Gojiro Read online

  Then Komodo spoke, his voice resolute and honest, without melodrama. “My own true friend,” he said, “I call on you to honor your most solemn Vow. I invoke the Triple Ring Promise.”

  The Triple Ring Promise, Amended

  IF YOU WANT TO FIGURE AN ABSOLUTE ZERO to all this, those loathsome negotiations concerning what came to be called the Triple Ring Promise Amendment would be the pit to plumb: Komodo and Gojiro poised at the brink of life, ready to cast themselves into the abyss with their own hands, neither willing to back off.

  “I won’t stop until you do!” Gojiro screamed, holding back a blurt of Radi-Breath.

  “You first,” Komodo retorted, his sword digging ever deeper.

  For Gojiro, the sight of Komodo’s drawn sword turned the scene on its hinge; the gleaming blade slashed through the monster’s self-possession. Komodo killing himself, too? This was unacceptable. The monster sought death so Komodo could live to seek his destiny unencumbered, not so the two of them could be found, their bodies draped across each other in a manner that might lead a red-faced cop to report “a sordid, interspecies suicide pact.” Gojiro would rather die a dozen times—or worse yet, stay alive—than see that happen.

  “Don’t you get it?” the monster screamed. “I’m supposed to be dead and you’re supposed to be alive!”

  Komodo tightened his hold around the sword. Blood was gushing now. “Our fates are intertwined into a common Identity. One cannot proceed without the other.”

  Gojiro gulped. “Wait a minute. Let’s talk this over. I know we can work something out here.”

  The Triple Ring Promise Amendment is what they came up with. They swore it as they once swore the Promise itself, in fire and blood.

  In short, the Amendment specified that if the tenets of the original Promise were not fulfilled to the satisfaction of both parties within one year’s time, the whole deal was off. The Triple Ring Promise would be null and void. They would be released from everything they ever believed was between them. An extra clause provided that “should, after the one-year period elapses, one of the parties choose to end his life, the other, in all good faith, must attempt to aid him in this endeavor.”

  “This is gonna be great, you’ll see,” Gojiro said with attempted animation.

  “Yes,” Komodo murmured, forcing a gruesome smile. “A fresh start.”

  “A clean slate!”

  “As if none of this had ever happened.”

  “Yeah! It’ll be like we never met!”

  “Like we never had met.”

  Then they looked at each other and wailed. Wailed and wailed. For the longest time, neither could speak.

  Finally Komodo brought his face near the folds of Gojiro’s hyoid. “Oh, my own true friend. How has it come to this?”

  * * *

  How had it come to where two friends had to bargain each other from suicide?

  Gojiro locked himself in his joyless burrow, tried to get a handle on the situation. The grim volcano offered his only privacy on the whole Island, not that being down there was a party. It was a lot more depressing since the renovation. It was the work of those misfit Atoms, based on a picture they found in an old Playboy. “A real bachelor pad,” the well-meaning but hopelessly damaged children chimed, every eye in their pinnish heads swirling as they installed the chrome, the overheated jacuzzi, and two-hundred-foot-wide revolving bed.

  “What? No red vinyl?” Gojiro snorted when he first saw the job. “No hookers in the bathrooms?” It didn’t help that he threw up the first time he lay down on the whirling bed. His stomach couldn’t take the rotation, which was revved faster than a centrifugal amusement park ride. “I got bedsick,” he complained, “I vomited in Lucky Luciano’s sheets!”

  It was the thought that counted, Komodo suggested.

  “Tell them not to think about me! I don’t want them down here again, neither. From now on, this is off-limits.” Then Gojiro trashed the place. He kicked through every mirror, twisted all the chrome, ripped the pinstripe wallpaper, swallowed the Pepsi machine whole. The one thing he didn’t touch was the massive wraparound Dishscreen. He just sat down amidst the rubble and began to watch.

