Free Gojiro by Mark Jacobson Page A

took to be Bobby Zeber, sported a fringed leather coat and an upper lip crimped to a Brando curl. As for Sheila Brooks, she sat on the back of the bike, her face turned away from the camera. All you could see was a mass of white hair.
    “Brooks’s daughter? I didn’t even know he had a daughter!”
    “Nor I, my own true friend,” Komodo put in.
    After that, even though he’d sworn, on principle, to boycott Brooks-Zeber products, the monster never failed to find himself rapt whenever the pictures appeared on the Dish. Tidal Wave remained his favorite, but he also confessed to liking Rockefeller’s Rocket , that one about how all the glass towers in the Big City weren’t buildings at all, but rather the spawn of seeds planted in financial districts by avaricious dupes of cannibalistic aliens. Gojiro loved it when, at germinational maturity, the buildings developed propulsion systems and flew off into space, interplanetary baguettes to be baked in massive micro ovens out beyond the stars. The sight of the stunned plutocrats trying to make one last hostile takeover before lift-off never failed to tickle the perennially class-antagonist reptile.
    “Brooks’s daughter, my fellow cineaste,” the monster laughed to himself soon after Komodo left the ’cano that day Sheila Brooks’s letter arrived. He was feeling a lot better. Komodo’s wacko chatter about Alchemical Heredity and that business about facing off with Joe Pro Brooks put the monster into a panic-paranoia red alert, but a major inlay of the hardcutting 235 spruced things up quite nicely. He Radi-fired a heaping superspoon and was soon flying higher than a Chinaman’s kite in Mr. Parker’s tokebunk.
    Yeah, the stupored reptile mused, it was nutty okay, Sheila Brooks writing to them, saying only they could help her. Life and Death! What could she be talking about? Life and Death? What could those words boil down to for the offspring of Joseph Brooks? Maybe her career was a mess. Faithful fan that he was, Gojiro had pored over the rampant speculation that Hermit Pandora’s reputed nightmare blockage was putting a serious dent into the Brooks-Zeber balance sheet. Might be so, the monster imagined. That most recent entry, Ants for Breakfast , no way it was so hot-hot-hot. There was just something missing .
    “Maybe she’s looking for a comeback too,” Gojiro chuckled, noting that Sheila Brooks’s supposed shortfall of ideas roughly coincided with the ban he placed on the further export of his own rotten pictures. Then, his lids suddenly brick heavy, the lizard dropped off to sleep.
    * * *
    Almost immediately Gojiro found himself back in that dream.
    “What? How could I be here again?” he cried within his slumber. It hadn’t happened for years, not since those unhappy evenings when the Black Spot Dream had invaded the Quadcameral with numbing regularity. “Can’t be just a dream,” the monster would yowl to Komodo back then, bolting upright in his burrow. “It’s like, alive. A psychotropic tapeworm inside my brain, corkscrewing through the parietal down into the private stock.”
    Now it was back. Again the monster found himself transported to the Great Promontory he had so long envisioned as his Hallowed Homelands. Lavarock! That’s where he was, bellydown on the Precious Pumice, a mere child of a ’tile, quarantined along with his fellow zardplebes. In the distance, he could hear the slow drawl of the fullgrowns.
    “Hear tell there be a variety of us over in Africa,” a grizzled eightfooter said, basking in the noonday sun, V. exanthematicus . “Said to ovipare in termite nests.”
    “No shit?” another mature replied.
    “Yessir! Termites dumber than a stump over there. Use their formics to spitbuild big bulgy paperthin nests. Then a zard comes along, tears a hole, ovipares, moves on. Couple minutes later, termite comes back, scratches his head, says, ‘How come I left this hole here, must of missed a spot.’ Builds that nest right