Gojiro by Mark Jacobson Read Free Book Online Page A

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 festooned 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