think—it’s wrong! We’re
better
than that!” Still the crowd forged ahead, a sea of harrowed faces.

“Oblivion!” they shouted. “Oblivion!”

However, when Komodo turned back to Sheila Brooks again, she no longer seemed affected by her fans’ hysteria. She was looking into a stereopticon. It must have been in her purse, fallen out in the tumult. Komodo studied it. What she’d said back at the Traj Taj seemed accurate: Her stereopticon was remarkably similar to the picture holder Gojiro snatched from the flotjet tide all those years ago. Except, of course, for the image within. It wasn’t of a mom and dad on a lush hillside, beside the bluest lake, before the towering mountain with the diamond sparkle of snow upon its crowning top. No. This picture showed Joseph Prometheus Brooks and Leona Ross Brooks standing together. They were in the middle of a Valley. A Valley surrounded by red craggy hills, beneath a wide-open sky. And they’re smiling, happy. Brooks’s hand is on her belly. She’s pregnant!