Sheila managed a gruesome smile through the ketchup. “Don’t worry about that. I have a dozen outfits like this. I don’t pay for them. They send them to me for free because I’m famous. I try to give them to the Goodwill, but the designers threaten to sue. Besides, that was . . . fun. Yeah! That was great!”
The Atoms went into an uproar. “Hooray for Ms. Brooks!” they shouted. Some of them started dancing on the table. “Ooga-booga,” they chanted; Sheila was “one of us.”
The rest of dinner was more relaxed. The squirm food caused only minor difficulties. Squirm food was a nutritional measure worked up by Komodo in an effort to get the Atoms to eat. As befitted their postholocaustal neoferal tendencies, few of the unfortunate children would consume anything if it simply lay on a plate. They preferred to hunt and gather, or at least chase. Komodo, after much dietary R&D, managed to concoct a menu of syntho-veggies and mock meats equipped with a spittle-proximity escape mechanism; when an open mouth got close, the food bolted away. Several of the clumsier Atoms sustained fork wounds as they attempted to pin their prey, but this could not be helped. It was the heat-seeking seaweed that almost got to Sheila. Some slob Atom dropped a piece of it onto the floor and it began lacing itself up her leg like Caesar’s sandal. Komodo, however, was able to slice the weed off with his pocketknife before her circulation was affected.
After dinner, the Atoms brought out their potholders: an inevitability. Originally conceived as Monster Day presents for Gojiro, the potholders were another arts-and-crafts project gone awry. In the beginning, even the grouchy reptile had to admit it was kind of cute, each and every Atom independently turning out the same exact design, an off-angled profile of Gojiro, fire raging behind. Except they got carried away. They kept making the things, churning them out like Helen Keller’s assembly line. Then they’d bring them to the lip of the ’cano and rain the ratty things down on the Monster like a polyester inversion. “Make ’em quit,” he roared, knee-deep in potholders. “Don’t they know I got hundred-inch-thick skin and nothing in the oven?” Attempting to save the situation, Komodo suggested that the Atoms sew their potholders together into a quilt, which they could then present to Gojiro. To avoid the fight about whose potholder would go where in the finished project, Komodo put them all in a giant drum and spun them around. But when he dumped them out, there it was: a football field-sized replica of the smaller potholders, that same off-angled profile of Gojiro, fire raging behind. Komodo couldn’t fathom the math of how it had turned out that way. Gojiro could only shrug. How do you fight obsession like that?
There was no such hassle when the Atoms presented their potholders to Sheila Brooks. They sat her in a velvet chair at the front of the mansion’s ballroom, then lined up in painful imitation of a department-store Santa Claus scene. One by one, the Atoms did their best bow and said, “Thank you, Ms. Brooks, for inviting us to your wonderful country.” Sheila Brooks accepted each potholder with an exaggerated nod of her head, putting each one on the neat pile in her lap. “This will really help me in the kitchen.”
“Are you a thrifty home economist?” Ebi asked.
“Uh, sure . . . I try to be,” Sheila said. She did, after all, spend hours a day poring over the supermarket ads, circling the best prices, scrupulously cutting out coupons. However, the idea of actually getting into a car and going to a wide-aisled, fluoro-bright market filled with gleaming wagons was psychically out of the question, so she just threw the coupons into a drawer.
“Perhaps you will cook for us sometime,” Ebi suggested.
Cook? Sheila considered the concept. “Well, I made a meatloaf once. You know, from a recipe on the back of the oatmeal box. I was going to make mock apple pie, too, except I ran out of crackers. I dunno. I got out of practice after Bobby said I was nuts to try following the thirty-day budget-stretcher menus in Woman’s Day when we had twenty million dollars in the bank. So mostly we order in . . . you know . . . the studio sends the catering truck over. But . . . I could try. I could try to cook for you.”
“Hoorayyy!” the Atoms yelled.