  That’s what he did the night he and Komodo swore the Triple Ring Promise Amendment, too. He watched the Dish. One year of life left, he might as well spend it with Felix and Oscar, Starsky and Hutch. It was a pretty typical night of viewing: “Have Gun Will Travel” reruns from Kuala Lumpur, gavel-to-gavel coverage on the Albanian politburo, a couple of hockey games with everything but the goals and fights edited out. The programs on Komodo’s hook-up were nothing if not eclectic. Commercials came from everywhere. Just then a harried young woman was walking down a forbidding city street when three thugs jumped from the shadows and beat her unmercifully with truncheons. “Bitch!” they screamed. Then a bland but jovial announcer’s voice came on. “Tired of the wear and tear of city life? Then move! Up to Sherwood Forests! The MODEL model condominium development!” The young woman reappeared, standing in front of a monolithic refrigerator, kissed her husband goodbye, sent her children off to school. “Move up to Sherwood Forests,” she said. “I did!”

  “Sick,” Gojiro commented, restraining himself from Radi-firing the Dishscreen. Years before, after hearing how Elvis regularly pumpgunned Graceland tubes, the monster got a little rough on his receptors. After a stern lecture from Komodo, however, he agreed to cut down. It wasn’t that hard a promise to keep. Once, the reptile considered himself a merciless critic of the tube-dominated psychoscape. He was always holding forth, making comments like, “Mary Hart! Dixie Whatley! Who are they but jackboot dupes of the culturato-narcoleptic horde! Down with Trapper John!”

  But now, he admitted with a grunt, “I just watch the stuff.”

  How had it come to this? Gojiro thought back, to the earliest of times, the beginnings of what was between him and Komodo. Had there ever been a more remarkable meeting? Komodo, swathed in sheets, stark lights upon his sleep-struck face, in that dismal hospital room in Okinawa. Gojiro, cowering and cold, casked up inside a dead volcano’s basalt vault. The two of them so dreadfully alone, forever severed from all they knew, all they were meant to know.

  Then—across all time, tide, and taxonomy—came Gojiro’s plea. Even now it seemed impossible, drawn from mystery’s deepest well: “Come in, please come in! Anyone!” A voice in the night, the monster’s mayday dot and dash skimmed the stormswept Pacific to be heard only by a single boy in a hospital bed.

  “Please to speak again?” These were the words Komodo spoke, his lips never moving, the only sounds in his melancholy room the blips of machinery and the squeak of rubbergloved hands on his skin. “You are a lizard? You are stuck inside volcano—in a place that is not your home, in a body that is not yours, and you think through a mind of which you cannot conceive? You are lonely and afraid? You have no friends?

  “I am a boy. I live in a hospital. There is no one here that looks like me. I will be your friend.”

  More than two decades later, in front of the droning Dishscreen, Gojiro wondered—could it really have happened like that? Did a conversation actually take place between a fifty-ton lizard and a ten-year-old boy dug out of a hole in Hiroshima, a boy who hadn’t said a word or moved a muscle in nine years? And, did that boy—that Coma Boy, silent icon of a most anxious age—snap free from the slumber that enveloped him, hoist himself from his bed, leave that hospital under the cover of night, and make a most treacherous journey across two thousand miles of sea to where that lizard was?

  Or was this just another installment in the series of mental forgeries, one more dollop of bogus history? How to tell? The monster didn’t know. Maybe that was the real bond between him and Komodo: a dialectic of lunacy. Whole so-called civilizations had been founded on shared psychosis, why not Radioactive Island?

  The monster dismissed these doubts. Komodo wasn’t crazy, a liar, or a fool. If Komodo said he escaped his whitecoated warders by crawling out a laundry-room window, and then hoppe
d a tramp steamer going south, eventually reaching Radioactive Island in that small rubber boat, using only a sanitarium sheet as a sail, then that’s how it was. If all the rest was madness, at least this was so.

  What a scene it was, the day Komodo’s tiny boat washed up on the headlands of what would come to be called Past Due Point. It wasn’t much of a place then. This was long before the major flotjet influxes and, of course, before the coming of the Atoms. Right then, Radioactive Island was nothing but the ’cano, an igneous lurch from the roiling petrochemical sea, and even that wasn’t as big as it would later become, after Komodo perfected his vulcanizing techniques. The Cloudcover was a lot thicker, though, a peasoup no laser could split. You couldn’t see a claw in front of your face out there, how dense the viscous draped. Primeval as all get-out, Radioactive Island was an unformed, ground-gurgling world in the midst of being born.

