The Cat's Pajamas

Far away calm Sebastian drifted on his white cloth boat. Far off some boy choirs chirped.

ON THE FREEWAY, speeding, I guessed.

“I know where we’re going!”

“Shh,” said Sam.

“To where Sebastian Rodriguez jumped.”

“Fell!”

“Fell to his death.”

“Look sharp. We’re almost there.”

“We are! Slow down. Ohmigod. There they are!”

Sam slowed down.

“Pull over,” I said. “God, I must be out of my mind. Look.”

“I am!”

On the freeway overpass bridge there indeed they were.

“Sebastian’s paintings on the gallery walls!”

“Those were photos. These are real.”

And indeed they were, brighter, bigger, phenomenal, mind-blowing, cataclysmic.

“Graffiti,” I said at last.

“But what graffiti,” Sam said, gazing up as at a cathedral’s stained glass.

“Why didn’t you show me these first?”

“You did see them, but with peripheral vision at sixty miles per hour. Now you’ve got them twenty-twenty.”

“But why now?”

“I didn’t want the real to interfere with the crazy mystery. I wanted to give you answers so you could imagine all the lunatic questions.”

“The photos in the gallery, the graffiti up there on the overhang. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

“Half chicken, half egg. The priest Montoya sped under these miracles a month ago, did a shocked double take, and almost braked himself into a road wreck.”

“He was the first art collector of Sebastian’s freeway annunciations and holy revelations?” I guessed.

“Right on! Staring at these Latino-American beauties he spun and ran back for a camera. The resulting blowups were so mind blasting, so eye and soul riveting, Montoya conceived a super master plan. Since most people would snub any freeway graffiti art, why not nail Sebastian’s white-hot bouquets on the gallery walls to burn people’s eyes and inflame their purses? Then, when it was too late to renege, change their minds and ask for their money back, stage the big revelation: ‘If you think these gallery eye-winkers are God-given,’ Montoya cried, ‘fix your eyes on Freeway 101, overpass 89.’ So Montoya hung these windows on burning life as photos and prepared to spring the truth on the critics when they were all safely on board. The problem was—”

“Sebastian fell on the freeway before the show could open?”

“Fell and endangered his reputation.”

“I thought death improved an artist’s chances for celebrity.”

“Some, yes, some, no. Sebastian’s was a special case. Complicated. When Sebastian fell—”