Shambling Towards Hiroshima Read online

  “The most provocative satiric voice in science fiction.”

  Washington Post

  “Widely regarded as the foremost satirist associated with the sf and Fantasy field.”

  SF Site

  “America’s best satirist.”

  JAMES GUNN, UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

  FOR The Philosopher’s Apprentice

  “A tumultuous take on humanity, philosophy and ethics that is as hilarious as it is outlandish.”

  Kirkus

  “Morrow addresses controversial topics without being heavy-handed, and suffuses the narrative with a wit that pragmatists and idealists alike will appreciate.”

  Entertainment Weekly

  FOR The Last Witchfinder

  “Here are storytelling, showmanship and provocative book-club bait … all rolled up into one inventive feat.”

  New York Times

  “James Morrow’s novel about early American witchcraft pulls off so many dazzling feats of literary magic that in a different century he’d have been burned at the stake.”

  Washington Post

  “This impeccably researched, highly ambitious novel — nine years in the writing — is a triumph of historical fiction.”

  Booklist

  FOR The Cat’s Pajamas

  “His latest collection demonstrates that his rapier wit has lost none of its edge as it encompasses twisted scenarios ranging from Martians invading Central Park to having the fates of other worlds rest upon the scores of American football games….All the stories manifest Morrow’s penchant for exploring the dark underbelly of technological promise and extracting quirky moral conundrums. Morrow’s fans will revel, and first-time readers may find his grim humor making fans of them, too.”

  Booklist

  “Far more entertaining than most of that tedious stuff you’ve been forcing yourself to read.”

  Fantastic Reviews

  “Morrow’s shorter tales possess … a keen sense of folly and morality, a witty inventiveness …”

  SciFiction.com

  “Amply displays [Morrow’s] ability to juggle absurdity, tragedy, irony and outrage …”

  Locus

  BOOKS BY JAMES MORROW

  NOVELS

  The Wine of Violence (1981)

  The Continent of Lies (1984)

  This Is the Way the World Ends (1985)

  Only Begotten Daughter (1990)

  City of Truth (1990)

  The Last Witchfinder (2006)

  The Philosopher’s Apprentice (2008)

  THE GODHEAD TRILOGY

  Towing Jehovah (1994)

  Blameless in Abaddon (1996)

  The Eternal Footman (1999)

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Swatting at the Cosmos (1990)

  Bible Stories for Adults (1995)

  The Cat’s Pajamas (2004)

  Shambling Towards Hiroshima

  Copyright © 2009 by James Morrow

  Cover design © 2009 by Ann Monn

  Interior design and composition by John D. Berry

  The typeface is Constantia, designed by John Hudson

  Tachyon Publications

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  (415) 285-5615

  www.tachyonpublications.com

  Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

  ISBN 13: 978-1-892391-84-1

  ISBN 10: 1-892391-84-8

  Printed in the United States of America by Worzalla

  First Edition: 2009

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I AM INDEBTED to various friends, relatives, colleagues, and Hollywood historians who consented to shamble through the manuscript of this novella, annotating errors and suggesting improvements, for no reward beyond seeing their names in print. This generous community includes Joe Adamson, Shira Daemon, Justin Fielding, Peter G. Hayes, Laurie Smith Kacza-nowska, Joseph Kaufman, Reggie Lutz, Mac McMahon, Christopher Morrow, Glenn Morrow, Fred Ramsey, John Semper, Alain Silver, James D. Smith, Bill Spangler, Marc Wanamaker, and most especially my exquisite wife, Kathryn Morrow. My gratitude also goes to my wonderful agent, Wendy Weil, as well as to the authors of the nonfiction works that inform Syms Thorley’s adventures, notably Hiroshima in America by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Racing the Enemy by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo! by Stuart Galbraith IV, Godzilla on My Mind by William Tsutsui, and Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag. And, finally, a snappy salute to Ron Adams and his ectoplasmic emporium, Creepy Classics, for supplying me with so many essential DVDS.

