Son of Kong, How Do You Do?

Gregory Wolos

Aplaus, New York
Baltowolos@aol.com

 
It’s a 45 minute boat ride from the outer isle airstrip across the straits. The ferry’s railing cuts into my solar plexus, but I lean forward until my ribs ache. The pain and my excitement keep me breathless. Though I can’t see it through the cottony dawn fog, I can feel my island directly ahead: Tallulo Lillo, largest of the South Pacific’s Halloween Islands. Word of mouth, colorful travel brochures, and intuition have convinced me that this tropical paradise will be the perfect site for my next picture– the major studio, megabuck blockbuster that will free me from bondage to the backlot slasher films on which I’ve cut my directorial teeth. My reputation for turning low budget carnage into cash has earned me this opportunity, and I won’t waste it. I’ve come to this island to film the movie of my dreams. When the fog lifts, Talullo Lillo, as viewed through my professional eye, will no longer be Talullo Lillo. It will be Kong’s Island.

 

I’m here to remake The Son of Kong!

 

Whispers distract me, though I know I’m alone on the slick deck. In my other movies, the first of the Slitter series, for example, hushed voices sifting through the fog would be a bad sign. The character who hears them is done for. The neck hairs of an audience familiar with my work would tickle to attention. But my fans would be disappointed now, because I know these voices.

 

I pretend at first that they belong to my young son and his nanny who nap with our baggage in the ferry’s cabin, but I’m kidding myself. Though I strain to keep my focus forward, I can’t block out my childhood voice, nor the laugh of my youthful mother. Now I see us, sneaking up from behind as suddenly as a tractor trailer in a rearview mirror.

 

“We lost your daddy in the war,” Mom says. “When I was pregnant with you.” Then she laughs, tosses the waves of blond hair the men in her life would die for, and funnels cigarette smoke as acrid as Godzilla’s breath through her nostrils. He died in the South Pacific, she says. “He was a hero,” she says, though I never saw a medal. Men passed through our house like ghosts, the same man with different faces, none of them heroic, none of them my father. They all loved my mother’s golden hair.

 

I’ve invented a father for my dreams. As if they were old movies, I watch the flashbacks he never lived to dread. I see gray newsreel figures formed from ashes and fog, their color wept away by time. Some soldiers lose their last meals over the sides of the landing craft before crouching into rows, using their rifles as staffs. My father last vomited back on the transport, one quick wretch over the railing. It spread like a parachute, shrinking toward the dark sea, reminding him of training films of paratroopers blown from their planes like dandelion seeds. But that’s in Europe. Here they say Zeros love to pick you off while you float through the clouds. The enemy waits in the island jungle. My father’s death would be their glory. Dad’s crammed in too low to see the horizon, which would be invisible anyway, because the fog pours over him, as white as milk. Sea swells smack the hull with a hollow syncopation. The newsreel ends, and the spinning film flaps on the projector, over and over.

 

The drums on shore pound like the vein in my temple, but slightly off, like a tune on the car radio a milli-beat off from the windshield wipers. BA-GA-BOOM, BA-GA-BOOM, BA-GA-BOOM, over and over, happy drums, and why not? What a boon to the island economy! A Hollywood movie on location for over six months. Allison and her crew have been here for a week already, chatting up the locals, handing out everything from Baby Kong pens to free passes to watch filming (which mean nothing– we’ll run an open set, as long as spectators keep their mouths shut while the cameras roll). We’ll let them think we need extras, though we won’t use a single Islander. If they’d seen the originals, they’d know that Kong Island is a black community. The image of terrified Polynesians just doesn’t register. Their shrieking faces look too happy.

 

Footage of screaming Pacific Islanders was test screened across the country, and no significant demographic group bought the premise. Some left the theaters swearing they smelled coconuts. A few said pineapple. None of the testing mattered anyway because of my commitment to the ethnicity of the original Son. But the demographics helped me avoid a studio showdown, because it’ll cost, flying in hundreds of black extras. So there’s no bigotry here. There won’t be any pale Island folk in my movie. Too Mutiny on the Bounty. Too idyllic.