  “Lizard!” Komodo shouted when he reached the beach, still in his hospital gown. “I am here! I am the boy you spoke to. I have come to be your friend!

  “Lizard! I had a good trip. The sharks were no problem after that one time. Please answer, lizard!”

  Gojiro did not answer. He couldn’t. It was all he could do to peek his massive green head out of the ’cano’s crater, squint into the murk.

  “I am that boy!” came Komodo’s voice. “The one you asked to come. To be your friend.”

  Boy? . . . Asked? . . . FRIEND? What an oafish Frankenstein he must’ve seemed, mumbling “Friend?,” the words echoing inside the Gothic acoustics of the vast, new-minted Quadcamerality.

  “Lizard!”

  Lizard? The monster huddled within the lavaflows, tried to compute the nature of this invader. Dimly, he recalled forms not unlike this boy. Were there not boys in his dreams, in that lost and fading world that visited him at night? Bipeds. They made sounds like this boy. They threw grass around their scaleless leathers, put bones in their noses, went out to sea squatting in long pieces of wood. There had been reports of them daring to come close to ’tiles, menacing them with sticks. One account actually had them surrounding a solitary basking zard, attacking and killing him. Then they stripped his leathers from his body, threw him in a blackbellied pot, and ate him!

  “Lizard! I have come. I am your friend!”

  What could that boy calling in the fog want? Why didn’t he go away? Stop your calling, the frightened reptile silently beseeched, his head a jumble. Nothing seemed the same. Before, it was all electricity. It buzzed, you did what you did. Now there were these thoughts.

  “Lizard, please, don’t be afraid.”

  Afraid? Gojiro sank lower into the ’cano. Where he came from, there was no such thing as being afraid. Fear had no niche. His kind barely deigned to peer down at the descending links of the food chain. But here—in this place, as this thing he had become? Now every step was fraught with doubt. He’d tried to carry on as before, but the great time-honored reflexes failed him. Only two days earlier he’d spotted a small furry thing running through the smoke-filled forest and set after it. It felt good, engaging the ageless predatory geometry, the ever-tightening circle of the hunt. Even the unease of his solitude gave way for the moment. But it turned to disaster. His instinctuals were unfamiliar with the beast’s behavior. Given its dirt-brown looks, the animal almost certainly should have gone with a camouflage-based defense. For millennia mammals of this apparent type had frozen cigarstore still, hoping stalking zards would mistake them for mossy mounds or outcropping roots; it was an old trick, the best kind. But instead, this individual began rubbing itself against a swatch of luminous shrubbery. Every time it stroked the bush, phosphor came off on its fur, accentuating its presence. Now, of course, the Max Factor factor in the taxonomic flora-fauna relationship between the blacklight plant and Flounce Fox is well documented, but then, back then, it nonplussed Gojiro no end. The fox’s extra legs and eyes didn’t do much for him either. Still, he was starving, so he pounced. But the several quick steps he planned turned into one thud, and the furball was crushed beneath his foot, mashed down so as to be indistinguishable from the other little dots stuck between his toe claws. The giant reptile licked off all the spots, but it wasn’t like there was a balanced meal there.

  Nothing was as it had been. When he tried to forktongue a snaky caterpillar from a branch, he wound up inhaling the whole tree and picking glass splinters out of his mouth for hours. After that, he hid himself inside the ’cano. He would rather starve than hunt again.

  And now there was this boy outside, calling for him. “Lizard! I have no friends either. We can be friends for each other. Please!”

  If only he could scream back, tell this boy that he didn’t need him to be his friend, that where he came from there was no such thing. No, the frightened lizard thought, in my world it’s different. Your friend is every other zard, those living and those who have lived, and those who have yet to live. A hundred zards, five hundred, a thousand, all piled up, a carpet of scales, a great quilt of ’tiles, not one inch of ground visible. A thousand zards, ten thousand, a million, maybe more—pressed and touching, closer and closer, so the blood in one as good as runs into another, until they blend into the Enormous One.

  That’s how it is, Gojiro thought, where I come from. At least that’s how it was . . .

  The boy’s shout came again.

  And Gojiro screamed, “Here I am. HERE I AM!”

  * * *

  Gojiro noticed the concentric circles on the boy’s chest as soon as Komodo came into the ’cano. Three rings—the outermost almost a foot across, the inner half that. In the glimmery light they almost glowed: a heart with a target.