It was about then that Lapu-lapu, that fishboy, started having a fit. Something was alive beneath his Ban-Lon shirt, circumnavigating his belly again and again. Komodo reached under his collar and pulled out a threeheaded frog. It was Crag’s work, couldn’t be any other. That kid! Him and a petri dish were a dangerous recombination. Komodo tried to harness the boy’s bio-gen talents, but it was no use. He created things only to destroy them. That’s what happened this time. The frog slipped from Komodo’s grasp, and Crag crushed it flat against the marble floor with a shovel.
“Ah-ha,” Komodo said, turning from the quivering blotch. “Bedtime, my little friends. Let’s be on our best behavior for Ms. Brooks.”
To Komodo’s amazement, this worked on the first try. It was too strange how eager those Atoms were to “be good” for Sheila Brooks. Suddenly as docile as sedated members of a police lineup, they made their way up the ornate staircase. “Good night, Ms. Brooks,” they intoned.
Sheila waved wanly.
Just then, Ebi broke out of the line. Had she ever looked prettier, happier? She moved so lightly, her long nightgown skimming the cool Italian tiles. Then she grabbed hold of Sheila Brooks’s limp hand and asked, “Can Ms. Brooks come upstairs and tuck us in?”
“I . . . well—Ms. Brooks, how do you feel about that?”
Sheila Brooks shuffled her outsized feet. “I dunno . . . I mean, if that’s all right.”
“Oh, Ms. Brooks!” Ebi exclaimed joyfully. Then, standing on tiptoes, Ebi put a kiss on Sheila Brooks’s whitecaked cheek.
* * *
The notion of anyone tucking in the Atoms was ridiculous, of course. Once, after much medical research, Komodo had customed a special bed for each of the luckless children, to fit their individual handicaps. But it was a waste. They threw themselves on top of one another and slept in a jumble, zardic style, which is exactly what they did right then, under the chandelier of the Traj Taj’s master bedroom. From the pile came the shout: “Story and song! Story and song!”
“I usually tell them a story,” Komodo said to Sheila Brooks, who was pressing herself against the thick velveteen wallpaper. “Do you mind?”
“No . . . I don’t. I like stories,” she said, wringing her long fingers.
As with the potholders, if the Atoms weren’t tired of something the first time, they never got tired of it. So there was only one bedtime story, told over and over. It was an old tale of Evollooic survival, the one about the wicked king and the antlers.
“Once upon a time, in a sad kingdom very far away,” Komodo began, in his most sonorous voice, “there was a bad king. This king didn’t like anyone, but there was one group of his subjects he hated more than the others. These people were proud and fierce, and they stayed to themselves and would not bow down when the king passed by. One day, the king sent his soldiers and made all these people come to the palace.
“ ‘You must prove your love for your king,’ the king said.
“ ‘How might we do that?’ they asked, for they did not care for the king in the least.
“ ‘By growing antlers,’ the king proclaimed.
“The people protested. How could they grow stubby bones from their skulls? ‘It is asking the impossible. Please have mercy.’
“But the king did not have mercy. ‘Antlers in six weeks! If you love your king enough, you’ll be able to do it. If not, I will have every last one of you killed.’
“ ‘Six weeks!’ the people cried. ‘How can we manifest such a massive adaptation within so short an interval?’ They did not know what to do. Some of them tried to fool the king. They tied wire hangers onto their heads, covered them with papier-mâché, pretended these were antlers. But the king was wily. He sent his guards to destroy these people.
“There was one small boy and one small girl in this kingdom, and they did not want to die. ‘Maybe we can save ourselves by taking the king’s advice,’ the little girl told the bo
y. ‘Perhaps, if we concentrate on how much we love our king, we’ll grow antlers on our heads.’
“ ‘But I hate the king,’ the boy said.
“ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ the girl replied. ‘We have to survive. If it takes loving him to do it, we must.’
“The little boy didn’t know if this was possible but said he’d try. Every night they went to bed thinking only of how much they loved the king. Every morning they woke up and checked their heads. But no antlers appeared. ‘It’s no use,’ the boy despaired. ‘I can’t control my hatred.’
“Then, only one day before the king’s deadline, the boy and girl vowed that they would love the king as they had never loved before. They would love him as if he were more than himself, as if he were All Things, as if without him and the love of him, the world would cease to be.