 

Ahead the fog congeals, a broad floating strip a lighter shade of gray. BA-GA-BOOM, BA-GA-BOOM, BA-GA-BOOM. Materializing on a higher plane than I would have thought, an out-rigger canoe appears, bearing welcoming gifts, no doubt. They’re up early. If they were to offer me an Island girl for the evening, hair like black silk, skin smooth as coconut milk, I would accept their hospitality. With a vain touch I stroke my own cheek and find it hardly smooth. If I had a minute for a quick shave, I’d take it.

 

The grainy old film rolls again. I watch as my father rubs his chin with his knuckles against his gritty beard. How will he shave in the jungle with his enemy lurking behind every fern, ready to spring for that bristly throat? He’s dreaming about a white porcelain wash basin. Hot water steams the mirror above. He clears a spot with the heel of his fist and looks into the future. Does he see his son beside him, waiting for him to lather his cheek? Mom lies in bed, her hair spread over the pillow like a sunrise. Reality returns as fog reseals the clear spot on the mirror, and my father feels the weight of the pack on his back and the rifle in his hand. There have been stories about G.I.’s drowning because cowardly landing craft pilots released them in deep water And if he should scramble safely to shore, what then? Every dune, every trunk of bamboo hides an enemy. They can make themselves smaller, thinner. They are diabolical, magic.

 

My boy has come along for the ride. Angela, his mother, has left us no choice. She’s on her honeymoon in Budapest. She’s married a chess master, and there’s some kind of World tournament there. I imagine Klaus, her husband, hunched over a chessboard, his craggy brow shadowing the pieces like Skull Mountain above Kong’s Island. (There’s no mountain on Tallulo Lillo. Just palm trees, a few lagoons, white beaches, the sky, and the Pacific Ocean. The computer imaging people will design Skull Mountain according to my specifications.) Sweat dots Klaus’s forehead– a drop in slow motion close up falls like a jewel and shatters in a silent explosion at the onyx feet of the black king. What frolicsome honeymoon nights Angela and Klaus must be enjoying.

 

I met my wife at the first Woodstock– as she swayed topless upon the shoulders of a massive, thick-bellied fellow, her breasts lightly basted with dried mud, as if she were a clay sculpture coming to life.

 

“Hello,” I said, gazing upward. “You have beautiful eyes. You should be a model.” The big fellow holding her aloft may have growled at me. I can’t remember his face.

 

For years Angela and I searched the footage of the documentary, looking for ourselves. As time went by we gave up. Had we ever met? Had either of us really been to Woodstock?

 

Having Carl was a doomed attempt to stave off middle age and salvage a marriage of nearly twenty years. “Papa” and “Mama.” New roles, new self-definitions. We should have been screen tested. There should have been a reading. Either an absence of aptitude or an abundance of apathy rendered us unfit for parenthood. I won’t blame my own lack of a father figure. Imagining oneself a good father is no more difficult than visualizing a murder. We’re committed to the reality of neither.

 

I remember the moments just after Angela gave birth to Carl. A nurse had swabbed the baby clean and nestled him at his weary mother’s breast. Angela’s lips pinched for a second, and she blinked dry eyes rapidly. She’s thinking too much, I thought, feeling my stomach fall. “He’s pretty hairy, isn’t he?” she murmured finally.

 

I nodded. I patted my wife’s hand, pressed gently with my knuckles the downy flesh behind the ear of my son. Then I yawned, sorry that I did, but unable to stop myself. “Tough business,” I said pointlessly.

 

Carl lost his furriness, all except for a headful of wild black curls. I see the boy whenever my schedule coincides with my custodial responsibilities. Odd weeks and weekends, special circumstances like our present trip. We are cordial. We call each other Carl and Dad, respectively.

 

Our voyage to the Halloween Islands will be the longest time we’ve spent together since his mother and I split up. His nanny Greta accompanies us. She has trouble meeting my eye because Klaus, Carl’s new step-Daddy, is her nephew. Yesterday afternoon on the sun deck my little boy beat me at chess, which I suppose is an argument for nurture over nature.

 

The boy is excited about the trip. He knows all about Kong. We’ve spent many weekends watching the original and sequel. He owns a photograph of the eighteen inch model used for both the senior and junior ape. Carl knows that baby Kong was pure white. He even knows that the little giant had a nickname– Kiko– used by the production crew. He owns one of those monkey dolls usually made of gray socks with white and red heels and toes, except his is all white. He calls it Kiko, though he knows the difference between a monkey and an ape. He’s aware that Kiko’s my baby, and that my son of Kong will be nameless, in faithful tribute to the original sequel.

