Tours through the Historical Society and Gun Club always ended on the top floor of the mansion, the ballroom. There, he, Composer, Poet (Sculptor), Photographer, Designer and the other visitors were invited to imagine (and mourn the passing of) the fabulous parties that were once held there, the ballroom situated so that the picture window at one end looked out onto the future that would become OZ, while the picture window at the opposite end had been aligned to give a clear view of the factory’s main smokestack, rising like a brick phallus from the abandoned work-houses, slag heaps and assembly lines below, “A still-living monument,” the guide said, “to the family’s wealth, power, birthright, and legacy.”
$1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00… .
If he ever rubbed a headlamp, Mechanic thought, and a genie appeared to grant him three wishes, he would ask of the genie the answer to three questions:
Question 1: Life.
Question 2: Death.
Question 3: Stuff.
Question 3: Stuff.
Question 3: Stuff.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
After that night in the bar, Designer thought about all Composer had said. Thought a lot about commerce being a language, as he had said. And whether or not all things could be said in every language, as he denied. She thought a lot about whether the language she used shaped what she said, but mostly she fretted about the difference between what it made her and what he said was Art.
She sat in the living room of her condo, looking at furnishings she had picked, she thought, to be an expression of her self, but now seeing how she could be an extension of them, living within a spread from Condo Beautiful or some other high-end magazine devoted to the art of tasteful living. How could those magazines—products themselves—not have modeled her space, and therefore her vision, and therefore her thoughts, and therefore her work, and therefore herself? Her chrome love-seat came from a celebrity shoot in Celebrity Living; vases that looked like a single sheet of folded snow came from another magazine, as did candle holders that could have been huge chrome tears, her white-leather sofa, white rug and all the rest of her furnishings all eloquently saying the same thing: money. As composer said they would.
She’d even picked out her white dog to match the rug, she remembered, as it trotted into the room. It sat before her and looked up as if to ask, Could putting something in her condo that didn’t come from a magazine make a difference?
She sat up straight.
The dog’s ears cocked, eyes on her.
Something that couldn’t be bought from a magazine, or even a catalog? Would breaking up the monolithic style of her decor crack open a new way of seeing? In the instant that the rut she’d been in materialized before her, she was also sure that she’d stumbled upon a way out.
But what could she possibly get that didn’t come from a store and that could shake up her work?
She snapped her fingers when it came to her: Art!—as Composer had said all along.
The next day after work, she swung by the gallery district of OZ, and stepping into the first white-walled, hardwood-floored space, she tingled with expectation. A gallery, she saw, was far different from a store. The ratio of merch to clerks was just the opposite of a store, with there being very few works of art on the bare walls, and lots of clerks, impeccably groomed in sleek black dresses, and paid, apparently, to do nothing more than lounge around, filling the gallery with their hip hairstyles and lean beauty.
The art didn’t have any prices. Or rather, everything had a price. It was just that determining the price of something as unique and ephemeral as art could only be a matter of discussion—not looking at a tag—in a language with a way of speaking all its own. In order to buy a work of art as opposed to a product, she learned, the gallery owner (shopkeeper) and the collector (shopper) would talk about everything but the price—the saturated colors in the clown’s outfit, for example, or the fine modeling that the artist employed in rendering the tear beneath his eye—how real it looked!—until an agreed-upon price would emerge from the fog of language like a dove that a magician might produce from a pile of scarves.
Not knowing anything about Art other than that she would know it when she saw it, she went from gallery to gallery, viewing their wares until suddenly there it was—A huge square canvas, painted blue with a yellow swirl. The swirl seemed to spiral down into the center of the painting like the eye of a hurricane seen from above, its intense yellow arms feathering out into the powder-blue background. Even though the chalky, Easter-egg colors formed a pleasing composition, she could tell this abstract painting was a work of Art and not just a pretty picture, as Composer might say, because try as she might, she couldn’t understand it. And in the end, she didn’t really even care to look at it that much.
Sure enough, the minute she got it home, it began to complicate her life. Here in her condo, the painting was much larger than it had appeared in the open space of the gallery. Her dog growled at it. She took down the designer mirror she’d had hanging over the fireplace, and put the painting up in its place. Seeing it from the couch, her dog cowering in her lap, the painting so big and dominating that she felt it was looking down its nose at her and her apartment as if they were unworthy of its presence. She put the mirror back up and hung the painting on the opposite wall, but trapped between the painting and its mirror image, the concentric swirl gave her a spinning sensation, the swirl itself seeming to rotate like the pinwheels used by hypnotists to gain control of a person’s mind until she could think of nothing else.
The only place to hang the painting in the bathroom was across from the toilet, but the blue water, the yellow swirl seemed like a potty joke here. In her bedroom, while laying on her bed and looking at the painting framed by the V of her open legs, it reminded her too much of a bull’s-eye, so she moved it back to its original place above the mantel.