“The next morning both the boy and girl awoke with the first bumpy ends of antlers sticking out of their heads. They went to the king’s castle and were examined by the court scientists. These great men conferred for some time and agreed: Antlers had grown.
“ ‘You are spared!’ the king proclaimed. ‘Your families are spared as well. But tell me, how did you do it?’
“ ‘We vowed to love you with a love greater than any that we could conceive of, more than Love itself,’ the little girl told the king, who was very pleased.
“So, by and by, it came to be that the little boy and girl, whose antlers grew bigger and bigger, were married and had children. Their children had antlers too. Eventually there was a whole community of people with antlers in the kingdom. And soon enough, they declared war on the rest of the people, the ones without antlers, and wiped them out. The king was the last to go.
“ ‘What makes you think you have a right to do this?’ the now elderly king asked with his dying breath.
“ ‘On the basis of our superior love,’ the girl said, as the boy rammed his sharpened antlers into the king.”
* * *
It was something Gojiro swore he’d never do again. But still he skulked away from that Zoo of Shame, suctioned up the creaky old drainpipe, skittered across the terra cotta roof, stopping on the wirewoven skylight overlooking that master bedroom. Was it the same as the spying he did back on Radioactive Island, all that time ago? The monster didn’t want to ask himself. All he knew was that he couldn’t resist.
As he peered through the window, the monster felt himself seized by another hallucination. This time, however, there was no panic in it, no possession. Instead, he felt himself become another beast, a flying zard, an archaeopteryx riding the hot Santa Ana winds, into the Los Angeles sky. He circled the Traj Taj, looking down to see a family—a mom, a dad, a passel of kids, the station wagon parked outside, same as any town, any place.
Then the light went off, and he scampered from the roof. He got back to the Zoo of Shame just in time for the song to begin. It was the second half of the nightly ritual. After telling the story, Komodo would take out his pocket synthbox, lay his calloused fingers on the tiny keyboard, and ask the children what they wanted to hear, even if he knew the answer would always be the same: “Heartbreak Hotel.” It was Komodo’s best number; his aching, choirboy tenor had a certain way with the phrase “Down at the end of lonely street, at Heartbreak Hotel.”
The Brain in the Basement
“CUTE KIDS,” SHEILA BROOKS SAID, FINALLY.
Until then they’d just been standing, mute, in the middle of the drafty ballroom, as if waiting for a spectral orchestra to strike up an angular, tonelessly modern waltz.
“Yes,” was all Komodo could say, as stiff as Greenland. Face-to-face with her in that grandiose, cavernous room, he felt cornered, trapped.
“Are they all yours?”
“Mine?”
“The kids. Are they all yours?”
“No, not exactly.”
“They’re adopted?”
“Well . . . not formally.”
Sheila Brooks tugged at the more accessible portions of her unruly coif. “Then . . . they’re foster children?”
Komodo seized on the term. “Foster children! Yes, you could call them that.” Then, feeling the ball in his court, he asked, “Do you have children, Ms. Brooks, you and Mr. Zeber?”
Sheila pressed her hands together, forcing the chewed skin around her nails whiter. “No. I can’t . . . have children.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s not biological. I’m not barren or anything. I took tests. There’s nothing wrong with my flesh.” She hit herself hard on the forehead with her palm. “It’s up here! That’s what stops it. Brain cells. They tunnel down and murder it, right in the womb—psycho-abortion. The doctors won’t admit it, but that’s what happens. I know.” Then Sheila Brooks turned her back, stared out the thirty-foot-high French window. She was sobbing now.
Komodo’s throat tightened. How different this was from that moment beneath Albert Bullins’s candy-striped tent. Back there, it was as if his every ion were charged, directed. He could have walked through any obstacle to her. He knew it was sinful—she was another man’s wife!—but, whatever had come over him during that uncommon instant, he wanted it back. It did not come. He could only stand, glued to his spot in that hideous room, listening to her sobs echo amidst the painted stars upon the vaulted ceiling. He was starting from absolute zero, as if the right words, the entire language he needed to express his thoughts hadn’t yet been invented.
