Gojiro Read online

  That’s what the Triple Ring Promise said, then.

  Could it all have been so simple once, so innocent, a perfect democracy of youth? Or was it just another chimeric “memory,” tricked up by nostalgia’s ruthless hand? How long did those Glazed Days last, Gojiro wondered, when he and Komodo ran free to spin the full 360 ’neath the stiffblown banner of the Triple Rings?

  Two years, three, five? When did it begin to dissolve? At what point did their Promise begin the creep toward that grotesque Amendment? Gojiro’s head ached. The condemning evidence was so exhaustive, the steely finger of accusation pointed so firmly in his direction. His sins were manifold, his record longer than a Nazi’s arm. But the litany of iniquity was pitched on a grander scale than any simple rap sheet. The fact was, Gojiro knew, that the Triple Ring Promise had been cosmologized from existence.

  Coffee, tea, or milk? Chaos or Cosmo? That was the old joke round the ’cano, back in the days of what came to be called the Budd Hazard sessions. Good ole Budd Hazard! Gojiro liked the ring of the name. It had a downhomey touch, the smell of fatback frying up ’longside the Mahayana. A private gag of a tag: a greenneck called like a redneck, trancing out like a yellowneck. And, during those dark times, before Radioactive Island even had a sun to separate night from day, Budd Hazard filled a need: He pumped up the Cosmo, forged Design.

  “Be Budd Hazard,” Komodo would say as they clung together in the ’cano’s deepest well, the sludge squalls raging outside.

  “Okay,” Gojiro replied, drawing a breath. There was no effort to it, no psychic’s writhe and roil, no incanting exorcist’s gory pliers to pull pseudoverities from a recalcitrant beyond. All the monster had to do was open his mouth and Budd Hazard came out.

  The wealth of information! The generosity of cognizance! First came tales of life on Lavarock, details to fill in Gojiro’s misty recollections of his former Hallowed Homelands. Legends and practices of the Zardic Line upon the Precious Pumice were copiously enumerated. Komodo could never get enough. So thoroughly cut off from his own previous existence, he reveled in the summoning of Gojiro’s past, illusionary or not. He sat rapt as the monster spieled out uninterrupted sagas of the hunt, whether it be the brutish rush against the foreflanks of a snorty tapir or the intricacies of tonguespearing a hingehung insect from its gossamer web.

  “What a paradise,” Komodo marveled.

  “That it was, that it was,” Gojiro said, leaning back, bathed in light and glowing, “a world like no other.” But then pain shot through him. “Except it’s nothing now. Atomized, blown apart. Wiped from the face of the earth. I alone survive to tell thee, Jack.”

  In the beginning, Gojiro thought that was what Budd Hazard was about: an afterimage of a life forever lost, a message in a reverberating bottle somehow wedged inside his malformed ear during the Heater’s storm. But it quickly became apparent that Budd Hazard was much more than a dry lament. Recollections of Lavarock were the merest germ of what he seemed to know.

  There was the night when the fission gales grew fierce and Komodo and Gojiro huddled together inside the volcano of their as-yet unnamed island. “Be Budd Hazard,” the frightened Komodo entreated, seeking comfort against the tumult.

  “All right,” Gojiro said, swallowing hard. The monster closed his eyes and moaned. “The scheme of the Universe,” he began, “is embraced within an all-encompassing System called the Evolloo. Everything living, everything that has lived, everything that ever will live is contained inside the unimaginable parameters of the Blessed Blueprint. It is a Vast Flow, a Miraculous Spine of Energy and from it, like the tributaries of a Great River, spring all forms of Life. Those who are Honest and True must learn to walk these Paths so that they may come to know their own Identity and place within the Great Plan—for this is the Order of Things.”

  Then, snapping from his trance, Gojiro looked at Komodo, saw how the sweat poured from his friend’s startled brow. “What I say?” the reptile asked.

  Komodo repeated it as best he could.

  “Geez . . .”

  From that point forward the Budd Hazard sessions took on a new gravity. Now they weren’t just to pass the time, but rather to create the very meaning of Time. It no longer seemed fit for them to receive Budd Hazard’s messages walking on the beach or swimming out by the Cloudcover, a half a mile from shore, Komodo balancing himself upon Gojiro’s snout. A special section of the ’cano was set aside, decked with fluoro-candles calibrated to best approximate a guru’s most conducive thinktank.

