Читать книгу Poison from a Dead Sun - Michael Hemmingson - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

GOLDGOTHA V. ARMADILGEDDON; OR, THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF MONSTERS

I left my homeland in Okinawa and went to college in California. I’d received enough negative response from my family (both my American father and my Japanese mother, divorced) and friends when I expressed a desire to do graduate work under the tutelage of Dr. Ethan Lory. I started to have doubts: was I really doing the right thing? Was this my true path? Should I stay in Japan and become a scientist like my father?

When I arrived at the University of California, San Diego, and went straight to Dr. Lory’s office, I knew this was the correct path for me.

There could be no other.

UCSD was a beautiful facility composed of five colleges on a cliff in La Jolla, overlooking the ocean, in the heart of San Diego’s wealth and prosperity; many movie stars who lived in Malibu and Beverly Hills had second homes in La Jolla—Dr. Seuss and Raymond Chandler had once called the place home.

Ethan Lory was speaking to a very tall blonde female graduate student about her M.A. thesis on H. G. Wells. She wore a very small and short skirt and revealed a lot of tanned, long leg, and I thought she should be posing for Playboy and not writing about the works of a dead author. She looked at me and got up, flustered, told Lory she would see him later, and departed quickly.

“Nolan Bender,” I said.

“Ah, you’re here, finally,” Lory said. He motioned for me to sit down. He was in his mid-fifties, wore a Hawaiian shirt (which he did every day) and khaki slacks and tennis shoes.

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Sir.” He laughed. “Say, let’s go get a drink.”

* * * *

“Why monsters?” he said and sighed. We were sharing a pitcher of beer and tequila shots at Porter’s Pub on the UCSD campus. “I tell you,” he said, “I come from a more innocent time. A time when things were black and white, when you knew what and who was evil and who and what was good. There were the bad monsters that wanted to do nothing but wreck cities and cause general havoc and mayhem; and there were the good monsters who helped mankind fight off all kinds of nasties, like the bad monsters and invaders from other dimensions and time travelers with ill intentions. Now, you don’t know who is who and what is what. A monster can be both good and bad; it will save your life and then turn around and stomp on you. You just can’t tell anymore.”

“For me, it all has to do with Goldgotha,” I said, trying to hide how buzzed I was getting. I wasn’t much of a drinker, not like Lory, who could put them away and still maintain his composure.

I hiccupped.

He smiled. “Ah, yes, your claim to fame.”

Goldgotha was attached to me—like a cancer, is the way I felt at the time; the famous monster had been with me ever since I was a child.

History—my father was a nuclear physicist, working on Okinawa. He accidentally left some radioactive samples in test tubes at home where I could see them one nosy night when I was seven years old. I intentionally poured the liquid nuclear matter in my goldfish’s bowl, to see what kind of effect it would have on my poor, unsuspecting goldfish. One could academically argue, in the Lacanian or Freudian mode, that deep down in my child psyche, I wanted (desired) to create a monster…and created one I did.

My goldfish grew slowly overnight, after I had gone to sleep, and by morning it had escaped its water bowl. It was the size of a cat. It smashed a window and went out into the world. Within a week, it was the size of a Goodyear Blimp, and growing bigger by the hour. It could move on land and swim in water and fly whenever it needed to; it also could emit a laser beam from its fishy eyes, for protection and destruction. At first it was considered a bad monster, until, one curious day, three mutated spiders merged into gigantic twenty-four-legged beast and attacked Seattle. Goldgotha (that was the name the media had given my fish) fought this big arachnid and won. Now Goldgotha was considered a good monster. It (he) retreated back to the sea, waiting for another day of kaiju glory.

My father wasn’t very happy about what I’d done. “There are enough damn monsters in the world, real and imagined,” he said, “and what do you do? You bring another one in it.”

Lory burped. “So,” he said, “there hasn’t been much activity from Goldgotha lately. Certainly not for the last seven years. Is it true you can just call upon him and he’ll show up?”

“I only did that once,” I said; “I was ten.”

“Hmm. What is it with kids and monsters?”

“This was when that mad scientist’s diseased lung detached itself from his body and wanted to wipe out all of mankind.”

“Ah, yes, Lungilla! I remember that beast well. Breathed out carcinogens onto people, killing them instantly. Indeed, the disease inside the lung was from a parallel universe. Then Goldgotha, the giant laser-breathing goldfish, emerged from the sea and did battle with Lungilla.”

I said, with pride, “Goldgotha squished Lungilla flat.”

“That’s what I have been talking about when I talk about monsters,” said Lory. “In those days, good always triumphed over evil! Nowadays, you see the bad monsters winning and going off to stomp Tokyo.”

“Why is it always Tokyo?” I asked. “Doesn’t Tokyo get tired of rebuilding only to have everything smashed down again months later?”

“Economics, kid. The developers and construction companies love it. A steady stream of labor. Frankly, I always had a theory that the yakuza was controlling those monsters—what a great way to wipe out your enemies, blame it on the kaiju, get rebuilding contracts funded by sympathetic world governments. It’s all a political game, always was. And,” he said, “I think Tokyo takes some kind of sick pride in always being wounded. Look at the worldwide attention it gets. But the monsters—well, the monsters have always been merely an extension of our avantpop, post-postmodern, post-kaiju selves. They are connected to the oldest fears and desires of humankind. That’s the meat of our academic field.”

