A moment later, approaching the rent-a-car desks, there was more trouble. Due to complications Komodo attributed to rapid altitude shifts, the shrink drug became unstable. Without warning, Gojiro began to blurt in every direction. His head ballooned, his back leg grew seven feet. That linoleum floor was cold; he felt the blood of his ancestors down there. His tail surged outward, wrapping around Komodo’s neck. Before the necessary corrections could be made, three Hare Krishnas and a bag hustler fled the main concourse in terror.
Shaken, Komodo ran out the door and hailed a taxi. It was just as well. Renting a car would have probably been a bad idea. Sure, Komodo had practiced saying, “Oh, are you not the trying-harder company who only carries the fine family of Ford cars?” But really, aside from an occasional spin in one of the three-wheeled plasti jobs that served as all-terrain vehicles on Radioactive Island, Komodo had never driven a car. He had no clue as to California geography either.
Taking a taxi avoided those potential problems. But when the driver, a young woman, turned and asked, “Where to?” in a deep, noir-affected voice, Komodo froze. It was the woman’s appearance that did it, the way her long, knotty white hair seemed to lunge from beneath her cap, the ghostly pallor on her face, and the tilt of the black sunglasses she wore shoved tight against her eyes.
“Ms. Brooks?” Komodo gasped. Could it be that Sheila Brooks had anticipated their arrival and, for reasons known only to herself, affected this cabdriving persona? “It is so thoughtful of you to greet us at the airport. We never expected it.”
The cabdriver giggled. “Pretty good, huh?” she said.
“Pardon?”
“My facsimilation.” As it turned out, the woman was only dressed up like Sheila Brooks. She was “a Brooksian” she explained as she edged the yellow cab onto the teeming freeway. “You know, like, we’re into Sheila. We try to vision with her Vision, dream the Sad Tomorrow, see the End. It’s very constructive. Sheila Brooks has changed my life. I never miss an Eschat-out.”
“Excuse me?”
“Eschatological Outlet Session. Jim—Jim Dust-to-Dust—he’s my Annihilation Terminal, you know, sort of our group leader, a really together guy. He says it’s really important to unburden your Apock Vision. You know, we midwife each other’s End Day intimations, enfold them to our own. It’s nothing heavy. We just get into our Sheilaness, know what I mean?”
Komodo nodded. Words were impossible for him right then.
“Good. I didn’t want you to think I was a Satanist or something, like my parents do. They threw me out of the house when I got into Sheila. They don’t know anything. Sheila’s not about Evil, she’s about getting rid of your Evil.” The woman, who couldn’t have been more than twenty, turned to look at Komodo. “You into Sheila?”
“Into her?” Komodo pulled at his suddenly sweaty collar. “I don’t know. I hope to see her, my friend and I. We hoped she might be able to help us.”
“Wow! You really sound into her. Maybe you could come to one of our meetings. We eschat at the Dull Medulla—you know, that club downtown. You’d dig it, I’m sure.”
Gojiro couldn’t believe it. So this was what “fans” were like! No wonder any number of zardpards and ’tile-o-files were more than happy to embrace whatever chicanery Shig spewed out. Apocalypse Anonymous, Armageddon on the pyramid scheme. Sapiens would believe anything!
The monster felt terrible for Komodo; this conversation wasn’t doing him any good. The reptile had never seen his friend so nervous. It had been building throughout the journey. Just the day before, waiting to change planes in who-knew-where, the two friends found themselves staring at a young well-groomed couple. With them was a young girl wearing a blue frilly dress. The parents were holding hands, beaming at their daughter. It wasn’t anything you’d really notice, just natural, in the way of things. The woman and the man kissed lightly, but within that slightest touch was a passion that spoke of much more. The man got up, lifted the daughter in his arms, hugged her. Then he took his briefcase and went off. “Tomorrow night!” he shouted over his shoulder, waving.
