a porcupine.
Something almost nobody knew about Saint Sebastian, incidentally, since painters liked to put so many arrows into him, was that he survived the incident. He actually got well.
He walked around Rome praising Christianity and bad-mouthing the Emperor, so he was sentenced to death a second time. He was beaten to death by rods.
And so on.
And Bonnie MacMahon told Beatrice and Karabekian that Mary Alice’s father, who was a member of the Parole Board out at Shepherdstown, had taught Mary Alice to swim when she was eight months old, and that he had made her swim at least four hours a day, every day, since she was three.
Rabo Karabekian thought this over, and then he said loudly, so a lot of people could hear him, “What kind of a man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor?”
• • •
And now comes the spiritual climax of this book, for it is at this point that I, the author, am suddenly transformed by what I have done so far. This is why I had gone to Midland City: to be born again. And Chaos announced that it was about to give birth to a new me by putting these words in the mouth of Rabo Karabekian: “What kind of a man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor?”
Such a small remark was able to have such thundering consequences because the spiritual matrix of the cocktail lounge was in what I choose to call a pre-earthquake condition. Terrific forces were at work on our souls, but they could do no work, because they balanced one another so nicely.
But then a grain of sand crumbled. One force had a sudden advantage over another, and spiritual continents began to shrug and heave.
One force, surely, was the lust for money which infested so many people in the cocktail lounge. They knew what Rabo Karabekian had been paid for his painting, and they wanted fifty thousand dollars, too. They could have a lot of fan with fifty thousand dollars, or so they believed. But they had to earn money the hard way, just a few dollars at a time, instead. It wasn’t right.
Another force was the fear in these same people that their lives might be ridiculous, that their entire city might be ridiculous. Now the worst had happened: Mary Alice Miller, the one thing about their city which they had supposed was ridicule-proof had just been lazily ridiculed by a man from out-of-town.
And my own pre-earthquake condition must be taken into consideration, too, since I was the one who was being reborn. Nobody else in the cocktail lounge was reborn, as far as I know. The rest got their minds changed, some of them, about the value of modern art.
As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.
I did not expect Rabo Karabekian to rescue me. I had created him, and he was in my opinion a vain and weak and trashy man, no artist at all. But it is Rabo Karabekian who made me the serene Earthling which I am this day.
Listen:
“What kind of a man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor?” he said to Bonnie MacMahon.
Bonnie MacMahon blew up. This was the first time she had blown up since she had come to work in the cocktail lounge. Her voice became as unpleasant as the noise of a handsaw’s cutting galvanized tin. It was loud, too. “Oh yeah?” she said. “Oh yeah?”
Everybody froze. Bunny Hoover stopped playing the piano. Nobody wanted to miss a word.
“You don’t think much of Mary Alice Miller?” she said. “Well, we don’t think much of your painting. I’ve seen better pictures done by a five-year-old.”
Karabekian slid off his barstool so he could face all those enemies standing up. He certainly surprised me. I expected him to retreat in a hail of olives, maraschino cherries and lemon rinds. But he was majestic up there “Listen—” he said so calmly, “I have read the editorial against my painting in your wonderful newspaper. I have read