IN & OZ: A Novel (7 page)

“Aesthetic decisions have real-world consequences,” Composer said, speaking up to be heard over the argument growing around one of the standard coin-operated pool tables found in all the bars of IN. “By preventing audiences from slipping into the passive, dreamlike trance of listening, by forcing them to instead work for every note with their eyes, they apprehend the constructed nature of music. That is, as they follow one of my scores, they see how there is nothing natural about it—or any music. March music, for example. While our passions are being excited by the rhythms of march music, its stirring melodies of fifes, bugles, and drums, we also absorb, usually unconsciously, how natural it is for there to be a military to play it.”

One of the guys playing pool was a sinewy rat of a sheet-metal worker, sheet-metal workers always having massive forearms from scissoring their shears through tin all day but not the biceps that come from heavy lifting. His partner, the big guy, was a jackhammer operator with a paunch like all jackhammer operators developed to help absorb recoil. It flattened against the pool table when he leaned in to take a shot. The two of them were playing Dunk-a-Drunk 8-Ball, so whoever lost had to chug a shot of standard whiskey. The jackhammer operator was losing. And the more he lost, the drunker he got, the more he lost, the drunker he got, the more he lost & Etc. Every time he threw back another drink, his wiry opponent took the opportunity to chalk a fingertip with one of the blue cubes meant for the cues. Then he would say, “That’s using the noggin,” and stamp a blue dot on the big guy’s ugly forehead.

“Listen,” Composer said. He whistled a single tone. Following his lead, Designer puckered in silent whistle, her lips so wet and full that Mechanic’s limbs weakened. “Is this note high or low?” Composer asked. He answered his own question by shrugging. “Impossible to say, of course, unless we compare it to the previous note. Or the note that will follow. But are those notes high or low? Soon we are comparing them to all sound.” He pushed back the asbestos helmet liner he wore as a beret. “When we do, we see how illusory is the concept of ‘a’ note. There can be no ‘note’ without an absence of sound between other sounds. No downbeat without an upbeat, no beat at all without silence. And so it is with all genres of music and the invisible assumptions that make them possible: No military music without a military. No church music without a history of churches. No. . . .”

The losing pool player wiped his brow and his hand came away a sweaty, blue smear just as he spotted the rat-guy chalking his fingertip for another strike. Like some hulking beast with a nervous system too primitive to immediately register pain, he looked from his blue-streaked hand, to the other player, chalk in hand, then to his own blue hand again. He rubbed more blue chalk from his face, stared at the confirmation. Then he exploded. Rat-man broke for the door but the hulk blocked his escape, stepping into the aisle between the pool table and the standard cigarette machines that lined the wall.

He snapped off the end of his pool cue by hitting it against the table.

Rat-man’s grin vanished. He sprung onto the table, ran its length then leapt for the door. Just as he left his feet, his opponent stabbed him in the stomach with the jagged end of the stick. Women shrieked. He seemed to freeze in mid-air, his disbelieving eyes big as cue balls staring down at the spear protruding from his gut. Clutching it, he collapsed face-up on the table. Other patrons raced to his writhing figure. Some produced box cutters and broken bottles to corner his attacker—heroes in their own movies. But the jackhammer operator didn’t even try to get away. As deflated as the guy he had just let the air out of, he only sank down to the bench normally used by players waiting their turn. He stared at his shoes with that blank expression Mechanic had seen plenty of times on the faces of players who had lost more gambling than they could afford. Before him, others pinned the screaming, sheet-metal worker to the pool table, holding him by the ankles and shoulders so he couldn’t make the bleeding worse by pulling out the cue.

The onlookers grew so dense around him that soon Mechanic couldn’t see anything but the handle of the pool cue, swaying reed-like above their heads with the rhythm of labored breathing. “Keep it together,” someone encouraged. There was a pitiful moan. “Be cool, man!” others advised. “The ambulance is coming!”

As did most of the others in the bar, Mechanic, Designer and Composer sat silently in their booth, taken out of time by the commotion of the fight, then the tenseness of the wait, by the spectacle of first the police arriving—
To Control & Punish
, said the reflective lettering on their jackets—then finally the ambulance. Paramedics in blue coveralls sauntered in carrying toolboxes like the mechanics they were: mechanics who dealt with body fluids instead of radiator leaks even if one of their toolboxes was empty, an ice-chest, as everyone knew, that all the paramedics of IN brought along in case their call for assistance became instead an occasion to harvest an organ. When the police pushed people back to create an aisle for them, Mechanic got a glimpse of the guy, his face ghostly-white against the green of the table. The
Standard Beer
light that hung over the pool table made his naked torso shine—a patient under the lamp of an operating table—now stripped of the clothing the paramedics had cut away. It also illuminated their hands, working first to wrap his punctured body in gauze, then to load it onto a stretcher.

As they took him away, a friend of his called after, “Don’t worry about your hard hat, man. I’ll bring it to work for you!”

Then it was over.

People milled about, talking about what they’d seen, and what he’d said, and what the other had said back. Someone threw a dart. A chubby drill-press operator in an overly tight tube-top pantomimed the fight for some girlfriends who had arrived after the action. “No way!” they shrieked at her animated explanation.

“I can’t believe they would fight over a game,” Designer said, her beautiful face flushed. Her lips were even fuller now, an indentation of teeth in her lower lip revealing how tense she had been. Composer described to Designer other fights he had witnessed in this bar, filling in details that seemed self-evident to Mechanic—e.g. “a game can be more than a game”—though judging from Designer’s reactions, they were the very things she’d been wondering: the best guide to a foreign culture not being a native, like Mechanic, apparently, but another foreigner, like Composer, even if from him, the cheating hearts, drunken husbands and wasted lives sounded more like the lyrics to a standard blues song.