  “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

  —The Tempest v, i

  to

  Vincent Singleton

  my Tennessee Taoist

  I

  WHETHER THIS MEMOIR will turn out to be the world’s longest suicide note, or instead the means by which I might elude the abyss, only time can tell: a precise interval of time, in fact, the twenty-five hours that stretch between the present moment, Sunday, October 28, 1984, 11:06 A.M., and my presumed departure tomorrow on the noon shuttle to the airport. Right now the other route by which I may exit this sterile Baltimore hotel — the balcony — is the more alluring. I need merely cross the room, slide back the glass door, step onto the terrace, and avail myself of the hundred-foot drop to the parking lot.

  Appearances are deceiving. Just because you’re reading my story, that doesn’t mean I lost my nerve and took the shuttle bus. The proper inference may simply be that I slipped the manuscript into an envelope festooned with stamps and addressed to the Rachel Bishop Literary Agency in New York, then left the package outside my door along with a note asking the hotel management to pop it in the nearest mailbox. Are you reading this, Rachel? I love you, sweetheart. You’re the greatest agent a has-been ever had. Assuming you find somebody who can decipher my handwriting, feel free to transcribe these pages, give them a title — The Day of the Lizard, perhaps, or Peasants with Torches, or Shambling Towards Hiroshima — and sell the thing to Doubleday for a big, fat advance, collecting your well-earned ten percent. The balance should go to Darlene. Yes, Rachel, I believe you’ve finally gotten a bestseller out of me, and it arrives bearing the ultimate seal of authenticity, the author’s notorious leap into oblivion, at once swan dive and swan song. True, the NSA may attempt to block publication, but when they go to make their case, the judge will laugh them out of court, especially when he hears about the giant fire-breathing bipedal iguanas.

  To tell you the truth, Rachel, I’ve been dropping hints about the Knickerbocker Project behemoths for over four years now, mostly to my devotees — that is, to admirers of Kha-Ton-Ra the living mummy, Corpuscula the alchemical creature, and Gorgantis, King of the Lizards. The kids aren’t interested. Instead they want to know how many yards of rotting gauze I wore in Curse of Kha-Ton-Ra. (One hundred fifty, as a matter of fact.) Did I play both roles in Corpuscula Meets the Doppelgänger? (Of course I did, O ye of little fanaticism.) Did I really write the script for Gorgantis the Invincible under the pseudonym Akira Fukiji? (Not only that, I wrote Gorgantis Unchained as Kihachi Ifukabe and Gorgantis vs. Octopocalypse as Minoru Natsuke.) By now the fans realize that, sooner or later, I’ll manage to bring up my obsession with Überweapons — biological, atomic, and otherwise. They tolerate this tic of mine, but barely. History holds no fascination for them. The politics of atrocity bores them silly.

  A Martian would be within his rights to ask why I’m in such low spirits this morning. After all, last night the Wonderama Fantasy Film Convention presented me with a major award, the Raydo, a name meant to evoke not only the rhedosaurus, that ersatz dinosaur featured in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, but also the two Ray
s without whom the movie wouldn’t exist — Bradbury, author of the original story, and Harryhausen, stop-motion animator extraordinaire. Were my hypothetical Martian to drop by Room 2014 right now, I would explain that on our planet winning a pewter trophy doesn’t feel nearly as good as bottomless despair feels bad.

  In my view it’s boorish to complain about banquet food, so let me go on record as saying that the chicken croquettes and bean salad at the Wonderama Awards dinner were scrumptious. Predictably enough, everybody squirmed during my acceptance speech — as usual, I railed against the thermonuclear arsenals into whose maw our civilization may soon disappear — and the applause was understandably tepid. Feeling at once piqued and chagrined, I slipped away before the next event, a raffle for a credible facsimile of my Gorgantis suit, which the Wonderama staff evidently got for a steal after the National Science Fiction Museum in Denver went bust.

  My Raydo statuette is a rather handsome artifact, featuring not only a skillful reproduction of the rhedosaurus in all his dorsal-plated glory, but also the Maine lighthouse he destroys halfway through the picture. The inscription is eloquent and contains only one error. Syms K. Thorley, Lifetime Achievement Award, Baltimore Imagi-Movies Society, 1984. My made-up middle initial is J. Where did they get that K? I hope they weren’t thinking of my eternal nemesis, the egregious Siegfried K. Dagover. That would be the unkindest typo of all.

