REBEKAH NAOMI COX:
HOW IT HAPPENED AND WHAT IT WAS
(A TALE OF COMPLETE SURPRISE,
IN THREE ACTS AND AN EPILOG)

By Connor Freff Cochran and Peter S. Beagle

Connor begins the tale. Peter will take his turn, in time...

ACT THE FIRST: Cocoa, Florida (2001) and Pasadena, California (2005)

It starts with a book (The Last Unicorn), a new family computer, and a very little girl — only 13 years old, in fact — who decides that she wants to make some pictures.

But I wasn't around for that part of the story. I only know about it by report. Nor was I around for the next bit, which happened four years later, when the little girl wasn't quite so little any more (except in height). That was when her 28 year-old brother, an actor and singer named Benjamin Cox, decided to travel to California to visit a friend. While there he noticed that the Pasadena Center was host to a gathering called ORC, the One Ring Celebration, an event that would draw in Tolkien fans from all over the world. Ben had known nothing about this ahead of time, but since he was certainly a fan of The Lord of the Rings he decided to check it out. Who knew what he might see there? Who knew what unexpected things might happen?

Who, indeed!

ACT THE SECOND: The Pasadena Center, January 2005.

Enter the Beagle and the Cochran, stage left, lugging boxes. Peter had agreed to attend ORC in order to speak on some panels and sign a bunch of autographs. I'd come along to man Peter's huckster table, make sure books were sold, and gather potential customers for Peter's upcoming projects. We were both unexpectedly frazzled by the second day. Peter, because he was getting a much bigger response from the fans than he had expected (which is not surprising, since he never expects any reaction at all; it's part of his charm). Me, because I'd spent the entire night in the emergency room of Pasadena's Huntington Memorial Hospital, hovering over a friend who had been laid low by salmonella poisoning.

It was at roughly this shining moment of mutual exhaustion that the aforementioned Benjamin walked by. He was shocked and delighted to actually be meeting Peter S. Beagle, author of some of his very favorite books. He introduced himself. He chatted amiably and brightened that corner of the converted underground garage which had been shanghaied into being a makeshift huckster room.

And somewhere in there he said a very smart thing to a very obtuse me.

"You know," he mentioned. "I have this 17 year-old sister who has been doing pictures based on The Last Unicorn. You might like to see them."

God, this is embarrassing. There's no way to tell this without admitting I'm an idiot.

Here's what I said:

"Sure. I'd love to. Any time."

But I didn't mean it. I really didn't mean it. I smiled, and I was polite, but I put this offered information in exactly the portion of my mental filing cabinet that you might expect. After all, I'd seen at least two tons of "relative" art in my professional life, none of it ever any good. (It seems like there's always a point in any design negotiation where the customer tries to knock down the price by saying "I've got this nephew that draws a little..."). And on the face of it, the notion of unicorn-centric fan art from a teenage girl didn't automatically dispose me to change my mind. After all, I'd seen even more mediocre fan art than relative art. So Benjamin had spoken, but though I heard the words, I'd already decided I knew what I was going to see.

ACT THE THIRD: MegaCon, at the Orlando Convention Center, February 2005

They were all standing there. Well, not all of them, but a lot of them: the Cox clan contains a goodly number of siblings. And there was Benjamin in the lead, saying "Remember I mentioned I had a sister who made some Last Unicorn pictures?" And there was younger brother Joseph, coaxing Rebekah forward. And there was Rebekah Naomi herself, offering up a plain blue ring binder. She was impossibly short, impossibly frail-looking, as shy a being as I've ever seen. If I called Central Casting and shouted "I need a junior high school elf, and I need her now!," it would be Rebekah that they'd send.

The binder had pictures in it.

Oh my heaven, did it have pictures in it.

...And now it is time for Peter to take up the tale. I'll be back on the flipside.

[Peter S. Beagle]

I could not conceivably have braced myself for the utterly astonishing gift revealed in Rebekah's illustrations for The Last Unicorn. Working only with a mouse and the cheapest, most basic graphics software bundled with her computer, she has created a harpy and a Red Bull as hatefully terrifying as I meant them to be, so many years ago, (I remember scaring the hell out of myself the afternoon I created the harpy, line by line, in an empty, creaking house in the Santa Cruz hills.) The image of Mia Farrow as Molly Grue — Mia hopes to play the role in a live-action version — is not only accurate but curiously haunting, revealing not only the character's vulnerability but perhaps the actress's own. As for the unicorn herself...

Thirty-seven years' worth of horned horses — hundreds of them, maybe thousands, in oils, watercolors, clay, silver, and God knows how many stuffed ones — and someone's finally gotten it right. Rebekah's unicorn retains the mystery and strangeness that I tried as best I could to describe in the second paragraph of the novel; and later, when her magical spirit has been broken by the Red Bull...

"...and even Molly, who loved her, could
not keep from seeing that a unicorn
is an absurd animal when the shining
has gone out of her..."
 

Rebekah Naomi Cox is, in my experience, the only artist who has ever captured that wondrous absurdity, and I don't know how she did it. She's too young, too shy, surely too inexperienced... and yet the same could fairly have been said of me when I was writing my first novel, A Fine And Private Place, and when I wrote The Last Unicorn, as well. What do I know? Art makes no damn sense. It's just there.

At the last, all I know to say about Rebekah is what I've already said: wherever she goes from here (and I certainly hope to be professionally associated with her work in the future), she's the one who got my unicorn right. Look... and see.

EPILOG THE LAST: Months later, back in California

And there you have it. Exit the Beagle and the Cochran, stage right, awestruck and doing their very best to spread the word. She drew these using a mouse, not a graphics tablet? You aren't kidding me? No, we're not kidding you. This wasn't PhotoShop and Illustrator and Maya and Poser, and she's not really a trained pro in her thirties? No, she's really 17, and she's self-taught, and the only program she used was the graphic tools subset of the $25 photo-cleanup software that came bundled in her family's home computer. Okay, I buy a 17 year-old girl doing the big-eyed unicorn. Those pictures scream grace and femininity. But that Red Bull? That Harpy? The same person did those nightmares? Well...yes.

It's like discovering the Pieta was carved with a brick and a fork.

And so it is. Where Rebekah will go next I have no idea. Talent like this takes its own path: all you can do is help and watch and hope. But if I ever need another lesson in not making assumptions, I'll remember this one...and from here on out the Beagle and the Cochran will be her great fans, and staunch champions.

CLOSE CURTAIN...

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