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Lumpur, gavel-to-gavel coverage on the Albanian politburo, a couple of hockey games with everything but the goals and fights edited out. The programs on Komodo’s hook-up were nothing if not eclectic. Commercials came from everywhere. Just then a harried young woman was walking down a forbidding city street when three thugs jumped from the shadows and beat her unmercifully with truncheons. “Bitch!” they screamed. Then a bland but jovial announcer’s voice came on. “Tired of the wear and tear of city life? Then move! Up to Sherwood Forests! The MODEL model condominium development!” The young woman reappeared, standing in front of a monolithic refrigerator, kissed her husband goodbye, sent her children off to school. “Move up to Sherwood Forests,” she said. “I did!”
    “Sick,” Gojiro commented, restraining himself from Radi-firing the Dishscreen. Years before, after hearing how Elvis regularly pumpgunned Graceland tubes, the monster got a little rough on his receptors. After a stern lecture from Komodo, however, he agreed to cut down. It wasn’t that hard a promise to keep. Once, the reptile considered himself a merciless critic of the tube-dominated psychoscape. He was always holding forth, making comments like, “Mary Hart! Dixie Whatley! Who are they but jackboot dupes of the culturato-narcoleptic horde! Down with Trapper John!”
    But now, he admitted with a grunt, “I just watch the stuff.”
    How had it come to this? Gojiro thought back, to the earliest of times, the beginnings of what was between him and Komodo. Had there ever been a more remarkable meeting? Komodo, swathed in sheets, stark lights upon his sleep-struck face, in that dismal hospital room in Okinawa. Gojiro, cowering and cold, casked up inside a dead volcano’s basalt vault. The two of them so dreadfully alone, forever severed from all they knew, all they were meant to know.
    Then—across all time, tide, and taxonomy—came Gojiro’s plea. Even now it seemed impossible, drawn from mystery’s deepest well: “Come in, please come in! Anyone!” A voice in the night, the monster’s mayday dot and dash skimmed the stormswept Pacific to be heard only by a single boy in a hospital bed.
    “Please to speak again?” These were the words Komodo spoke, his lips never moving, the only sounds in his melancholy room the blips of machinery and the squeak of rubbergloved hands on his skin. “You are a lizard? You are stuck inside volcano—in a place that is not your home, in a body that is not yours, and you think through a mind of which you cannot conceive? You are lonely and afraid? You have no friends?
    “I am a boy. I live in a hospital. There is no one here that looks like me. I will be your friend.”
    More than two decades later, in front of the droning Dishscreen, Gojiro wondered—could it really have happened like that? Did a conversation actually take place between a fifty-ton lizard and a ten-year-old boy dug out of a hole in Hiroshima, a boy who hadn’t said a word or moved a muscle in nine years? And, did that boy—that Coma Boy, silent icon of a most anxious age—snap free from the slumber that enveloped him, hoist himself from his bed, leave that hospital under the cover of night, and make a most treacherous journey across two thousand miles of sea to where that lizard was?
    Or was this just another installment in the series of mental forgeries, one more dollop of bogus history? How to tell? The monster didn’t know. Maybe that was the real bond between him and Komodo: a dialectic of lunacy. Whole so-called civilizations had been founded on shared psychosis, why not Radioactive Island?
    The monster dismissed these doubts. Komodo wasn’t crazy, a liar, or a fool. If Komodo said he escaped his whitecoated warders by crawling out a laundry-room window, and then hopped a tramp steamer going south, eventually reaching Radioactive Island in that small rubber boat, using only a sanitarium sheet as a sail, then that’s how it