IN & OZ: A Novel Page 3

  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 breakins 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.

  Mechanic recognized one of them on a pumper in the distance, languidly working the spray from its hose over a patch of smoldering water and he honked the horn of his car in greeting. The firefighter waved the spray up and down in reply.

  The landscape was charcoal black from the recent refinery fire, though—except for a scattering of shiny-new billboards that rose from its crust like the first, new green shoots after a forest conflagration.

  ALIVE WITH PLEASURE! silently proclaimed a boisterous tableau of young, athletic, cigarette smokers. A second, circular billboard had been erected before it, painted black with yellow swirls that made it look like the vortex of a sewer, or a toilet, swirling with distorted words that were being sucked in. The words were stretched out so much by the vortex that it was impossible for Mechanic and Photographer to read them until they reached a point where they had an edge-on view of the billboard and the elongated letters were foreshortened enough to leap into clarity:

  It was the work of a group of poets who thought they could fight the general abstinence from thought that plagued IN by convincing its electorate to limit the number of billboards, which to them were nothing more than a cancer of canned thought, a kind of anti-poetry. Photographer had told Mechanic the whole story on the way to one of their committee meetings: how once the anti-billboard faction managed to get the limitations of billboards on the ballot as a referendum, the pro-billboard faction began to wage their own public relations campaign, erecting even more billboards to beautify the countryside with mountain-sized pictures of autumn in Vermont or Niagara Falls or s that would cheer people, make them feel good about themselves, and of course, about billboards. Though the poets had won the first battle, they realized that they were losing the war and that their only hope was in fighting fire with fire, i.e., billboards. Billboards were, after all, the single most efficient means by which to reach drivers, those voters most likely to care about the issue. And if poets couldn’t defeat language whores with words, well then, there was no hope for anyone. An arms race of billboards ensued, with each side writing in the gaps between the signs of the other with ever bigger and more conspicuous billboards. It wasn’t going well for the poets. And yet, though the committee meeting that Photographer had insisted Mechanic attend with him had grown very heated—fistfights prickled the proceedings—Photographer had remained surprisingly calm. Mechanic couldn’t imagine why until afterwards Photographer scrambled around the upturned chairs and after-meeting arguments to introduce Mechanic to one of the poets who was leaving. A woman poet.

  Or maybe she was a Sculptor. Mechanic could never be sure since Poet (or Sculptor) no longer made any work. She had been so disgusted, Photographer had explained on the way home (or maybe she had been enamored—again, Mechanic had never been sure which), by the ease of reading billboards, by their commanding presence in the world—language embodied—and by their enormous audiences that she took them to their logical conclusion, adopting dirt as her medium, dirt being, of course, the most democratic of all mediums. And since dirt covered all the earth, there was no need for her to make any other poems (sculptures), there being nothing more to say (see).

  “…such an intelligent and sensitive woman, don’t you think?” Photographer said now, the sight of the billboards they passed having given him reason to bring her up again. He brought her up a lot, it seemed. And each time it was to sound Mechanic out for his opinion of the woman. Or so it seemed. And he talked about her in a way that Mechanic never heard him talk of anyone: tenderly. What was between them? Mechanic wondered, considering that Photographer was old enough to be her father. But he kept his peace, pushing in silence as the last of the town petered out, becoming a dark and empty plain.

  “Ah, we’ve arrived,” Photographer said.

  They shouldered the car onto the shoulder of the road, blocked the steering wheel with a large metal bar and padlock, then walked the last several hundred yards across a vast, vacant site up to where Composer lived: a deep shaft, created by the quarrying of granite used for the skin of the Essence of OZ Building and which, therefore, was that building’s inverse image, as deep as the Essence of OZ Building was high, and with its exact shape. Locals knew it as The Essence of IN Hole.

  Solemnly, out of respect for the Composer’s grief, they descended. As expected, they found him at the bottom of the hole, bereft and supine on a fainting couch. Someone, he had discovered, had been playing his music. Not the way it was meant to be played, no, for it could in fact not be played at all: as his work matured, he had found himself increasingly impatient with the constraints all composers were forced to work under: the fact, for instance, that a violinist only had two arms. For a while he had tried to work around these constraints, creating compositions that required two violinists to man a single instrument so that the second musician could supply, when necessary, the extra fingers required by his music. But eventually even this became to him a form of suffocation, an impossible straight-jacketing of his ideas. So he abandoned what he had come to see as the ultimate constraint in music—hearing—and he began to compose only for those who read music, those who could play his music in their minds by looking at the notes he wrote for trumpets with as many keys as a saxophone, flutes that could be appreciated in the audio-bound world only by dogs, or harps with strings so long that their subsonic reverberations could be felt only by whales far out at sea, and for the first time in his life he breathed free.

