IN & OZ: A Novel (8 page)

Before coming to the tollbooth, he had no idea of the number of people who saw Designer’s art, and were carried along by her art, and were comforted by her art. But now he knew: everyone. Or everyone who mattered. Or rather everyone with money, which seemed to be the same as everyone who mattered. Eight hours a day he took a dollar from a steady procession of them, and saw up-close how her art shaped this human comedy with harried businesswomen looking through the scrolling multi-colored ticker-tapes projected on their windshields so that they could follow stock reports without taking their eyes off the road; or the drowsy, gently guided into the narrow lane of his booth by technology developed for the nose-cones of missiles; or lovers nestled within velvet-clouds that had once been a dream in Designer’s mind, while mobsters didn’t have to lift a pinkie-ringed finger to yell into cell phones that she, in her infinite wisdom, had wisely drawn into their dashboards. When the power window of one car automatically lowered itself so that its driver could pay his toll, Bedouin flute music and the scent of jasmine rolled out from his private harem that was a mosh pit to the next driver, hard-pounding techno-trance socking out from her pugilistic-sound system. These and a thousand other drivers passed by his booth, the utter joy they took from her art—if it wasn’t as invisible to them as their very breath—telling him how utterly uninterested they would be in the stuff of his art. Some didn’t even bother to hide the disgust they felt toward him for breaking the dream of driving as he did being there as he was to take their toll.

$1.00                          $1.00

$1.00

$1.00

Hand out, dollar in, hand out, dollar in. . . . The mechanical repetitiveness of extending a hand, retracting a dollar, then extending a hand became a kind of mantra to him, lulling him to thought. He had a lot to think about. Soon, he would finally finish the hydraulic bouquet he’d been constructing for Designer, and the thought of the moment when he would actually give it to her filled him with dread. She was so big—such an influential artist while he was?—What?

$1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00. . . .

A fool for thinking that what she did and what he did could ever be married? $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00;

$1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00. . . .

Photographer and Composer might say it didn’t matter, especially Photographer. But deep down, with the world voting in dollars, and voting for her and her invisible cars, only a true fool would not have doubts.

$1.00

$1.00

$1.00

$1.00

                 $1.00. . . .

A horrid thought suddenly brought him up by the short hairs: What if a person could only see what he had seen by crawling under a car to see it?

As if summoned by fate to illustrate what he was thinking, he spotted a figure far below, at the base of the hill, laboring to push a bicycle up its steep grade.

What if crawling through sludge, exhaling to collapse your chest so that you could squeeze into the narrow space afforded by a jack was the only way to see it? he thought, watching her. He could tell that it was definitely a her, pushing her bike up a hill that made walking easier than pedalling. Cars whizzed past, honking their horns as angrily at her as they honked at him and his car.

Maybe if Designer found a way to bring what he saw out into the light for everyone, they would see something, but it wouldn’t be It. The possibility made him shudder.

Then he held his breath. As the bicyclist neared, he could see that it was Poet (Sculptor).

He could also see why she was pushing her bicycle. Unlike modern OZ bikes with their featherweight construction and delicate derailers that made pedalling uphill easy, her bike seemed to have been designed by a boiler company. Its brown, primer-colored frame had the rigidity and heaviness of the bridge’s girders and made easing it into the line of cars waiting to pay their toll awkward for her.

$1.00           $1.00 $1.00

She moved, in the line, a little closer.

Perspiration painted big oval stains on the underarms of her work shirt, its sleeves rolled up and revealing sinewy forearms. She had used duct tape to make a bicycle cuff on one leg of her standard, factory-uniform trousers.

$1.00     $1.00

             $1.00

Then she was close enough for him to see strands of hair matted on her forehead, brush marks in the paint of her bicycle, her bicycle obviously having been painted by hand with leftover house paint.

“Hello,” he said, as she came up to his booth.

She smiled, nodded her hello back, breathing hard to catch her breath, her face flushed, her flat chest huffing. She was radiant from the exertion. He hadn’t noticed how beautiful she was till the work of climbing the hill pointed it out.

