Steve Tomasula - IN & OZ

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.