Shambling Towards Hiroshima

by James Morrow

  For many years Willis O’Brien managed to remain active in the industry. Throughout 1947 he supervised his protégé Ray Harryhausen on the intricate stop-motion animation that makes Mighty Joe Young such a watchable romp. I cannot help regarding the climax of that picture, in which the huge gorilla helps rescue the young residents of a burning orphanage, as Obie’s attempt to give Operation Fortune Cookie the denouement it deserved. He couldn’t save the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but at least he could deliver dozens of fictional foundlings from a similarly fiery death. Alas, after rising to the occasion of Mighty Joe Young, Obie was stricken with a bad case of post-Gorgantis stress syndrome. He lost his ability to sell himself, and no more prestigious assignments came his way. His work on The Black Scorpion and The Giant Behemoth was impressive as always, but the films themselves lacked magic, causing little stir upon their release. In 1960, two years before his death, Obie endured the final humiliation, when Irwin Allen recruited him as an “effects technician” on a wretched reincarnation of the picture that had made his career, The Lost World of 1925. Allen’s inexcusable movie did not contain even one second of stop-motion, merely live lizards decked out in horns and spikes, pathetically impersonating dinosaurs. The last instance of Obie’s handiwork to reach the big screen graces that mirthless exercise in celluloid elephantiasis, Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Obie contributed to the violent climax, animating eleven articulated puppets representing members of the all-star cast, dutifully hurtling them, as the script required, to near-certain death from a wildly oscillating fire-engine ladder. Such is the span of this gifted man’s career, a sorrowful sweep from a beguiling Lost World to a meaningless Mad World. It’s a sad, sad, sad, sad arc.

  As for the post-war Syms Thorley, he started off the new decade as a monster in trouble, drinking too much, sleeping too little, despairing too frequently, tumescing too seldom — the worst possible man for Darlene to have in her life. I was dismissed by three talent agents in as many months. On those rare occasions when I got to sleep, my subconscious insisted on tormenting me with mushroom clouds and irradiated children. I lost weight, friends, money, hope.

  Walking out on me was Darlene’s second wisest choice of 1952, the first being her decision to relocate to Manhattan and join the television revolution, a move that soon led to her successful anthology series Shock Street, hosted by a drug-addled Bela Lugosi. Back in those days, you may recall, almost everything that appeared on your personal cathode-ray tube was either a film-chain broadcast from Hollywood or a real-time presentation from New York. Among the morbid fascinations of those crude but endearing Shock Street programs was watching poor Lugosi dying before your eyes on live television.

  For the next three years I was a Jewish Blanche Dubois, dependent on the kindness of strangers, not to mention the charity of acquaintances, the gullibility of relatives, and occasionally even the benevolence of enemies, as when Dagover gave me a role in Galactic Lycanthropus. But then something extraordinary occurred. Late in 1955 I received a letter from Saburo Miyauchi, head of production at the nascent Kokusai Pictures in Tokyo. Mr. Miyauchi informed me that his company was about to enter the American market with a dubbed version of Yofuné-Nushi, Creature of Wrath, a sci-fi spectacle featuring a radioactive prehistoric lizard. Every shot of the titular monster, Mr. Miyauchi confessed, had been salvaged from the black-and-white 35mm silent footage that “the China Lake emissaries brought back to Japan two months before the war ended.” He had two reasons for writing. First, he wanted to offer me ¥50,000 — about five hundred dollars — as compensation for my appropriated performance. Second, because Yofuné-Nushi, Creature of Wrath had been so popular in Japan, “even among the explosion-affected persons,” he hoped I would accept ¥200,000 to appear in the sequel, Yofuné-Nushi Strikes Again, which would feature “the backup version of the lizard suit that figured in our first monster film, the original costume being unusable owing to the rips and burns it acquired during your U.S. Navy’s presentation to the Imperial Delegation in June of 1945.”

  I have yet to learn exactly how the Kokusai executives deduced that the dwarf behemoth who effaced the miniature Shirazuka was actually an actor in a suit. Perhaps after the war somebody sent Mr. Miyauchi the Los Angeles Examiner photos of the Santa Monica Beach Monster, and he put two and two together. One thing is clear. Kokusai didn’t pay the Defense Department a single yen for the duplicate PRR. The costume had been a bribe, pure and simple, given to the Japanese moguls on condition that they keep mum about the Knickerbocker Project.