Gradually the bar returned to normal. Standard bar music began to play again from the standard jukebox. Soon there was a dart game going. And not long after that, another game of Dunk-a-Drunk on the pool table where the man had lain bleeding, the stains he had left on its felt indistinguishable from those left by spilt beer. Composer was back at the point he’d been making when he’d been interrupted by the fight: “. . .your typical audio composer, though, goes about his or her business listening to the maestro of the slide whistle but never really hearing, and therefore never apprehending how any music that can be bought and sold—even the most anarchist of rock music—is a force in the maintenance of the status quo. . . .”

Listening to Composer explain how “ultimately, what we consider to be music and how we play it determines who and what we are,” Mechanic had the gut feeling that he was right; his words did seem to explain why the pool game had meant so much to the loser. But there also seemed to be another thing that Composer was leaving out, something equally important: the fact that the game had meant so much to the two men, Mechanic knew, because their bodies had been in the bargain, the big guy going nuts over the graffiti of the chalk, his body being something so not-to-fuck-with because during the rest of the week all of their bodies were little more than tools that the factories they worked in would slowly consume—like a pencil, or a drill bit—this information also expressed in the lopsided development of the woman in the tube-top, her right arm, but not her left, muscular from operating a drill-press all day.

Two young guys went by with the gimpiness of old geezers, or rather, the gimpiness of carpet layers, Mechanic knew, the premature sponginess in their knees coming from the days they spent on them.

Looking from them to Composer’s symmetrical body, and Designer’s symmetrical face—and how different their classically proportioned jaws were from the other jaws in the bar—he tried to reconcile what Composer said with what he had seen, what he thought, with how everyone he knew lived: the idea that art could shape its viewer when up until then the only thing that had shaped anyone he had ever known was the world.

“. . .among composers in the audio spectrum,” Composer was saying, “Mallarmé alone understood that the musician who bypasses the senses completely is the musician who creates music
par excellence
.”

The carpet layers started dancing in an area cleared of tables, and were soon joined by the drill-press operator and her friends: women with hairdos of lacquered ringlets so tight their heads could be easily sheathed in the hairnets required of cafeteria workers. As the jukebox mechanically put out the popular hits—love songs that followed their predictable plots—more dancers took to the floor: a line dance of partners whose finger snaps conformed to the arc of a shovel’s throw, swirls of skirts echoing the pirouettes of mopping.

“In this they are like viewers who remain fixated on rainbows, mistaking this sliver of visible light for the entire electro-magnetic spectrum, comforting audiences by confirming their assumptions about the good and the natural. . . .” Composer touched Designer’s arm for emphasis. She didn’t move away. “But tell me, once all music is as popular as door chimes, what will be the point?”

Mechanic wanted to touch her other arm. To tell her how all that Composer said about silence applied equally to machines. Gratefully, he didn’t have to: “My friends and I are not so interested in art that pleases by confirming the justice, the naturalness, the nobility, even, of those who, unawares, hold it to be just, and natural, and noble for them to spend their days making cars so they can buy cars to get to jobs where they make cars.”

Composer winked at Mechanic, including him.

“B-B-But. . .” Mechanic stuttered, struggling for a way to make her see that autos still could be harmonies of beautiful metal that was seen, and beautiful mechanics that remained unseen. Why not?

“We are more interested in X-rays of machines,” Composer was saying, “X-rays of music.”

“If only there was some way of bringing them together,” she answered earnestly.

Yes! Yes! Yes! screamed through Mechanic’s mind as his mouth struggled for the words to say it.

Smiling, Composer raised his glass. “To Art.”

“And to love!” Mechanic blurted out. He thought Designer gave him a smile. But that may have just been a trick of the light, the bare bulb that hung above their booth sputtering out just at that moment. He licked his lips to continue, to work into the conversation his undying admiration for her, and for what they could do together—Why not?

Just as he found the coordination to speak, though, she said, “Well I like rainbows anyway. They
are
beautiful.”

“Yes, but—”

“And if silence is just as important as sound, isn’t it just a matter of which one you like better? I mean, what good is art that no one can understand? Or art that no one can stand to look at? Even Aristotle said, That art is best which hides art.”

Had Photographer been there, Mechanic knew, he would have launched into her Aristotle like a junkyard dog into a trespasser.

“Wouldn’t it be better,” she said, “to take a middle road? To make art everyone can understand and love? Even if it says less?”

As she continued to speak, Mechanic expected Composer to say something in rebuttal to the reasons, or non-reasons, she gave for liking elevator music: that though she didn’t know anything about music, she knew what she liked, and what she liked had nothing to do with the reasons they gave for liking. It was beyond liking. Beyond reason, she reasoned, claiming that giving such seduction reason was like diagramming the beauty of a sunset, or a moonrise, the reasons themselves seductive, but in the end seduction and not consummation, not sunset, not moonrise. . . .

Mechanic itched to say something himself, Aristotle obviously not knowing a crankshaft from a carburetor. But Composer only gave a sympathetic nod and answered, “Perhaps.” Then he—he who rarely laughed—let out a hearty chuckle, “Yes, perhaps you are completely right. Who can say?” And Mechanic remained silent, the clink of beer bottles the two of them exchanged in front of his face as meaningful as some secret handshake he had been allowed to witness, but not understand.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Did it all come down to cash?

From the vantage of the tollbooth, the highest point in IN not counting Photographer’s camera-house, Mechanic could see the OZ skyline glittering like a city molded of diamond dust. The Essence of OZ Building rose highest of all, of course, and he looked onto it longingly, imagining Designer there drawing mythical creatures that would morph into clay models, then real steel, bent and welded by robots in the brown, palm-treed countries from which they emanated, filling the roads of the world, including the one that streamed by him in his tollbooth. $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, 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