IN & OZ: A Novel (3 page)

What he thought was a growl gradually became a hissing—what?—laughter? Was the man laughing at his work? Mechanic could feel anger draw him to the fight. Come on, come on, he thought, just waiting for the man to turn on him with his fists. He might have let him have it right there from behind if the man hadn’t been so much more frail than himself: bony shoulders, scrawny neck, a bald spot shining out through a head of long white hair. When the man finally did turn to Mechanic, though, he said, “You, sir, are a genius.”

Mechanic tightened his grip on the hammer.

Wiping pale, blue eyes, the man continued, “All my life I have driven this car without once considering the beauty, and functionality of its radiator, a metal honeycomb tirelessly cooling my auto’s engine in summer, supplying heat to comfort my body in winter. But now I shall never drive again without first appreciating its handiwork, and yours, and all of those whose labor has helped make my locomotion and comfort possible. All my life I have longed for another who would understand, who could understand, the true beauty of art, and the world, instead of those lies and illusions we are expected to live by, and now, having discovered a single honest man, I feel I can die at peace.”

Needless to say, whatever name the force goes by that reunites the salmon with its place of birth, that allows migrating ducks to hold their V; whatever marries sound to moving pictures, or print to page, had also brought together Mechanic and this man. Indeed, even before this meeting, they learned, they had been next-door neighbors, though not in the usual dimension. For this man, a Photographer, lived in a house that doubled as a camera and was built on the highest point of IN, the top of the bridge that sutured IN to OZ, the very bridge that Mechanic lived beneath. Mechanic, for his part, was shocked to learn that someone lived above him. Having spent his entire life under this bridge, hearing the decrescendo of tires as cars slowed to pay the toll that was required at its midpoint, then the crescendo of tires as those cars sped off again, the sound had been a kind of nature to him, the way the rhythmic rush, then hiss of waves must sound to villagers who live out their days beside an ocean. Learning that his sky contained a man couldn’t have been more startling had he been a tourist eating a hot-dog at a bathing beach when Venus rose from its sea.

After these successive shocks—first the shock of seeing clearly the essence of Auto, then the shock of discovering that the sky contained a man, he began to notice a lot of things he never had before. Like the dogs. Whenever a fight broke out between him and a customer, the dogs invariably took his side. That is, they were loyal to him, he saw, though he had never done anything to earn their loyalty, and this realization filled him with memories of his dead parents. As though waking from an emotional hibernation, he began to miss them, then human companionship in general, which he had become estranged from since their burials. When Photographer began dropping by, inviting Mechanic for a drink in one or another of the standard bars that dotted IN, he began to understand that this was what humans did. When Photographer didn’t show up for several days, Mechanic even took the initiative himself, calling on Photographer in his camera-house on the top of the toll bridge, and it felt right. Better than being alone. Seated there, guest-beer in hand, he’d gaze upon the Essence of OZ Building, shimmering mirage-like in the distance as Photographer went on about his own life, and loves, and of course his work.

Once he had been a filmmaker, Photographer said on one of these occasions. But the artificiality of time in films had sickened him, as did the relentless march of film through a projector, always in the same direction, and always moving at a speed that made it impossible for a person to truly see.

“So I started making films that consisted of only one frame,” he said. “But audiences howled, ‘These aren’t films! They’re photographs!’” Photographer spat out the window at the stream of cars passing beneath his house on the roadway of the bridge. “Philistines! Lemmings! Never did they say, this is a
bad
film. Never do they tell you, this is the work of a
bad
mechanic. Am I right? No! Instead they howl this
isn’t
a film! Or this
isn’t
a mechanical repair! Am I right? Am I right?”

Mechanic always felt humbled by Photographer’s learning and ability to seize on the precise essence of a problem.