“I’m awful,” she said, blowing her nose with a honk. “Coming over here, laying this on you. It’s just that . . . kids . . . I dunno. I walk through nurseries, see them lying in their plastic cribs, with their little feet and little hands, all of them, just starting out and then it takes over—what’s gonna happen. The squealing brakes, the microbes eating away, the bad water out of the tap, tornados tearing off the roof of the school . . . And the kids—they know. They know I know—who I am. They see me coming and they run.”
She let out a wail. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It’s just that your kids—well, with them, I dunno, it didn’t happen. I don’t know why. I looked in their faces, and the horror, it didn’t start up. It was like . . . you know what I mean, whatever was gonna happen to them, it already did. It was different. Like . . . comfortable.”
She took a breath. “That one, the one who kissed me, what’s her name?”
“Ebi. Her name is Ebi.”
“Ebi.”
* * *
Grasping at etiquette’s thin straw, he asked if she’d like to see the house.
They made an ungainly couple, moving through the gloomy mansion together. It was more than the height discrepancy; there was significant differential in their bipedal formats as well. Komodo, crisp and compact, walked with a straight-lined precision that no fashion model with the Britannica balanced on her head could hope to duplicate. Sheila Brooks, on the other hand, locomoted with complete physical obliviousness. Her step was shot through with a cartoonish segmentation, each wideslung leg swing accented by an outward heel flare. This was compounded by a radical forward crane of her seemingly extravertebraed neck, which caused her large oblong head to precede the splaying footflap by a good yard. Needless to say, her posture left much to be desired. Despite this shambling display, however, her stride remained quite lengthy, so much so that she only required one step for Komodo’s every two. He attempted to compensate by doubletiming his gait. But then Sheila went faster too, causing Komodo to speed up further. In this way they traversed the shrouded corridors and cold marble staircases, faster and faster, neither one of them willing to call attention to the ever-escalating pace.
Finally, halfway down a dismal hallway, Sheila Brooks stopped to look at a painting of the sad producer’s long-lost love. There were dozens of the portraits in the house, all done by the old producer himself. Apparently, it was the way he’d passed those years alone. Each painting was dated, enabling Komodo, a student of such things, to trace the artistic trend. It was interes
ting to note how, in the earliest works, the pert-faced subject was almost always seated beside a sunlit window, much in the Vermeer style. The later pictures were darker, grieving, as if the window had been shuttered up with bricks.
“She is quite beautiful, don’t you think?” Komodo offered tenuously, recounting much of what the real estate brochure imparted in regard to the Traj Taj’s legend.
“Really good skin,” Sheila noted.
“It is a sad story,” Komodo said. “But the children enjoy looking at the paintings. Many of them have copied the works in finger oils. They have an ardent appreciation for art.”
“My mother was a painter,” Sheila Brooks said bluntly.
“Oh yes,” Komodo replied with sudden excitement. “I am aware of her work.”
“You are?”
“Absolutely. Her portrait of your father standing in the middle of the Encrucijada Valley is . . . shattering. Of course, I have only seen reproductions, shoddy ones at that, but sometimes I cannot even bear to look at those. It is almost too beautiful, too powerful. I’m certain seeing the original would be a great experience.”
“I never saw it.”
Komodo shuffled his feet. “You’ve never seen your mother’s painting?”
“I’ve never seen any of what she did.”
“But you should.”
“What for?”
“Because . . . because you are a great artist yourself. Your films are very compelling.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
Komodo couldn’t stop himself. “Where I came from there is a theory, sometimes referred to as Alchemical Heredity, or the Tenacity of Genes and Dreams. This means that, just as certain physical aspects are passed from parents to children, it is possible for thoughts, ideas, dreams, to likewise be inherited. Perhaps it is simply a personal folly, but I believe that there are dreams that, left unfinished in one generation, can be completed, or at least carried on, by the next. In fact, it was by virtue of your parentage that I felt we should come—”
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