Something that happens a million times a day in a million airports, right? But immediately Gojiro felt Komodo’s gyros scramble. Uneasy on his feet, he had to lean against a vending machine, his breath coming hard, in spurts. It killed Gojiro to see his friend suffer like that. So many times before, not completely kidding, he’d downrated the extent to which the Heater worked its surreal elasticity upon Komodo’s person. “Compared to me, what’s your beef?” the monster mocked. “You ain’t a hundred times your supposed size, you ain’t got feet for days. Ain’t like anyone can tell what you are by just looking. You open a sushi bar in Shreveport and what’s the worst—they make fun of how you say your r’s?”
Now Gojiro regretted those not-so-gentle jokes. This was Komodo’s first time amongst his erstwhile Bunch since those dim-perceived days on Okinawa. And it was obvious, regardless of his outward appearance, that he wasn’t one of them and never would be again. It was one thing to be Bunchless on Radioactive Island; that was a world of freaks. But here—everywhere Komodo turned was a reminder of all he’d lost, what he’d never regain. It wasn’t fair! Why shouldn’t Komodo have been that man with the wife and the daughter, that man who was about to board an airplane, be hurled into the void of space, yet was so assured of his place he could turn and shout, “Tomorrow night!”
“This is it—235047 Neptune View Lane,” the cabdriver said, apparently ignorant of the fact that she was stopping in front of her idol’s home.
Komodo gave her a twenty-dollar bill and, remembering his lines, said, “Keep the change.”
“Thanks!” she said, handing Komodo the address of the Dull Medulla, telling him to come by. “You look like you have some great nightmares.” Then, somewhat quizzically, she asked, “You don’t wear pajamas all the time, do you?”
* * *
“You sure this is the right place?” Gojiro said, poking his head from Komodo’s satchel. “You’d figure big Tinseltown types would have a doorman with a bearskin hat. This joint looks abandoned.”
It was true. Set alone atop a hill overlooking the ocean, the house that corresponded to the address Sheila Brooks gave in her letter appeared to be ripe for the gentry’s rape. All along the barely visible sidewalk were crumpled cigarette packs and pieces of shattered glass. The tall cement wall was cracked in spots by creepers, overgrown with palm fronds. The iron gate hadn’t been painted in years and was nearly rusted away in some places. The only things that looked new were the half-dozen or so shiny locks drilled into the gate.
Locating a small squawk box, Komodo pushed a cracked plastic button. An ear-splitting gnash emitted. “Naaaaaaa.”
“What’s this thing’s problem?” Gojiro sneered. He could feel himself getting into a pretty bad mood.
Komodo rang again, and this time a shriekish message came out. “Voice-activated! Intone now.”
“Excuse me,” Komodo said into the box. “I am Yukio Komodo. I wish to please speak with Ms. Sheila Brooks.”
There was no answer.
Louder this time: “Please, I am Yukio Komodo of Radioactive Island, to see Ms. Brooks.” With that the locks turned in their tumblers and the gate slid open with an Inner Sanctum creak.
“Geez,” Gojiro said as they stepped into the courtyard. For sure, no Beverly Hills landscaper was getting any richer off this spread. It looked like someone had thrown a wild party there in 1962 and forgotten to clean up. Off to one side of the two-acre enclosure was what looked to be a half-finished swimming pool. Now, though, it was no more than a mosquito breeding ditch with a caterpillar tractor stuck in the bottom. A weatherbeaten, blindfolded clothes-store mannequin slouched behind the tractor’s controls. In the center of the yard was a cracked and mottled statue of Saint Sebastian, but instead of arrows, rusted golf clubs were stuck into it. The lawn was solid kudzu.
So this was the Turret House, so called because of the roundish protuberances at its two seaward corners.
The domicile loomed large in the Brooks-Zeber legend. When Bobby Zeber first moved in, twenty years before, it was a boardinghouse. Just out of Brooklyn, a hardnosed city kid who wanted to be a movie director, Zeber paid seventy-five dollars a month for the room at the top of the left turret. It was in that room that Sheila Brooks was said to have had the first of the End of the World nightmares Zeber translated into films, creating the vast Brooks-Zeber empire. That’s where the couple stayed—along with the other tenants, two old cat-ladies and a country singer—long after Tidal Wave was breaking all box-office records. It was good, living with “real people,” Bobby Zeber was quoted as saying. But soon the old ladies were dead, and the country singer crossed over. Bobby Zeber bought the place and erected the giant fence, leading to much speculation as to the exact variety of beatnik Xanadu happening behind those walls. There were reports of hivelike installations of isolation tanks that doubled as bomb shelters, one unit for every fifty square feet. Looking at the joint now, though, none of that seemed feasible. It was just too beat.
