Steve Tomasula: IN & OZ

In the front row, Composer was also limp, but from rapture. As the final note of the music played out across the screen, and in unison Photographer and Mechanic cut out the projector and engine, he sprung to his feet, applauding wildly. The woman awoke with a start. She looked around as though it took her a few moments to realize where she was. When she did, she also began to applaud. Mechanic and Poet (Sculptor) joined in, standing and clapping with Photographer shouting, “ Bravo! Bravissimo! ”

Weak with happiness, Composer struggled to stand. He stepped from the rows of folding chairs up to the front of the scroll, clasping his hands together and shaking them victoriously overhead in the manner of prizefighters, or opera conductors who redirect the applause meant for them back to the orchestra in the pit while Poet (Sculptor) presented him with her Mason jar of dirt, her bouquet. “My friends, my dear, dear friends,” he announced, gesturing to Mechanic and Photographer when the applause finally died down. “Let me at least buy you a drink.”

Mechanic, Photographer and Composer pulled on their coats, and Poet (Sculptor) joined them as they headed for the door, each glancing back at the woman who only continued to stand near her seat, holding her dog.

“Who is she?” they asked one another, huddling, each having assumed she was one of the other’s relatives.

Finally, Composer, still glowing with gratitude and love for his friends, and indeed, all humanity, bowed to the woman, and said, “Madam, my friends and I are going to a nearby tavern to celebrate this momentous occasion. You are more that welcome to join us.”

“Yes,” Mechanic told the woman, stepping in front of Poet (Sculptor) to do so. “You are more than welcome.”

Outside, they offered her a ride, but since she had her own car, she said she would follow, then hurried off to get it, her dog taking quick steps to keep up.

“Hey,” Photographer yelled, seeing that Poet (Sculptor) was about to ride away on her bicycle. “Aren’t you coming?” he called, jogging to catch up to her.

In high spirits, Composer jumped onto the hood of Mechanic’s car. “Va-ROOOOOM!” he yelled, calling to her that they had lots of room. Mechanic could see Photographer trying to convince Poet (Sculptor) to come with them, tugging her elbow toward the group in a kidding sort of way. In the end, she kept shaking her head, and Photographer kissed her on the cheek, then rejoined the group alone.

“Your friend’s not coming?” Mechanic asked, taking up a good position to push.

“You blockhead,” Photographer answered, also putting a shoulder to the trunk.

“Huh?”

“Va-ROOOOM! Va-ROOM!” Composer roared from the hood, reaching in through its open windshield to steer. A white car, the woman in her car, pulled up behind them, and they were off. If there were ever any pedestrians in IN, which there never were, they might have mistaken Composer’s va-rooming for the revving of the car’s engine. But the woman, who drove close behind at their pedestrian’s pace, immediately recognized the sound as an imitation of the engine that had powered his concert.

A light, oily mist began to fall, making the pushing easier and lifting spirits, and soon Mechanic stopped wondering why Photographer had been cross. As during the concert, he couldn’t keep his eyes off of the woman — and her car: a white coupe bowed as an angel wing, or dolphin fin, or a cresting wave — it was impossible to say — it being a car such as never appeared in IN until years after its new-car smell had been consumed by the noses of previous owners.

Inside the bar, he continued to let her nearness etch itself on his mind as the others talked excitedly about the concert. Photographer, of course, critiqued his own, and Mechanic’s interpretation, finding it far short of what the music deserved. He mused on future performances, and wished they had thought to attach a muffler to deaden the roar of the engine. Composer would hear none of it. Though normally reticent, he was still in high spirits and exuberantly claimed that the performance was just as he had always imagined. Better than he had imagined, for if the engine hadn’t drowned out the noise of the street outside, and the drips from the ceiling inside, and the barking of the audience’s dog, who knows what horrors of harmonics they might have combined into? “Perfect silence is very difficult to achieve,” he noted, “and so sometimes one must settle for its equivalent, White Noise.”

Though Mechanic had thought the woman hadn’t seen a note, she spoke as knowledgeably about the music as any of them. Even passionately. She waxed poetic about how much the music meant to her personally, thanking Composer for bringing it into the world, the world being a more beautiful place for it. Her enthusiasm kindled their own and they all laughed and joked about the world, and art, with Photographer talking about looking, and Composer scribbling out songs on a napkin for their entertainment. All was as effervescent as the bubbles in their beer until there was a lull in the conversation and the woman turned to Mechanic and asked, “So what’s wrong with your car?”

The question, the fact that she had spoken directly to him, brought him up short. “W-What do you mean?”

“Your car. What’s wrong with it? Why does it have doors for wheels? And why are its wheels welded on top of its roof?”

“My friend is an artist,” Photographer announced, lifting his beer in homage. “That car is his art.”

The woman’s angelic brow wrinkled. “Why?”

Photographer rolled his eyes as if she had asked the stupidest question he had ever heard and Mechanic kicked him under the table to tell him to let it go.

But the woman persisted. “I mean, I wouldn’t want a car with its wheels on its roof. I wouldn’t be able to drive to work. I live twenty miles from my job. Why don’t you make cars people can drive to work?”

The table fell silent. Mechanic rocked his glass, making O-rings with its damp bottom, for truly, he couldn’t say. Finally Photographer, who lived within a camera, said with what Mechanic thought was undue sarcasm, “Why don’t you live closer to your work?”

“I just don’t see why anyone would—”

“ Obviously , he wants people to see that cars have wheels,” Photographer said in a patronizing way, pronouncing the words slowly, as though for a child.

The woman was unfazed. “But everyone already knows that.”

“And anyway,” Photographer said, growing hotter by the moment, “what do you know about such matters?”

“A lot, actually. I design cars.”

The table was struck dumb. Then Composer repeated, obviously impressed, “You are a designer of automobiles?” And the woman, Designer, explained how she worked in the Essence of OZ Building, designing the sleek molded bumpers that covered the shock absorbers that actually protected a car from bumps, and the gleaming facades of chrome spokes that hid the grotesque nuts that held the wheels to their axles. Composer asked many questions, drawing her out on every detail, their call and response growing into a festival of admiration. “So you too begin by composing in silence?” he said, when she explained how it all began with a blank sketch pad. Once the initial idea was down in black and white, as thought embodied, she next turned it into eye-candy, developing her ideas with pastels, fleshing out the sensual curves of poreless skin, massaging and massaging until the drawing looked like…. “Well, until it looked like your car,” she told Mechanic.

“Y-You designed my car?” Mechanic stammered.

She nodded. “Before you put its wheels on its roof, that is.”

Photographer, who had been sitting there scowling the whole while, hugged Mechanic to him and snapped at her, “Well my friend here fixed your design!”