the Interstate, seemed to cry out in pain to Wayne, because he read the message on the side of it phonetically. The message told Wayne that the truck was in agony, as it hauled things from here to there. This was the message, and Wayne said it out loud:
• • •
Here was what was going to happen to Wayne in about four days—because I wanted it to happen to him: He would be picked up and questioned by policemen, because he was behaving suspiciously outside the back gate of Barrytron, Ltd., which was involved in super-secret weapons work. They thought at first that he might be pretending to be stupid and ignorant, that he might, in fact, be a cunning spy for the Communists.
A check of his fingerprints and his wonderful dental work proved that he was who he said he was. But there was still something else he had to explain: What was he doing with a membership card in the Playboy Club of America, made out in the name of Paulo di Capistrano? He had found it in a garbage can in back of the new Holiday Inn.
And so on.
• • •
And it was time now for me to have Rabo Karabekian, the minimalist painter, and Beatrice Keedsler, the novelist, say and do some more stuff for the sake of this book. I did not want to spook them by staring at them as I worked their controls, so I pretended to be absorbed in drawing pictures on my tabletop with a damp fingertip.
I drew the Earthling symbol for nothingness, which was this:
I drew the Earthling symbol for everything, which was this:
Dwayne Hoover and Wayne Hoobler knew the first one, but not the second one. And now I drew a symbol in vanishing mist which was bitterly familiar to Dwayne but not to Wayne. This was it:
And now I drew a symbol whose meaning Dwayne had known for a few years in school, a meaning which had since eluded him. The symbol would have looked like the end of a table in a prison dining hall to Wayne. It represented the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. This ratio could also be expressed as a number, and even as Dwayne and Wayne and Karabekian and Beatrice Keedsler and all the rest of us went about our business, Earthling scientists were monotonously radioing that number into outer space. The idea was to show other inhabited planets, in case they were listening, how intelligent we were. We had tortured circles until they coughed up this symbol of their secret lives:
• • •
And I made an invisible duplicate on my Formica tabletop of a painting by Rabo Karabekian, entitled The Temptation of Saint Anthony. My duplicate was a miniature of the real thing, and mine was not in color, but I had captured the picture’s form and the spirit, too. This is what I drew.
The original was twenty feet wide and sixteen feet high. The field was Hawaiian Avocado, a green wall paint manufactured by the O’Hare Paint and Varnish Company in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. The vertical stripe was dayglo orange reflecting tape. This was the most expensive piece of art, not counting buildings and tombstones, and not counting the statue of Abraham Lincoln in front of the old Nigger high school.
It was a scandal what the painting cost. It was the first purchase for the permanent collection of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts. Fred T. Barry, the Chairman of the Board of Barrytron, Ltd., had coughed up fifty thousand dollars of his own for the picture.
Midland City was outraged. So was I.
• • •
So was Beatrice Keedsler, but she kept her dismay to herself as she sat at the piano bar with Karabekian. Karabekian, who wore a sweatshirt imprinted with the likeness of Beethoven, knew he was surrounded by people who hated him for getting so much money for so little work. He was amused.
Like everybody else in the cocktail lounge, he was softening his brain with alcohol. This was a substance produced by a tiny creature called yeast. Yeast organisms ate sugar and excreted alcohol. They killed themselves by destroying their own environment with yeast shit.
• • •
Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that