Gojiro Read Free Page B

glue.”
    “I’ll stick some Elmer’s on this sucker, all right,” he snarled. “Seal my fate but good.”
    Not that it was going to be that easy. The shot had to strike him in the parietal, that third eye a million mystic chanters hope to find but that every zard has, right there, smack in the middle of his head. On Radioactive Island it was universally accepted that (in Komodo’s words) “the parietal is the window to the Quadcameral.” Now, however, Gojiro planned to use the sacred passage as a conduit to oblivion. It was the only way, the monster told himself. If he missed the parietal’s foot-across diameter, the rebounding blast would impact pointlessly into his humongous noggin. Slabs of himself would shear off, but what good would that be, regenerative as he was? What a drag to slash your wrists and watch the wound heal even before the blood hit daylight. The Quadcam was different though; it didn’t grow back. That much had been established.
    Adjusting the mirror’s angle—no simple trick when your fingers are the size of Greyhound buses—Gojiro pictured his odoriferous decomposing body being found in the solitary gloom of his cell-like burrow, the next day or perhaps the next week, the Dish droning the theme song from “Green Acres.” He wouldn’t leave a note. What was there to write? “No Thank You” was the best he could come up with, and even that seemed redundant.
    But it never got to that. Because you see, just as Komodo knows, in his heart, what Gojiro does, Gojiro knows about Komodo. And, right then, Gojiro knew Komodo was coming. He felt him plug in, sensed him running across the beach at Corvair Bay, heard him wrap his satin pants around the fireman’s pole at the volcano’s summit and begin the three-thousand-foot descent.
    “Stop!” Komodo screamed as he jumped from the pole. “You mustn’t!”
    “No choice!” Gojiro shouted back. “Please, get away! Here it goes!”
    “My own true friend!” Komodo dropped to his knees. “You cannot do this!”
    Gojiro didn’t look at Komodo; it was one thing he couldn’t do. Let Komodo’s love through and it would pull him back from death, snatch away its liberation. The monster tried to make his heart a block of dry and smoky ice, all hermetic, like a sub beneath the Arctic cap, an iron lung orbiting beyond the most farflung asteroid. But still Komodo’s love came ahead, a relentless, viscous flow, expanding, enveloping, seeping like the H-man through the smallest cracks of the most barred door, across the sill, over the transom.
    “Let me go! Can’t you see, it’s over,” Gojiro bellowed. So many times Komodo’s all-forgiving love had pulled him from the slough of despond, but now that love seemed the slough itself. What right did Komodo have to hold him now, when death was the only answer?
    “Don’t try to stop me!” Gojiro shouted. He drew his withery arms close, squeezed his every lid tight. He’d block out Komodo’s love, make a barricade it couldn’t vault. It was his only chance. Death, full speed ahead.
    “My own true friend, you must not!” Komodo screamed, but his voice was a radio thrown out the window of a speeding train.
    Suddenly there was nothing in Gojiro’s eyesweep but that mental X he’d pasted onto the center of his parietal. A cool sense of precision came over him, a clinical calm. Plenty of times, after watching those old newsreels, Gojiro wondered how those fliers did it, how they followed their flight plan, opened their bomb-bay doors, let the cataclysm descend. Now he knew. It must have been like this, a crease in all emotion, a void where the sum of their supposed charity, the best of what made them themselves, detached and fell away. Maybe, in a wholly different context, with wholly different motives, this was how it once was for him, when he was still a lizard like any other, when he’d wait with boundless patience for the exact right moment to forktongue an insect from the cypress bark. It was