* * * *

I, too, was quite fascinated with the cross-disciplinary, interpersonal, and post-ethical historical and contemporary interactions between humans and monsters. After all, my take was beyond academic—I had an interpersonal, historical, and empirical connection with Goldgotha. I think the other graduate students in the Monsters Studies Department resented me for this; none of them had ever had a close encounter with the object of their theories; everything about this field, for them, was distant and suppositional—their information came from books, the TV, and interviews with those who had had contact. While their research was quantitative, mine was qualitative and participant-observer in nature when it came to the ethnography of monsters. I ignored their sneers behind my back and their false smiles and praise when speaking to my face. This sort of attitude was common in all departments in the halls of academia; why should my vocation be any different?

Over the past ten years, critics and scholars alike have speculated that Goldgotha was dead; no one had seen neither gill nor fin of him. “Goldfish, as it is, do not live for long,” one person wrote, “so perhaps, even as a kaiju, Goldgotha had a limited lifespan.”1 I have never believed this. I could feel Goldgotha out there, somewhere in the sea, waiting to emerge when mankind, and the world, would need his help the most. I also knew I could call on him, like I did when I was a kid—if I really wanted it, he would appear for me.

There were some people who also realized this. Well, maybe not “people.” They were aliens from the seventh dimensional realm of Jupiter, inhabitants of the city Startopia, and they wanted Goldgotha for their pernicious plans.

* * * *

This is how it happened.…

During my second quarter at UCSD, I acquired quite a taste for beer and tequila, no thanks to Ethan Lory. I was spending more and more evenings at the campus pub. This is where I met Sachiko. She was everything you’d think a sexy, savvy, twenty-first-century Japanese girl should be, wearing skin-tight back jeans that had a few styling tears in the fabric, one right below her left ass cheek, showing an enticing smidgen of sultry flesh. She was wearing a yellow halter and no bra, the dark nipples of her small breasts hard and obvious and calling to any man’s eyes. Her lips were bright red with lipstick and she wore a classy beret on her head. I was looking at her and she was looking at me; she was alone and sipping a pint of Chinese beer. She got up and approached me. She sat down with me. We talked. She said she was a grad student in quantum dimensional theory, but monsters had always fascinated her. I said the study of other dimensions always got my synapses fired up, and this was no lie.

You know the story—we have some drinks, we’re drunk, we’re connecting well, she says she has on-campus housing, would I walk her home? She smelled like…well, she smelled like sex. Like she wanted me to screw her.

And so I did.

I have to say, it was great.

We fell asleep in each other’s arms.

I woke up, naked, strapped to a cold metal table inside some kind of spaceship.

Sachiko was there; she was wearing a tight silver spacesuit. So were several other women. They were all looked exactly like her—clones, I thought.

* * * *

“This is the human shape we took, for this dimension,” Sachiko informed me. “Our true form, in our own dimension—which happens to be the seventh—is a gaseous matter. We are from the planet you call Jupiter, soldiers for the Municipality of Startopia.”

Gee, I thought. The greatest lay of my life turns out to be an alien that’s a chemical cloud.

“We want Goldgotha,” she said.

“What?” I said. I played dumb.

A jolt of pain went up and down my body.

“Don’t act ignorant,” one of the Sachikos said. “We can inflict grave discomfort for many hours. We know all about you. We know about Goldgotha.”

“What do you want with that fish?”

“Simple. We wish to control the monster and use it. We know you can call it from its hideaway place.”

“I don’t know if.…”

“We know you can.”

“We know,” they all said at the same time.

I said, “I won’t do it.”

They said, “We shall inflict horrible pain.”

Oh, they caused me a lot of agony all right, and I almost broke, I almost gave in, but I was strong, I was determined, I wasn’t going to participate in whatever foul, ill deeds these aliens had in mind.

I passed out from the torture, sweating and bleeding.

* * * *

I came to.

They had Dr. Ethan Lory captive. One of the Sachikos pointed a large, black, oval weapon at his head.

“Don’t cooperate with these bitches, kid,” Lory said.

“We will kill him,” a Sachiko said.

“They’re serious,” I told Lory, “they will.”

“Let them!” Lory said, and laughed. “I know all about these trans-dimensional Jupiter aliens! Their entire agenda is to conquer all planets in the third and fifth dimensions of the solar system! They need monsters to do it. You can’t let them have Goldgotha!”

I asked, “Even if you have to die?”

“Even if I die.” He winked. “Death is so three-dimensional anyway. They won’t really kill me. They need me.”

One of the Sachikos said to me, “Will you cooperate?”

I said, “No.”

The one with the weapon fired the weapon. Lory’s head vaporized. His headless body slumped to the floor. It was a clean vaporization, no blood.

“Oh shit,” I said.

“Proceed to Plan C!” one of the Sachikos said.