The house’s heavy wooden door was ajar; after getting no response to his knocks, Komodo leaned in. The foyer was ripe with a thick scent of mildew and animal hair. “Ms. Brooks?” Komodo called out timidly, but there was only the sound of the ocean. A quick scan of the hallway, which opened into a large dark room that had most likely been the parlor of the boardinghouse, revealed no sign of life. Three large Spanish Inquisition-style banquet tables—seating for at least fifty—dominated the gloomy room, although it was difficult to imagine that anyone had ever eaten there. On the walls were stray op-art paintings and dozens of acid-rock posters stuck up with peeling Scotch tape. High stacks of yellowing newspapers and piles of greasy motorcycle parts were scattered everywhere.
“Ms. Brooks?” Komodo called out again, a little louder. The wood floor, which was partially covered with somber, thick-piled Oriental rugs, heaved with every step. A dim shaft of light coming from a small stained-glass window was the only illumination. “I thought this was California, not Transylvania,” Gojiro said, peeking from Komodo’s bag. Right then, two cats sprang from a breakfront and ran yowling in opposite directions.
“That tears it,” Gojiro shouted, lurching toward the door, nearly pulling the case from Komodo’s hand. “Let’s book!”
“Please! You know what we must do,” Komodo whispered, trying to be the brave one.
That was when they heard a groan from the next room. “I need an eight-letter word for ‘ersatz curd enzyme,’ ” came a pinched, wheezing voice.
Komodo went toward the voice. He turned a corner and was immediately blinded by a blast of light. When his irises adjusted he saw a tall, bony woman. She was standing in front of a large picture window, holding a folded newspaper. The glare streaming in the window blurred her outer edges.
“I’m close. It’ll fall into place—with just this one word.”
“Ms. Brooks?” Komodo said tentatively.
“Got it! Velveeta! They ask that one a lot,” the figure said. A moment passed. Then the woman slowly began to turn around to face Komodo and Gojiro. It seemed to take an eternity. Neither of the two friends knew what to expect. The few recent photos of Sheila Brooks they’d seen in magazines or on the Dish had been taken at extreme long range, between the pickets of fences or across crowded streets, and with that large floppy hat she always wore, not much could be made out. But it was her all right. The shock of recognition nearly blew Gojiro out the back side of Komodo’s bag. Sheila Brooks: that same face in the window of the seaplane in the Dream of the Black Spot, the little girl with the fear on her face.
Gojiro saw what twenty-five years of fear does to a face. It was all red, white, and black. The red was a haphazard streak of ruby lipstick applied, roughly, to the outline of her wide mouth. The white was her hair and skin—her cheeks seemingly colorless and the texture of hospital tile, a sheen of frostlike desolation down to the jutting point of her chin. And the black. The black was those glasses, wraparounds and more: the glacial slick of the lenses surrounded by suctioning rubber sidepanels extending from the upper reaches of her invisible eyebrows well down to the bridge of her prominent nose.
Sheila Brooks stood there without speaking. She wore a fuzzy pink bathrobe held closed by a patent-leather belt. With her eyes tucked up behind those gruesome glasses, it was impossible to tell what she was looking at.
“Excuse me, Ms. Brooks,” Komodo ventured, “my name is Yukio Komodo . . . of Radioactive Island . . . I’ve come . . .”
Sheila Brooks did not answer. A long, pointed tooth slipped into view and bit into the smear of her lower lip. Then, pivoting on the heel of a blowsy bedroom slipper, she turned to face the large window once more.
“Some greeting!” Gojiro said with disgust. “No manners. None at all.”
“Perhaps she did not see us,” Komodo offered.
“Then what the hell was she looking at?”
Komodo moved forward. “I will speak to her.”