 

“We’ve got problems!” Allison says before I’ve even settled into the limousine that awaits me at the dock. Carl and Greta will follow in a taxi so my assistant and I can talk business. Finding and solving problems is Allison’s job. She’s high energy and dedicated. We’re a team, unless she screws up. She knows I’d hand the studio her head, and there wouldn’t be any hard feelings. I have very little leverage until this film succeeds.

 

Allison pinches an unlit cigarette between her lips, though she quit smoking years ago. “I like smokers,” she says. “I want to keep myself attractive to them.” And she is attractive, in spite of the grip on the cigarette that crimps her mouth into a sneer. She wears her dark hair rolled and twisted in a knot so tight atop her head that her blue eyes are pulled wide open. And because of her impulse to force them into a worried squint, they bulge with frightening intensity. “The Bwide of Fwankenthtein,” Carl once whispered to me in a quavery lisp.

 

We failed as lovers. I found her attention to detail too exacting for a physical relationship.

 

“Problems?” I ask. I am fingering the strings of flower petals draped around my neck by nearly naked island women. The less exclusive hotels near the harbor gleam like chalk cliffs over the palm trees and pink beach that curves against the blue ocean into the horizon. “What could possibly be a problem here? I’m being treated like royalty– like a Tiki– I’m a God. They’ll be sacrificing their virgins to me, like old Kong. Won’t they? What about locations. Do we have an itinerary?”

 

“Yes– wait–” Allison blinks– the look of the Bride when she met her betrothed. “I sent that canoe out. I paid for those drummers. I hired those girls. Those flowers came out of our own budget. Now we’ve got a few publicity shots to send back to the States. Nobody else on the island knows you’re here yet. The word is that you’re arriving by plane tomorrow. That give us time to prepare.”

 

I don’t like the sound of this. I’m not ready for it. “Prepare?”

 

“Listen–” Allison spits the cigarette out of her mouth, doesn’t even seem to notice as it bounces off her thigh onto the leather upholstery. “–These are simple island folks, but they’re pissed. They really are.”

 

“Okay– so who’s ‘they?’ Who’s not welcoming Son of Kong with open arms?” I’ve got visions of kids hugging furry white Kiko dolls that’ll make teddy bears obsolete. The rims of Allison’s contact lenses brand her bright blue irises.

 

“There are two groups, really. But they’re forming a coalition, and I hate to say it, they’re getting support.” She’s unzipped a canvas briefcase and hands me a clipboard thick with xeroxed newspaper articles.

 

” ‘Mothers against Kong,'” I read.

 

“It’s hot locally already. But right now it’s an island issue. Can you imagine if it gets to the states?”

 

“The studio will love the free publicity.”

 

“Maybe.” Allison’s eyes pop like flashbulbs. “But women are very powerful these days.”

 

I hand the clipboard back to her. I can’t focus on the article. I’m too tired from last night’s champagne and the sleepless nights my nightmares cause. My hands rise to my aching temples. “Summarize,” I say.

 

“Well,” Allison sighs, “It seems our project is attacking motherhood. Who, after all, is the little giant ape’s mother? ‘Son of Kong,’ okay, but where’s Mama Kong? Why doesn’t she get half the credit? The baby’s not the product of abiogenesis, is he?”

 

“Abiogenesis?”

 

“It’s in the article. A Ms. Malamala, she’s the spokesperson, says that by denying the Son of Kong his maternity, we’re, in effect, denying all children their mother. We’re not only undermining the maternal role in a child’s co-nurturing, we could cause psychological damage to children and even adults who watch the movie and have actually experienced or even only feared childhood abandonment. Like flashbacks.” Allison picks up her loose cigarette and jams it back between her lips. “What you’ve done,” she says, “is unite feminists and motherists. Quite an accomplishment. Nobel Prize caliber.”

 

“What do they want?” I ask. Suddenly, every limb feels leaden, as if I’m pinned to my seat in a space vehicle accelerating to escape velocity.

 

“Creative options? Acknowledge the baby ape’s maternity. Title change to The Son of Kongs, maybe, as in Mr. and Mrs. Or explain that missing Mommy. Something that makes her sympathetic, of course. Or make the movie involve the Mom thematically.”

