Free Gojiro by Mark Jacobson

monster had seen the thinfaced, popeyed actor they had playing the role a hundred times. He was always frying Boris Karloff’s eyeballs sunnyside up or watching some portrait go grotty on a Victorian wall. Campy to the max. But this time, when that old hack poked his whitepowdered head out from behind the heavy wrought-iron door of his sandswept house outside Samarkand, Gojiro nearly jumped out of his leathers.
    The face . . . it was so terribly familiar . “Hey!” the reptile screamed to Komodo, who was busy with the beakers and bunsens. “Something kooky about this movie, check it out.”
    “He gave her a potion, told her to dissolve it in liquid,” Gojiro explained when Komodo joined him. A tremendous tumbler took up the whole frame. Behind it, shadowy, the girl could be seen, opening the packet the Diviner had given her, dispensing it like Bromo. The whole Dishscreen seemed to shake. Suddenly there was water, water, everywhere. Over England, Russia, Timbuktu, and Kalamazoo.
    Then came the Tidal Wave: a rolling wall across the Atlantic, ten thousand feet tall, dwarfing the Empire State Building. And there, cowering in a doorway on St. Mark’s Place, crying, bawling, was the little girl.
    “She thinks it’s all her fault!” a mortified Gojiro shouted. “She thinks she’s drowning the world, because she wanted to skate.”
    “Who’s that?” Komodo asked, terrified, as the tall, thin man in black walked up the deserted Second Avenue.
    “It’s him! The Diviner.”
    Komodo and Gojiro grabbed each other when the wizened, harsh-eyed man spoke. “So you wanted to skate?” he said, low-pitched and thunderous. He handed the little girl another envelope and told her to wait until the wave was close enough to touch, then throw the powder in the water. “Then you’ll skate.”
    “Throw it, throw it!” Komodo and Gojiro screamed as the little girl stood at the tip of Manhattan, the wave almost upon her, a blinding energy curve of which no Silver Surfer ever caught the crest. The little girl let go. The powder hit the water, stopped the swell solid, turned it to a concave lurch of ice.
    That last scene killed the monster. How sweet the little girl looked in her ruffled red skirt, turning her figure eights at the base of that great surge of Doom. And how the robins chirped as the sun broke through the clouds, and the first buds were on the trees.
    Back then, neither Gojiro nor Komodo took note of the final credits tacked on to the end of Tidal Wave . What could a florid logo indicating the picture was “a Brooks-Zeber Film for Hermit Pandora Productions” mean to them, so far away, on an island Mercator never projected? It wasn’t until they read those tabloids, part of the “circulating library” that washed up on the Corvair Bay Beach shoreline every day, that they learned the identity of Tidal Wave’s creator.
    “Look!” Gojiro shouted to Komodo some time later, reading from the syndicated “Gollywood Agog” column. “No wonder they call the reclusive SHEILA BROOKS ‘the Hermit Pandora.’ Word is that the daughter of America’s late great atomic scientist JOSEPH PROMETHEUS BROOKS will not be present yet AGAIN to accept the scads of kudos her most recent releases, The Bottom Line’s the Swipe of the Scythe and Atlantis Came Up This Morning and It Was Anaheim , both up for Best Picture, are certain to garner. This will be still another disappointment to the Dreamer of the Sad Tomorrow’s teeming throng of fans. BOBBY ZEBER, director of the couple’s hot-hot-hot pictures, will represent the team, but he does not seem particularly thrilled about it. ‘What does it matter, anyway?’ ZEBER sighed to your Golly Agog correspondent. To them, we say: ‘Come off it, guys! We love you! Get with the program!’ ”
    Alongside the copy was a murky photo captioned “The Brooks-Zeber team.” It was clearly not a new picture. They were sitting on a red motorcycle. The man, a brooding presence whom Gojiro