Immediately Komodo threw Gojiro and the needle back into the bag, out of sight.
“That’s the second time this week! Voice-activated, my eye! The other day a chipmunk opened it. I didn’t even know they had larynxes.”
It was a rueful, authoritative voice, nothing less than one might expect from Bobby Zeber. After all, wasn’t Zeber supposed to be the diabolical Brooklyn Svengali, bad hat of the Hermit Pandora story? The way the tabloids had it, he kept Sheila locked in a closet with a Betamax strapped to her head. “Terror’s own whipcrack,” they called him, “a slaver in a town of slavers who happened to luck into the best slave.”
Gojiro, casual fan, was familiar with this characterization, but did not necessarily agree with it. There was that time, before all the public appearances stopped, when Zeber and Sheila were interviewed on the Dish. Sheila couldn’t speak, not a word. Zeber was chatting like mad, covering for her, distracting everyone with his street-hewn good looks. But then came the question: “Could you tell us, Sheila, what Bobby really does for you?” Sheila blanched and said, “Well, he keeps me . . . safe. Gives me the safe place.” That got to Gojiro. Basketcases like Sheila Brooks needed safe places, he knew, someone to keep them safe. From then on, whenever he watched Tidal Wave and saw that little-girl version of Sheila Brooks skating blithely beneath that melting wall of ice, Gojiro imagined Bobby Zeber was there too, holding an umbrella over her head, warding off the falling drops so she’d never know what deluge hit her.
However, right then, as he came from the dark hall into that sunbursted room, Bobby Zeber didn’t fit the fierce protector image, not at all. Throwing his leather case onto a chair with a grunt, there was a weariness about him, a smack of defeat. You could see it in his eyes. They looked dead, like the windows of buildings in bad neighborhoods seen from passing trains, dark holes with the glass crashed out.
“I don’t know about that circus script,” Zeber was saying. “You know the antigravity scene? That jerk Mazwell gives each Bazami brother a soliloquy to say as they fall. It must be a half-hour from when the Flying Rhombus collapses until they hit the floor. It’s going to be a problem . . .”
Zeber stopped when he saw Komodo. “Who are you?”
Sheila, keeping her head pushed deep within the television container, shouted, “I thought he was you.”
Suddenly pantherlike, full of barbed tension, Zeber planted himself between his wife and the intruder.
Komodo bowed sharply at the waist. “May I introduce myself?”
“That’s a start.” Zeber’s voice was hard, edgy.
Komodo bowed again. “I am Yukio Komodo of Radioactive Island. Mr. Zeber . . . I cannot express how unworthy I am to have such magnificent artists as your wife and yourself invite me to this great country to potentially collaborate on a film. It is an honor that far exceeds my meager talent.”
Zeber did half a double take. “I come in late or something? Sheila, is there some reason I don’t know what this guy is talking about?”
Komodo began to speak, but Sheila Brooks cut him off. “I wrote him a letter!”
For the moment it was as if Komodo was not in the room. Bobby looked at Sheila with an even gaze. “What kind of letter? What did you write in this letter?”
Sheila fell into a chair, her long legs flying out from beneath her. “I don’t know!” she wailed.
Bobby’s voice grew very quiet. “What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I don’t know . . . I don’t know if I remember.”
Bobby turned to Komodo. “Pardon me, Mr. . . .”
Another sharp bow. “Komodo!”
“Mr. Komodo, would you mind excusing Ms. Brooks and myself for a moment.”
“Certainly.” Komodo bowed again, a couple of times.
However, as he turned to go, Sheila Brooks screamed out, “Show him the letter! Show it to him!”
For a moment Komodo did not know what to do. Bobby Zeber seemed quite intent on getting him out of the room. But, following Sheila’s instructions, he produced the letter. Unfortunately, he forgot he’d resealed it in that special Cloudcover-proof sleeve. It was a little something Komodo churned up from a tideload of vinyl slipcovers. Zeber took one tug at the envelope and it shot out of his hands, careening around the room with the zest of a Spalding Hi-bounce.
“Wha?”
It wasn’t until it had knocked an Oscar from the dusty mantelpiece that Komodo was able to snare the ricocheting letter from the air. “Oh! I am so sorry,” he said softly, mortified. “I am an amateur inventor. This covering is one of my less successful efforts.”
