IN & OZ: A Novel (6 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

That night, Mechanic was too excited to sleep. Standing in the alley behind his garage, he understood the emotional release Photographer must have felt laying eyes on the radiator where his windshield used to be and recognizing the presence of a kindred spirit. If he and her could work together, he saw, more clearly than he had ever seen anything in his life, then he was sure they could come up with some way to make everyone not only be able to see what he had seen, but want to see it—as badly as he wanted her to—he wanted her—he wanted—

He bent back and let out a howl. This set off his dogs within the garage, and laughing he unlatched the door. The dogs burst out, ramming him to the ground with the force of an exploding acetylene tank. Before their teeth could break skin, though, they recognized his smell and he instead found himself enveloped in licking tongues. He struggled back to his feet, simultaneously ruffling their fur, and kneeing the jumping dogs in the chest to keep them from knocking him down again. The exuberance of the happy dogs forced him to push them away harder, then punch them in the mouths. They continued to leap on him, and he continued to punch them till knuckles and mouths bleeding, he yelled, “Go on! Get out of here!” As if too shocked by their good fortune to move, the dogs needed a kick before they yelped, then tore off down the alley, barking ecstatically, and snapping at each other.

In bed, his mind raced with wild visions of all the fabulous devices he and Designer could invent together: automobiles with clear bodies so people could see the engines inside, and engines with clear blocks so people could see their pistons derricking up and down. Their autos would be like anatomical models on wheels: The Visible Man and also The Visible Woman, with red oil coursing through their veins, a colon of pink exhaust. On through the night he revised their dreams, the distant yapping of the dogs followed by the occasional clatter of garbage cans serenading him till tired and happy he fell asleep.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

    
Poetry in OZ, which is generally sold in drugstores, is generally printed on cardboard that can be folded to fit in envelopes.

In the morning, Designer arrived at her desk and began to sketch the idea she’d gotten driving through the wind at the top of the toll bridge she had to cross to get home. But every drawing she began resembled a pipe organ on wheels. She’d tear off a new page, then begin again, the idea whistling just beyond reach, just illusive enough to escape her crayon. . . .

    
In general, poetry is not sold in IN.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Nights, Mechanic’s furnace roared, its sides pulsing with a dark, blood-red heat. Each slam of the drop-forge it powered was another rhyme in the visual sonnet he was composing for her—
Wham! Wham!
—hammering crankcase bearings, and piston rods into pressed-flowers of themselves. As he worked, the enormous flywheel of his forge slowly rotated, its massive millstone of a counterweight adding enough danger to the garage to command respect from anyone for it and its unforgiving brute power, its indifference to whether it was crushing metal or bone.

Chewing a stump of jerky during a break, he considered the marks he already bore: a white, crescent-moon of a scar on one thumb from a brush against a hot manifold; skinned knuckles from the times a wrench he had been pushing hard against slipped its nut, a mechanic’s occupation writing itself on his body, as it had on his father’s—just as the fate of his watch-dogs had been determined by their powerful bodies and jaws, just as the petite size of Designer’s dog afforded it a place in her lap. And yet, he knew, spotting his broken hammer, his was a fate past, not future, and he smiled at the thought of the empty dog cage outside, even if his livelihood as a mechanic seemed to have left with them.

Initially, the dwindling customers made him doubt himself as a mechanic—could all of those car owners be wrong? He’d break out in an existential sweat trying to come up with an answer. For if he wasn’t a mechanic, what was he? Like those hermits who had too much time on their hands for thinking about God, he might have lost his mind completely if he hadn’t had Photographer there to convince him that the deeper he was within himself as a mechanic, the fewer people there would be who would want him to work on their cars: “What else did you expect?”

Not this, he admitted to himself once alone again. Not the continual fighting with customers. Seeing one after another desert him was too much like déjà vu of the solitude he was in after his parents died. Especially the day he repaired the car of an old friend of his father’s: a friend that his father had known since the days when they worked in the plant together, long before Mechanic’s father had become a mechanic; a friend so old and so much like family that Mechanic’s father had worked on this friend’s Standard Auto for years for free, keeping a car running that the two of them had actually helped build as young men doing their bit as it went down the line and whose simple mechanisms Mechanic had continued to keep running ever since his father died—a link between them. When this old family friend had come around to pick up his vehicle after the last repair, though, he had stopped abruptly in the bay door of the garage, the two after-work cold-ones he’d brought by to ease reminiscing falling from his hands and shattering on the concrete floor of the garage as he stared at his car standing on end and sledge hammered into the shape of an Urn. Slowly, his eyes welled with tears. His head hung there with the limpness of a dead man walking. Then he turned and left without saying a word, too choked up to speak, and after he was gone, Mechanic slumped down onto his toolbox and wept.

He wept for his father and his father’s friend, mourning the time when they were strapping young cock-o-the-walks in the plant. He wept for himself—for an innocent time when he was just a boy and had borrowed his father’s tools to fix his own bicycle for the very first time. How happy he’d been! How proudly they had beamed at him!

His mood blackened. There was no going back. Even if he wanted to. He couldn’t not know what he knew, no matter how badly he wished it. And knowing what he knew, he knew he could never wish it. No, not him. Not ever again.