  Today my Raydo will function as a paperweight, securing each successive page after I’ve torn it, littered with my scribblings, from the legal pad. I’m equipped with thirty such virgin tablets, and I’ve laid in other essentials, too. A box of Bic pens, a carton of filter-tipped Camels, a jar of Maxwell House instant coffee with a submersible heating coil, two pastrami sandwiches from room service, a liter of amontillado in a novelty cut-glass decanter. This is Edgar Allan Poe’s city, after all, and I’ve decided to pay him homage. Pardon me while I take a few sips of sherry — yes, it’s decadent to drink before noon, but Poe’s hovering shade expects me to follow protocol — and then I’ll begin my tale.

  At the moment I’m writing from the slough of despond, but my mood was exultant and my career in full flower when the two FBI agents showed up on the Monogram Pictures sound stage to assess the caliber of my patriotism. We’d just finished a productive morning’s shoot on Revenge of Corpuscula for dear old Sam Katzman and his noble little studio, William Beaudine directing, Mack Stengler lensing, Dave Milton providing his usual bricks-without-straw décor. The screenplay credit would go to Darlene, though I contributed six good lines and two nifty plot twists during a furious forty-eight-hour rewrite session in our Santa Monica bungalow. Darlene and I had been shacking up ever since falling head-over-heels on the set of the original Corpuscula, which she wrote on a dare from her best friend, Brenda Weisberg, the only woman in Hollywood routinely churning out horror movie scripts. (Brenda’s masterpiece is probably The Mad Ghoul of ‘43, though many fans swear by The Mummy’s Ghost of two years later.) Oddly enough, Darlene’s script was exactly what Sam had been looking for, and when the picture performed better than expected, he signed her to a six-year exclusive contract, an interval during which she was obligated to rewrite every crappy Bob Steele western and East Side Kids vehicle that landed on her desk, plus a gaggle of Corpuscula sequels.

  Like the first three films in the cycle, all conspicuously profitable despite the constraints imposed by Monogram’s accountants and the Second World War, Revenge of Corpuscula paired me with Siegfried K. Dagover, the latter playing Dr. Woltan Werdistratus to my hulking but articulate brute, Corpuscula. Darlene’s ingenious variation on the Frankenstein myth had Werdistratus eschewing a mad scientist’s normal method of creating artificial life: zapping a rag-doll assemblage of pilfered body parts with electricity. Instead, her insane doctor unearthed a human skeleton, using it as the matrix around which various organs, muscles, ligaments, vessels, and ducts coalesced by means of — and here Darlene was exploiting a motif from Mary Shelley’s original novel — alchemical procedures pioneered by Paracelsus and his fellow adepts. About five years ago the master’s theses started appearing, bearing titles like “Hollywood’s Challenge to Empiricism’s Hegemony: Magic and Medicine in the Corpuscula Cycle.” You think I’m kidding.

  We’d gotten it in the can, by God, the three most difficult pages in Darlene’s script, Corpuscula threatening to hand Dr. Werdistratus over to the authorities unless the two of them reach an understanding. If you’ve seen the picture, you remember the routine, the alchemical monster strapping his creator to a torture rack in the dungeon laboratory, then confronting him with a cavalcade of pickled brains, each belonging to a recently deceased genius, the monster’s aim being for Werdistratus to fuse them into a supercerebrum and graft it onto Corpuscula’s cortex, thereby transforming him from outcast to intellectual giant. As usual, Dagover tried to hijack the scene, and as usual I didn’t let him. He wasn’t a terrible actor, but he had only two personae: neurasthenic connoisseur of the dark arts, and deranged desecrator of God’s designs. I could act him under the table with a paper bag over my head and a clothespin on my tongue.

  Beyond our successful rendering of the torture rack scene, I had other reasons to be jubilant. The previous morning, Darlene’s pregnancy test had come back negative. Two days earlier, Germany had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. And to top it off, at the beginning of the week I’d finished my first serious attempt at screenwriting. In my opinion Lycanthropus was so scary it made Siodmak’s script for The Wolf Man seem like a bedtime story for depressive children, though I wouldn’t be truly pleased with my achievement until Darlene told me it was swell.