“So all right,” Photographer continued, “I am but one man. They are the world. Yet rather than acquiesce to the making of what proctologists, accountants, and cheerleaders on Friday-night dates
opined
to be ‘art,’ I gave up films completely and began making photographs. For awhile, I took great joy in looking through the viewfinder, changing the world by the way it was framed. I fell under the spell of framing. Believing as I did at that time that the essence of photography lay in the selection of what was left out, I began to experiment with ever-smaller frames, seeing more by including less until not even a microscope sufficed as lens. Looking through one at a hair on a gnat’s ass—a tree, not the forest, so to speak—I came to see how even this was a forest of atoms. That is, I saw how the photos themselves, the mere flotsam of looking, were what most people wanted in a photograph while the photos were the very thing that arrested looking. So I began to take pictures without any film in the camera, which was finally satisfying, and led to this,” he said, indicating the house around them: a walk-in camera obscura which focused light on a point where Photographer would stand, eyes shut, letting the image that came in through the window that was a lens project itself onto his closed eyelids.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Before coming to work in the Essence of OZ Building, Designer had never really listened to elevator music, so wouldn’t even pretend to the level of connoisseurship shared by co-workers who argued the ornaments of every piece. But now that she found herself exposed to it during most of her waking hours, she felt captivated by it. Or at least captivated by the music that played in the elevator she worked in, which was more ethereal, more—different—than the music she had heard in other elevators.

The tempo changed, catching her off guard again, and as per the game she played against herself during her morning jogs, she turned down the next dirt road, pleasantly surprised to find a Technicolor rainbow over amber waves of grain undulating in the breezeless air.

If she guessed that the tempo would quicken, she thought, picking up her pace to stay with the new pace of the music, it would suddenly stop; if other songs went
da-da-de
, this music would go simply
dada
. So intriguing were its departures that trying to anticipate them became as engrossing to her as soap operas or video games were to others.

It did it again—
Nuts!
—and she took another fork in the road, the waves of grain giving way to an arid, Road-Runner/Coyote terrain, a greeting-card sunrise enflaming spacious skies.

She understood why the self-proclaimed connoisseurs of elevator music she worked with dismissed it as they did, crying out, “This isn’t elevator music!” It
was
different. Still, she had no counter argument. In previous disagreements, she always maintained that while she didn’t know anything about music, she knew what she liked. But this—not even that reason applied to this music. For how could she claim to know what she liked when it demonstrated note by note that a person couldn’t like what they didn’t know?

The sun peeked through a purple mountain’s majesty just as her jog took her by Mt. Rushmore, the gigantic stone heads of once-upon-a-time presidents having been replaced by bas-reliefs of the Excita, Bellvu, K9 and K7—the Company’s four best sellers, cars and trucks that she had designed. Hearing that new, fluid music while seeing the sun glare with the baldness of an interrogation lamp on her old ideas, all set in stone, she couldn’t help but feel as if the music was calling on her to explain. To justify. . . .

Those designs, immortalized in stone for their popularity and sales, were not her best work, she knew. She’d been young when she’d come up with them and now, older, more mature as a designer, the roof lines and trunk profiles she drew carried far more authority, even gravitas, and they showed her earlier designs for what they were: pirouettes on a high-wire by a girl too young and green to know let alone care about any musty burden of design history. Yet the more eloquent her designs became, speaking more while saying less, the fewer the people there were who seemed to get their depth. The fewer the people there were who
could
get it, she feared, an appreciation of her designs increasingly requiring as they did a knowledge of fender history, of the history of roof lines, of the limits and possibilities of sheet-metal bend-radii and injection-mold tensile strength and a million other technical constraints. . . . Though the reviewers in
Auto Times
and other culture magazines loved the layers of her work, though the speeches to stockholders and PR within the company alibied away the downturn on the charts for her models—citing cost-cutting measures, and budgets for billboards and cycles in the grease industry, the aging of their Sports Hero Spokesman, consolidation in container shipping or the movement of other stars—she herself couldn’t silence the tiny voice that whispered from her pillow at night, “Could forty million auto buyers all be wrong?”

