Steve Tomasula: IN & OZ

Years ago they had switched to fire hoses in the hopes that spraying water on the river would have the double benefit of returning it to its mostly aquatic, pre-flammable state, and the plan had mostly worked. Unlike the first weeks when Mechanic and his family had been evacuated to live with other families in an unused civic theater, firefighters now only had to be called out to control the occasional spot blaze. It was considered easy duty so given to those old timers who had been there through the worst.

Mechanic recognized one of them on a pumper in the distance, languidly working the spray from its hose over a patch of smoldering water and he honked the horn of his car in greeting. The firefighter waved the spray up and down in reply.

The landscape was charcoal black from the recent refinery fire, though — except for a scattering of shiny-new billboards that rose from its crust like the first, new green shoots after a forest conflagration.

ALIVE WITH PLEASURE! silently proclaimed a boisterous tableau of young, athletic, cigarette smokers. A second, circular billboard had been erected before it, painted black with yellow swirls that made it look like the vortex of a sewer, or a toilet, swirling with distorted words that were being sucked in. The words were stretched out so much by the vortex that it was impossible for Mechanic and Photographer to read them until they reached a point where they had an edge-on view of the billboard and the elongated letters were foreshortened enough to leap into clarity:

It was the work of a group of poets who thought they could fight the general abstinence from thought that plagued IN by convincing its electorate to limit the number of billboards, which to them were nothing more than a cancer of canned thought, a kind of anti-poetry. Photographer had told Mechanic the whole story on the way to one of their committee meetings: how once the anti-billboard faction managed to get the limitations of billboards on the ballot as a referendum, the pro-billboard faction began to wage their own public relations campaign, erecting even more billboards to beautify the countryside with mountain-sized pictures of autumn in Vermont or Niagara Falls or s that would cheer people, make them feel good about themselves, and of course, about billboards. Though the poets had won the first battle, they realized that they were losing the war and that their only hope was in fighting fire with fire, i.e., billboards. Billboards were, after all, the single most efficient means by which to reach drivers, those voters most likely to care about the issue. And if poets couldn’t defeat language whores with words, well then, there was no hope for anyone. An arms race of billboards ensued, with each side writing in the gaps between the signs of the other with ever bigger and more conspicuous billboards. It wasn’t going well for the poets. And yet, though the committee meeting that Photographer had insisted Mechanic attend with him had grown very heated — fistfights prickled the proceedings — Photographer had remained surprisingly calm. Mechanic couldn’t imagine why until afterwards Photographer scrambled around the upturned chairs and after-meeting arguments to introduce Mechanic to one of the poets who was leaving. A woman poet.

Or maybe she was a Sculptor. Mechanic could never be sure since Poet (or Sculptor) no longer made any work. She had been so disgusted, Photographer had explained on the way home (or maybe she had been enamored — again, Mechanic had never been sure which), by the ease of reading billboards, by their commanding presence in the world — language embodied — and by their enormous audiences that she took them to their logical conclusion, adopting dirt as her medium, dirt being, of course, the most democratic of all mediums. And since dirt covered all the earth, there was no need for her to make any other poems (sculptures), there being nothing more to say (see).

“…such an intelligent and sensitive woman, don’t you think?” Photographer said now, the sight of the billboards they passed having given him reason to bring her up again. He brought her up a lot, it seemed. And each time it was to sound Mechanic out for his opinion of the woman. Or so it seemed. And he talked about her in a way that Mechanic never heard him talk of anyone: tenderly. What was between them? Mechanic wondered, considering that Photographer was old enough to be her father. But he kept his peace, pushing in silence as the last of the town petered out, becoming a dark and empty plain.

“Ah, we’ve arrived,” Photographer said.

They shouldered the car onto the shoulder of the road, blocked the steering wheel with a large metal bar and padlock, then walked the last several hundred yards across a vast, vacant site up to where Composer lived: a deep shaft, created by the quarrying of granite used for the skin of the Essence of OZ Building and which, therefore, was that building’s inverse image, as deep as the Essence of OZ Building was high, and with its exact shape. Locals knew it as The Essence of IN Hole.

Solemnly, out of respect for the Composer’s grief, they descended. As expected, they found him at the bottom of the hole, bereft and supine on a fainting couch. Someone, he had discovered, had been playing his music. Not the way it was meant to be played, no, for it could in fact not be played at all: as his work matured, he had found himself increasingly impatient with the constraints all composers were forced to work under: the fact, for instance, that a violinist only had two arms. For a while he had tried to work around these constraints, creating compositions that required two violinists to man a single instrument so that the second musician could supply, when necessary, the extra fingers required by his music. But eventually even this became to him a form of suffocation, an impossible straight-jacketing of his ideas. So he abandoned what he had come to see as the ultimate constraint in music — hearing — and he began to compose only for those who read music, those who could play his music in their minds by looking at the notes he wrote for trumpets with as many keys as a saxophone, flutes that could be appreciated in the audio-bound world only by dogs, or harps with strings so long that their subsonic reverberations could be felt only by whales far out at sea, and for the first time in his life he breathed free.

Only now, he had learned, someone in OZ had figured out a way to use computers and other electronics to play his inaudible music, and was playing it everywhere. Even in elevators. And the news couldn’t have been more devastating to him had he learned that a beloved child had been transformed into a zombie, a grotesque parody of his darling, and loosed upon the world to serve as his representative and stand-in for the real Music, true Music, the Music he actually composed and in which the world showed absolutely no interest.

In Oz, Mental Health is measured by The Index of Economic Indicators.

MUSSIKAL INC., was listed under artistic credits in the maintenance log of the elevator that Designer worked in. MUSSIKAL INC. Standing in her office at night, she gazed out at the dots of fire that snaked through IN. For it was exactly like that — Musical ink — indelible as the ink of a tattoo writing itself upon her, the tickle of its needle making her shiver. And when there was a tattoo, she knew, there had to be a tattoo artist.

To cheer their comrade, Mechanic and Photographer decided to mount a concert of Composer’s music so that the world could hear it the way it was meant to be heard, that is, in silence. So they rented an alternative performance space, i.e., one of the many abandoned warehouses of IN, and they printed up handbills: