Steve Tomasula - IN & OZ

“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.

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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.

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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.

The group stood in reverent silence, their funhouse reflections dim in the tarnished titanium of this last car, shaped like a torpedo with high rocket fins. In the hush of the museum, the memento mori moved Mechanic to thoughts of his own dead parents, and how blueprints for this stillborn future must have been created at about the same time that his father, who had never intended to be a mechanic, had opened his garage. Living under a bridge as Mechanic’s father and mother did, whenever someone’s car broke down it would coast downhill and end up at their door. Usually owners of the broken cars simply asked to use the phone. Sometimes they would ask his father to have a look-see at the engine. Eventually, the increasing business brought on by the ever-more severe cost-cutting measures at the plant forced him to put up a hand-lettered sign listing fees for various repairs. He never returned from his next layoff, having metamorphosed during it into a full-time mechanic.