  Only now,
he had learned, someone in OZ had figured out a way to use computers and other electronics to play his inaudible music, and was playing it everywhere. Even in elevators. And the news couldn’t have been more devastating to him had he learned that a beloved child had been transformed into a zombie, a grotesque parody of his darling, and loosed upon the world to serve as his representative and standin for the real Music, true Music, the Music he actually composed and in which the world showed absolutely no interest.

  CHAPTER TEN

  In Oz, Mental Health is measured by The Index of Economic Indicators.

  MUSSIKAL INC., was listed under artistic credits in the maintenance log of the elevator that Designer worked in. MUSSIKAL INC. Standing in her office at night, she gazed out at the dots of fire that snaked through IN. For it was exactly like that—Musical ink—indelible as the ink of a tattoo writing itself upon her, the tickle of its needle making her shiver. And when there was a tattoo, she knew, there had to be a tattoo artist.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  To cheer their comrade, Mechanic and Photographer decided to mount a concert of Composer’s music so that the world could hear it the way it was meant to be heard, that is, in silence. So they rented an alternative performance space, i.e., one of the many abandoned warehouses of IN, and they printed up handbills:

  World Premier

  One Night Only

  A Performance of “The Essence of Music” presented so that the world can hear for itself the difference between True Music and the bastard children masquerading as the Real and True Music, a grotesquerie of Honesty, a saccharine TRAVESTY of HOW THINGS ARE which distorts not by lying but by FRAMING the world in such a way so as to CROP from view the WHOLE OF MUSIC and make of it a standardized assemblage of sounds to play while in the car or vacuuming the house, The Lap Dog of Muisakal Inc. and all its Movie-TV-Satellite-Theme Park-Action Figure-Billboard-Toilet Seat-Coffee Bean-Shower Curtain Subsidiaries, the darling of the corporate culture newsletter—a.k.a.

  The Daily Times—giving Customers (a.k.a. Readers) what they want—50,000

  Shareholders can’t be wrong!

  —FAMILY RELATIONS! SENTIMENT!

  HIGH SCHOOL MEMORIES!

  EPIPHANIES!—

  faceless, nameless, ubiquitous mUSic valorized for its vanquishing of elitism, its glorification of The Common Man and The Common Woman and their place on the Common Assembly Line and the power it gives him AND her to assert their SELVES by BUYING OUR PRODUCT. Listen to it now and again and you’ll discover the Miracle of LOVE. And so convenient it can be turned on or off like a FAUCET… .

  Since Photographer had composed the fine print, it ranted for several pages, comprising as it did a kind of manifesto.

  On the night of the performance, Mechanic manned the enormous scrolling contraption he had cobbled together from junkyard parts and abandoned circus equipment: a huge canvas scroll powered by a 600 h.p. diesel engine that roared when he shifted gears to make the canvas gradually unwind like the roll of a player piano as it crossed the stage. At the rear of the warehouse, Photographer manned a movie projector, lying on its side so that as the scroll unwound from one spool to the other, the pages of sheet music, which Photographer had photographed then spliced together to form a continuous movie, would be projected upon the blank canvas of the unscrolling scroll, in synch with it.

  Composer sat in the front row of the dozen folding chairs they had set up. There was no one else in the audience, save Poet (Sculptor). Mechanic could tell that this was a special occasion for her by the way she’d gotten dressed up. Though she wore the same battle-ship gray factory uniform she’d had on at the anti-billboard meeting, the tails of its work shirt were tucked in. She’d also buttoned the top button of her shirt in a formal sort of way. She sat politely waiting, feet flat on the floor, knees together, her hands clasped around a Mason jar full of dirt in her lap. To amuse her, Mechanic revved the engine and worked the clutch; Photographer held a palm against the film’s rotating take-up reel to adjust its speed, the two of them tuning like a violinist and cellist.

  Then they were ready.

  In the idle before the first downbeat, the slamming boom of warehouse doors echoed throughout the cavernous metal building. A woman appeared—a woman in a smart, white-satin business suit. She strode toward them like a fashion model on a runway, hips and shoulders swiveling in sync, her high-heels clicking loudly across the concrete floor. She held a tiny, white lapdog that shivered from the damp of the leaky warehouse/auditorium, cowering as she swung it onto her lap to take a seat in the audience.

