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AS JUNE ROLLS INTO JULY, Sheldon rides with the family less and less, preferring to play ball with his Little League or sleep at his friends’ houses. The Kid, too, becomes bored with just “riding.” By now it is the same old scenery blowing past, the same old night-world. He lies in the vibrating bed of the Camino and gazes up at the high-tension towers along Upriver Drive—imagining Godzilla stalking through the darkness, keeping pace. When they pass the fuel farms by Hillyard—which remind him of industrial Tokyo from the Toho monster films—there’s Godzilla again: wading through the buildings, destroying silos with his blue-white-hot radioactive breath (which sets his tree-like dorsal fins aglow). The Kid finds he can make anything in Spokane interesting by imagination alone. Gradually he forgets about Dogora-Carcinoma and the beehive inside his window well. Gradually he forgets about wanting to know what others won’t tell him, about penetrating surfaces. Over-laying the world with fantasy seems good enough.
This continues until he comes across a picture in Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine which is not the usual touched-up still but a genuine behind-the- scenes snapshot. The picture depicts a technician dressed as Godzilla from the waist down, ruggedly-textured legs—keg-like in their enormity—held in place by thick suspenders (the image reminds him of the before-and-after weight-loss ads he has seen in his mother’s magazines, usually a grinning, waif-thin Sandy Duncan posing in a single leg of the pants she’d worn “before”); while the top of the suit sits upon a nearby workbench, wires trailing, so that you can see right into it. You can see foam latex ganglia and glandular, sweat-soaked padding, bands of cables and tubing, gaffing tape, staples.
The technician meanwhile is a middle-aged Japanese male, balding and over-weight, who is sweating beneath the hot lights and appears wiped-out.
He is having himself a cigar.
From that point on, whenever he sees the Big G, he sees through the suit. He sees the foam latex ganglia and the glandular, sweat-soaked padding. He sees the balding fat man with his cigar, itself burned down to the stub.
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THEY ARE HUDDLED in a booth at a Chinese restaurant when he asks his mother why comic books cost 25 cents now rather than 20, or 15. He is nine going on ten. The leaves on the trees are green. He is a little taller and his hair is a little longer.
She tells him it is because of inflation, and that it is a good example of how important it is to have an understanding of mathematics, which he has been struggling with in school. She has a keen grasp of mathematics, he knows, though she calls them “economics.” She keeps the books for his father’s painting company as well as her own daycare business, keeping everything humming along, often talking of “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
“I know you hate it, honey,” she says, “but it’s something you’ll have to grow into. The dinosaurs couldn’t adapt and that’s why they became extinct.”
This is his mother's version of You'll shoot your eye out, tailored just for him.
He reads his magazine as she talks, a special issue of FM dedicated exclusively to the films of Ray Harryhausen. He is reading about the scene in One Million Years B.C. where Raquel Welch is snatched up by a pterodactyl and flapped, kicking and screaming, to its nest among the cliffs. The effect was achieved by manipulating foam-latex puppets with steel armatures inside one frame at a time, then matting the action together. He looks up from a picture of a giant crab (from Harryhausen’s Mysterious Island) and notes the broken shells on his plate, figures he can stick coat hangers in them and animate them, as Harryhausen did—if his parents ever buy him a movie camera.
“...you can’t be an astronaut if you don’t know your times tables,” his mother is saying.
“Or a graphics painter,” says his dad.
“Like Archie,” says his mother.
“I don’t want to be an astronaut or a graphics painter,” he says.
Nobody says anything for a while. Not even about The Bankruptcy, which has come up a lot lately when things get this quiet. Things have gotten this quiet a lot.
“We can’t afford a movie camera right now," says his mom.
Everybody eats in silence.
When the smiling waitress delivers the bill on a little tray with three fortune cookies, his mom rummages through her purse and withdraws her checkbook. It isn’t until after she’s laid the check in the tray and returned the book that he notices an oblong black box where the checkbook had been. She pushes it toward him with a pale finger, glancing at his dad who doesn’t respond but seems as taken aback as the Kid. At the top of the box is stenciled: JOHNSON SMITH TOY & NOVELTY COMPANY.