  Gojiro lay on a massive pile of paisley cushions, with Komodo hovering, poised to record whatever was spoken.

  “I can’t,” Gojiro said as they were about to commence. “I can’t find him.”

  “Concentrate,” Komodo said.

  “I never had to concentrate before. I’m just nervous, I guess.”

  “Me too,” Komodo confessed.

  Truth was, they were more than nervous. They were filled with dread. Budd Hazard beckoned them to a mysterium of obscure Flows, great Forces of Energy extending through Eternity—an Unknown place where they imagined, in their battered, eager souls, they would find the Sacred. At this threshold they faltered. Everything about them—their world, that dank and spewing Island—was without form. By what license did they feel they could even hope to bring shape to that forsaken nothingness?

  “We can’t,” Gojiro tensed. “We are not sufficient.”

  Komodo paced the ’cano floor. Suddenly, a wild look came over his face. That look! Even then he had it, that naive yet undeniable Jap-Mickey-Rooney-discovering-America look, the crazy exhilaration that throws off doubt and pushes forward through the fear. “My own true friend!” Komodo declared. “Budd Hazard speaks to us because he deems us worthy. To refuse him would be a terrible insult. We must seek to know what he wishes to tell us. It is our duty!”

  “If you say so,” Gojiro mumbled. If it had been up to him, maybe, they would have dropped the whole Budd Hazard thing right there. But Komodo seemed so sure. His face was so open, so hopeful. That was enough. The monster closed his many lids and soon the words rushed forth. The session went on for days; nothing less than the Foundations of Thought were laid down.

  Foremost among these bedrocking underpins was the Principle of the Inviolate Binary. “There can be no Bunch without a Beam, no Beam without a Bunch,” Budd Hazard imparted, defining a Bunch as “a group of like individuals, what might be referred to as a species.” A Beam was a much more elusive concept. “It is the cohering Energy of the world, sourced from the Mainstem, adapted to the individual needs of the Bunch,” the enigmatic Muse said. It was in the interface of these two entities that the Universe found its design. “A Beam makes a Bunch a Bunch,” Budd Hazard declared. Without a Beam a Bunch would be nothing more than a “disassociated band of biologically similar renegades.” On the other hand, a Beam was nothing but “a misdirected font of energy” without a Bunch about which to focus its all-encompassing, aligning force.

  “It is the Goal and Obligation of All Life to seek its particular Identity within the Inviolate Binary structure and to live, as distinct yet interrelated forms, beneath the mantle of the Evolloo,” Budd Hazard pronounced. “The Evolloo is All.”

  Gojiro and Komodo listened with an ever-expanding sense of wonder. How sublime it was to hear Budd Hazard’s words forge a scheme amid the seemingly unfathomable murk of their world. To witness that swirling hub of Thought shower light throughout the black maw of emptiness. With each new revelation, their trepidations gave way to a giddy joy. It was intoxicating to be in the presence of all that Truth.

  “I’m singing!” Gojiro roared. “Can’t you hear me singing? I’m singing ’bout Budd Hazard!”

  “Who?” Komodo rejoined. “Who might that Budd Hazard be? Where’s he been, what’s he seen?”

  “Who? You ask me who Budd Hazard be? Where’s he go, what’s he know? I’ll tell you what Budd Hazard knows! He knows the present and he knows the past. He knows who be first and who be last. He
knows what is green and what is blue, and what goes down in the Evolloo!”

  “Tell me more, tell me more! Tell me more about what Budd Hazard knows!”

  “More? Why not, there’s no law. He knows the weather, those of a feather, put any words together, and that’s what Budd Hazard knows. He knows the jungle, knows the street, knows what bad smell comes from your feet!”

  “Oh, please! My ignorance is no joke, it’s a sad and sorry yoke. Just tell what Budd Hazard spoke!”

  “He knows the secret of the Endless Chain, seen it plain. He knows all Love and what it’s worth, and how things work here on Earth. That’s what Budd Hazard knows!”

