Steve Tomasula: IN & OZ

Before coming to work in the Essence of OZ Building, Designer had never really listened to elevator music, so wouldn’t even pretend to the level of connoisseurship shared by co-workers who argued the ornaments of every piece. But now that she found herself exposed to it during most of her waking hours, she felt captivated by it. Or at least captivated by the music that played in the elevator she worked in, which was more ethereal, more — different — than the music she had heard in other elevators.

The tempo changed, catching her off guard again, and as per the game she played against herself during her morning jogs, she turned down the next dirt road, pleasantly surprised to find a Technicolor rainbow over amber waves of grain undulating in the breezeless air.

If she guessed that the tempo would quicken, she thought, picking up her pace to stay with the new pace of the music, it would suddenly stop; if other songs went da-da-de , this music would go simply dada . So intriguing were its departures that trying to anticipate them became as engrossing to her as soap operas or video games were to others.

It did it again— Nuts! — and she took another fork in the road, the waves of grain giving way to an arid, Road-Runner/Coyote terrain, a greeting-card sunrise enflaming spacious skies.

She understood why the self-proclaimed connoisseurs of elevator music she worked with dismissed it as they did, crying out, “This isn’t elevator music!” It was different. Still, she had no counter argument. In previous disagreements, she always maintained that while she didn’t know anything about music, she knew what she liked. But this — not even that reason applied to this music. For how could she claim to know what she liked when it demonstrated note by note that a person couldn’t like what they didn’t know?

The sun peeked through a purple mountain’s majesty just as her jog took her by Mt. Rushmore, the gigantic stone heads of once-upon-a-time presidents having been replaced by bas-reliefs of the Excita, Bellvu, K9 and K7—the Company’s four best sellers, cars and trucks that she had designed. Hearing that new, fluid music while seeing the sun glare with the baldness of an interrogation lamp on her old ideas, all set in stone, she couldn’t help but feel as if the music was calling on her to explain. To justify….

Those designs, immortalized in stone for their popularity and sales, were not her best work, she knew. She’d been young when she’d come up with them and now, older, more mature as a designer, the roof lines and trunk profiles she drew carried far more authority, even gravitas, and they showed her earlier designs for what they were: pirouettes on a high-wire by a girl too young and green to know let alone care about any musty burden of design history. Yet the more eloquent her designs became, speaking more while saying less, the fewer the people there were who seemed to get their depth. The fewer the people there were who could get it, she feared, an appreciation of her designs increasingly requiring as they did a knowledge of fender history, of the history of roof lines, of the limits and possibilities of sheet-metal bend-radii and injection-mold tensile strength and a million other technical constraints…. Though the reviewers in Auto Times and other culture magazines loved the layers of her work, though the speeches to stockholders and PR within the company alibied away the downturn on the charts for her models — citing cost-cutting measures, and budgets for billboards and cycles in the grease industry, the aging of their Sports Hero Spokesman, consolidation in container shipping or the movement of other stars — she herself couldn’t silence the tiny voice that whispered from her pillow at night, “Could forty million auto buyers all be wrong?”

Oh What a Beautiful Morning began playing: the signal that the work day was about to begin and that the roads she’d been jogging down would in a few moments be taken over by cars racing through their test laps. For an instant she had an intimation of waking up as she increasingly did at home, bolting upright in a sweat from a nightmare in which she had been reading her own name on a tombstone. Yet, pulling off the VR helmet to return to the fluorescent lighting and her work-a-day thoughts here in the office, she somehow found solace in this strange elevator music — this music with its synthesizers and discords and who-knows-what that was complex beyond comprehension but could, nevertheless, be felt by someone like her who didn’t know a thing about music. And when she looked beyond her art book on the windowsill and out toward the sun rising dully over the brown stain on the horizon that was IN, she couldn’t help but feel that there was some answer that she wasn’t seeing. Something beyond OZ that she knew nothing about.

In OZ, flowers are always delivered hermetically sealed in plastic.

The gravity that had brought Mechanic and Photographer together continued its tide pull and soon Mechanic was moving within Photographer’s current of friends, including one Composer who had become, like Photographer’s other friends, a friend of Mechanic as well. So, when a tragedy befell Composer, Mechanic didn’t need to be told that he and Photographer would go sit shiva with him, to be there, to help, though there was nothing they could actually do.

They took Mechanic’s car, a large sedan that an irate customer had abandoned after he failed to see why Mechanic had welded its wheels to the roof, and mounted car doors like skis where there used to be wheels. Night falling, security lights with the brightness of arc welders began to wink on above the sheds and backdoors they protected. As Mechanic and Photographer pushed the car through their neighborhood of concrete houses and sludge-compacting plants, its eventide serenity, the evensong of its buzzing security lights was broken only by their grunts of exertion, and the occasional roar of smoke stacks venting fireballs of burning waste gas.

I ASSUME YOU DRIVE EXCITA? said one soot-streaked billboard, a sophisticated woman in a bikini tuxedo splayed across the hood of a new pickup truck.

Looking down was easy in IN; though its streets had no lamps, the number of sheds and backdoors and front doors and barred windows that sported a full-sized streetlight to deter break-ins was so great that it was never dark. But to look up, to see higher than the billboards, or to see where they were going, Mechanic had to shield his eyes, the huge lamps that were intended to be mounted twenty-five feet above the pavement always glaring at eye-level like intense bug zappers that killed the night and its stars. They gave the deserted streets the silvery cast of dead fish, and the color often made Photographer remark that living in IN was like living in an eternal black-and-white photo, an Atget (whatever that was).

It stayed that way until the cramped streets of worker houses and sulfur mills and loading docks and slag heaps and munitions factories began to give way to blocks with huge gaps in them. The outline of a foundation marked where a standard school had recently stood. Other lots were empty except for square silhouettes of the standard houses that had filled them before that neighborhood’s oil refinery blew up, taking the neighborhood with it. This was also the point where the river that snaked through IN had caught fire back when Mechanic was just a kid. Its stagnant water had become such a cocktail of chemical runoff from the industrial plants along its banks that its very nature changed, like those dead, salt-saturated seas that eventually make rocks float, this river having become flammable.

Since he had grown up under a bridge, he had gotten to know most of the firefighters of IN, bridges affording the most convenient spots from which to spray the flaming river with their chemical foams. Some of those original firefighters were now reaching retirement age — the ones who hadn’t been burnt alive in the initial days — and every time Mechanic came across one of those strapping young men — giants in his child’s mind — now graying and frail, having spent their lives fighting the river, he felt a poignant tenderness toward them. Toward every mortal creature.