Quicker than he wanted, he was standing beside Sheila Brooks. Outside was the ocean’s great expanse, nothing else. How long they stood there, side by side, mute, framed in that latticed window, peering at the boundless sea, was hard to gauge. It seemed like forever.
Sheila Brooks’s voice broke the spell. There was an urgency in it. “Why do they do it? What’s in it for them? Why do they keep coming back for more?”
“Pardon?”
“The waves.”
Gojiro slapped his forehead. Had they come all that way for this? Komodo was in trouble, the reptile could tell. Any moment, it seemed, he would pass out, crash through the window, and fall to the surf below. Gojiro stiffened his leg and kicked at his friend through the bag. “Wake up!” he hissed. “Find out what she knows and let’s blow this pop stand.”
That got Komodo going. He took the lime-green stationery from the pocket of his black pajamas. “We have come in response to your letter.”
Sheila Brooks craned her long neck defensively. “Letter? I don’t know about any letter.”
“But Ms. Brooks. It came to us at our home.”
Sheila thrust her arms down on either side of her body, clenching her elongated fingers into bloodless fists. “Must be some other Sheila Brooks. There’re hundreds of them. Look in the phone book. I’m not lying.”
Komodo began to sweat. Again he presented the envelope. “But it has your signature, your address.”
Sheila Brooks’s lower lip began to quiver. “Couldn’t have been me. I haven’t written a letter in years. Not since boarding school. I’m a terrible correspondent. No one’s ever gotten a letter from me. Ask anyone.”
“Please, Ms. Brooks. You must listen. We have come across the ocean, traveled many days—”
“I can’t help that!” Sheila Brooks’s voice was beginning to crack now. “You know, you just can’t walk in here and start talking to me. You’ve got to make an appointment. You’ve got to wait six weeks in the outer office, another three in the inner office. Even then I’ll be too ill to talk to you. I’m a sick woman.”
“But Ms. Brooks, that is part of why we have come. To help you.”
“Help me?” This came out as a squawk.
“Yes . . . in your letter. You said it was a matter of life and death. This is a great coincidence, since, for my friend and I, this situation is likewise a concern of life and death.”
“Life? Death?”
“Yes. I must talk to you about your father.”
Komodo reached to touch Sheila Brooks for the first time, brushing his hands lightly by her shoulder. “Yes,” he said, beginning to unfold the letter, “it says you wish us to come to this place so that we might make a film entitled Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision.
“Gojiro vs. Joseph Pro . . .” Her mouth dropped open, hung there a moment.
But then, staring down at the oversized watch on her bony wrist, she pulled away. “Can’t you see what you’re doing to me? You’re throwing off my entir
e schedule. I’ve been looking at these waves for thirty-four minutes. Those four extra minutes could be fatal! I’ve got to stop. It’s my therapy! You just can’t barge into someone’s house and interrupt her therapy.”
Sheila Brooks turned from the picture window, pitched her gaunt body across the room toward a trio of television sets. A hard plastic cowl was affixed to each set. Peering into those formfitted funnels effectively blocked out all other stimuli except what was on the screen. Sheila shoved her head into one of them.
“Ms. Brooks, please.”
“Not now!” Sheila screamed from inside the gray hood. The sound of a game show Gojiro recognized as “Family Feud” droned in the background. “I’m in therapy! You can’t even conceive of how expensive treatment like this is. A team of doctors at UCLA work around the clock to keep me in psychic alignment. One half-hour of vacant landscape alternated with one half-hour of saturated reality. I can’t deviate! One more second of looking at those waves and who knows what might have happened. I told you before: I’m a very sick woman. You can’t conceive how sick. Now, please, go away!”
“But Ms. Brooks, you must understand what is at stake.”
But she was gone now. She would not answer.
“I have not come alone!” A zipper opened above Gojiro’s head. Sunlight flooded over him. He felt Komodo’s hand reach down, grasping for him.
“What’s the big idea?” the monster yowled. Komodo was filling a syringe with the shrink antidote; he planned a demonstration, right then and there. “You’re crazy!”
Then, from the other side of the house, came the sound of a door opening. “Hey, Sheil,” came a voice. “The gate was open, you open the gate?”
Gojiro Page 10
