We entered at the back of the room. At the front, four figures already occupied the elevated dais, behind table microphones and sweating pitchers of ice water. The dais was covered in maroon bunting which matched the acoustic padding of the ballroom’s walls and the thin upholstery of the stackable chairs that were arranged in rows, wall to wall. A crowd of perhaps fifty or sixty sat, attentive and respectful, scratching, coughing, crossing and uncrossing legs, wrinkling papers.
“Good of Abraham to honor us with his presence,” said one of the panelists into his microphone, with heavy sarcasm. It drew a burst of relieved laughter from the audience, then a scattering of applause.
“Up,” egged Francesca, and my father obeyed. She and I took seats at the aisle, Francesca clutching my arm in her excitement.
The moderator, who’d wisecracked at our entry into the room, was a balding, sixtyish man, distinguishable at this distance from Abraham himself primarily by a garish blue ascot. He introduced himself as Sidney Blumlein, formerly art director for Ballantine, and if not exactly Abraham Ebdus’s discoverer then at least his main employer and patron during what he called the crucial first decade of my father’s work. “I’ve also been his apologist for longer than he’d want me to remind you,” Blumlein continued. “I’m not ashamed to say I protected his art from editorial meddling a dozen times, two dozen. And I talked Abe out of refusing his first Hugo.” Another warm chuckle from the crowd. “But truly, it was always an honor.”
The others introduced themselves: first Buddy Green, who blinked through thick glasses and couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, editor of an on-line zine called Ebdus Collector, dedicated to the purchase of the rare original painted boards of my father’s designs. I’d blundered across Green’s Web site a few times, Googling the name Ebdus to search my own archived journalism. Next was R. Fred Vundane, a tiny, withered man in a Vandyke beard and mad-scientist glasses, author of twenty-eight novels, including Neural Circus, the very first for which my father had painted a jacket. Then Paul Pflug, another paperback painter, a fiftyish biker-type, fat in leather pants, with a blond ponytail and eyes concealed by dark wraparounds. Pflug seated himself at the far edge of the dais, leaving an empty chair and unfilled water glass between himself and Vundane.
The tributes and anecdotes weren’t so terribly interesting that I couldn’t mostly study my father and his reactions. I didn’t recall ever seeing him this way, onstage, at a distance, held in a collective gaze. The result was a kind of nakedness I realized now he’d always avoided. Green spoke gushingly in a high whine, claiming Ebdus as the successor in a line of science-fiction illustrators from Virgil Finlay through Richard Powers-names which meant less than nothing to me-and it was evident Abraham took pleasure in it, however masochistically. Vundane spoke with aggrieved vanity-perhaps he yearned for a panel on “The Works of Vundane”-about Ebdus’s deep and uncommon insight into the surrealist nature of his, Vundane’s, writing. And when Pflug’s turn came he reminisced, gruffly, about meeting my father at the beginning of his career, and claimed Abraham’s seriousness, his regard for standards, as an example which had altered the course of his, Pflug’s, career.
Abraham didn’t speak, just nodded as the others alternated on the microphones. But his distaste for whatever it was Vundane and Pflug had accomplished-or failed to-was painfully obvious. For that matter, it was unmistakable that nobody on the dais liked Pflug. I wondered how he’d come to be invited.
“I’ve told this story many times,” said Buddy Green. “I was trying to trace the provenance of the original art for the Belmont Specials-his first seventeen paintings. They weren’t in the hands of any of the major collectors. They weren’t in the hands of any of the minor collectors. Unfortunately, they weren’t in my hands. I kept writing to the Belmont people and they said they didn’t know what I was talking about. I thought they were stonewalling. So, being a little slow on the uptake, it finally occurred to me to ask Abraham. And he explained, like it was no big deal, that he destroyed them. He couldn’t imagine anyone cared.”
Abraham’s eyes scoured the crowd, looking for me, I permitted myself to imagine. I wondered how it felt to hear those called his first seventeen paintings.
“It’s true,” said Sidney Blumlein, with great avuncular gusto. “When I hired him away from Belmont, Abe was systematically destroying the work.”
This drew oohs and aahs, a kind of titillated awe from the crowd.
“This man is the only one your father respects,” whispered Francesca. “None of the others. Not even Zelmo.”
“Zelmo?”
“The chair. I mean, of the whole convention. You’ll meet him at dinner. He’s a very important lawyer.”
“Ah.”
Now the microphone was retaken by Blumlein, whom Francesca had claimed as Abraham’s only friend on the panel. Being moderator, Blumlein took it upon himself to prize open the jaws of the clam-to find a way to force Abraham Ebdus to acknowledge and address his admirers.
“For more than two decades Abe has graced our field, and I do mean graced. All well and good. But at this time of celebration there’s no reason to pussyfoot around the question-he’s done so at a remove. His background isn’t science fiction, and in that he’s an exception from the vast majority of professionals at this gathering, at any gathering in our field. We’re fans, our interests begin in the pulp-magazine tradition, however we might like to hope we’ve elevated it.”
Pflug sneered. Vundane took a pitcher and topped off his untouched glass.
The audience was stilled, silenced from its murmurs of approval and recognition, perhaps less certain now that everything they were hearing fell safely in the vein of an Elk Lodge testimonial dinner.
“Abraham Ebdus, let’s not kid ourselves, had no interest in elevating it. He was looking to make a buck to support his art-what he regarded as his real art. As perhaps some of you, perhaps many of you may know, Abe is a filmmaker, an experimental filmmaker, of terrific seriousness and devotion. This is how he spends his days, when he’s not painting jackets for books. It has nothing to do with science fiction. What’s miraculous-what we’re all here to celebrate-is that being a real artist, one of depth and profundity, Abe brought to the books a visionary intensity that did elevate. That contained beauty and strangeness. Because he couldn’t help himself.”
I saw how well Sidney Blumlein knew my father. He was urging Abraham into the weird light of this roomful of celebrants, baiting him with the possibility of an audience worth addressing. I didn’t know whether I wanted him to succeed.
“This is what, Abe? Only your fifth or sixth time at a convention?”
My father hunched, seeming to wish he could reply with his shoulders. Finally he leaned into the microphone and said, “I haven’t counted.”
“I first dragged you to a LunaCon, in New York, in the early eighties. You weren’t happy.”
“No, it wasn’t to my taste,” said Abraham reluctantly.
The crowd tittered.
“And wouldn’t it be fair to say, Abe, you rarely if ever read the books under your jackets?”
Now a collective gasp.
“Oh, I’ve never done,” said Abraham. “I say it without apology. Mr. Vundane, your book, what was the title?”
“Neural Circus,” supplied R. Fred Vundane, his jaw so clenched it mashed the vowels.
“Yes, Neural Circus. I was always stopped by that title. It seemed, I’m sorry, vaguely distasteful to me. You speak of surrealists-I suppose you mean the poets. It feels a very poor shade of symbolist imagery, actually. Rimbaud, maybe? No, I was asked to envision other worlds, and I did. Any congruence with the work is happenstance.”