 

“Or baby boy’s attachment to her– his grieving over his dead father complicated by the Oedipal magnetism of his recently remarried Mom.”

 

“Remarried?” Allison struggles to squint. New veins thread the whites of her eyes.

 

“To Carl Denham– the promoter who started the whole mess– and baby Kong is despondent–and vengeful. A psychological wreck. They want creative? I’ll give them a god-damned monkey Hamlet!

 

Allison is silent. She purses her lips, and the cigarette sticks out at me like an accusing finger. “This is serious,” she says.

 

I sigh. “Okay. A motherhood group supported by women’s rights activists. Who else hates me?”

 

“Only the group of Islanders who are calling you a racist.”

 

“What?” It would be a pleasure to do nothing but watch the scenery. It reminds me of Honolulu, but it’s wilder. Nothing is cultivated. The flora cut by the road is profuse, tangled, and mean. Lush, but not luxuriant. Inland there are hills, but no mountains. Where’s Carl, I wonder, and glance out the limo’s rear window. All I see is the gray road snaking back to nowhere through the over and undergrowth. From above the cerulean sky flattens us like a cover slip over a microscopic specimen. Occasionally, the deep blue Pacific breaks into view through the shore side vegetation. There’s a shadow on the waves– maybe it’s Venus surfing in on her oyster shell to remind me of what a sexist bastard I am.

 

And now I’m a racist too?

 

“The word’s out that you’re not intending to use locals in the film. I couldn’t squelch it.”

 

“So now I have to apologize for being faithful to the original? These people should understand about art. Don’t they remember Gauguin? Hell, we’ll give their Island Marlon Brando the part of Charlie the cook. Charlie’s Chinese.” An ache swells in my head like the Devil’s fetus. I’m talking and listening, but my eye has caught that shadow on Pacific again. It might be something large swimming just below the surface. Just before the foliage again interrupts my view, I see it’s an empty military landing craft retreating with the tide.

 

“I’m afraid they won’t be so easy to appease–” I receive Allison’s voice as if through cheap headphones. “Raymond— Raymond– your monkey’s white. Not only do they want representation in the film, they have a problem with the monkey’s whiteness–”

 

“He’s not a monkey, god-dammit, he’s a gorilla!” But I’m wishing I hadn’t lost that landing craft–

 

The newsreel again.

 

Every instinct screams at my beached father to retreat, to turn to the sea like a newly hatched turtle. Does he envision, as I do, a gull’s bill scissoring through a soft shell or severing a flipper with a snip? His raging nerves deafen my father to the enemy’s bullets, but he feels their concussion as they split the air.

 

 

Fear drives him forward. He struggles past a leg lying on the beach. It wears a familiar boot, and the khaki cloth swaddling its shin is the color of his uniform. Its stump glistens like raw steak. It lies toe up, as if it’s the only visible limb of a sleeping ghost. My father lumbers by into the jungle, but the leg hangs in his mind, kicking away all thoughts but one:

 

Has the enemy seen anything like the golden hair of his girl back home? Her face hovering above his bare chest, her curtain of hair descending like cool sunshine against his skin.

 

The buzz of voices. Allison’s and my own. Arguing out of reflex. “–the economy!” I’m shouting. “What do they do here, export coconuts?”

 

“Tourism. They’re very poor.”

 

“Well, Son of Kong will change that.” Our hotel, the only building in sight, squats on the horizon. “They’ll get a location credit. HBO will do a ‘Making of–‘ here. The studio will set up a Kong museum in town. I see a theme park–”

 

“They want their own people to be in a movie made on their island,” Allison says. “They’re funny that way. Territorial.”

 

My head still aches. Does everyone have such trouble being welcomed? “What about preserving the integrity of the original? And do they care about putting African American actors out of work?” I wrench my neck around and peer down the serpentine road. The foliage pours behind us– the fluid palms wave and bow like sea weed in the creamy wind. From a distant fold in the verdure my boy’s cab emerges. As I picture Carl hugging his white monkey and gazing at the tropical sky, our limo brakes to an abrupt halt. Allison’s clipboard skitters off the seat. She ignores it, her attention riveted to whatever she sees straight ahead through the windshield.

 

“Damn,” she mutters. We’ve reached a semi-circular drive along which huge flags atop fifty foot poles snap in colorful international array all the way to the hotel entrance. But our path is blocked by a mob of a hundred or so placard toting Islanders.