  Throttle open. The diesel engine roared deafeningly. The projector flickered to life, bringing up the first bars of the projected music. In the glow, Mechanic could see Composer following the music with his eyes, his face a portrait of a man gazing out into the rarefied air of a mountain he had tried to scale all his life. Though Mechanic was occupied with running the scroll, shifting gears to speed it up at the fast parts of the music, slowing it down when the notations said decelerando, the engine roared continually, reverberating so loudly in the otherwise empty warehouse that the floor shook. Through it all, Composer sat transfixed, and Mechanic was touched to see how moved Composer obviously was by the kindness his friends had performed for him: he seemed to be living and dying by turns as the music took ecstatic flight or plunged into somber depths. Often, he would bite his knuckles, barely able to watch, or clasp his hands prayerfully as a particularly moving passage was projected to wall-size. Poet (Sculptor) also concentrated with the attention of one learning a new language, squinting to follow the notations.

  The other woman sat stupefied, her hands clamped over the ears of the dog in her lap. As the overture progressed, her head swiveled from Mechanic operating the scroll, to Photographer operating his projector behind as if she were passing an auto accident and didn’t know whether to gawk at the mangled wreckage on the highway or the bodies in the ditch. They had nearly reached the one hour mark when she finally let go of the dog and put her fingers in her own ears against the roar of the engine. Then as the second measure began, she cradled her head in her hand. Mechanic was glad she was sitting behind Composer so he couldn’t see her inattention. He was glad she was in front of the projector so that Photographer couldn’t see that half of the audience was such a—Such a—Yes, there was no denying the word—such a philistine. Though he couldn’t follow most of the music himself, he understood the undivided attention it required, while she had given up on following it so completely that she was grooming her dog—a visual equivalent to the elderly who leave their hearing aids at home, then thinking the music has ended, begin talking loudly over the soft passages of a symphony.

  Why had she come, Mechanic wondered, traveling to a neighborhood that was obviously worse than her own? Her lips formed a perfect Cupid’s bow and were painted red, her suit so tailored to her body that it could not have come off of any of the standard racks of IN. Compared to the grays and browns that dominated IN, her sleek white suit made her a gleaming new Ferrari to their graveyard of discarded washtubs, and he couldn’t stop stealing glances at her. Two hours later, when the music hit a lengthy passage that was all in third gear, he was able to prop the throttle in a fixed position and leave his stool. She obviously hadn’t known to come prepared, so he walked past Poet (Sculptor) and went to her and, in the deafening drone, offered by way of gestures for her to take half of the sandwich he had brought for his own dinner. She shook her head, mouthing the words NO THANK YOU, and he was struck by how gracious she was, even in refusal, as though it didn’t matter that she was there in a perfect white suit, perfect blonde hair, while he was a pile of mechanic’s weeds, the whiteness of his sandwich bread accentuating his tool-blackened fingernails.

  Her dog stared at the sandwich. Using gestures again, he offered to give it to him, and again by mouthing the words with lips so red and full that they seemed to move in slo-motion, she said he was too kind. But after he vehemently asserted that he didn’t mind, she acquiesced,
and he gave it over.

  Perched back on his stool, again in control of the throttle, he ate his own half of the sandwich. The dog had already finished, and was sniffing around the base of her chair, licking up crumbs. Mechanic resolved to stop staring at the woman, but as the concert drove on, she made looking at her increasingly easy, her eyelids growing heavy, drowsily closing for longer and longer periods. Finally her head nodded down to her chest. When her dog reared its hinnie, he was glad she was asleep so she couldn’t see it crap on the warehouse floor.

  Seven hours later, as the last few bars of music were projected on the scroll, he was only staring at her, slouched in her metal folding chair, her dog asleep in her lap, her own eyes shut too, her ears plugged with Kleenex against the roar of the engine.

  In the front row, Composer was also limp, but from rapture. As the final note of the music played out across the screen, and in unison Photographer and Mechanic cut out the projector and engine, he sprung to his feet, applauding wildly. The woman awoke with a start. She looked around as though it took her a few moments to realize where she was. When she did, she also began to applaud. Mechanic and Poet (Sculptor) joined in, standing and clapping with Photographer shouting, “Bravo! Bravissimo!”

  Weak with happiness, Composer struggled to stand. He stepped from the rows of folding chairs up to the front of the scroll, clasping his hands together and shaking them victoriously overhead in the manner of prizefighters, or opera conductors who redirect the applause meant for them back to the orchestra in the pit while Poet (Sculptor) presented him with her Mason jar of dirt, her bouquet. “My friends, my dear, dear friends,” he announced, gesturing to Mechanic and Photographer when the applause finally died down. “Let me at least buy you a drink.”

  Mechanic, Photographer and Composer pulled on their coats, and Poet (Sculptor) joined them as they headed for the door, each glancing back at the woman who only continued to stand near her seat, holding her dog.