Steve Tomasula: IN & OZ

Considering Designer?… Did this mean he had more or less hope for her?

He looked at the grime that blackened the lifeline in his palm. In anger he flung the tools off of the bench. How he wished he could just go back to repairing cars again. He hammered his anvil. Had he known the curse that was about to enter through his eyes the day he had worked on that trannie, he knew, picking up the very screwdriver he had used to unbutton it, he would have used the screwdriver to instead gouge himself blind. He looked down into the glinting star of its point, bringing it slowly toward his eye….

A low moan came from the night outside the garage.

A prowler? He picked up his father’s hammer, and tripped out into the yard, stubbing his toe over that small mound of dirt that kept appearing before his door: a small, breast-shaped hump that he leveled each time he tripped over it but that kept reappearing like some stubborn weed: a persistent weed-seed below, no doubt, trying to push up into the light.

The wind had shifted. Whereas earlier it had smelled of sludge, telling him that it blew from the east where the oil dump was located, he could now smell the stench of sulfur from the steel mills that took up all of the useable shoreline of IN’s land-locked lake. The sky in that direction throbbed with the deep, reddish-brown of meat that had gone bad, the glow coming from the pouring of an ingot, he knew. But the red sky had never before throbbed in rhythm with the sound of heavy breathing — coming from?—

When he shielded his eyes from the glare of the security light buzzing over his back door, he could see — the dogs. The dogs had come back. Instead of running off to live in OZ as he had imagined, they had come home to him. And one, the bitch, was lying in the cage panting — pregnant — her swollen belly rising and falling like the exhaust lid of a diesel engine throbbing heavily in idle.

Designer tingled as technicians wheeled the metal mockup of the grill she had designed into the wind tunnel. This time for sure, she thought, her mind reeling with discarded sketches, then blueprints, as she watched the technicians bolt the carless grill to a test stand. She moved to the observation window that ran along the wind tunnel’s length. Scores of clay mockups filled the room around her: prototypes that were actually half grills, the model-makers saving time by making only the left side of each prototype, then placing it against a mirror so that she would have the illusion of seeing the whole. Looking into these mirrors reflecting mirrors, she caught sight of that monstrosity someone had sent her and that now rested beside the bay doors, waiting to go out with the trash: a huge mangle of welded fenders and other parts from cars she had once designed, now disfigured and multiplied nightmarishly in the labyrinth of mirrors. Someone had used a welding torch to sign it, A Secret Admirer , and the sight of it gave her a chill. If it was an admirer, and not a psycho, why hadn’t he used his name? Why had he mailed her the butchered parts of her children the way a sick-o might mail the ears or nose of a kidnapped child back to the mother?…

The wind tunnel began to hum. As the wind rushing through its funnel-shaped walls picked up speed, the sound coming from the auto grill increased in pitch as though it were a chrome slide-whistle. Only a slide-whistle that gave up a haunting note: the first note from a new instrument, not unlike the quavering sound that can be elicited from the wet rim of a wine glass, only in the wind tunnel mechanically prolonged. Not the music of the spheres, nor that pathetic soundless music, but something between the elevator music and the beauty of the silent music played by the night sky. An ethereal tone that seemed to come from somewhere between the lowest sphere of heaven and the highest peak on earth.

Technicians, and model makers, and prototype fabricators and others that had helped to make the test a success let out a loud cheer. “Bravo! Bravissimo!” they shouted, turning to her to applaud.

“Yes!” she replied, fist in air. She had her instrument. Now all she needed was her Mallarmé to bring from it glorious musik.

As though on cue, just as Mechanic arrived at the address Photographer had given him there was a sudden Crack! — thud and his car became as immobile as a tree. Walking out from behind the trunk, he immediately saw the problem: one of the welds that held the door under the axle as a ski had broken. The car listed badly to the front-passenger side, where the break was located, and the sight of it wearied him. After finding the note Photographer had left, telling him when and where to meet, he had set out in plenty of time. But as he pushed his car, he had gotten lost in his thoughts over recent events, and had forgotten completely about their meeting until coming out of his mental wandering, he discovered that his pushing had brought him to the correct block anyway. Then this—

The jack was still in the trunk, he considered, sitting down on the curb. It had been left there from the days when the car used to go about on tires instead of skis. But his welding equipment was back at his garage, of course, and the dilemma seemed to express his life. As he ran through various options for bringing the broken car and his welding equipment together — tow the car there? bring the equipment here? — a darkening self-doubt began to seep over him. Would repairing the ski be no different than making any repair? That is, if putting a door in the place of a tire kept people from taking wheels for granted, would repairing the ski help him take skis for granted? If familiarity could make anything invisible, he thought, growing sicker by the minute, had a car with skis for wheels become invisible to him? Was he no better than those philistines, as Photographer called them, who insisted on cars with tires? Just in a different, i.e., worse, way? — a hypocrite?

Rising, he circled his sagging car, wondering what to do, the questions only leading him down a labyrinth of further questions. Would having his car towed be any different than driving a car with wheels himself?… He didn’t know the neighborhood he was in, or even how far from home he had gone, but judging from the weariness of his muscles, the welder and the car were very far apart.

Photographer, he remembered, Photographer would know what to do and he was right here.

The building that the car had run aground before was plain even by IN standards, its windows boarded up in the manner of porno shops. Checking the address again, Mechanic confirmed that he was indeed in the right place. BOOKS said block lettering on the door.

Entering, Mechanic was surprised to see that the place was indeed a bookstore and not a bar. He didn’t know there were any bookstores in IN, or that they only sold repair manuals. The metal shelves of manuals were arranged by genres of machines, from hair dryers and pencil sharpeners all the way up to entire industrial plants. Wandering the aisles, looking for Photographer, Mechanic paused here and there to thumb through the occasional title that caught his eye. Most of them seemed to be just light reading, exploded diagrams and instructions for making repairs to machines that were so simple, the repair of them seemed intuitive. He couldn’t imagine anyone reading these books, let alone taking the time to write out the detailed instructions they contained. Others were for machines that performed functions so abstract he couldn’t even imagine what need had brought them into existence, or the principles that made them operate, let alone who the books could have possibly been written for.

Looking up at their spines as he walked, he accidentally kicked into a folding chair — a line of metal folding chairs that had been set up in the aisle near the back of the store. At the head of the line of four or five chairs was a podium and standing at the podium was Poet (Sculptor).