He stares at it and then at her.
“Go ahead,” she says.
He opens the box.
The X-Ray glasses are there. He knows they are X-Ray glasses because the words X-RAY VISION have been printed in white bloc letters across their top. They are wafer-thin, as though made of paper. They are paper—but thick paper. Their rims glint darkly, flickeringly, by the table’s little candle. The glints are printed on the paper. The “lenses” are red and white paper spirals, but at the center of each lays a pupil of translucent film—the real lenses—which catch the candlelight and refract purple-orange.
His mom pushes the lid down, gently.
“Math first, when we get home. I’ll help you.”
His mind is swimming.
“Okay,” he says.
“You can have them after summer school, when we pick you up.”
“Okay.”
“We love you, son.”
“Okay.”
“Even if you don’t want to be a graphics painter,” says his dad.
“Like Archie,” says his mom. “Or an astronaut.”
He lowers his head. He ducks beneath the table and comes up wearing his werewolf mask—a cheap, plastic, black and green one he’s had since Halloween—which he wears slung over his back, like a sombrero. He’s put cored-out crab legs on his fingers.
“I vawnt to suck your blood,” he says, pretending to bite his mother's neck.
“That’s Dracula!” she protests.
He crawls under the table and comes up on his dad's side, attacking him. He shakes his claws at the elderly couple in the booth next to them, growling. He leaps into the aisle and howls at the wait staff, all of whom cover their faces, feigning terror. Everyone laughs. Especially his mother, who does so with her head thrown back and her fingertips touching her long-sleeved blouse, just beneath her armpit, as though needing to hold something in place.
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WHEN THEY PICK HIM UP from summer school the next day, he notices the black box, like a little coffin, sitting on the dash right away. It would make a neat shot in a movie, he thinks, that black box, just the way he sees it, from the bed of the Camino, through the rear window, with the reflections of treetops sliding past. His mother looks at him over her shoulder as if to say, well? That would make a neat shot too, the treetops flowing up her face like that, like water. He turns away, slumps against the cab, so that he and his mother are essentially sitting back to back. He whips the math test from his peach-colored folder and holds it over the bed rail, letting it rattle and snap in the wind. She snatches it from him and rolls up her window. He grins. The Camino’s engine rumbles along.
Moments later he hears music again—looks sidelong to see his mother reaching around the cab, handing him the case. At first he pretends not to see her, but then snatches the box from her grip. He opens it immediately and takes out the glasses, unfolds the frames. Printed inside are instructions: HOLD YOUR HAND TOWARDS THE LIGHT SPREAD FINGERS AND SEE THE BONES. He slides them on, hooking the cardboard frames around his ears, and then holds his hand up to the sun, spreading his fingers.
The effect, such as it is, is interesting. The lenses create a kind of aura around his hand and each finger, causing their edges to glow orange and purple. The result is that his fingers themselves become the bones, the creases in their flesh mimicking the creases between joints. He finds that the further he moves his hand away, the more intense becomes the effect; when held at the greatest distance, it really does appear as though he can see through his fingers, the halos having grown so much that the silhouettes of his fingers shrink, becoming more bone-like. He looks at the neighborhood flashing by but sees no appreciable effect, other than a slight glow about the treetops and the power poles, the rooftops, the crisscrossing power lines.
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WHAT HE HAS TOLD NO ONE is that he has fallen further behind in school than anyone could guess, not just math. That his passing of the test is a freak accident, a fraud—a combination of his mother’s help and the teacher’s choice of questions and his ability to look cross-eyed at his classmate’s papers. What he has told no one, what does not show up on his report cards, is that he spends the bulk of each class drawing pictures in his binder, pictures of King Kong and Godzilla and Rodan and King Ghidorah. That when he is not drawing he is writing, but not what he has been instructed to. Instead he writes about sea serpents and UFOs and the saber-toothed cat, Sagra—his own creation, whom he pits against the others—who is undefeated except for Kong, who always wins, who was his brother’s monster, before his brother forgot him, abandoned him.
X-Ray Rider will continue in Dark Horses #32