IN & OZ: A Novel Read online

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  Copyright © 2003 by Steve Tomasula

  Interview © 2012 by The University of Chicago

  All rights reserved.

  University of Chicago Press edition 2012

  Design by Crispin Presbys

  Printed in the United States of America

  This edition was made possible in part by support from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame.

  21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 12345

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-80744-7 (paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-80744-4 (paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-80745-4 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tomasula, Steve.

  In & Oz : a novel / by Steve Tomasula ; followed by an interview with the author by Pawel Frelik.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-80744-7 (paperback: alkaline paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-80744-4 (paperback: alkaline paper)

  I. Title. II. Title: In and Oz. III. Title: In & Oz. IV. Title: InandOz.

  PS3620.O5315 2012

  813’.6—dc23

  2011035123

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  IN&OZ

  a novel by

  Steve Tomasula

  followed by an interview

  with the author by Paweł Frelik

  The University of Chicago Press

  Chicago & London

  also by Steve Tomasula

  VAS: An Opera in Flatland

  The Book of Portraiture

  TOC: A New-Media Novel

  Visit the author’s website at

  www.stevetomasula.com

  PREVIOUS PRAISE

  “The author’s signature intelligence, at once quirky, mannered, uncanny, removed, and satiric, continues to manifest itself in spades… . IN & OZ bears a family resemblance to Orwell’s Animal Farm in its political awareness and fabulist inclination, Barthelme’s Dead Father in its stylized absurdity and abstract intellect, and Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew in its fusion of cool aesthetic contemplation and fictive techniques.”

  —Lance Olsen, American Book Review

  “A strong, funny, moving mix of fable and pared-down poem… using strange new perspectives to reveal us to ourselves.”

  —Faren Miller, Locus Magazine

  “IN & OZ moves like a finely tuned, well-oiled car through the cloudy landscape of whimsical American Letters …a novel of ideas and images… that would have made H. G. Wells nod with approval and a big fat grin…”

  —Michael Hemmingson, Review of Contemporary Fiction

  “Not very far in the future, things are a lot like now only more so… . The walls of class do not fall, though, in this eccentric but worthy descendant of Huxley’s fatally bittersweet Brave New World.”

  —Ray Olsen, Booklist

  “Beguilingly winsome, yet with a steel core, IN & OZ …is simple yet poetic and Tomasula’s narrative tactics…render a fabulist romance that’s very touching and amusing. The sheer innovation… of this book bespeaks what the small press does best.”

  —Paul D. Filippo, Asimov’s Magazine

  VAS: An Opera in Flatland

  “A breathtaking inquiry into the artifacts of the human imagination, VAS: An Opera in Flatland is sensuous, ferocious, and original.”

  —Rikki Ducornet, Novelist

  “Steve Tomasula’s extraordinary ‘novel’—or is it a film script? collage art work? philosophical meditation?—tracks the story of a ‘simple’ event in the life of a 21st century family. But ‘story’ is the wrong word here, for Tomasula’s dissection of post-biological life is about the new interaction of bodies and DNA possibilities. Tomasula’s imagination, his satiric edge, his wildly comic sense of things, combined with Farrell’s inventive page lay-out make reading this ‘Opera in Flatland’ an unforgettable experience.”

  —Marjorie Perloff, Critic

  “VAS, a beautifully vibrant collaboration…balances terrifying facts and a desperate humor with an ease worthy of David Markson…an experience both disturbing and enlightening, and one for which I am grateful.”

  —Adam Jones, Review of Contemporary Fiction

  “With striking visual aplomb, VAS casts factoids off the steps of the Temples of the Predetermined into the yet-to-be-written name of errant possibility.”

  —Charles Bernstein, Poet

  “VAS: An Opera in Flatland is a beguilingly intricate, immaculately crafted labour of love and anyone interested in the future of genetics or writing, or both, should seek it out.”

  —Rick Poynor, Eye

  “VAS is a welcome and an innovative contribution to the ongoing discussion and debate on biotechnology and the posthuman… .”

  —Eugene Thacker, Leonardo

  “Bound in a cover made to look like human flesh…VAS: An Opera in Flatland…interweaves myriad forms… . The result is a project so stunningly ambitious…that the only true disappointment is that it has to end.”

  —Emily Pérez, Gulf Coast Review

  “An unforgettably unique reading pleasure and the most visually exhilarating fiction to appear in years.”

  —Kassia Fleisher, American Book Review

  The Book of Portraiture

  “Brilliant…the overarching theme of representation and self-portraiture, from cave art to computer code, gives this novel a historical sweep that is breathtaking. Like Joseph McElroy and Richard Powers, Tomasula can make intellectually engaging fiction out of forbidding (to some of us) topics like recombinant genetics, microbiology, computer technology, and other hard sciences, and utilizes the advantages of graphic design to go places even those gifted writers don’t go…Tomasula’s finest creation yet.”