I’m sure Lory would have taken pop culture delight in knowing that his capture and death was Plan B from outer space.

* * * *

Plan C was to release one of their monsters onto the Earth. They decided to pick their kaiju from the desert of New Mexico. A Sachiko told me, “In the 1940s of your planet and nation, one of our ships crashed in New Mexico. Its crew was subject to torture by the American government. So, by right of justice, we have chosen to mutate a creature from that region. Behold,” and she laughed manically, “the awesome death power of Armadilgeddon!”

The monster was a giant armadillo with an impenetrable shell, and a tail that shot out lightning bolts. First, it destroyed Albuquerque, which was no great loss, and then it made its way west. It obliterated Phoenix, Arizona, and started for the port town of San Diego, California—where I now lived.

Oh, the military tried to kill it, like militaries always try and fail. They sent jets, tanks, and missiles, but Armadilgeddon really did have an invincible shell.

“Our monster will not die!” one of the Sachiko aliens said to me. “Do you believe Goldgotha can stop Armadilgeddon?”

“Oh yeah,” I said.

“If so…,” she grinned, “call for it.”

* * * *

I had no choice. After all, human lives were in jeopardy. That spaceship I was in—a big saucer-shaped thing—was hovering over Mission Bay as Armadilgeddon made its way through San Diego, smashing buildings and slaughtering people by the will of its Startopian masters. I didn’t put any blame on the kaiju. It had once been a mere simple armadillo in the American southwest; its only worries being coyotes that wanted to eat it, or speeding cars going down the highway, wanting to run over it.

I concentrated. I closed my eyes and imagined Goldgotha in my mind, as best as I could recollect. In my head, I said, Goldgotha, help us again!

I sounded like a child inside my mind.

In many ways, I was.

I had to touch upon my inner child, my memories, to make a connection with my former goldfish.

I opened my eyes and screamed, “GOLDGOTHA! WHERE ARE YOU?!?”

And from the nether regions of the sea and my subconscious, the kaiju heard my plea…and came forth like a hidden nightmare, a forgotten romance with fantasy. Like a trumpet from an angel of wrath, Goldgotha sprang from the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean and leapt onto the beaches of San Diego, standing on his fins, screeching—beseeching Armadilgeddon for BATTLE.

“Finally!” all the Sachiko aliens said. “Goldgotha will be ours!”

I said, “Don’t be so sure of that, ladies.”

“Once Armadilgeddon defeats Goldgotha,” one Sachiko told me with a snicker, “we will place our mind-controlling devices into the monster, and with it we shall smash the cities of the Earth, and we will rule this planet like we were destined to!”

I started to have my doubts about Goldgotha’s power to win…but I should have known better. I thought about how long it had been since Goldgotha had done battle, at least any battle that I knew about…but Goldgotha had never let me, or the world, down, and he wasn’t about to start.

With the Sachiko aliens, I watched the war of the monsters from a view screen in the spaceship. It was quite a fight. Both monsters did considerable damage to each other with lasers and lightning bolts, not to mention the physical blows to each of their massive bodies. It wasn’t looking good for Goldgotha—he’d lost part of his dorsal fin, he was bleeding green blood, so he retreated into Coronado Bay. The Sachikos were cheering for their creature. I felt doomed. I wanted to tell Goldgotha I was sorry. But Goldgotha attached himself to a nuclear aircraft carrier that was docked at the North Island Naval Base, sucking away at all the nuclear power; this made Goldgotha twice as big, and with renewed strength, he was back in action and quickly stomped on Armadilgeddon, ripping out his foe’s intestines.

He whopped that big armadillo’s mutated ass three ways to Jupiter.

The Sachiko aliens were scared now. With Armadilgeddon dead, Goldgotha turned its fishy attention to the spaceship. Before the Sachikos could get the craft started to fly away, Goldgotha hit the ship with his laser breath. The ship crashed into the water. The Sachikos turned into their gaseous form and escaped out the air vents. Goldgotha sucked them into his gills and feasted on them.

I was able to get myself free—I always could, but I didn’t want the Sachikos to zap my head off.

Goldgotha ripped open the spaceship with his giant teeth. He peered in.

We were face-to-face, in a matter of speaking.

“Goldgotha,” I said, very softly.

He made a sound…a sound of compassion.

I could feel him.

He was happy to see me again.

We still had our connection. We always would.

* * * *

Goldgotha returned to the sea and I was a hero. My personal kaiju—my friend—saved the earth from the evil aliens from Jupiter’s seventh dimension.

Hero. This was fine by me. I didn’t mind the unwarranted attention. I only wished Dr. Lory could have been there to witness it, share it.

I blamed myself for his decapitation and death.

I returned to school to finish my graduate work, but my heart was no longer in the academic study of monsters.

I switched to communications, with an emphasis on print journalism.

And ten years later, I was a professional reporter…leaving the ethnography of the kaiju far behind me, but not too far when it came to invaders and the fate of the earth.

11. Reamy, Thomas. "Unexpected Lives—On the Mortality Rate of Monsters in a Post-Structural Society.” The Journal for the Academic Study of Contemporary Kaiju. Vol. 5, Issue 3.