  A passion he never imagined overtook Gojiro then. Ideas rumbled within him, then exploded, spread throughout the land. It was as if the Heater itself had detonated inside, its tempest winds blowing his molecules over every inch of this new world he and Komodo called their own. He felt himself cascade down like heavy rain on the forests of the wretched glassine trees, spreading his essence to the beaches, out to the Cloudcover. His particles pinwheeled from the dank skies, settled on the matted fur of all the furtives dug deep in their burrows and onto the creaky wings of the impossible insects struggling through the gales off Corvair Bay. Again and again he came, with the clockwork regularity all things innately understand as symmetry. In no quarter was he unexpected or unwelcomed. He felt connection with everything in this freshout, untried world.

  He was Budd Hazard, ’tile for all times, one of the roughs, one of the smooths, a Cosmozard.

  * * *

  Was it inevitable, what happened next? Gojiro reckoned so. He didn’t need a goading encounter group of former offenders to tell him that with a personality like his, addiction is not many truck stops down the highway from intoxication. That’s what Budd Hazard bred: total dependency. Just as later it got to the point where he couldn’t get through a half-hour sitcom without firing up a gluey ball of hardcutting 235, he became addicted to Budd Hazard. He became a Cosmo junkie.

  With quicksilver slivers of the Scheme’s great jigsaw hot on his clawtips, he obsessed to possess the rest. He declared war on the white areas of his map; no territory would remain Unknown. All levity left him. No longer was there time to stroll with Komodo out by the lurching precipices of Past Due Point. The reptile’s every instant was hostaged to Budd Hazard’s consuming wigstretch.

  “Come to bed,” Komodo would say, bleary-eyed from the seemingly endless clocksweeps of transcription.

  “Not yet,” came the reptile’s breathless reply. “I’m on the edge of a great breakthrough concerning the progression of Beamic knowledge relative to the development of a full Bunch as opposed to the individual within the Bunch. Can’t you see? We’re about to shoot the definitive hole in the theory of the ontogeny and phylogeny of consciousness.”

  “Perhaps this is the question of a philistine,” Komodo ventured, “but is it possible to know too much?”

  “Know too much? I thought you fancied yourself a man of science—a philosopher! How can you know too much until you know it all? You want a Universe mottled with pocks and dings? Don’t you want the perfect sphere?”

  Gojiro told Komodo he could go to sleep, if that’s what he wanted to do. “From now on, worldview constructing goes on twenty-four hours a day around here—just like the world. Get your forty winks. I’ll put the transcriber on automatic.”

  The behemoth grew increasingly withdrawn, solitary. Subtle neuroshifts occurred inside his burgeoning brain. No longer did he have to summon up Budd Hazard. The Muse became a constant, a macro to his program, always there, defining, refining, pumping up Cosmo and more Cosmo. It was as if the reptile had merged with his drug, and it with him.

  Then, one night, Gojiro called Komodo into the ’cano. The two friends hadn’t seen each other for days. Tension ruled.

  “I want to discuss a matter of the utmost magnitude,” Gojiro intoned, circles around his red eyes, his leathers sagging. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for weeks.

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

  “It concerns the Triple Ring Promise,” Gojiro monotoned, as if he were reading a year-end report. “Recent Budd Hazard visitations indicate this proposition has reached a superannuated circumstance. It exists only within the context of base sentimentality and therefore is meaningless within the evermarch of the Endless Flow. It must be subject to major revision.”

  “Excuse me,” Komodo said, stunned. “Are you really talking about our Triple Ring Promise?”

  “Yes! In its current form it is hopelessly primitive. We must modernize it, update it, bring it more in line with the current state of Evollooic Thought.”

  “But . . .” Tears beaded up in Komodo’s eyes. “Update our Promise—how is that possible? When we swore it, it was for . . . forever. How can you modernize forever?”

  “We must jettison juvenilia!” the huge lizard shouted. “The Boy’s Life is not eternal; no moment is frozen in amber. Who are we, anyway, all-for-one, one-for-all fops on a candy wrapper? Later for Puff the Magic Dragon. We must take a more mature view. Would you have our world continue some ‘a boy and his lizard’ show?”

  “It’s just as much ‘a lizard and his boy’!” Komodo shot back. Then he was crying. “I’m sorry . . . it’s just that the Triple Ring Promise . . .”

  “I know,” Gojiro replied, his manner melting. “I know how you feel—that’s how I feel too. But the Triple Rings, what do they really mean? Please, tell me the parameters of our Promise, as it is today.”

