IN & OZ: A Novel (10 page)

    
In OZ, vanilla is called Crema de las Angelitas.

In IN, the main street is named Main Street.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Each dawn, Mechanic pushed his car up the steep slope of the bridge to the booth where he worked. $1.00. . .$1.00. . .$1.00. . . . Each sundown he struggled to hold back his car by its rear bumper so it wouldn’t get away as he guided it back to its garage under the bridge. Each day he pushed it up, only to find himself the next day, like Sisyphus, pushing it up again. As he did, drivers whizzed by, shouting as they passed, “Get a horse!”

That vision he’d had of Poet (Sculptor) coasting downhill on her bike often came to him in those moments, her arms out in victory, hair whipping behind in the breeze, and the contrast made him wonder why both the going up and the coming down was so difficult for him.

In the evenings he worked on abandoned cars, unleashing his frustration and fantasies on their bodies. In the morning, he would push his car uphill, other cars whizzing past, their horns blaring as he imagined he was leaving IN. Yet at day’s end, he would return, the bumper of his car straining to escape his grip, his heels dug in to slow its descent as he was dragged behind by gravity and inertia.

Returned by nature to the garage he had set out from that morning, he would sit on its lift at the center of its concrete floor—an inmate of his own life, yet also its exile. Banished by whom? he wondered, operating the hydraulic controls of the lift to rise. By himself, he knew, by his former life as a mechanic which he no longer fit. By his lack of imagination. The lift locked in its upper-most position, the same height—and no more—that it reached every time. By his inability to escape into the life of an artist, like Composer or Photographer, he had to admit, but also through the fault of his parents for not escaping for him and giving him a different life: peasants before him whose generic stock seemed to infuse his very cells. . . .

His hands had already grown to a size and thickness that allowed their calluses to fit the locations of worn spots on the tools he inherited. His fingerprints, yellow swirls on work-hardened pads, made his hands resemble his father’s so much that he had to blink to clear his mind and make his hands become once again his own. If having hands that “were his own” even made any sense.

“We are literally star dust,” Photographer had said, explaining how the surface of the earth was the accumulation of billions of years of cosmic dust that had fallen from space: cosmic dust, or dirt, that mingled with the dust of all of their fathers and mothers, too, nourishing the plants and animals we eat, becoming the stuff of our cells, which once they die, return to dust. “All ancient cultures express this singular truth in their creation myths,” he had said, “the Hebrews punning Adam—first man—with
Ad-ahma
, or dirt/earth, the Latins punning Humans with
humus
, mud again. Did you know that ninety percent of household dust is comprised of dead skin cells?” he asked. “Think of it, everywhere we look, dirt is turning into men and women who are turning into dust. What story could be more surreal than this, if by ‘sur’ we mean ‘Super’ and not ‘Un’?” When Mechanic said he did not know, Photographer continued to explain how Poet (Sculptor) grasped the dust-to-dust palindrome more profoundly than any of them: this was why she took up dirt as her language; not all things can be said in every language even if language always shapes what is said. What she had to say was best put in a vocabulary of loam, of soil, of mud, of dust, of humus, of earth, of ground, of adobe, of alluvium, of silt, of clay, of sand, of sediment. . . .”

Considering Designer?. . . Did this mean he had more or less hope for her?

He looked at the grime that blackened the lifeline in his palm. In anger he flung the tools off of the bench. How he wished he could just go back to repairing cars again. He hammered his anvil. Had he known the curse that was about to enter through his eyes the day he had worked on that trannie, he knew, picking up the very screwdriver he had used to unbutton it, he would have used the screwdriver to instead gouge himself blind. He looked down into the glinting star of its point, bringing it slowly toward his eye. . . .

A low moan came from the night outside the garage.

A prowler? He picked up his father’s hammer, and tripped out into the yard, stubbing his toe over that small mound of dirt that kept appearing before his door: a small, breast-shaped hump that he leveled each time he tripped over it but that kept reappearing like some stubborn weed: a persistent weed-seed below, no doubt, trying to push up into the light.