“One dollar, please,” he said. She dug around in the mouth of a homemade metal purse that looked like a fish; its scales were overlapping, flattened bottle caps.

One, two, three, four. . . .

Watching her count out pennies, reading her lips as she did so, he took pleasure in how easy it was to be with her here in the narrow lane of the tollbooth. How easy it was to talk to her, to understand her, the constraints of the tollbooth transaction keeping their conversation from bleeding all over into topics with no bounds, or the messy groping about that troubled Mechanic in most other conversations where you could never really tell what was truly being said, or what the other person really wanted.

. . .forty-four, forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty. She paused, looking up to him, and he understood that she wanted him to take the first half of the toll. When he did, their hands touched.

. . .fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three. . . .

If only all of life could be so clear! As she continued to count, he wracked his brain for a way to stretch the moment. What
did
men and women talk about, anyway!

. . .seventy-nine, eighty, eighty-one. . . .

Politics! “I—I—I’m sorry about the vote,” he stammered.

The dismissive shrug he received in reply froze his heart. Leading up to the referendum on limiting billboard space, the campaign had grown more intense with each side pushing the envelope of billboarding while language did what language always does, and some of the anti-billboard-istas began to appreciate writing on pages that were twenty-feet high. To these poor fallible men and women who had never had an audience other than themselves, Photographer had explained, the thousands of motorists who streamed by and read their words—their words!—was intoxicating beyond bearability. In secret, they had begun to work against the limitation of billboards. A form of censorship. Some of the pro-billboard-ists, on the other hand, began to loath the increasing difficulty they had in cutting through the “poetic static,” as they called it, with the poetry of their products. Secretly, they began to work to limit the number of billboards. That is, some anti became defacto-pro and some pro became defacto-anti-billboarders, and in the end voters decided by referendum to freeze the number of billboards at their new, elevated level, which half of the pro-billboarders took as defeat, and half of the anti-billboarders took as defeat, and half of the pro-billboarders took as victory, and half of the anti-billboarders took as victory, though it was impossible to tell which half was which.

Had he insulted her? “I mean—I’m glad!” he blurted. Why had he stepped outside of the easy give-and-take of the tollbooth!

Again she only shrugged, exactly as before, and finished counting out pennies from her fish purse.

“I mean—I mean, I’d like to see some of your poetry one day.”

She paused, giving him a wry?—or maybe it was a condescending smile.

“I mean your sculpture?”

Her head cocked like a dog hearing an odd squeal.

“I mean your dirt.”

She placed the second fifty coins in his hand. Their hands touched again, hers lingering this time. Or was it just his imagination?—the moment seemed to stop during which every detail was so vivid it made him ache: her chewed fingernails, the sweet stink of her sweat, the whiteness of the balls of her knuckles made even more pure by the dirt in their creases that he knew from the engine grime under his own fingernails would never come clean. Not so long as she kept dirt as her medium. . . .

The driver of the next car honked impatiently.

Then her sinewy hands were taking up the grips of her handlebars. But she nodded as she rotated a pedal into position, a serene expression coming over her face to let him know that someday she’d show him some.

“Well goodbye,” he said.

She smiled back, then pushed off, as happily as if the vote had never happened. A moment later he saw her legs kick out from each side of her bike as she allowed the gravity of the hill to speed her along, coasting, the wind whipping her shirttail as the bicycle picked up speed, her arms suddenly shooting up into a victory V as well. . . .

How did she do it? he wondered. How did she manage to float above it all? No more concerned by votes, or cash, or even whether people walked all over the dirt of the earth, not giving a shit whether or not it was her art?

For a long time afterwards, he replayed in his mind that vision of her coasting downhill, picking up speed, the wind whipping the tails of her work shirt as he tried to puzzle out her secret and why, even if he could, it wouldn’t work for him.

It wasn’t that Mechanic was unsympathetic to the claim made by Poet (Sculptor)’s silence—that the gesture of making dirt your medium was enough. He himself had gone on for the longest time without telling anyone what he had seen, and he might have continued to fix cars in the traditional sense indefinitely had he not begun to fear that Artistic Truths unshared had a name: hallucinations.