  “That we are together,” Komodo stuttered, “that the answers you seek are the answers I seek.”

  “But what are those answers?” The monster was weeping now too. “Tell me.”

  Komodo could not. His thoughts had never ventured beyond the marvel of their mutual self-discovery, the ecstasy of their friendship.

  “Don’t you see?” Gojiro pleaded. “We are allowing our Promise to stagnate, to signify nothing more than the faded loyalty of an old school patch, something to be kept in a drawer—a memento of passed youth. I say our Promise is worth more than that! Deserves better than that! Think of it: who we are . . . where we come from . . . what we will be—these answers will not simply come to us. We cannot sit and wait, falsely secure in our blithe dreamworld. Trust is not enough when one craves Light!

  “We must seek, set forth on a great quest. And where must this search begin? I submit the starting point rides right upon our own chests. Yes, the Triple Rings! They are our center, the core of all we are. We must penetrate our solemn Oath—explode it if need be and bring it back reborn!”

  Then, his reverie done, Gojiro looked down and saw that Komodo wasn’t crying anymore. Instead, that look was on his face. “Yes,” Komodo said with quiet emotion, “you are right, my own true friend. This is what we must do.”

  * * *

  “Paradise? Here? Now?” Thinking back on these fifteen-year-old events, Gojiro could only shake his massive head. Was there no end to paying for the smallest optimism in this reproachful world, he groused, the phosphor gray Dish light playing over his lax body. All he’d ever hoped for was a degree of meaning, some measure by which to understand what had happened to him, how he’d come to be this thing he was. That didn’t seem much to ask, did it?

  Yeah, they penetrated the Triple Ring Promise all right. They broke right through those pristine diameters with the wrecker’s ball of their antic intellect, dissolved the guileless design with a presumptive onslaught more corrosive than any blast of Radi-Breath. Now, far too late, it was easy enough to trace the swath of grievous miscalculation, how so many hot flashes succeeded only in lashing an icy noose around their necks.

  The crazed notion that Radioactive Island might be reincarnated as a latter-day, post-Atomic Utopia, happy home to a New Bunch fused with a New Beam, a nirvana in which a mutant lizard and the Hiroshima Coma Boy might glimpse their true Identities—all of it was beyond anything a benighted kabbalist in pointed hat festoone
d with whirling stars and planets could have conjured. Yet these became the new terms of the Triple Ring Promise, the only conditions by which the updated version could be fulfilled. Just thinking of it ravaged Gojiro. They tossed their Vow into the raging concoctions of Cosmo’s test tube, larded its simple beauty with impossible clauses and conditions, and when the fateful bun was out of the oven, nothing remained but that loathsome Amendment.

  Swaddled deep inside his melancholy volcano, the whole leapfrog of events weighed on the monster. He thought of Budd Hazard and called out, “Hey, Budd . . . Budd baby. Where you at, man? What’s the matter, you don’t got no advice for me? No cosmogonic council? No music for a theophanic string quartet? Not an ontological crumb for the hungry heart? Hey Budd—fuck you!”

  Of course, there was no reply. There hadn’t been for years. Had there really ever been a Budd Hazard? Or was the supposed Muse nothing more than a smirking demiurge, a prank of philosophy perpetrated by one north forty of his mammoth cogitator against another? “Should have known,” the monster grumbled. “Jive won’t get you Zen.”

  So many times Gojiro attempted to renounce the Triple Ring Promise, quietly resign. “Maybe there’s still a chance for Radioactive Island to become a place of joy and warmth, like Angulome City, Houyhnhnmland, or Mount Daumal,” he told Komodo as tenderly as he could, “but it can’t happen with me around. I’m a five-hundred-foot-tall cancer! You got to cast my raggedy fate to the winds.”

  “No!” Komodo shouted, his face wild, his tears flying. “I won’t allow it. I won’t let you renounce all we know to be so.”

  “Don’t you see where all this crazy Cosmo has got us? Cosmo’s Hell’s own soldering gun, cementing us in this cell forever and ever. Screw Cosmo. Get Leo G. Carroll in here and cancel his goddamned contract! Don’t you get it? We killed our Promise, we overloaded its circuits and blew it out with bullshit.”