 

“Pull up to them slowly,” Allison tells the driver. “You’ll have to talk to somebody, Ray.” She’s nervous, and her eyes bulge dangerously. We coast toward the crowd, and the bodies part to either side like floating flower petals. The protesters, male and female, wear tank tops and T shirts, shorts or skirts printed in bright floral patterns. Most of them hold their signs lazily, as if they’re umbrellas on a sunny day or rifles on safety. They’re so relaxed I begin to wonder if I’ve mistaken the purpose of their assembly. Until I read their signs.

 

“KONG GO HOME” many state in succinct protest, though there are others, longer and more puzzling. “SON OF KONG AIN’T NO MAMA’S BOY” one reads. This is hoisted suddenly by a slender Island woman in a sleeveless orange dress ornamented with an elaborate gilt design. The sign she totes like a glittering statuette no doubt alludes to Kiko’s lack of a mother. Her gesture must have been a signal, because as her placard rises the others sprout in response.

 

A short, thick fellow wearing black glasses, a Fu Manchu, and a thin braid about a yard long waves a cryptic sign overhead in a beefy arm: “WE ARE FIT TO BE TRAMPLED!” His grin gleams white against his butterscotch skin. So do the grins of the woman in the bright dress and the rest of the revitalized demonstrators. Maybe they’re not really upset, I think. Maybe it’s all a joke.

 

“They look happy to see us,” I whisper to Allison as we drive through them. Then we get close to the bearer of the “TRAMPLED” sign, and I understand it. It means the Islanders consider themselves good enough to have a giant ape grind them face down into the humid soil of their homeland. I look again at the smiles of those who crowd the limo– and I see how badly I was mistaken. The lips of these folk shrink away from teeth bared in anger. A glow burns deep in their dark eyes like the red hot coals of a barbecue pit. But it looks like they’re smiling.

 

“See, for Christ’s sake,” I mutter, “Look at those faces– that’s why I can’t use them. From a distance they look like they’re laughing.”

 

“Do more close ups–” Allison whispers back.

 

There are thumps. At first I think the limo has run into the protesters, but then I realize that they’re slapping the car, paddling as it passes as if we’re fraternity pledges. Allison and I scrunch down in our seats as the thuds crescendo. We are surrounded by flowered torsos. Now and then a face squints for us through the tinted glass. I remember that Carl’s somewhere behind. Shrunken defensively, I swivel necklessly like Quasi Moto to peek out back. The rear window is covered by a mosaic of hands. From those palms I could read their futures, if I had the art. My concern for Carl tugs at my focus.

 

Color drains from the picture, and I’m watching as my father crouches before me in the jungle. His eyes are wide with fear. His hand strangles his rifle. What act of bravery can I imagine for him? These eyes, haunted yet hunting, sweep the foliage until they meet mine. My heart pounds as I wait for the snap of recognition.

 

Allison and I, little Carl and a very frightened Greta are surrounded. Hotel security escorted us just short of the hotel doors, four burly guys who look like wrestlers and flexed their Pacific Island muscles while the crowd waved its placards and chanted, at a surprisingly high pitch: “KONG-OH, KONG-OH, KONG-OH!” (Kong, go?) But the guards melted away from us like pig fat on a spit when confronted with the paparazzi and media jackals that block the entrance. I recognize some of the scavengers poised for attack with microphones and cameras. These are not mere locals. They represent tabloids and major news syndicates– the U. S. of A.– Hollywood. I turn a desperate eye to Allison, and she shakes her head.

 

“Not me,” she frowns. “Try one of them.” She bobs her knot of hair toward the demonstrators.

 

Greta hugs herself inside a sweater, as if it’s sleeting down her collar. Her eyes are downcast, but her upper lip curls contemptuously in my direction. Carl, his wild hair leaping like a black flame, stands beside his nanny, unprotected and waiting. His albino monkey dangles from his hand. I catch my son’s eye and pat my thigh, and he trots over, smiling up at me. His tongue pokes through the gap where he’s lost a front tooth. His eyes flutter eagerly. I place my hand on his head and collect him against my hip. The crowd surges like an ocean at our backs. “KONG-OH, KONG-OH, KONG-OH!” The media fiends roil before us like a nest of hornets.