It was just that it was hard to believe that the actual medium of all art was dirt. Or cash. Or that fashion was the most honest solution, as Designer maintained—dirt and cash being the Yin to the other’s Yang with sales as the only True artistic review, every other judgment being a matter of simple preference, a gas gauge on half-empty/half-full, toe-mae-toe/toe-maa-toe, you like standard vanilla/I like piña colada, so what’s all the fuss about? But if that were so, then the swings between the seen and the unseen that so exercised Photographer—the swings between the Greeks and their sculptures of beautiful bodies, to the Medieval art of the unseen spirit that could start him frothing at the mouth—were of no more consequence than the changes in the width of neckties or the styles of hem lengths.

He didn’t know a lot about the history of art. But he did know a little about the history of autos, or at least the Standard Autos that were once manufactured in IN, the first of which was a plow.

Turning from OZ, he looked onto the brownness of IN, flat as mud except for the few decaying turn-of-the-century mansions. One of them, the house of an industrialist from the days when autos were assembled by human hands, had been restored and turned into a museum and home of the IN Historical Society and Gun Enthusiasts Club.

$1.00

As Mechanic mechanically took in the bills, he began to wander the displays of the museum in his mind, walking along with Designer, and Composer, and Photographer and Poet (Sculptor), taking advantage of the one perk that came with most of the jobs in IN: the fact that as his body continued to do its work, his mind could leave, entering what passed in IN for Virtual Reality. The first exhibit they approached was of a farm plow which, as a plaque explained, had been manufactured by the Blacksmith who founded the Standard Plow and Feed Co. back in the days when the last of the Indian trading paths were becoming dirt roads. Poet (Sculptor) ran ahead of the group, admiring the homey simplicity of a replica of the rough log cabin where the Blacksmith/Founder was shown forging the first plow. For a generation the company did well, Composer read to the group from the plaque. But as IN grew and others began to make Improved Standard Plows, then the wheelbarrows, wagons and carriages that Blacksmith & Sons had begun to produce, the company faltered and would have gone under if it hadn’t been saved by the outbreak of the Civil War that allowed them to beat plowshares into swords and bayonets which they sold to both sides at a very high profit. The next war, WWI, was even better for business, they learned, moving on to a motorized diorama: sections of plaster-of-Paris farmland and painted scenery rotated to the underside of the table that the diorama was built on while slag pits and factories that had been on the underside of the table rotated up to take their place in the growth of IN. Connected by rail as never before to sources of coal, steel and lumber, the company was able to capitalize on a single design, the Standard Design, that allowed them to output a carriage every five hours, modifying each during production to be either a horse-drawn buggy for Sunday drives or a wheeled cannon mount. They also made their first horseless carriage: a motorized vehicle which could be fitted with a Gatling gun for military use, but was in fact first used to break up a strike by workers at a factory that supplied the rivets in its frame.

The expansion that had been fueled by the war allowed the company—now known as The Standard Automobile & Armament Factory—to again survive the peace, this time by making automobiles: black carriages with gasoline engines that had to be started with a crank. It was during this period that the mansion had been built, the great-great grandsons of the original Blacksmith having grown so very rich and powerful that once a President even spent the night in their mansion. A third shift had been added and production ran night and day. By this time the shifts of SAAF were a kind of nature to the people of IN, the factory whistle marking the rising and setting of their sons who grew up to become their fathers on its assembly lines though Photographer pointed out that this history was not so evident in the history of IN that was written in the sheets of metal they forged, a history that ran from the black-carriages to the sedans with running boards for gangsters to stand on, to the amphibious troop carriers and rocket launchers of WWII, then the tail fins and flamboyant hood ornaments when times were good, which fell away as times grew lean and the expected WWIII remained forever just beyond the horizon. The last car the company ever made was a single prototype built for a World’s Fair: a Futuristic Car of the Future from a future that, of course, never came.