  —Steven Moore, American Book Review

  “What Tomasula accomplishes with The Book of Portraiture is exactly the resonance between the history in the novel and the history of the novel… .Certainly, its concern is with different historical periods, and, certainly it offers itself as a reflection on those periods. But the context of the Spanish Inquisition or 19th century psychopathology is not simply ‘re-created’ through the transparency of narrative prose. Instead…Tomasula basically re-defines the novel.”

  —Eugene Thacker, Leonardo

  “A grand historical account…The Book of Portraiture reimagines what the novel, particularly the historical novel, might mean in the digital world, and it does so with verve, gusto, and style.”

  —McKenzie Wark, Bookforum

  “The Book of Portraiture fuses the pleasure of reading great literature…with the pleasure of great philosophy…that force a reader to re-examine everything she had read and thought before.”

  —Emily Pérez, American Letters & Commentary

  for Maria

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN<
br />
  PAWEŁ FRELIK TALKS WITH STEVE TOMASULA

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  The dogs of IN are snarling again, snapping at each other and breaking their teeth against the bars of their pen.

  They are mean dogs, dirty and of indeterminate breed but with the color and size of dogs associated with fascism. Their owner, similar in look and temperament, hates dogs. He only keeps them because he also keeps thousands of shiny tools that he needs for his one real passion, working on junk cars, in the garage behind his house, beside the pen he has made of welded rebar where the dogs spend their days fighting and barking and fucking and shitting and running back and forth, irritating themselves and each other until night falls and Mechanic puts them in the garage to protect the tools.

  CHAPTER TWO

  There are no dogs in OZ. Or rather, there are no real dogs. There are police dogs. And sheep dogs. And drug-sniffing dogs and watchdogs. But there are no car-chasing dogs. No garbage-can-upsetting dogs. No, need it be said, poet dogs. The streets are very clean and traffic moves at the speed of commerce, which is to say, as fast and smooth as a concept car on a victory lap as one woman, a Designer, might have put it, had she been at her drawing board instead of shopping.

  Lapdog in hand, she entered one of the bookstores of OZ and immediately felt herself become more serious, informed by tradition, by quality. Being a designer, she was not oblivious to the role that the store itself played in this sense of herself that could be read in the body language of everyone browsing the aisles. Like them, she felt her motions slow to the dignified pace of a curator, or librarian, influenced as they were by the leisurely pace of music that played on a loop—beautiful, egghead music that she would never listen to at home but enjoyed here because it had been mastered somehow to include only the bright tones and none of the darker, pathetic notes usually associated with music of that sort. Greek columns ran up the walls to where portraits of authors looked down from spots that were too high to hold product: portraits of difficult, aesthetic high-wire walkers from the last century as well as contemporary authors of cookbooks, based-on-fact thrillers, and other works that could actually be found in the store—all drawn in the style of engraving associated with the dead presidents on monetary notes so that even non-readers could understand their value.

  Designer found it all particularly moving today since this was the day that the book featuring some of her own work was to appear in stores: a glossy, coffee-table art book documenting a recent showing of Automobiles that had been mounted at the Museum of OZ Art, and that was to have her bestselling sports coupe on the cover.

  Approaching the books, she put down her dog so she would have both hands free and took her place among the other shoppers. Book after glossy book devoted to the beauty of Auto flowed by, their cover photos so slick that they seemed to be works of art in their own right—portraits of stretch limos with tricked-out doors, spray painted in lollipop greens and purples, car hoods that were Sistine chapels of airbrushed saints and angels, baby-blue clouds of acrylic heavenly hosts—a stream of books and magazines so hypnotically beautiful that they made it nearly impossible to select just one.

  Indeed, in OZ, they had so refined the art of giving the customer what he or she wants that there are no books available that are not wanted by everyone. To Designer, like most of those too young to remember another way, this was just how it was—a state of nature. And in fact, it was the result of a sort of evolution: in the early days, a book would be displayed on a shelf only so long as it sold at a certain popular level. But as the speed of commerce increased, and the business of books (plural) decreased the time any one book (singular) might remain on a shelf, the bookshelves themselves began to lengthen, then move, evolving into extremely long conveyer belts that carried books directly from printing presses through the stores where customers were to this day compelled to quickly make their selection the way they might select sushi from a passing boat in a Japanese restaurant. That is, as with raw fish, freshness became the dominant concern. So instead of re-circulating back through the kitchen then out past the customers again, “printed matter” that no one plucked from the stream on a single pass continued on its one-way journey through the stores and into the recycling plants of IN. There it was shredded, and turned into products that people might find more useful, such as humorous calendars, greeting cards or the paper cups used in the coffee shops that took up most of the actual square footage of each bookstore. Since movies, cars, bottled water, perfume, art and all forms of entertainment were sold in exactly this way, culture had become like time in OZ—always the same, though no customer could ever dip his or her toe into the same stream twice. And without anyone even noticing, dogs, real dogs, somehow vanished.