 

“Hide that thing,” Allison hisses. I think for a second she means Carl. Then I realize her popping eyes have locked upon the white monkey doll. She’s not wild about my son, though she’s never said so. She knows he thinks she’s “thcary.” His lisp only surfaces in critical moments of emotional certainty.

 

The jungle is grim in black and white, depthless like a bas-relief. My father lurches desperately through, clutching his rifle. He’s lost his helmet and backpack. Dad’s in full retreat. He’s discovered that there’s only a single enemy, whose pursuing tread shakes my vision.

 

Papa Kong.

 

There’s music now, a full orchestra, staccato strings hurrying Dad along. He hesitates, casting a glance over his shoulder, and the orchestra pauses. Another thunderous step! My father resumes his retreat to fresh music, ducking under a creeper, sweeping a fern from his path with the rifle he totes like a relay baton. Sometimes victory is survival and courage is the safety of a dream. And both my father and the beast have a golden girl on their minds.

 

Until this project my films have created terror in the civilized landscapes of cities and suburbs. Deranged killers of my creation infiltrated our children’s schools, summer camps, and malls. But it’s in the jungle that my daddy runs from the father of my newest film’s star.

 

The hotel looms above us like the Titanic’s iceberg. I imagine that its submerged bulk has torn a hole in our hull, and we’re sinking. Already we’re listing badly. I’m losing my balance. The protesters surround our little group, from which Greta has defected, on three sides. The nanny now stands among the reporters, who squirm about her like nursing puppies.

 

Something’s happening here–a convulsive pulse in my leg. Carl’s got an arm locked around my thigh like a tourniquet. He’s sobbing and reaching toward Allison, who snarls at him and brandishes her teeth. She’s crushing the monkey doll her flat chest, trying to cover it up with her thin arms.

 

“Damn, Allison,” I sigh through a tense grin. The last thing I need is a scene among the Islanders. I sift through their faces, hoping for a sign of mercy “Come on, give the kid his doll.” The protesters have stopped their chant and stand silently, watching, as do the reporters, who no longer buzz about Greta.

 

“Son of Kong, how do you do?”

 

I jerk my head around so fast nerves and muscles pop. It’s the woman in the orange and gold dress. But she’s not talking to me. She’s bent over my son. Her black hair sweeps over his shoulders like a magician’s cape, and he disappears for a second. The cape lifts, and she’s shaking his hand, and he’s staring at her wide-eyed. Still stooping to my son and clasping his hand, she glances up, past me, and her black eyes threaten Allison like hot pistol barrels. My assistant clutches the white doll with anemic ferocity.

 

“Wicked thing,” the Island woman says. “Give the boy back his monkey!” If such a thing is possible, she’s got a voice like an angry doe–Bambi’s mother on the subject of “man.” My hands ache to slide down the curves of her dress–to test her reality.

 

Allison hesitates a second, shrugs, and tosses me the doll, which I catch and give to my son as my assistant stalks to the knot of reporters. Carl lifts it to his damp cheek and rests his head upon it.

 

“Poor, poor motherless thing.” The Island woman rises from my boy’s side, and her eyelids lift, her eyes blooming like black satin flowers. Does she mean the monkey or my son?

 

“You screwin’ up big time,” a sharp voice beside me bleats. It’s the squat Fu Manchued Islander with the black glasses and whiplike braid. His biceps swell like hams out of the short sleeves of his flowered shirt. “Boss,” he says, “we didn’t need the stinking Bounty . We didn’t need your god-damned Melville, ‘the man who lived with the cannibals.'” His buffalo gut bounces with agitation. “Gauguin, what’s he do for us? Steal our soul. Hundred years later, somebody else makes a million bucks. Not us. We got nothing but paradise. ‘Dites-moi pourquoi,’ boss. Why you always running here? Why don’t you go bother some Eskimos?” His massive arms cross emphatically over his belly and his mustache drags his lips into a frown. If I could penetrate his dark glasses and make eye contact, I might stop shaking.

 

Carl is giggling. The woman who saved his monkey has lifted it to her face and clucks to it, kissing its eyes. I’m composing poems to her in my mind, and I haven’t written a poem since high school.

 

Helmeted police in jodhpurs and high black boots have arrived. They’re talking to Allison and the reporters. She’s shaking her head, pointing and shrugging her shoulders as if she trying to reconstruct a traffic accident.