So he concluded one day, trying to square his inner being with the loss of his outer business, If Thomas Alva Edison was a mechanic, he didn’t want to be a mechanic. If Archimedes was a mechanic, he didn’t want to be a mechanic. If Da Vinci was a mechanic, he thought, he’d give it a chance. But he didn’t need “customers” to do so—not if, as Photographer claimed, it was looking that made the photographer, or dancing the dancer.

Without giving it any more thought, he got up one morning, put on his mechanic’s boots, and his mechanic’s uniform, but instead of opening his shop, he walked past the empty dog pen, walked past the oil stains in the empty driveway where customers once lined up with their foul plugs, and blown gaskets. He got behind his own car and pushed it out onto the road, signaled for a U-turn, then began the long, arduous climb up the grade that became the bridge he lived beneath where up-above he took a job as a tollbooth attendant.

If he could no longer repair cars, truly repair them and not just make offending parts invisible, then he could at least appreciate them, and do his own work, the work no one would pay him to do, on his own time, as poets and philosophers have always done. Rather than participate in what had become for him unbearable, he would stand in a tiny booth at the middle of the bridge that connected the flatland of IN with the floating world of OZ, midway between earth and sky, collecting tolls from the passing motorists while the planets aligned, and perhaps, the one audience who mattered the most came out to meet him halfway. And so he did, seeing her hand in every sensuous fender, every perky headlamp and all the quarter panels, door trim and the rest that ebbed, then flowed through his lane.

    
In IN, Desire was as simple as stripes on a bar code, Fulfillment as baroque as a loan.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Composers who insist upon working within the audio spectrum,” Composer said, “would do well to study that most perfect of concert instruments, the slide whistle.” He, Mechanic, and Designer, but not Photographer, Photographer having refused to come along, were in one of the many industrial taverns of IN, smoking standard cigarettes, and drinking standard alcohol that tasted to Mechanic like antifreeze. He himself would have never chosen this tavern, which only went by the name DRINK BOOZE. Especially not as a place to meet such a non-standard woman as Designer. But the dirtier the bar, the more directly its income was tied to the factory payroll, the more Composer and Photographer seemed to like it. He had always dismissed this aspect of their taste as just another of the many things he didn’t understand about them. But it became especially baffling when he learned that Composer and Photographer had both been born in OZ and educated in OZ and still had the money to live in OZ, their families made up of wealthy OZ professors and business people, even doctors and judges—a fact he should have realized from the first time they shook hands, their hands being as soft as the foam rubber of luxury-car seats. Unlike his own standard mechanic’s hands. Or the hands of his mechanic father. Or the hands of his mother who had to carry heavy pots of cabbage every day of her life. Or, come to think of it, the hands of everyone he had ever known growing up in IN. This legacy of hands was why he, but neither of them, was concerned about finding actual work. That is, the kind of work that was dull and/or dirty and/or dangerous and/or demeaning and so no one wanted to do and would therefore pay to have done for them, unlike making music or art—what they also called their “work.” But it didn’t explain why they had chosen to live in IN, while he, if he had ever thought of it which he never did, it being such an impossible thing to think, would have liked to live in OZ.

“Listening to the slide whistle,” Composer was saying, “we understand how illusory are the borders of any single ‘note.’ We understand how it is only through an appeal to the most artificial of conventions, the musical score, the constraints of hearing, that the composer of the audio spectrum makes us come to believe in this sleight-of-hand called music.” He paused to take a slow drag on his cigarette, letting the smoke whistle out. “A-sharp or B-flat?”

Mechanic couldn’t help but notice how Designer hung on his words. Dressed down in a faux work shirt tailored to show off her figure, her hair was pulled back under a matching stoker’s cap. It accentuated the clean design of her face—square chin and a model’s cheekbones. Stealing glances at her foreign-import proportions, he could distinguish through her dungarees the outline of leggy legs, as sleek and elegant as her own designs. One leg dangling over the other, they ended in shoes designed to resemble work boots only not so much that it wouldn’t be obvious that she didn’t actually “work” (in the way the word was used in IN); her faux work boots were too petite to contain the steel reinforcing that real boots needed to protect toes from being crushed by a dropped beam. Even if her work shirt had had her name stitched over its pocket like a real work shirt instead of the “Grrrr-l” that was actually embroidered there, even if she wore greasy coveralls, the bar patrons gawking at her could have told she wasn’t from IN, Mechanic knew, Mechanic being one of them.

He considered his own pinstriped mechanic’s coveralls. Then he considered the pipe-fitter’s jacket and turtleneck Composer wore. Though they both bought their clothes at the same resale and vintage boutiques of gas-station attendant uniforms and high-voltage-proof hip-waders, the work shirts that Mechanic wore looked like work shirts, while Composer’s work shirts somehow came off as fashion. Why? Mechanic wondered, looking from the lifetime of premium, not standard, health benefits written in the luster of Designer’s blonde hair, to the straightness and whiteness of Composer’s teeth, to both of their creamy-smooth skins: skin that looked perpetually new unlike repainted hoods and fenders that always showed a trace, especially when the light was right, of earlier crumples that could never be hammered out completely.