  In my reply to Mr. Miyauchi, I informed him that, before signing a contract, I would have to speak with my agent — by which I meant that, thanks to this deal, I could now probably convince some predatory ten-percenter to represent me — but I told him I believed this was the start of a productive partnership. In the final paragraph, I offered my opinion that American audiences would never warm up to a picture called Yofuné-Nushi, Creature of Wrath. If I were a Japanese movie magnate, I would call the English-language release of my sci-fi epic Gorgantis, King of the Lizards.

  Three weeks later I flew to Tokyo, where I joined the ranks of gaijin, foreigners, laboring in the grotty but honorable fields of kaiju eiga, monster movies. Although no reputable L.A. agent was interested in my new career, I soon acquired the local services of Yozo “Johnny” Mosura, a combination talent scout and Tokyo League baseball bookie. Despite the omnipresent saki and beer I managed to stay relatively sober, limping my way through nine Gorgantis epics, three of which I wrote myself.

  After two decades, Kokusai’s kaiju eiga empire ceased to be profitable, but by then I was sufficiently solvent to repatriate myself. I bought a house in Malibu and became a bourgeois beach bum, bedeviled by drink, haunted by the ghosts of China Lake, but still finding reasons to get up in the morning. In time I discovered a new vocation, putting my talent for melodramatic plotting to lucrative use. Encouraged by my New York literary agent, Rachel Bishop, I churned out a half-dozen paperback horror novels for Aardvark Books, all ostensibly written by somebody named Sean Prince, my pseudonym’s pseudonym.

  About ten years ago, both of my pasts — Monogram Pictures living legend and kaiju eiga superstar — caught up with me, and I became a darling of the monster-movie convention circuit. Every month would bring a new celebration: Monster Bash, Cinemacabre, Charnel Carnival, Shadowflix, Wonderama. I held forth on panels, did public interviews, made guest-of-honor speeches, and presented my 35mm slide-show on the art of suit acting. At some point during any given appearance I would start ranting about the hibakusha. The fans learned to put up with it. What choice did they have? When Corpuscula, Kha-Ton-Ra, or Gorgantis talks, the true believer listens. As the years went on and the conventions began blurring into each other, I found myself making indiscreet allusions to the Knickerbocker lizards, but mostly I stuck to the atomic bombing of Japan.

  “The instant that doctors in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki hospitals began reporting thousands of fatalities from a mysterious plague, General Groves undertook to persuade the American public that the A-bomb attacks had involved no appreciable radioactive fallout. A famous photograph showed the general’s personal driver, a young soldier named Patrick Stout, standing in the Hiroshima bomb crater, smiling up at the camera. Twenty-four years later, at the age of fifty-three, Stout died of leukemia.”

  Every time I told that story, the convention attendees greeted me with glassy-eyed stares. They’d come to hear about Corpuscula, not blood cancer.

  “Most historians agree that Hirohito’s ‘sacred decision’ to demand total capitulation of his generals was undergirded by two extraordinary events: the Soviet Union’s entry into the Pacific War, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Does this mean that the attack on Nagasaki was unnecessary? It’s difficult to say, but two facts are incontrovertible. First, General Groves obsessively arranged for the Nagasaki bombing to occur as quickly as possible after the Hiroshima raid, on the dubious theory that nothing short of a one-
two punch would get the enemy’s attention. Second, on the morning of August 8, two days following Hiroshima and twenty-four hours before the destruction of Nagasaki, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo sat down to confer with Hirohito, only to learn that, because of the devastating new weapon, the Emperor had decided to terminate the war posthaste, thus sparing his people further suffering.”

  These remarks also elicited blank expressions from the kaiju eiga faithful. The fans perked up only when I mentioned in passing that Togo’s son-in-law had helped to found Kokusai Pictures.

