Steve Tomasula: IN & OZ

Though she had won many awards for her designs of auto bodies, secretly, she never thought of herself as a designer of autos at all. True enough, her curvaceous fenders and hoods did mask the grotesque viscera of cars. But they did so in the way that an arty dress or designer eyeglasses were more of a language than an article of clothing or medical aide — a dominant language, the way French had once been the tongue of diplomacy, or Latin of conquest. If she wasn’t giving desire form — and shaping the world by doing so — what exactly was she or any designer doing? Isn’t this why women’s blue jeans came in so many versions: The Flare (Slung Way, Way Low); The Boyfriend (The Relaxed Comfort of His Jeans); The Curve (Show Off YourS); The Capri (Gypsy Styling); The London Jean (High, High Inseam); The Carpenter (Baggy with Hammer Loops); The Hip-Hop (Trés Gangsta); The Natural (Everybody’s Favorite)?… Each body she designed, then, was a body that her drivers could take as their own, and people could change their selves by changing what they drove. New immigrants to OZ could acquire the OZian Dream of assimilation by buying the forest-green or golden-rod Family Vans all families in OZ drove. Rebels could “fight the power” by buying flashy-red off-road vehicles. In either case they were beautiful products, and people made themselves beautiful by using them. And that was what she actually designed, beautiful people. A beautiful world.

In OZ, Fulfillment was as simple as the swipe of a charge card, Desire baroque as its codes.

One day in IN, Mechanic was lying in sludge beneath a car, utility lamp tight in his teeth, when something within him snapped. No sooner had he gotten the filthy-black underbelly of the car unbuttoned than he found himself staring into the gleam of silver gears, radiant with honey-gold lubricant. Though he had seen gears like this thousands of times before, it had never once occurred to him how eloquently their polished metal teeth explained his life: their mesh and power ratios may as well have been engineers, and foundry men, all on a shaft, with machinists, and mechanics, as his father had been, and the farmers and cooks, as his mother had been, who fed the factory workers, and highway builders who made it possible for everyone to get to jobs that brought into existence the need for marvels such as cars which needed transmissions which needed gears which needed him. So intense was the wonder caused by this glimpse at the world and his place in it that Mechanic couldn’t have been more agape had he been the fish that spends its life completely ignorant of “sea” until it found itself pitched gasping onto the beach; or a child, who upon overturning a rock and finding grubs reducing a rotten apple to dirt is able to think for the first time, “That apple is I.” It was as if he had stumbled upon one of those forces that guide equally the planets in their orbits and the flight of an arrow — a force that had been there all along, making the visible what it was, though the force itself remained invisible, unspeakable, unrecognizable. Until now.

Trembling, and not knowing what else to do, he repaired the transmission and bolted it shut.

But as time went on, it became increasingly difficult for him to forget about what he had seen. Standing before customers who tried to describe the vapor lock plaguing their cars by making a hacking cough, or customers who, with the erudition of medieval peasants on the topic of thermodynamics, explained to Mechanic the symptoms of a slack timing chain by imitating a spastic tic, he came to understand that the ignorant sought him out not for enlightenment but solely to make the profound inner workings of Auto invisible: to fix whatever rattle or misfire or stall it was that had brought some offending fuel pump or brake drum or other mechanism before him so that he could return it to the dark and they could go on being fish who wouldn’t think about the sea until it broke again.

Perhaps it was the continual barking of the dogs that finally got to him. Or the continual whine of tires on the toll-road bridge that the man lived troll-like below. The neighbors blamed it on the strain he had been under during the prolonged dying of first his father, then his mother, both from the unrelenting ugliness of the steel mills and oil refineries, and the endless barrel and crate and gunpowder and acetylene factories that permeated IN, and so permeated its citizen-employees, filling first their souls, then their lungs with a rust-colored stain. In any case, Mechanic found he could no longer go on as he had. He reached the point where he couldn’t even pretend he cared if the autos left in his care were ever set “right.” The street rodders and kustom kar rebuilders who came to him were a catalyst in this, escaping into their fantasies of chrome oil pans and black-lit leafsprings, airbrushed tattoo-art of virgins on hoods, skulls in the doorjambs, bodies so beautiful that they made the essence of Auto completely invisible.

Indeed, fitting a chromed manifold onto a goldplated block, he began to be weighted down by his own culpability, his own — yes, moral sellout was not too strong a word.

So the next time a customer brought in a transmission for repair, he unbolted it from the chassis where it hung bat-like in darkness beneath the car. Then he remounted it upside down. Now, the gearshift lever which had previously stuck up between the bucket seats inside the car protruded from the car’s underbelly while the gears themselves were exposed on the inside of the car where they were all quite visible, dangerously visible, to both driver and passengers.

“What the hell!” shouted the owner of the car upon his return.

Their argument ended with Mechanic throwing his customer out, keys after, the man’s oaths to bring lawyers raining down confused by the wild snarling of the dogs flinging themselves against their pen to get at him.

A brief lexicon of words useful in IN: Blood Sausage. Carcinogenic. Steam Pipe.

Fenders flowed from her Conté crayon so fluidly that without even trying, Designer could doodle out a decade’s worth of auto designs so that when thumbed in flip-book fashion, their tail fins would shrink, a Dimetrodon evolving into a salamander, before growing back into dinosaur-sized scale. Advanced Marketing loved her. But she herself began to feel as if there was something hollow, something missing in her sketches. And therefore in her life. As others in her office sat at their desks, their heads inside the Virtual Reality Helmets that let them try out 3-D visions of the autos she designed, she drifted away on the clouds, allowing herself to become lost in the elevator music that played continually in her corporately-sleek office.

As every architect knows, the taller a building becomes, the more of its interior must be dedicated to elevators and their cables and lifting apparatus. And in order to make The Essence of OZ Building the tallest in the world, and thereby have it speak superiority over all other companies and their “second-rate” skyscrapers, it had been necessary to devote the entire interior of this building to elevators. The hallways were elevators, the closets were elevators, the stairwells were elevators, the elevators were elevators, of course, but so were all of the offices, and Designer and the others who worked in these offices spent their days gliding up and down, serenaded by elevator music as they sat motionless at their desks, gunning engines and roaring around the room in virtual-reality cars, or applying the formulas that would spinoff last season’s style into next year’s must-have rage.

In OZ, there has never been a romantic comedy that was not This Season’s Funniest Tender Movie!