  For weeks, the monster refrained from commenting on the strange pattern. It didn’t seem right. Komodo, after all, never mentioned his not inconsiderable deformities. It was only after a semibucolic jaunt out by Mycotoxin Pond that Gojiro brought it up. Komodo had spent most of the wan afternoon peering into the ever-still waters there, running his fingers over the slight humps of the maroon rings.

  “My friend,” Gojiro ventured, “do they hurt you?”

  “Excuse me?” Komodo answered, lost in thought.

  “Those scars on your chest, those circles. Do they cause you . . . great pain? They’re . . .”

  Komodo grinned, showing his sharp teeth. “Grisly?”

  Gojiro was embarrassed. “They do look kind of bad.”

  “No, my friend, they don’t hurt a bit.”

  “Must have when it happened.”

  “I would assume,” Komodo sighed. “But I have no recollection. I don’t remember any of it.”

  “I don’t remember nothing of what happened to me, neither. Just that I used to be one way, and now I’m like this.”

  “Yes,” Komodo said, his voice veering off.

  Truth was, Komodo did recall some of his days before he came to Radioactive Island. Every so often, tiny snatches of his life in that Okinawa infirmary would return to him. He remembered the constant stream of fake earnest officials, each anxious to have his picture taken placing a small toy by the bedside of the famous Coma Boy. There was also the conversation of doctors, distant whitemasked men, discussing him as if he weren’t there at all.

  “What do you make of these marks here?” one doctor said to another, poring over Komodo’s torso.

  “Yeah, those circles,” the other drawled. “Search me. He looks like he’s a branded steer off the Triple Ring Ranch.”

  It drove Gojiro crazy when Komodo told him that. “Cracker navy scumbags,” the monster railed. Making jokes over who the Heater marked! Still, the term stuck.

  “These Triple Rings,” Komodo said wistfully, “ride upon my chest like a question mark. I sense a great mystery about them. Sometimes I think if I were to find out what they meant, I might learn many things.”

  “Like what?” Gojiro asked as he hoisted Komodo onto his supraocular ridge, where the thinlegged Japanese liked to ride. From up there he could see over the ragged timberline to the turbid sea.


  “Oh, I don’t know . . .” Komodo shrugged, his head piercing the dense haze. “Who I am. Where I came from. How I came to be here with you. What we will do next.”

  “Little things like that.”

  “Little things like that,” Komodo replied with his high-pitched giggle.

  The next morning, the heat woke Komodo up. It was like a blast furnace against his face.

  “My friend!” Komodo screamed. “There is a terrible fire! We must put it out!”

  “No danger, my friend,” Gojiro said quietly. He was standing close to Komodo, his back turned.

  “But it smells like . . . something from the past. It frightens me.”

  “Don’t be afraid, my friend,” Gojiro said. “It’s all done, now.”

  He did it with the growth rings from a crosscut section of a giant metalfibrous tree he pulled from the ground beyond Reterritorialization Bay. He was careful to make sure he had the perfect trio: one big, one middle-sized, one small. He heated them with his own breath. That was a surprise. He knew something had happened to his throat, but he didn’t suspect he’d retained the Heater’s fury inside his lungs, that with one bellow he could hurl a city into flames. He held the rings between his claws and roared until they turned white-hot, then he pressed them to his chest.

  “My friend!” Komodo shouted, drawing near.

  “It’s all right.” Gojiro turned to Komodo.

  “Your chest . . .”

  Gojiro’s gaze did not waver. “The answers you seek are the answers I seek. This world you live in is the world I live in. What we’ll do, we’ll do together.”

  “Yes,” Komodo said, “my own true friend.”

  * * *

  That was the Triple Ring Promise. Then.

  Those were the Glazed Days, the onset of it all, when they stood on the bonewhite sands of their beach, peered out to the seething Cloudcover and knew: Out there was another world, a kingdom that held itself apart from them. Who and what ruled out there made them exiles, fugitives in the countries of their birth. But here, in this dark and ashy tract, they found refuge. Here they were safe. Safe and together in a realm where a twelve-year-old boy and a five-hundred-foot-tall lizard could pledge themselves to each other and be friends.