“Sure thing,” Zeber said. Gingerly taking hold of the letter once more, he began to read it. He seemed to take a few passes before he got the gist. He alternately blinked and looked up at Sheila, who was half turned away, wringing her white hands.
“Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision . . . oh, sweetheart,” Zeber said mournfully. Sheila was crying real bad now. “Baby . . .” He went over, put his arms around her. The two of them stayed like that a while, Sheila crying, Bobby soothing her. Gojiro poked his head out of Komodo’s case and studied the scene, wondering about the circle Zeber’s arms made around his wife. Was that the circumference of the safe place? What went on in that zone? Did gravity reign, or did you just float?
Komodo had no etiquettal angle on the situation. His head was spinning. He was about to go when Bobby Zeber left Sheila’s side, extended his hand.
“Mr. Komodo, I’m sorry I didn’t offer you a more congenial welcome. Of course I am familiar with your work. It is certainly . . . interesting, in its field.”
That was good for another half-dozen manic bows from Komodo. He was getting out of hand with those bows. Every time Komodo flung himself forward, Gojiro got thrown around inside that sack; by this point he was feeling pretty sore.
Bobby Zeber smiled but didn’t take his eyes off Sheila. “As you can see, Mr. Komodo, this isn’t the best time to talk. I didn’t see any car outside—can I call one for you? Where are you staying?”
“We are . . . not staying anywhere. We just arrived.”
An odd half-smile came over Zeber’s face. “You just got off the plane and came right over here? Don’t you have any luggage?”
Komodo blushed and held up his bag. “Only this.”
“You travel light, Mr. Komodo. Well, my office can make a hotel reservation for you.”
“That is most kind of you, Mr. Zeber . . .” Komodo managed. He didn’t know what else to say.
Komodo was about to leave when, from across the room, Sheila wailed, “He says he can’t wait. He says he’s got to know now. He says he didn’t come alone.”
Again Bobby Zeber was puzzled. “Didn’t come alone?”
That was when Shig came through the door.
Home Away from Home
THAT SHIG, HE WAS NOTHING if not a take-charge guy. A smoothstepping razor in his dress-white linens, moving with the eerie grace of Nureyev’s own android, he bowed sharply to a blubbering Sheila Brooks and nodded to an uncomprehending Bobby Zeber. Then, without apology, he hustled Komodo and Gojiro out the door, through the Turret House’s still-squawking front gate.
“This way, please,” Shig said, placing a chauffeur’s hat over his impeccable flattop as he held open the rear door of a stretch limousine. Then he got into the driver’s seat and pushed a button that rolled up a soundproof partition between himself and his two passengers.
Gojiro scrambled out of Komodo’s bag. Shig’s servant act always got to him. “He makes out like he’s just some lackey playing a salaam game, and all the while he’s puppet-stringing us along. Dammit!” The shrunken monster threw himself at the limousine partition. But the glass had obviously been swabbed with Komodo’s reinforced Gardol shield window cleaner, and the reptile, given his reduced size and strength, could do nothing but bounce and bruise.
Forty minutes of listless freeway watching later, Shig turned off into a canyon and proceeded over a s
uccession of yucca-choked dirt roads. “Where’s he taking us?” Gojiro whined. “We come a million miles, for what? To have him lead us around by the nose?” Moments later, they passed under an overgrown archway and stopped. Shig jumped out, dutifully trotting around to swing open the back door. “They have been waiting.”
Komodo and Gojiro, now stabilized at six feet and able to bipedal, tumbled out of the car and into the scratchy late-afternoon sunshine. “Who? Who’s been waiting?” They looked around and saw no one. Off to the right was a large stand of date palms and behind that a huge, looming house. The air was still, hot.
A cockatoo’s shriek cut through the quiet. Then a trumpet’s clarion: “Bap-bap-bap-ba-da-bap-ba!”
The monster’s ears pricked up. He never mistook a James Jamerson bass line. A familiar voice rang out, “Calling out around the world, are you ready for a brand new beat?” The sound was all around, deafening. “’Cause summer’s here and the time is right for dancing in the street!”
The first egghead came out from behind a huge topiary hedge that looked to have once been cut in the general shape of a giraffe, but that now was grown into an indistinct horticultural blotch. “They’re dancing in Chicago, down in New Orleans.” Crudely fashioned from papier-mâché, magic-markered hornrims ringing its big button eyes and a pleated white skirt wound around the middle, the egg was obviously supposed to resemble Billie Jean King, the tennis player. Knotty legs covered with pink spandex, the egg held its racquet like a guitar, strumming across the catgut crosshatching. “Can’t forget the Motor City.”