  With Beaudine’s blessing Dudley the AD decreed a lunch break, saying he wanted everybody back at 1:30 P.M. sharp on stage two for the big cemetery scene — Werdistratus and his warpie assistant, Klorg, skulking among the graves with spades, prospecting for carrion — and then the pair of G-Men came striding across the laboratory set, hopscotching among the cables and gobo stands, outfitted in genuine Lamont Cranston slouch hats and misterioso sunglasses. At first I thought they were actors themselves, headed for the nearest exit after appearing in some dopey spy thriller on stage three, but when they brushed up against me, tugged on my sheepskin doublet, and hustled me into a fretwork of film noir shadows, I realized they had something else in mind. They introduced themselves as Agent Jones and Agent Brown — their real names, I later learned, though at the time I didn’t believe them. The grilling began instantly, before I could remove a shred of makeup. Corpuscula gave them no pause, despite the third eye embedded in his cheek and the herniated brain emerging from his fractured skull. I figured such sang-froid was habitual for guys in their line. The rest of the day would probably find them coolly quizzing a bank robber as he lay expiring of gunshot wounds or calmly questioning a naked whore who’d just disemboweled a john in self-defense. A tattered ambulatory cadaver was nothing.

  Agent Brown, a lardish man with a pencil-thin moustache, asked me if I was in fact “a Jew named Isaac Margolis who now calls himself Syms Thorley.”

  “Isaac was the name of a great uncle who died before I was born,” I said, chattering nervously. I was convinced they’d come to arrest me as a draft dodger, even though I had a legitimate medical deferment. “It’s a Jewish custom. You want to know anything else about my people, talk to Louis B. Mayer.

  Being a Jew is not my area of expertise.”

  “Ah, so you’re assimilated,” said Agent Jones with an anti-Semitic curl of his lip. He had tiny eyes, bad teeth, and the negligible nose of an altar-boy Pinocchio.

  “My bubbe keeps trying to make me observant,” I said, “but all I really care about is the movies.”

  “That fits with the data we’ve collected so far,” Agent Brown said.

  “Did my draft board send you here?” I asked. “I’m classified 1-M.”

  “We know all about your flat feet,” Agent Jones said. “A mighty fortunate handicap, if you ask me.”

  “We also
know about last summer’s appendectomy and your girlfriend’s pregnancy test,” Agent Brown said.

  “Here’s the deal, Thorley,” Agent Jones said. “Your Uncle Isaac might be dead, but your Uncle Sam is alive and kicking, and he’s got a special assignment for you, something any red-blooded, stouthearted, flat-footed American would be keen to take on.”

  Just then Dagover strolled by, still in character, the wild-eyed Werdistratus, obviously hoping I’d gotten in trouble and eager to overhear the details.

  “We need to take this conversation elsewhere,” Agent Brown said, casting a suspicious eye on the mad scientist.

  “I’m afraid Monogram doesn’t have a commissary, but there’s a swell little Mexican place on the corner of Sunset and Talmadge,” I said.

  “The Neon Cactus,” Agent Jones said, nodding.

  “We’ve reserved a booth,” Agent Brown said.

  “Hey, Dudley,” I called to the AD, “Eliot Ness and his transvestite sister are taking me out to lunch. I’m done for the day, right?”

  Dudley flipped open his brass-handled board. “No more Corpuscula scenes this afternoon, but we need you in your makeup for an 8:00 A.M. take one. Do me a favor and be at the studio by six.”

  “Here’s an idea,” I told Dudley. “Have Carl come out to my house at dawn tomorrow and put the makeup on me while I’m still asleep.”

  “I hate this job,” Dudley said.

  “A bewildered Syms Thorley and his new friends set off for the Neon Cactus, in quest of whatever’s on tap,” I said, flashing the AD a florid Corpuscula grin. “Fade-out.”

  What they had on tap was Dos Equis, which the G-Men and I supplemented with outsized orders of tacos and gazpacho. Actors and soldiers jammed the place to the walls. A lively lass with a pretty face and a considerable figure brought us our food. The cliché is true now, and it was true then: L.A. has the most nubile waitresses in the world, hopeful starlets anticipating the proper cosmic conjunction of a cruising producer and a flattering sunbeam.