The wind had shifted. Whereas earlier it had smelled of sludge, telling him that it blew from the east where the oil dump was located, he could now smell the stench of sulfur from the steel mills that took up all of the useable shoreline of IN’s land-locked lake. The sky in that direction throbbed with the deep, reddish-brown of meat that had gone bad, the glow coming from the pouring of an ingot, he knew. But the red sky had never before throbbed in rhythm with the sound of heavy breathing—coming from?—

When he shielded his eyes from the glare of the security light buzzing over his back door, he could see—the dogs. The dogs had come back. Instead of running off to live in OZ as he had imagined, they had come home to him. And one, the bitch, was lying in the cage panting—pregnant—her swollen belly rising and falling like the exhaust lid of a diesel engine throbbing heavily in idle.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Designer tingled as technicians wheeled the metal mockup of the grill she had designed into the wind tunnel. This time for sure, she thought, her mind reeling with discarded sketches, then blueprints, as she watched the technicians bolt the carless grill to a test stand. She moved to the observation window that ran along the wind tunnel’s length. Scores of clay mockups filled the room around her: prototypes that were actually half grills, the model-makers saving time by making only the left side of each prototype, then placing it against a mirror so that she would have the illusion of seeing the whole. Looking into these mirrors reflecting mirrors, she caught sight of that monstrosity someone had sent her and that now rested beside the bay doors, waiting to go out with the trash: a huge mangle of welded fenders and other parts from cars she had once designed, now disfigured and multiplied nightmarishly in the labyrinth of mirrors. Someone had used a welding torch to sign it,
A Secret Admirer
, and the sight of it gave her a chill. If it was an admirer, and not a psycho, why hadn’t he used his name? Why had he mailed her the butchered parts of her children the way a sick-o might mail the ears or nose of a kidnapped child back to the mother?. . .

The wind tunnel began to hum. As the wind rushing through its funnel-shaped walls picked up speed, the sound coming from the auto grill increased in pitch as though it were a chrome slide-whistle. Only a slide-whistle that gave up a haunting note: the first note from a new instrument, not unlike the quavering sound that can be elicited from the wet rim of a wine glass, only in the wind tunnel mechanically prolonged. Not the music of the spheres, nor that pathetic soundless music, but something between the elevator music and the beauty of the silent music played by the night sky. An ethereal tone that seemed to come from somewhere between the lowest sphere of heaven and the highest peak on earth.

Technicians, and model makers, and prototype fabricators and others that had helped to make the test a success let out a loud cheer.
“Bravo! Bravissimo!”
they shouted, turning to her to applaud.

“Yes!” she replied, fist in air. She had her instrument. Now all she needed was her Mallarmé to bring from it glorious musik.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

As though on cue, just as Mechanic arrived at the address Photographer had given him there was a sudden
Crack!-thud
and his car became as immobile as a tree. Walking out from behind the trunk, he immediately saw the problem: one of the welds that held the door under the axle as a ski had broken. The car listed badly to the front-passenger side, where the break was located, and the sight of it wearied him. After finding the note Photographer had left, telling him when and where to meet, he had set out in plenty of time. But as he pushed his car, he had gotten lost in his thoughts over recent events, and had forgotten completely about their meeting until coming out of his mental wandering, he discovered that his pushing had brought him to the correct block anyway. Then this—

The jack was still in the trunk, he considered, sitting down on the curb. It had been left there from the days when the car used to go about on tires instead of skis. But his welding equipment was back at his garage, of course, and the dilemma seemed to express his life. As he ran through various options for bringing the broken car and his welding equipment together—tow the car there? bring the equipment here?—a darkening self-doubt began to seep over him. Would repairing the ski be no different than making any repair? That is, if putting a door in the place of a tire kept people from taking wheels for granted, would repairing the ski help him take skis for granted? If familiarity could make anything invisible, he thought, growing sicker by the minute, had a car with skis for wheels become invisible to him? Was he no better than those philistines, as Photographer called them, who insisted on cars with tires? Just in a different, i.e., worse, way?—a hypocrite?