Other eggs emerged from the bushes, arrayed in haphazard formation. They carried a large replica of the American flag constructed, like an ornate car-wash sign, from small metallic streamers. There was Al Capone, Mickey Mantle, Dolly Parton, Abraham Lincoln. Together they no-lip-synced, “Every guy grab a girl! All we need is music! Sweet music!” The Davy Crockett egg had a live raccoon on top of it.
“Oh, shit! I don’t believe it!” Gojiro shouted. “How’d they get here?”
It was the Atoms, all right, at least three dozen of them. Any doubt was removed when the inevitable squabble broke out, Dick Clark ramheading John Travolta, Billie Jean burying her racquet deep into Al Capone’s dome.
“They created these crafts for you during our journey across the sea,” Shig said tautly, “to welcome you to our new home.”
“New home? What’s he talking about, new home?”
Before Komodo could answer, the Atoms pecked through their eggshell heads and shouted, “Welcome to our new home, Mr. Komodo and Gojiro!” Then they stormed forward, hurling their ruined bodies at Gojiro, knocking him to the yellowed lawn, licking and slobbering all the while.
“Welcome to our new American home,” they kept screaming, over and over.
* * *
Home. Now there’s a concept that’s taken a touch of abuse in my little life and times, Gojiro thought. No more than right then. The American home Shig had picked out for them was a ten-acre parcel of nonstop disaffection. Once nothing but an oasisless desert, the land had been settled by some lowrent migrants, but those predustbowlers were chased out in the early teens by the agents of a big producer who wanted to build a castle for a particular starlet he couldn’t get off his mind. What resulted was the kind of joint God might have thrown together if he had enough bread and bad taste. Five or six dozen rooms, the style was mostly Spanish, with gables and buttresses slapped on here and there. Maybe the Alhambra got more inlays, maybe not. Too bad the starlet became a nun and moved back to Texas, leaving the producer to spend the rest of his life in the place, by himself, crying. The press, unendingly maudlin, dubbed the place “The Taj Mahal of Tragic Heartbreak,” Traj Taj for short.
After the producer died in the late 1950s, the place fell into disuse. Sure there was that band of hippie squatters who ate the kidneys of the young caretaker couple, and that rock band that painted the mansion purple, but they only used the place for parties, so you can’t count them. In fact, including the two failed cults and the short-lived seminars run by insurance companies, it could be said the Traj Taj had never maintained a meaningful population.
Now this was to be their crib. Shig had already done some remodeling, ripping down the highest minaret and replacing it with a stone chimney that continually belched smoke rings, three at a time, concentric. It wasn’t the first time Gojiro had looked at those three rings and seen nothing more than the filigree of a most fanciful jail cell.
Still, it was almost worth it all to lay eyes on Ebi again. It was the worst part of sneaking off Radioactive Island, not being able to say goodbye to Ebi. How horrible it had been for the monster, especially as he swam by that fateful spot just inside the Cloudcover, to think of Ebi asleep in that delirious dormitory right beside those mutantous children.
It wasn’t that Ebi wasn’t an Atom. She was—Komodo’s tests proved that. “Her cellular breakdown is accelerating. She can’t have long,” Komodo said the very night they left. “We . . . may not see her again.” But that’s how it is for Atoms, they got an hourglass sewn inside them, and it don’t take Dr. Kildare’s abacus to chart how their meter be running down, running down.
There was a time when Komodo thought he could do something for Ebi. For all the Atoms. He imagined his destiny might entail somehow curing these orphans of the Heater’s storm, offering a modicum of medical shelter. Every time another of the ravaged children washed through the Cloudcover, clinging to whatever flotjet, Komodo would dig deeper into his Nightingale bag searching for a new remedy. He made studies, charted the torque of their every twitch, plotted the way the malignancies spread across their faces like coffee stains. Tubes went in, tubes came out, but it was no use, the pestilence stayed. Try as he might, Komodo couldn’t erase the condemning print of the wrong finger on the wrong button from those Atoms. Their Mendels were too messed, the bisects of their half-lives too frenzied.
