Steve Tomasula - IN & OZ

“Listen,” Composer said. He whistled a single tone. Following his lead, Designer puckered in silent whistle, her lips so wet and full that Mechanic’s limbs weakened. “Is this note high or low?” Composer asked. He answered his own question by shrugging. “Impossible to say, of course, unless we compare it to the previous note. Or the note that will follow. But are those notes high or low? Soon we are comparing them to all sound.” He pushed back the asbestos helmet liner he wore as a beret. “When we do, we see how illusory is the concept of ‘a’ note. There can be no ‘note’ without an absence of sound between other sounds. No downbeat without an upbeat, no beat at all without silence. And so it is with all genres of music and the invisible assumptions that make them possible: No military music without a military. No church music without a history of churches. No….”

The losing pool player wiped his brow and his hand came away a sweaty, blue smear just as he spotted the rat-guy chalking his fingertip for another strike. Like some hulking beast with a nervous system too primitive to immediately register pain, he looked from his blue-streaked hand, to the other player, chalk in hand, then to his own blue hand again. He rubbed more blue chalk from his face, stared at the confirmation. Then he exploded. Rat-man broke for the door but the hulk blocked his escape, stepping into the aisle between the pool table and the standard cigarette machines that lined the wall.

He snapped off the end of his pool cue by hitting it against the table.

Rat-man’s grin vanished. He sprung onto the table, ran its length then leapt for the door. Just as he left his feet, his opponent stabbed him in the stomach with the jagged end of the stick. Women shrieked. He seemed to freeze in mid-air, his disbelieving eyes big as cue balls staring down at the spear protruding from his gut. Clutching it, he collapsed face-up on the table. Other patrons raced to his writhing figure. Some produced box cutters and broken bottles to corner his attacker — heroes in their own movies. But the jackhammer operator didn’t even try to get away. As deflated as the guy he had just let the air out of, he only sank down to the bench normally used by players waiting their turn. He stared at his shoes with that blank expression Mechanic had seen plenty of times on the faces of players who had lost more gambling than they could afford. Before him, others pinned the screaming, sheet-metal worker to the pool table, holding him by the ankles and shoulders so he couldn’t make the bleeding worse by pulling out the cue.

The onlookers grew so dense around him that soon Mechanic couldn’t see anything but the handle of the pool cue, swaying reed-like above their heads with the rhythm of labored breathing. “Keep it together,” someone encouraged. There was a pitiful moan. “Be cool, man!” others advised. “The ambulance is coming!”

As did most of the others in the bar, Mechanic, Designer and Composer sat silently in their booth, taken out of time by the commotion of the fight, then the tenseness of the wait, by the spectacle of first the police arriving— To Control & Punish , said the reflective lettering on their jackets — then finally the ambulance. Paramedics in blue coveralls sauntered in carrying toolboxes like the mechanics they were: mechanics who dealt with body fluids instead of radiator leaks even if one of their toolboxes was empty, an ice-chest, as everyone knew, that all the paramedics of IN brought along in case their call for assistance became instead an occasion to harvest an organ. When the police pushed people back to create an aisle for them, Mechanic got a glimpse of the guy, his face ghostly-white against the green of the table. The Standard Beer light that hung over the pool table made his naked torso shine — a patient under the lamp of an operating table — now stripped of the clothing the paramedics had cut away. It also illuminated their hands, working first to wrap his punctured body in gauze, then to load it onto a stretcher.

As they took him away, a friend of his called after, “Don’t worry about your hard hat, man. I’ll bring it to work for you!”

Then it was over.

People milled about, talking about what they’d seen, and what he’d said, and what the other had said back. Someone threw a dart. A chubby drill-press operator in an overly tight tube-top pantomimed the fight for some girlfriends who had arrived after the action. “No way!” they shrieked at her animated explanation.

“I can’t believe they would fight over a game,” Designer said, her beautiful face flushed. Her lips were even fuller now, an indentation of teeth in her lower lip revealing how tense she had been. Composer described to Designer other fights he had witnessed in this bar, filling in details that seemed self-evident to Mechanic — e.g. “a game can be more than a game”—though judging from Designer’s reactions, they were the very things she’d been wondering: the best guide to a foreign culture not being a native, like Mechanic, apparently, but another foreigner, like Composer, even if from him, the cheating hearts, drunken husbands and wasted lives sounded more like the lyrics to a standard blues song.

Gradually the bar returned to normal. Standard bar music began to play again from the standard jukebox. Soon there was a dart game going. And not long after that, another game of Dunk-a-Drunk on the pool table where the man had lain bleeding, the stains he had left on its felt indistinguishable from those left by spilt beer. Composer was back at the point he’d been making when he’d been interrupted by the fight: “…your typical audio composer, though, goes about his or her business listening to the maestro of the slide whistle but never really hearing, and therefore never apprehending how any music that can be bought and sold — even the most anarchist of rock music — is a force in the maintenance of the status quo….”

Listening to Composer explain how “ultimately, what we consider to be music and how we play it determines who and what we are,” Mechanic had the gut feeling that he was right; his words did seem to explain why the pool game had meant so much to the loser. But there also seemed to be another thing that Composer was leaving out, something equally important: the fact that the game had meant so much to the two men, Mechanic knew, because their bodies had been in the bargain, the big guy going nuts over the graffiti of the chalk, his body being something so not-to-fuck-with because during the rest of the week all of their bodies were little more than tools that the factories they worked in would slowly consume — like a pencil, or a drill bit — this information also expressed in the lopsided development of the woman in the tube-top, her right arm, but not her left, muscular from operating a drill-press all day.

Two young guys went by with the gimpiness of old geezers, or rather, the gimpiness of carpet layers, Mechanic knew, the premature sponginess in their knees coming from the days they spent on them.

Looking from them to Composer’s symmetrical body, and Designer’s symmetrical face — and how different their classically proportioned jaws were from the other jaws in the bar — he tried to reconcile what Composer said with what he had seen, what he thought, with how everyone he knew lived: the idea that art could shape its viewer when up until then the only thing that had shaped anyone he had ever known was the world.

“…among composers in the audio spectrum,” Composer was saying, “Mallarmé alone understood that the musician who bypasses the senses completely is the musician who creates music par excellence .”

The carpet layers started dancing in an area cleared of tables, and were soon joined by the drill-press operator and her friends: women with hairdos of lacquered ringlets so tight their heads could be easily sheathed in the hairnets required of cafeteria workers. As the jukebox mechanically put out the popular hits — love songs that followed their predictable plots — more dancers took to the floor: a line dance of partners whose finger snaps conformed to the arc of a shovel’s throw, swirls of skirts echoing the pirouettes of mopping.