IN & OZ: A Novel Read online

  Trembling, and not knowing what else to do, he repaired the transmission and bolted it shut.

  But as time went on, it became increasingly difficult for him to forget about what he had seen. Standing before customers who tried to describe the vapor lock plaguing their cars by making a hacking cough, or customers who, with the erudition of medieval peasants on the topic of thermodynamics, explained to Mechanic the symptoms of a slack timing chain by imitating a spastic tic, he came to understand that the ignorant sought him out not for enlightenment but solely to make the profound inner workings of Auto invisible: to fix whatever rattle or misfire or stall it was that had brought some offending fuel pump or brake drum or other mechanism before him so that he could return it to the dark and they could go on being fish who wouldn’t think about the sea until it broke again.

  Perhaps it was the continual barking of the dogs that finally got to him. Or the continual whine of tires on the toll-road bridge that the man lived troll-like below. The neighbors blamed it on the strain he had been under during the prolonged dying of first his father, then his mother, both from the unrelenting ugliness of the steel mills and oil refineries, and the endless barrel and crate and gunpowder and acetylene factories that permeated IN, and so permeated its citizen-employees, filling first their souls, then their lungs with a rust-colored stain. In any case, Mechanic found he could no longer go on as he had. He reached the point where he couldn’t even pretend he cared if the autos left in his care were ever set “right.” The street rodders and kustom kar rebuilders who came to him were a catalyst in this, escaping into their fantasies of chrome oil pans and black-lit leafsprings, airbrushed tattoo-art of virgins on hoods, skulls in the doorjambs, bodies so beautiful that they made the essence of Auto completely invisible.

  Indeed, fitting a chromed manifold onto a goldplated block, he began to be weighted down by his own culpability, his own—yes, moral sellout was not too strong a word.

  So the next time a customer brought in a transmission for repair, he unbolted it from the chassis where it hung bat-like in darkness beneath the car. Then he remounted it upside down. Now, the gearshift lever which had previously stuck up between the bucket seats inside the car protruded from the car’s underbelly while the gears themselves were exposed on the inside of the car where they were all quite visible, dangerously visible, to both driver and passengers.

  “What the hell!” shouted the owner of the car upon his return.

  Their argument ended with Mechanic throwing his customer out, keys after, the man’s oaths to bring lawyers raining down confused by the wild snarling of the dogs flinging themselves against their pen to get at him.

  A brief lexicon of words useful in IN: Blood Sausage. Carcinogenic. Steam Pipe.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Fenders flowed from her Conté crayon so fluidly that without even trying, Designer could doodle out a decade’s worth of auto designs so that when thumbed in flip-book fashion, their tail fins would shrink, a Dimetrodon evolving into a salamander, before growing back into dinosaur-sized scale. Advanced Marketing loved her. But she herself began to feel as if there was something hollow, something missing in her sketches. And therefore in her life. As others in her office sat at their desks, their heads inside the Virtual Reality Helmets that let them try out 3-D visions of the autos she designed, she drifted away on the clouds, allowing herself to become lost in the elevator music that played continually in her corporately-sleek office.

  As every architect knows, the taller a building becomes, the more of its interior must be dedicated to elevators and their cables and lifting apparatus. And in order to make The Essence of OZ Building the tallest in the world, and thereby have it speak superiority over all other companies and their “second-rate” skyscrapers, it had been necessary to devote the entire interior of this building to elevators. The hallways were elevators, the closets were elevators, the stairwells were elevators, the elevators were elevators, of course, but so were all of the offices, and Designer and the others who worked in these offices spent their days gliding up and down, serenaded by elevator music as they sat motionless at their desks, gunning engines and roaring around the room in virtual-reality cars, or applying the formulas that would spinoff last season’s style into next year’s must-have rage.

  In OZ, there has never been a romantic comedy that was not This Season’s Funniest Tender Movie!

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Art had nothing to do with it. Even after one lawyer accused him of that crime, Mechanic maintained that art had nothing to do with what he did. It was simply that having grasped the essence of Auto, he could no longer participate in the lie that was Not-Auto, the lie that blindered people from the beauty of the Truth that resided beneath the false beauty they mindlessly used to tool about their work-a-day lives. And if making them see meant making their cars inoperable, in the way that a hammer was most itself when broken, so be it.

  He had come to that realization the time one of his own hammers broke while he was using it to beat the fender of a customer’s car into a shape that could never be taken for granted again. During his entire life he had taken that hammer for granted, even though it was the one true heirloom he had inherited from his father’s father’s father, by way of his father’s father, via his father. When he needed to tap free a cotter pin, he would reach for the hammer without even thinking, use it, then return it to its place with no more notice than he would give his lungs during a breath. But once the hammer broke, he saw that it was only when broken that he missed it, sorely missed it, which is to say, see its hammerness for what it was. And so it was with his?—

  The next customer who called it “Art” had brought in a car with a leaky radiator. When he returned at the appointed hour to retrieve his automobile and stood before it, staring at the radiator, now in the space that normally held the windshield, Mechanic reached behind to his workbench and gripped his broken hammer in case he had to fight the man off. Too many times before, what should have been a simple exchange of payment for car keys turned into a scene of bewilderment, even rage. The dogs had learned to sense strong emotion and were already going wild in their cage, so this time Mechanic was ready.

  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, h
earing 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.