That was when he started wearing those black pajamas all the time. It is not a commonly known fact, but Komodo was not always such a dour dresser. Time was he’d snatch all varieties of natty sartorials from the cresting surf off Corvair Bay Beach. Plaid sports coats, checked golf slacks, vented guayabers, jaunty Bavarian hats with feathers in the brim, the occasional blue blazer, all these were part of Komodo’s wardrobe. It was only after the Atoms began to appear that he went to the black pajamas. There was always one of them to mourn.
It killed the reptile to see Komodo’s disappointment, the way every time an Atom died, he’d come loose from his pacific nature and smash up his beakers and bunsens. “I cannot save them! I am useless,” he’d sob, hiding his face in shame. Sometimes it seemed to Gojiro that the only justification for the Atoms’ existence was that Komodo might find a way to heal them, and, in this way, heal himself. It seemed unfair, the way those hapless children remained remote from all help, impervious to any savior’s redemption.
Ebi, however, was a different story. Gojiro couldn’t contain his delight at seeing her there, digging in the underbrush behind the Traj Taj. How beautiful she was!—her skin the color of groundnuts, her hair an ebony sheen, her marvelous whitetoothed smile. So many times Gojiro looked at her and found it impossible to believe she was like the others. But she’d start rubbing those luminous eyes, which sometimes couldn’t see, pulling at the webs between her fingers, and he’d know: Ebi was an Atom, same as if she’d come in on the tide walleyed from Megaton Night, India, or twistspined from Luminescent Creek, Arkansas.
When Komodo saw Ebi, he wanted to run to her, to hoist her in his arms. But he suppressed the urge. He didn’t pick Ebi up like he wanted to, he didn’t hold her close to him. Gojiro had to look away. His friend’s restraint was heartmangling. But Komodo could never break an oath. When he swore, so long ago, that Ebi would be treated like any other child affected with this terror, he had meant it. He stuck to it.
“Mr. Komodo,” Ebi said, looking up from her digging. Her face was open, full of wonder. However that acid burned th
e blackholes of the Heater’s honeycomb through her marrows, she never let on.
“Come see this,” she exclaimed with that soft eureka in her voice that Gojiro always found so enchanting. She was holding up a sausage-shaped six-foot-long segment of velveteen strangler vine. The tubular trash was all over Radioactive Island. It grew so quickly that Gojiro would wake up with it lashing down his entire lower body. He’d have to bite through the thick strands to free himself, no picnic since those vines were sourced from fireproof drapes and the crap tasted worse than a month’s diet of styrofoam, not to mention the wiggly stringslugs it left between your teeth that had to be beaten to death with sticks.
“Why, it’s a specimen of Velvetinus vinus number seventeen,” Komodo said, with no small interest.
“Yes,” Ebi said, excited yet thoughtful. “I found this growing here.”
“Here?” Komodo rubbed his chin. “Could that be possible?”
They stood there for a moment, just the two of them, investigating her find. For the first time since arriving in America, Komodo seemed himself. Just being with Ebi, having a problem to decipher, reconvened his equilibrium. Back on Radioactive Island, doing botanicals with Ebi was among his greatest pleasures. In the beginning, nature trail walks, weeklong forages into the jungles past Vinyl Aire and Melanoma meadows, had been open to all Atoms. However, the ones who did show up either quickly lost interest or went face-first into the grinding underbrush (Treadmillus turftoeus, short-blade type). Only Ebi persisted. Komodo was so proud when she took over as chief taxonomer and set about identifying the varying components of the Island’s burgeoning ecosphere. In a few short years, she’d already specified and named fifteen thousand brand-new species of Insta-Envir, which is what Radioactive Island flora and fauna in its recombinant postflotjet stage is called, if you don’t know.
That was Ebi: head of herbages, appellator of birds and beasts, as morally diligent a scientist as the discipline allowed. One incident in particular stands out. Not long after designating her three-thousandth species, Ebi decided she couldn’t keep all the classifications and categorizations under her pillow anymore. It got too lumpy. She needed a more orderly record-keeping system. With Komodo’s help, she rigged up small monitors and placed them in close proximity to representative examples of wildgrowing flora and fauna. Each screen featured a crawl detailing the particular species’ flotjet antecedents and various integrative adaptations since it first appeared on Radioactive Island. However, it wasn’t too long before the monitors began to be vandalized.
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