Shambling Towards Hiroshima Read online

  I know what this moment expects of me. Its demands could not be clearer. I am to find redemption in Eric’s brief visit. Because I moved him so deeply, I should now resolve to keep on attending sci-fi movie conventions, haranguing the fans about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thereby enlightening a small but significant minority.

  But I can no longer live in the moment. I can only live in the past, an intolerable location, and the future, which I shall find habitable only to the degree that I am not there.

  My bags are not yet packed. The noon shuttle will leave without me. Like Mr. Poe, I am weak and weary. I must sleep. I am weary of god-emperors and their obscene obliviousness to the blood in which their divinity is soaked. I am weary of the God of Leslie Groves and Harry Truman, that atom-splitting deity who one day presented the general and his President with a gift from on high, or so they believed. I am weary of the God of my Fathers and his meager regard for mothers, including the one who gave birth to Yukiko. I am weary of the incarnate God who makes such a moving cameo appearance at the end of Obie’s The Last Days of Pompeii but who sat paring his nails while Vesuvius vaporized twenty thousand people. I am weary of the fission bomb, the fusion bomb, and — coming soon to an arsenal near you — Ronald Reagan’s neutron bomb. Our world suffers from a surfeit of the sacred, and I shall not be sorry to leave it.

  The next time you have a chance to watch the original Corpuscula, stay with it till the end of act two, which finds me slipping furtively into the front parlor of Castle Werdistratus. It’s Darlene’s best piece of writing ever, and probably my best job of acting, and for once Beaudine knew where to put the camera.

  The room is empty but for the scientist’s young son, Anton, who sprawls on the carpet playing with his toy freight train, its spring-driven steam locomotive coupled to a box car, a tank car, a gondola, and a caboose. A half-dozen wooden horses occupy the gondola. When Corpuscula sits down beside the train, Anton is startled but not frightened. The boy winds up his locomotive and releases it. Corpuscula deliberately places his leg across the track. The train derails. Horses fly in all directions. Corpuscula laughs.

  After scolding the monster, Anton restores the train to the track, winds up the locomotive, and sends the horses on their way. Once again Corpuscula causes a wreck — but this time it’s the monster who carefully, oh, so carefully, places each bruised and battered horse back in the gondola.

  The boy allows Corpuscula to wind up the locomotive. The train begins its circular journey. Suddenly Werdistratus appears, shotgun in hand, and chases his creature into the night.

  And that is how I wish to be remembered, friends. I am Corpuscula, savior of horses. Sayonara.

  While there would be a certain poetry in giving Syms Thorley the last word, especially since that word was Sayonara, the editors wish to add a coda. We are pleased to have presented the fullest narrative yet published concerning the Knickerbocker Project. Though some people may call our actions unpatriotic, even treasonous, we felt duty-bound to shed light not only on an arcane chapter in American history but also on the motives behind Thorley’s jump from the twentieth floor of a Baltimore Holiday Inn.

  His suicide attempt was famously unsuccessful. By an astonishing turn of fate, the flatbed truck bearing the partially deflated Gorgantis balloon passed beneath the window just as the hapless actor plummeted toward the parking lot. The behemoth was supine, so Thorley must have glimpsed the grinning jaws right before he hit the stomach. He bounced. Slamming into the hotel wall, he cracked his skull, with resultant cerebral trauma. To the day he died — from old age as much as anything — on March 18, 1993, in a second-rate Santa Monica nursing home, he never uttered a single word, nor did he lose his fixed, seraphic smile, so unlike the monster’s yet perhaps inspired by it.

  Despite his catatonia Thorley enjoyed a steady stream of visitors, among them Joy Groelish, Darlene Wasserman, Eric Yamashita, and Esther Dagover, who’d divorced Siegfried in 1962 and subsequently married a Beverly Hills art dealer. No doubt Sam Katzman and Brenda Weisberg would have also paid their respects, but the former had passed away in 1973, and the latter was too ill to travel. At one point Tiffany Nolan flew in from Baltimore. Crouching over his wheelchair, she told Thorley how, as she was leaving the Holiday Inn with her autographed video of Gorgantis vs. Miasmica, she was approached by Wilbur McKee, a twenty-six-year-old Wonderama attendee. Emboldened by their mutual enthusiasm for kaiju eiga, Wilbur invited Tiffany out for a drink. Six months later, the two fans were married. Tiffany insists that, when she told Thorley this real-life fairy tale, he understood every word.

  Eric Yamashita, as we all know, indeed managed to turn Gorgantis into a symbol for nuclear weapons abolition. While humankind has not yet taken the message to heart, Eric swears that he will never abandon the struggle. He really believes that one day our species will wake up and say, “Good God, what are we doing?”

  We hope Eric and Tiffany are right when they insist that Thorley spent his nursing home sojourn in happy, if comatose, contemplation of his halcyon days. Until the very end, they claim, his brain was flooded with golden memories of tramping around graveyards, crypts, dungeons, and laboratories with the aim of giving pleasurable frissons to moviegoers, an ambition in which he was, as we all know, wholly successful. Visit the actor’s modest marble tombstone, and you will find many tokens of esteem perched among the flowers: Corpuscula action figures, Kha-Ton-Ra rings, plush Gorgantis toys, even the robot from Flesh of Iron.

  The appended notes are short and sweet. The one we transcribed on our last trip to Forest Lawn was typical, scrawled on a piece of shirt cardboard and secured beneath a pot of geraniums. Raindrops had blurred the ink, and the cardboard was badly warped, but we could still read every word.

  Good-bye, dear Syms,

  You were the best,

  especially as Corpuscula,

  and also the King of the Lizards.

  We’re sorry we never met you.

  With gratitude,

  Rose and Luís Rodriguez,

  Your fans for life.