Rising, he circled his sagging car, wondering what to do, the questions only leading him down a labyrinth of further questions. Would having his car towed be any different than driving a car with wheels himself?. . . He didn’t know the neighborhood he was in, or even how far from home he had gone, but judging from the weariness of his muscles, the welder and the car were very far apart.

Photographer, he remembered, Photographer would know what to do and he was right here.

The building that the car had run aground before was plain even by IN standards, its windows boarded up in the manner of porno shops. Checking the address again, Mechanic confirmed that he was indeed in the right place. BOOKS said block lettering on the door.

Entering, Mechanic was surprised to see that the place was indeed a bookstore and not a bar. He didn’t know there were any bookstores in IN, or that they only sold repair manuals. The metal shelves of manuals were arranged by genres of machines, from hair dryers and pencil sharpeners all the way up to entire industrial plants. Wandering the aisles, looking for Photographer, Mechanic paused here and there to thumb through the occasional title that caught his eye. Most of them seemed to be just light reading, exploded diagrams and instructions for making repairs to machines that were so simple, the repair of them seemed intuitive. He couldn’t imagine anyone reading these books, let alone taking the time to write out the detailed instructions they contained. Others were for machines that performed functions so abstract he couldn’t even imagine what need had brought them into existence, or the principles that made them operate, let alone who the books could have possibly been written for.

Looking up at their spines as he walked, he accidentally kicked into a folding chair—a line of metal folding chairs that had been set up in the aisle near the back of the store. At the head of the line of four or five chairs was a podium and standing at the podium was Poet (Sculptor).

She went motionless when she saw that he saw her, glanced away, then back, then gave a little finger wave.

A rush of confusion went through him—the unexpectedness, the disorientation of suddenly coming upon her—but in the confusion was a sense of relief, coming upon a familiar face after the trials of the day. She did seem glad to see him. Still, unlike their encounter on the toll road and the comforting narrow bounds that the toll lane had put upon what he was supposed to say, making his way between the chairs and shelves of books on either side, the open-endedness of this situation filled him with terror. Should he just pretend he didn’t recognize her? Turn and run?—no, he realized, remembering the sad way his broken car listed out in the street. He had to say something, but what? “Are you?—” he tried, nearing. “Are you buying a book?”

‘No. Selling,’ she said, by way of shaking her head, then pointing to the name tag pinned to her work shirt: SALES ASSOCIATE.

“You work here?”

She smiled, nodding sheepishly.

Encouraged to see that the narrow aisle between bookshelves was very much like the lane of a tollbooth, he determined to not sound like the mo-ped he had been the last time. “Then can you show me where you keep your manuals on—On? On hydraulic brakes?”

“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” someone hissed rudely. Turning around, Mechanic found Photographer sitting in one of the metal folding chairs he had just walked past. Photographer whispered loudly, “There’ll be a book signing afterwards; you can ask questions then.”

Book signing? Poet (Sculptor) was standing behind a podium, an open book on the podium, a microphone adjusted to her height, and the truth of what was happening dawned on Mechanic. She was giving a?—A reading?—a
poetry
reading?

“Oh, I’m sorry!” he exclaimed, stumbling to take a seat—where?—upfront? All three of the chairs in the line were empty and it was hard to decide. Agitated, Photographer motioned for him to sit in the one before him. “I didn’t realize!. . .” Mechanic stuttered, stumbling into it.

She nodded that it was okay, that no harm had been done, then continued.

“Where have you been?” Photographer snapped, leaning forward to whisper sharply in Mechanic’s ear. “Didn’t you get my note?” As was his custom, he had tied it to a brick and then dropped the brick onto the roof of Mechanic’s house so he would be alerted by the racket of the dogs it would set off. “You were supposed to have been here twenty minutes ago.”

“I-I got lost,” Mechanic whispered back. Poet (Sculptor) stood at the podium, turning pages, her eyes and finger moving down each page as she silently read. “Why didn’t you tell me she was giving a reading?”