  “It’s worth remembering that, beyond using atomic bombs to force a Japanese surrender, Truman and his Secretary of State, James Byrnes, also hoped the new weapon would help the United States constrain Soviet ambitions after the war. ‘It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered,’ the President wrote in his diary, ‘but it can be made the most useful.’ Thus did Truman and Byrnes become charter members of the Machiavellian club that today includes the architects of President Reagan’s nuclear arms buildup: unlettered and parochial men promoting incendiary devices whose true nature they do not understand — the quintessential peasants with the ultimate torches.”

  A few Gorgantis aficionados seemed interested in this point, knowing as they did that certain prominent strategists in the Reagan Administration harbored illusions of moving beyond the Cold War into a glorious and only mildly radioactive era of nuclear victory over the Soviets. But most fans simply looked at their watches.

  “As Susan Sontag argues in her brilliant essay, ‘The Imagination of Disaster,’ science fiction films enable us to participate in the fantasy of living not only through our own deaths, but also the death of cities and the destruction of humanity itself. In Sontag’s memorable phrase, such movies are ‘in complicity with the abhorrent.’“

  Of all the points I liked to make at the conventions, that one went over the least well with the fans.

  I must admit that my acceptance speech following the Wonderama Awards dinner was the most pompous and didactic yet. Beyond my usual screed about the hibakusha, my topic was Harry Truman’s convoluted post-war statements concerning Hiroshima. Even I was embarrassed by the irrelevance of my remarks — an inarticulate attack on inarticulateness — and I left the banquet hall before finding out who’d won the raffle for the Gorgantis suit replica.

  “I made the only decision I ever knew how to make,” Truman famously asserted in one of his carefully scripted reminiscences. What does that mean, exactly? Did Truman see himself as a professional decision-maker with a narrow specialty, the choice between destroying and not destroying Japanese cities? What is the distinction, exactly, between being unable to make any other decision and never having been able to make any other decision? Have Überweapons made coherence obsolete? As we become ever more complicitous in the abhorrent, will eloquence, lucidity, and reason itself —

  Wait. Damn. Someone’s at the door. Crap.

  I’m not sure who I was expecting to find on the threshold of Room 2014. Ray the rhedosaurus fan? Tiffany the hooker? Darlene Wasserman, wanting to give the relationship another chance?

  I certainly wasn’t anticipating Gorgantis, but there he stood, my reptilian alter ego, throwing his head back in a mighty roar while sweeping the hall carpet with his tail. The human inside the suit introduced himself as Eric Yamashita, the convention attendee who’d won the raffle on Saturday night. His reasons for darkening my door were twofold. First, he wanted to tell me how much he enjoyed my acceptance speech at the banquet, especially my expression of sympathy for the hibakusha. Second, he’d inadvertently imprisoned himself in the costume, and he was hoping that I recalled enough about its complicated zipper system to liberate him.

  I invited my young fan into the room.

  “I cannot tell you how fortunate I feel that this suit has come into my possession,” Gorgantis said.

  “Would you like me to autograph it?” I asked.

  “Extrication will be sufficient. But not immediately. At the moment I am happy to be inside. I feel blessed by the lizard’s enveloping presence.”

  “So did I, once upon a time.”

  “Two years ago I joined the Germantown Society of Friends,” Gorgantis said. “I now run their most active committee, the Greater Philadelphia Coalition to Halt the Arms Race.”

  “A Japanese Quaker?” I said.

  “Rather the way you’re a Jewish Buddhist,” Gorgantis said. “I’m not a Buddhist.”

  “Ah, but you are, Mr. Thorley, even if you don’t know it. Your philosophical remarks on Saturday night gave you away.”

  I told Eric there was some lukewarm coffee left over from breakfast. Would he care for a cup? He replied that, oddly enough, he was a devotee of lukewarm coffee, and he would be happy to accept my offer once free of the costume.

  “I don’t think of sci-fi fans as political activists,” I said.

  “When somebody tells you he loves monster movies, you’re learning very little about him. I hope to make this magnificent lizard as famous a symbol for the abolition of nuclear weapons as Smokey the Bear has become for the prevention of forest fires. The Reagan Administration has thus far managed to ignore apartheid, poverty, pollution, and the AIDS epidemic, but I won’t allow them to deny the behemoth.”

