Steve Tomasula - IN & OZ

He and Composer began arguing heatedly, but Mechanic didn’t hear, his mind stuck in the single gear of the woman before him designing his car. To think that first there was nothing. Then there was something! His own car! And it had come from her pen. It was no easier to get his mind around her, or anyone, dreaming his car into existence than it was to imagine a blacksmith forging a river. Yet here she was, and yes she had. A river goddess, bringing into existence not only the river but the banks it cut, the rocks it polished, the forests it watered, the trees it uprooted, the rapids it rode and the falls it plunged down along the way.

That night, Mechanic was too excited to sleep. Standing in the alley behind his garage, he understood the emotional release Photographer must have felt laying eyes on the radiator where his windshield used to be and recognizing the presence of a kindred spirit. If he and her could work together, he saw, more clearly than he had ever seen anything in his life, then he was sure they could come up with some way to make everyone not only be able to see what he had seen, but want to see it — as badly as he wanted her to — he wanted her — he wanted—

He bent back and let out a howl. This set off his dogs within the garage, and laughing he unlatched the door. The dogs burst out, ramming him to the ground with the force of an exploding acetylene tank. Before their teeth could break skin, though, they recognized his smell and he instead found himself enveloped in licking tongues. He struggled back to his feet, simultaneously ruffling their fur, and kneeing the jumping dogs in the chest to keep them from knocking him down again. The exuberance of the happy dogs forced him to push them away harder, then punch them in the mouths. They continued to leap on him, and he continued to punch them till knuckles and mouths bleeding, he yelled, “Go on! Get out of here!” As if too shocked by their good fortune to move, the dogs needed a kick before they yelped, then tore off down the alley, barking ecstatically, and snapping at each other.

In bed, his mind raced with wild visions of all the fabulous devices he and Designer could invent together: automobiles with clear bodies so people could see the engines inside, and engines with clear blocks so people could see their pistons derricking up and down. Their autos would be like anatomical models on wheels: The Visible Man and also The Visible Woman, with red oil coursing through their veins, a colon of pink exhaust. On through the night he revised their dreams, the distant yapping of the dogs followed by the occasional clatter of garbage cans serenading him till tired and happy he fell asleep.

Poetry in OZ, which is generally sold in drugstores, is generally printed on cardboard that can be folded to fit in envelopes.

In the morning, Designer arrived at her desk and began to sketch the idea she’d gotten driving through the wind at the top of the toll bridge she had to cross to get home. But every drawing she began resembled a pipe organ on wheels. She’d tear off a new page, then begin again, the idea whistling just beyond reach, just illusive enough to escape her crayon….

In general, poetry is not sold in IN.

Nights, Mechanic’s furnace roared, its sides pulsing with a dark, blood-red heat. Each slam of the drop-forge it powered was another rhyme in the visual sonnet he was composing for her— Wham! Wham! — hammering crankcase bearings, and piston rods into pressed-flowers of themselves. As he worked, the enormous flywheel of his forge slowly rotated, its massive millstone of a counterweight adding enough danger to the garage to command respect from anyone for it and its unforgiving brute power, its indifference to whether it was crushing metal or bone.

Chewing a stump of jerky during a break, he considered the marks he already bore: a white, crescent-moon of a scar on one thumb from a brush against a hot manifold; skinned knuckles from the times a wrench he had been pushing hard against slipped its nut, a mechanic’s occupation writing itself on his body, as it had on his father’s — just as the fate of his watch-dogs had been determined by their powerful bodies and jaws, just as the petite size of Designer’s dog afforded it a place in her lap. And yet, he knew, spotting his broken hammer, his was a fate past, not future, and he smiled at the thought of the empty dog cage outside, even if his livelihood as a mechanic seemed to have left with them.

Initially, the dwindling customers made him doubt himself as a mechanic — could all of those car owners be wrong? He’d break out in an existential sweat trying to come up with an answer. For if he wasn’t a mechanic, what was he? Like those hermits who had too much time on their hands for thinking about God, he might have lost his mind completely if he hadn’t had Photographer there to convince him that the deeper he was within himself as a mechanic, the fewer people there would be who would want him to work on their cars: “What else did you expect?”

Not this, he admitted to himself once alone again. Not the continual fighting with customers. Seeing one after another desert him was too much like déjà vu of the solitude he was in after his parents died. Especially the day he repaired the car of an old friend of his father’s: a friend that his father had known since the days when they worked in the plant together, long before Mechanic’s father had become a mechanic; a friend so old and so much like family that Mechanic’s father had worked on this friend’s Standard Auto for years for free, keeping a car running that the two of them had actually helped build as young men doing their bit as it went down the line and whose simple mechanisms Mechanic had continued to keep running ever since his father died — a link between them. When this old family friend had come around to pick up his vehicle after the last repair, though, he had stopped abruptly in the bay door of the garage, the two after-work cold-ones he’d brought by to ease reminiscing falling from his hands and shattering on the concrete floor of the garage as he stared at his car standing on end and sledge hammered into the shape of an Urn. Slowly, his eyes welled with tears. His head hung there with the limpness of a dead man walking. Then he turned and left without saying a word, too choked up to speak, and after he was gone, Mechanic slumped down onto his toolbox and wept.

He wept for his father and his father’s friend, mourning the time when they were strapping young cock-o-the-walks in the plant. He wept for himself — for an innocent time when he was just a boy and had borrowed his father’s tools to fix his own bicycle for the very first time. How happy he’d been! How proudly they had beamed at him!

His mood blackened. There was no going back. Even if he wanted to. He couldn’t not know what he knew, no matter how badly he wished it. And knowing what he knew, he knew he could never wish it. No, not him. Not ever again.