 

My hand’s on my forehead. Beneath it strange notions flop like a netfull of frantic fish. I wear neither a uniform nor flowered shirt, I remind myself. I am a professional– a businessman and an artist in a white suit.

 

“Listen, Mr.–” I address the bulky Islander.

 

“Pah-pui,” he challenges.

 

“Pah-pooey. Have you thought over the importance of The Son of Kong to the island? Economically?” I nod toward my son. My boy cradles his monkey, rocking it back and forth with a placid smile. A strange feeling rises in my chest like a giant champagne bubble, floats into my head and pops, wetting the inside of my skull, misting my eyes. “Pah-pui,” I sniff–this time the name sounds right–“Why, just those monkey dolls alone. It’ll cost more to make them here, but can you imagine? Genuine Kiko dolls made right on the island of his birth! Nobody in the world will mention Son of Kong without thinking of Tallulo Lillo.”

 

“Screw the monkey,” Pah-pui grunts like a Buddha burping. “You need Island folk. We come with the island. That’s the deal. We want to be in the movie!” The faces around us smear together like a fading blood stain.

 

I shake my head. Allison gestures among police and reporters at the edge of my vision, but I’m separated from them. The woman in the orange and gold dress doesn’t leave my son. Still cradling his monkey, he leans against her, and her hands rest on his shoulders, her pink nails like the tiny petals of a flower. My heart is melting as I listen to myself.

 

“I can’t help it. It’s an artistic thing. I want to be faithful to the original Son. What can I tell you? The natives on Kong’s Island have to be black. You seem to be wonderful people, you Islanders. I’m sure you are, but it hurts me to say you just don’t look right.”

 

Pah-pui’s snorting like a bull. If my brain weren’t spinning, I’d probably be afraid for my life. “We don’t look right?” I imagine his eyes sizzling like volcanic craters behind his dark glasses. “You selling us a white god-damned monkey, and we don’t look right?” A froth of saliva collects at the corners of his mouth.

 

“Motherless white monkey,” croons the woman with my son in her mama Bambi voice. She’s lost one hand in Carl’s wild hair and her other has slid down his chest and pets Kiko. Her eyes lift to mine, and I feel the roots of their blossoms taking hold in my soul.

 

Suddenly I’m staggered by a burst of brightness. The Pacific sun has slid from behind the glacial hotel and stuns me with light. But by some trick of staging, only I’m touched. The mass of Islanders, the woman with my son, Pah-pui, Allison, the police and reporters, darken into silhouettes.

 

I squint into the shadows from my blazing circle. My hand forms a useless salute in my effort to shield my eyes. From somewhere distant I hear the drums that throbbed like a pulse as I neared the island just this very dawn: “BA-GA-BOOM, BA-GA- BOOM, BA-GA-BOOM.”

 

“God-thilla,” a small voice declares. It’s the child clutching the monkey. “God-thilla ate the Japaneeth.”

 

And in my mind’s eye, as broad as the silver screen, I see them–who could look more abject, more terrified, their taffy faces pulled into expressions of horror, eyes popped out of their heads, suspended like black marbles, staring ever upward, one man’s lifted arm pointing a finger as if to christen some horrifying compass point in a new world of unimaginable misery and defeat.

 

“Godzilla!” the figure on the screen shouts, and with that pronouncement departs forever the sheltered innocence of the human heart.

 

“God-thilla,” my son repeats, and he is himself illuminated like an angel by the moving sun. Carl’s hand rises to his cheek with wonder and humility.

 

I sigh. And nod. Carl is right. Nothing could be clearer. Black faces, yellow faces, brown faces, white faces, male and female faces, mentally and physically challenged faces–all can quiver and quake in empathetic harmony at the mighty step of Kong. Only the faceless know no fear.

 

My Son of Kong will feature native Tallulo Lillons–the gems of the Halloween Islands. Kiko will have a mother. My conception of the film turns in my head like a huge glob of primordial clay on a potter’s wheel as broad as heaven, and the possibilities leave me dizzy and breathless. Maybe my movie won’t have a villain. Maybe Kong’s Island won’t collapse into the sea.

 

The sun shifts. I’m bathed in the fluid shade of a giant, flapping flag, but Carl and his monkey shine like the brightest stars in the universe.