  “I assume there’s no flamethrower in there.”

  “Probably not, but in case it’s got one, I should still be allowed to keep the costume,” Gorgantis noted with maximum reptilian acerbity. “Isn’t that why we have the Second Amendment?” He bellowed and swished his tail. “The time has come for me to hatch.”

  I ran my hands all over the rubbery fabric, as if frisking the lizard for a concealed weapon. This particular Gorgantis incarnation did not perfectly replicate the prototype, but I still located all the relevant catches, snaps, and zippers. Five minutes later, a sweating and smiling young man stepped out, wearing blue jeans and a Phillies baseball jersey. He was remarkably handsome, reminiscent of Kojiro Hongo from Daikaiju Ketto Gamera tai Barugon, which graced American screens in 1966 as War of the Monsters. If Jimmy Whale were here, he would’ve fallen instantly in love.

  “Before I go, I must tell you why nuclear abolition means so much to me,” Eric said. “My favorite aunt was a hibakusha.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Until two years ago, Megumi Yamashita lived with us, or, to be more accurate, passed her living death with us. We lost her to thyroid cancer. She never talked about Hiroshima, but one day I found a long letter she’d written to her brother in Kyoto. It went on for forty pages.”

  “Maybe you should publish it,” I said, pouring lukewarm coffee into a hotel mug. “I have a good agent these days.”

  “She told of the blinding flash and the black rain. She described the burned survivors staggering toward the river. Their eyes had melted in their skulls. My aunt wrote that a cyclone made of screams tore through the city that day. The people were crying for their mothers, their children, their gods, their deaths. Most especially they cried for water.”

  “The radiation.” I passed Eric his mug of tepid brew. “It causes intolerable thirst.”

  “Their skin was coming off in sheets, like wax dripping from a candle.”

  “I’ve seen the pictures.” Kha-Ton-Ra’s flesh was likewise a tenuous organ, but he had all those bandages to hold it in place.

  Eric sipped coffee. “Somehow my aunt made it to the hospital. She’d been trained as a nurse, so she wanted to volunteer. She wasn’t prepared for what she found. How could she be? A little girl with no arms. A little boy whose head had become a charred blister. Another boy whose lips and cheeks had vanished, so you could see his broiled gums and all his teeth. Wasn’t the Hiroshima bomb called Little Boy?”

  “And Nagasaki was Fat Man.”

  My visitor was weeping now. “Another little girl, no more than five. Her name was Yukiko. All the skin on her back had fallen away. She kept crying ‘Mommy! Water! Mommy! Water!’ My aunt tried to give her some water, but Yukiko was
thrashing too much from the pain. She died without seeing her mother.”

  From the pocket of his jeans Eric produced a neatly folded white handkerchief. He daubed the tears from his eyes and swabbed the mucus from his nose. A silent minute elapsed. I ate the last English muffin. My visitor finished his coffee.

  “On the way up here I met the steward to whom you gave your Raydo,” Eric said at last. “Am I to infer a dark meaning from that gesture?”

  “Bull’s-eye. You smoked me out.”

  My visitor dragged his Gorgantis suit back toward the entrance to my steamy room. “In your speech at the banquet, I heard a terrible despair.”

  “Call it my tribute to Yukiko.”

  “Yukiko would not be honored.”

  “My inspiration is Claude Eatherly,” I said. “The pilot who flew the weather plane that found the skies over Hiroshima sufficiently clear on the morning of August 6, 1945. His personality was never the most stable, but Little Boy broke him completely — psychiatric disorders, criminal behavior, suicidal impulses.”

  “But he never killed himself.”

  “He was a braver man than I.”

  Eric wrapped his fingers around the door handle. “Mr. Thorley, I beg you.” He withdrew his hand, jammed it in his pocket. “This can’t be right.”

  “You’re talking to a hibakusha.”

  “I think not.”

  “Oh, yes, my friend. A hibakusha. Have no doubt.”

  It took me a half-hour to convince Eric Yamashita that nothing he could say or do would deflect me from my path. At last the young abolitionist took up his lizard rig and left. Once again I am alone.