  In OZ, revolving doors are thought of with the nostalgia usually reserved for train stations.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Mechanic’s dogs are half mad, starved for attention as they are, crazed from hunger in order to “give them that edge.” They go berserk whenever they catch sight of him, which is hundreds of times a day as he goes back and forth between his cinderblock house and his cinderblock garage.

  Not long ago, Mechanic had been deaf to all of this. Though he passed them so often he had worn a rut in the yard between the house and the garage, he never so much as glanced at the dogs and their terrific noise. While neighbors of a man like this might be expected to be incensed at his neglect, by the racket of two huge dogs fighting in a pen all day, this man’s neighbors are not. Before he got the dogs, they know, his garage was broken into. And tools stolen. So they accept the wet stench of dirty dogs and their shit, and the racket, and the fact that the yard looks brown and dead as if it were winter the year round—they dismiss these and many other “intangibles” for the greater good of the tools.

  That is, they, as do all good citizens of IN, understand.

  In IN, the Tractor-Trailer is King, and the Mobile Home Queen.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Just as soldiers or nudists are able to identify each other by their dress, so a wordless language developed in OZ that allowed even the thinnest of demographic slivers to find mates, identify enemies, and do all the things people must do in order for their work-a-day lives to unfold. Many and diverse mouths contributed to the development of this language but the dominant voice issued from its clearest example: The Essence of OZ Building in which Designer worked, and which was in fact so tall that its shadow fell ‘round the world. From a distance, this building had the aspect of a castle in the sky, its granite skin glittering in the sun. From her studio at its top, the world appeared Lilliputian below, a body of lesser skyscrapers and roads and bridges, including a rusty hump of a girder bridge that rose high above the flatland in the distance where it sutured OZ to IN.

  Designer liked to take the art book whose cover sported one of her cars and stand it up on the windowsill, then contemplate the disjunction in scale created by the juxtaposition: the car on the cover, the simulacrum of a car, looked large, up close as it was, while outside the window, the real cars down below appeared tiny, and somehow this relationship seemed to hold more truth than it would if she were to take the photo of the car down to the street and let the real cars run over it.

  Though she had won many awards for her designs of auto bodies, secretly, she never thought of herself as a designer of autos at all. True enough, her curvaceous fenders and hoods did mask the grotesque viscera of cars. But they did so in the way that an arty dress or designer eyeglasses were more of a language than an article of clothing or medical aide—a dominant language, the way French had once been the tongue of diplomacy, or Latin of conquest. If she wasn’t giving desire form—and shaping the world by doing so—what exactly was she or any designer doing? Isn’t this why women’s blue jeans came in so many versions: The Flare (Slung Way, Way Low); The Boyfriend (The Relaxed Comfort of His Jeans); The Curve (Show Off YourS); The Capri (Gypsy Styling); The London Jean (High, High Inseam); The Carpenter (Ba
ggy with Hammer Loops); The Hip-Hop (Trés Gangsta); The Natural (Everybody’s Favorite)?… Each body she designed, then, was a body that her drivers could take as their own, and people could change their selves by changing what they drove. New immigrants to OZ could acquire the OZian Dream of assimilation by buying the forest-green or golden-rod Family Vans all families in OZ drove. Rebels could “fight the power” by buying flashy-red off-road vehicles. In either case they were beautiful products, and people made themselves beautiful by using them. And that was what she actually designed, beautiful people. A beautiful world.

  In OZ, Fulfillment was as simple as the swipe of a charge card, Desire baroque as its codes.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  One day in IN, Mechanic was lying in sludge beneath a car, utility lamp tight in his teeth, when something within him snapped. No sooner had he gotten the filthy-black underbelly of the car unbuttoned than he found himself staring into the gleam of silver gears, radiant with honey-gold lubricant. Though he had seen gears like this thousands of times before, it had never once occurred to him how eloquently their polished metal teeth explained his life: their mesh and power ratios may as well have been engineers, and foundry men, all on a shaft, with machinists, and mechanics, as his father had been, and the farmers and cooks, as his mother had been, who fed the factory workers, and highway builders who made it possible for everyone to get to jobs that brought into existence the need for marvels such as cars which needed transmissions which needed gears which needed him. So intense was the wonder caused by this glimpse at the world and his place in it that Mechanic couldn’t have been more agape had he been the fish that spends its life completely ignorant of “sea” until it found itself pitched gasping onto the beach; or a child, who upon overturning a rock and finding grubs reducing a rotten apple to dirt is able to think for the first time, “That apple is I.” It was as if he had stumbled upon one of those forces that guide equally the planets in their orbits and the flight of an arrow—a force that had been there all along, making the visible what it was, though the force itself remained invisible, unspeakable, unrecognizable. Until now.