 

The final scene of The Son of Kong, the original, runs through my mind for the thousandth time, but, even though it’s in black and white, the picture is so clear it’s a whole new experience.

 

The promoter who exploited King Kong to death has returned to the monster’s island. He discovers, pities, and befriends the baby giant ape his selfish acts had orphaned. In a flimsy act of atonement, he bandages a finger the beast wounds protecting him.

 

Then a cataclysmic earthquake ensues, and Kong’s Island, untouched by geologic and evolutionary change for millions of years, suddenly melts into the sea like wet clay. All the terrors of the jungle are washed away. Baby Kong, his foot trapped in a fissure, catches up the promoter, who I see now is my father, or someone very like him, and hoists him high overhead. The raging sea rises. The water reaches Baby Kong’s chest. Passes his chin. Soon the bandaged hand is all that’s left of little Kong. It holds my wriggling and kicking father out of the sea, finally releasing him when the rescuing rowboat, containing the kindly captain and, yes, another golden girl, crawls beneath. This solitary hand stays open in a sort of farewell wave. The dying fingers spread, and the bandage comes loose, dragged down like a waterlogged flag as the sea swallows the noble baby.

 

A smooth trunk curves under my hand as I smile up into the spreading palm leaves. Clinging beneath them a hundred feet over my head are two black coconuts. Towards these shimmies a boy in a fawn-colored monkey suit. It is Halloween on the Halloween Islands, and why not a home-made Kiko costume for my son? What mistaken faith had insisted that the baby ape be white?

 

Three months into production on Tallulo Lillo, and my boy climbs like a native. He is a great favorite among the Islanders. My own skill at climbing has come more slowly, but I’ve shed much of my discomfort with heights.

 

“Up you go, Papa Kong,” calls Pah-pui. He stands beside a trailer, his bare belly hanging like globe over a grass skirt. Feathers are banded about his head, wrist, and ankles. A necklace of shark teeth and shells lies upon his chest. A guileless wisdom rests in his dark, unshaded eyes. Make up hides the dragon tattoo on his shoulder. He plays an island chief in the movie. Right now he holds a styrofoam cup of coffee.

 

During today’s shooting Pah-pui and his tribe of nearly naked Islanders will run in terror from a void–the vacant space that computer imaging will replace with the righteously indignant figure of Kiko’s giant mother. She will crush a few huts but harm nothing living in her fretful search for her son.

 

My boy chirps happily above, and my legs and arms tighten around the tree. I rise toward him in confident, incremental rhythm. This morning I feel weightless. The studio is delighted with my revised approach to the project. Our family film is slated for release in December of next year. Every child in the world will own a Kiko doll. And a Mama Kong. Though sold separately, they can be velcroed together.

 

From below, a sudden sound, the cheer of a crowd, swells upward. I am only yards from my Carl. I can almost touch his furry leg. The cheer rises like a warm cloud, a pillow that would catch me if I slipped. I gape downward. The jungle spreads beneath me like the thick green coat of some measureless creature, its limits defined only by the ink blue of the Pacific and the lighter blue of the sky.

 

It’s the costumed tribe of Islanders who cheer me, Pah-pui’s plumed figure standing out like a rooster. From this height the air is thickly perfumed by the flora, and I submit to a vertiginous euphoria. The cameras, the booms, the extra lights, the platforms and scaffolding, the trucks and carts and trailers flown in from the States, the catering tent–all the artificial evidence of our production, toylike to begin with from this height–dissolve into the jungle. What I see from my palm tree as I rest for a moment upon my cushion of cheers and fragrance are the thatched roofs Mama Kong will appear to trample. I wave to my people and the chorus lifts, and the air grows sweeter. And I’m laughing, just like my boy.

 

I spy Blanche Malamala, the Island woman who rescued Kiko for my son. Emerging from the crowd beside Pah-pui, she stands golden in the near nudity of her brief native costume. I have asked the computer imaging people to endow Mama Kong with the naturally imperious grace of Blanche’s movements. I have seen the essence of her beauty extracted to a fluid 3-D outline on a computer monitor, seen her metamorphosed into the figure of the mother ape, and I have come to adore the creature.

 

Without fear I hang above the island, waving, Carl a pleasant thought above my head, and I’m not sure I can ever leave.

 

And do I love, do I have enough love for it all, I wonder.