IN & OZ: A Novel (5 page)

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.

“Who is she?” they asked one another, huddling, each having assumed she was one of the other’s relatives.

Finally, Composer, still glowing with gratitude and love for his friends, and indeed, all humanity, bowed to the woman, and said, “Madam, my friends and I are going to a nearby tavern to celebrate this momentous occasion. You are more that welcome to join us.”

“Yes,” Mechanic told the woman, stepping in front of Poet (Sculptor) to do so. “You are more than welcome.”

Outside, they offered her a ride, but since she had her own car, she said she would follow, then hurried off to get it, her dog taking quick steps to keep up.

“Hey,” Photographer yelled, seeing that Poet (Sculptor) was about to ride away on her bicycle. “Aren’t you coming?” he called, jogging to catch up to her.

In high spirits, Composer jumped onto the hood of Mechanic’s car. “Va-ROOOOOM!” he yelled, calling to her that they had lots of room. Mechanic could see Photographer trying to convince Poet (Sculptor) to come with them, tugging her elbow toward the group in a kidding sort of way. In the end, she kept shaking her head, and Photographer kissed her on the cheek, then rejoined the group alone.

“Your friend’s not coming?” Mechanic asked, taking up a good position to push.

“You blockhead,” Photographer answered, also putting a shoulder to the trunk.

“Huh?”

“Va-ROOOOM! Va-ROOM!” Composer roared from the hood, reaching in through its open windshield to steer. A white car, the woman in her car, pulled up behind them, and they were off. If there were ever any pedestrians in IN, which there never were, they might have mistaken Composer’s va-rooming for the revving of the car’s engine. But the woman, who drove close behind at their pedestrian’s pace, immediately recognized the sound as an imitation of the engine that had powered his concert.

A light, oily mist began to fall, making the pushing easier and lifting spirits, and soon Mechanic stopped wondering why Photographer had been cross. As during the concert, he couldn’t keep his eyes off of the woman—and her car: a white coupe bowed as an angel wing, or dolphin fin, or a cresting wave—it was impossible to say—it being a car such as never appeared in IN until years after its new-car smell had been consumed by the noses of previous owners.

Inside the bar, he continued to let her nearness etch itself on his mind as the others talked excitedly about the concert. Photographer, of course, critiqued his own, and Mechanic’s interpretation, finding it far short of what the music deserved. He mused on future performances, and wished they had thought to attach a muffler to deaden the roar of the engine. Composer would hear none of it. Though normally reticent, he was still in high spirits and exuberantly claimed that the performance was just as he had always imagined. Better than he had imagined, for if the engine hadn’t drowned out the noise of the street outside, and the drips from the ceiling inside, and the barking of the audience’s dog, who knows what horrors of harmonics they might have combined into? “Perfect silence is very difficult to achieve,” he noted, “and so sometimes one must settle for its equivalent, White Noise.”

Though Mechanic had thought the woman hadn’t seen a note, she spoke as knowledgeably about the music as any of them. Even passionately. She waxed poetic about how much the music meant to her personally, thanking Composer for bringing it into the world, the world being a more beautiful place for it. Her enthusiasm kindled their own and they all laughed and joked about the world, and art, with Photographer talking about looking, and Composer scribbling out songs on a napkin for their entertainment. All was as effervescent as the bubbles in their beer until there was a lull in the conversation and the woman turned to Mechanic and asked, “So what’s wrong with your car?”

The question, the fact that she had spoken directly to him, brought him up short. “W-What do you mean?”

“Your car. What’s wrong with it? Why does it have doors for wheels? And why are its wheels welded on top of its roof?”

“My friend is an artist,” Photographer announced, lifting his beer in homage. “That car is his art.”

The woman’s angelic brow wrinkled. “Why?”

Photographer rolled his eyes as if she had asked the stupidest question he had ever heard and Mechanic kicked him under the table to tell him to let it go.

But the woman persisted. “I mean, I wouldn’t want a car with its wheels on its roof. I wouldn’t be able to drive to work. I live twenty miles from my job. Why don’t you make cars people can drive to work?”

The table fell silent. Mechanic rocked his glass, making O-rings with its damp bottom, for truly, he couldn’t say. Finally Photographer, who lived within a camera, said with what Mechanic thought was undue sarcasm, “Why don’t you live closer to your work?”

“I just don’t see why anyone would—”

“
Obviously
, he wants people to see that cars have wheels,” Photographer said in a patronizing way, pronouncing the words slowly, as though for a child.

The woman was unfazed. “But everyone already knows that.”

“And anyway,” Photographer said, growing hotter by the moment, “what do you know about such matters?”

“A lot, actually. I design cars.”

The table was struck dumb. Then Composer repeated, obviously impressed, “You are a designer of automobiles?” And the woman, Designer, explained how she worked in the Essence of OZ Building, designing the sleek molded bumpers that covered the shock absorbers that actually protected a car from bumps, and the gleaming facades of chrome spokes that hid the grotesque nuts that held the wheels to their axles. Composer asked many questions, drawing her out on every detail, their call and response growing into a festival of admiration. “So you too begin by composing in silence?” he said, when she explained how it all began with a blank sketch pad. Once the initial idea was down in black and white, as thought embodied, she next turned it into eye-candy, developing her ideas with pastels, fleshing out the sensual curves of poreless skin, massaging and massaging until the drawing looked like. . . . “Well, until it looked like your car,” she told Mechanic.

“Y-You designed my car?” Mechanic stammered.

She nodded. “Before you put its wheels on its roof, that is.”

Photographer, who had been sitting there scowling the whole while, hugged Mechanic to him and snapped at her, “Well my friend here
fixed
your design!”

He and Composer began arguing heatedly, but Mechanic didn’t hear, his mind stuck in the single gear of the woman before him designing his car. To think that first there was nothing. Then there was something! His own car! And it had come from her pen. It was no easier to get his mind around her, or anyone, dreaming his car into existence than it was to imagine a blacksmith forging a river. Yet here she was, and yes she had. A river goddess, bringing into existence not only the river but the banks it cut, the rocks it polished, the forests it watered, the trees it uprooted, the rapids it rode and the falls it plunged down along the way.

CHAPTER TWELVE