Oh What a Beautiful Morning
began playing: the signal that the work day was about to begin and that the roads she’d been jogging down would in a few moments be taken over by cars racing through their test laps. For an instant she had an intimation of waking up as she increasingly did at home, bolting upright in a sweat from a nightmare in which she had been reading her own name on a tombstone. Yet, pulling off the VR helmet to return to the fluorescent lighting and her work-a-day thoughts here in the office, she somehow found solace in this strange elevator music—this music with its synthesizers and discords and who-knows-what that was complex beyond comprehension but could, nevertheless, be felt by someone like her who didn’t know a thing about music. And when she looked beyond her art book on the windowsill and out toward the sun rising dully over the brown stain on the horizon that was IN, she couldn’t help but feel that there was some answer that she wasn’t seeing. Something beyond OZ that she knew nothing about.

    
In OZ, flowers are always delivered hermetically sealed in plastic.

CHAPTER NINE

The gravity that had brought Mechanic and Photographer together continued its tide pull and soon Mechanic was moving within Photographer’s current of friends, including one Composer who had become, like Photographer’s other friends, a friend of Mechanic as well. So, when a tragedy befell Composer, Mechanic didn’t need to be told that he and Photographer would go sit shiva with him, to be there, to help, though there was nothing they could actually do.

They took Mechanic’s car, a large sedan that an irate customer had abandoned after he failed to see why Mechanic had welded its wheels to the roof, and mounted car doors like skis where there used to be wheels. Night falling, security lights with the brightness of arc welders began to wink on above the sheds and backdoors they protected. As Mechanic and Photographer pushed the car through their neighborhood of concrete houses and sludge-compacting plants, its eventide serenity, the evensong of its buzzing security lights was broken only by their grunts of exertion, and the occasional roar of smoke stacks venting fireballs of burning waste gas.

I ASSUME YOU DRIVE EXCITA? said one soot-streaked billboard, a sophisticated woman in a bikini tuxedo splayed across the hood of a new pickup truck.

Looking down was easy in IN; though its streets had no lamps, the number of sheds and backdoors and front doors and barred windows that sported a full-sized streetlight to deter break-ins was so great that it was never dark. But to look up, to see higher than the billboards, or to see where they were going, Mechanic had to shield his eyes, the huge lamps that were intended to be mounted twenty-five feet above the pavement always glaring at eye-level like intense bug zappers that killed the night and its stars. They gave the deserted streets the silvery cast of dead fish, and the color often made Photographer remark that living in IN was like living in an eternal black-and-white photo, an Atget (whatever that was).

It stayed that way until the cramped streets of worker houses and sulfur mills and loading docks and slag heaps and munitions factories began to give way to blocks with huge gaps in them. The outline of a foundation marked where a standard school had recently stood. Other lots were empty except for square silhouettes of the standard houses that had filled them before that neighborhood’s oil refinery blew up, taking the neighborhood with it. This was also the point where the river that snaked through IN had caught fire back when Mechanic was just a kid. Its stagnant water had become such a cocktail of chemical runoff from the industrial plants along its banks that its very nature changed, like those dead, salt-saturated seas that eventually make rocks float, this river having become flammable.

Since he had grown up under a bridge, he had gotten to know most of the firefighters of IN, bridges affording the most convenient spots from which to spray the flaming river with their chemical foams. Some of those original firefighters were now reaching retirement age—the ones who hadn’t been burnt alive in the initial days—and every time Mechanic came across one of those strapping young men—giants in his child’s mind—now graying and frail, having spent their lives fighting the river, he felt a poignant tenderness toward them. Toward every mortal creature.

Years ago they had switched to fire hoses in the hopes that spraying water on the river would have the double benefit of returning it to its mostly aquatic, pre-flammable state, and the plan had mostly worked. Unlike the first weeks when Mechanic and his family had been evacuated to live with other families in an unused civic theater, firefighters now only had to be called out to control the occasional spot blaze. It was considered easy duty so given to those old timers who had been there through the worst.