Being a designer, she soon found a way to make the Art seem less like a dominating sneer, though. She placed some asymmetrical flowers beside it on the mantel—in a vase that matched, and therefore drew the eye from the blue background of the painting. In Elegant Living Illustrated, she found a pair of pillows for sale that had beadwork in a color and pattern that matched the painting exactly and put these on the couch. A lamp from Elegant Interiors had the squarish proportions of the painting, as did the end table from Modern Living that she placed it upon. As time passed and she grew accustomed to the painting and the other new merch in her condo, she found it harder and harder to say which was product and which art. And one day, trying to remember why she had gone out and paid so much for the painting, she clapped her hands together and laughed to realize that she’d found a real answer to the question that had sent her out on her quest. And she had the painting to thank.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
That night, Mechanic arced the last weld on the bouquet he was making for Designer. He tilted his helmet up to admire his handiwork, licked his lips, then hit the START button. The enormous orchid of metal groaned; the fenders he had hammered into petal shapes shrieked the scream of sheet-metal being separated by the Jaws of Life as they opened in bloom: the hundreds of side-view mirrors that he had salvaged from smashedup cars of Her design rose pistil-like from its center… .
Waiting to be pollinated… .
Excitedly, he closed up his garage, then set off to find Composer so he could add the last missing bit: a piece of music that would play from the orchid and speak of the difference Composer had been so eloquent about that night in the tavern, a piece of music, or silence, so eloquent that Designer would know that how things worked was at least as important as how they looked—if they didn’t, in fact, comprise a whole, a single beat, an infinite slide-whistle.
He found Composer alone in his hole. Before he could even get the request out, though, Composer said, “She wants me to compose a piece of music for her.”
“Who?” Mechanic asked happily. The moment he asked, though, he saw the grim expression on Composer’s face and held his breat
h, dreading but unable to believe what he knew would be the answer.
“Designer,” Composer said. Mechanic felt his body become a crash-test dummy, the wooden heart inside of that dummy another dummy with a dummy’s heart and all of them broken against a wall. By the time his body had warmed enough for him to resume breathing, Composer was saying, “… and wants me to compose a piece of music that can be whistled by the grill of the automobile she is now designing.”
“A piece of?—Of audio music?” Mechanic finally managed to get out.
Composer nodded. “There’s more. She’s convinced her company to create a Department of Automotive Musik Engineering. They want me to become its Maestro and Chief Engineer.”
Mechanic wanted to think this was a joke. It was the only way his mind could register the barely recognizable quacking he was hearing. “Then you?—And HER?—Would work together?”
Composer looked away. The two of them were silent a long time, feeling the blackness of the hole deepen.
“And you?” Mechanic asked. “What do you think?”
Whereas once Composer would have answered with a sneer at what they considered music to be, now he shrugged. “Overnight I would have a worldwide audience,” he said. Overnight I would be paid. And paid well for my work.”
“But it would be your work, not your music,” Mechanic said. Composer again fell into the silence of the justly-accused, and the stillness allowed the ghosts of hundreds of smoky conversations to drift up around them. As from a far away place Mechanic heard a ghostly Yankee Doodle—with Composer’s voice at its edge gushing over the utter genius of the Mallarmé arrangement with its last phrase containing the entire melody the way a Russian nesting doll contains a smaller duplicate of itself. “Halve the note and double the beat and place the song within itselffff,” Composer’s specter sang to the tune, “And sing a song about itself that’s caught up in its singggggg-inggggg… .”
That song saved my soul, he’d always said, claiming that it taught him the truth about all music. And life: that it was only by paying the strictest attention to music, and not by pandering to the masses, that a musician could discover a subject grander than music. Remembering his claim now, Mechanic spat back at him, “Then Le Petomane was just a story? A fairy tale, meant to amuse drinking buddies?” Again Composer looked away, cut to the quick this time, and for a moment, Mechanic regretted throwing back in his face the French vaudeville performer who was able to fart at will and with such force that he would begin his act by blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. Through the course of his performances, Composer would always say whenever the subject of artists prostituting their work came up, Le Petomane would spread and flex his buttocks to play musical scales, folk tunes, light opera, till at the end of each evening, he would ask the audience to solemnly rise as he farted out La Marseillaise. “So great was his popularity, a shining beacon and logical end for all artists who aspire to an audience,” Composer would conclude, “that he earned one hundred times more than the dozen top opera singers of the day combined.”
“I’ve only come to see that there’s another lesson in Yankee Doodle,” Composer now answered somberly: “That a penny whistle can lighten the human heart.” Looking up from his clasped hands he added, “And what’s so wrong with that?”
In OZ, vanilla is called Crema de las Angelitas.
In IN, the main street is named Main Street.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Each dawn, Mechanic pushed his car up the steep slope of the bridge to the booth where he worked. $1.00…$1.00…$1.00… . Each sundown he struggled to hold back his car by its rear bumper so it wouldn’t get away as he guided it back to its garage under the bridge. Each day he pushed it up, only to find himself the next day, like Sisyphus, pushing it up again. As he did, drivers whizzed by, shouting as they passed, “Get a horse!”
That vision he’d had of Poet (Sculptor) coasting downhill on her bike often came to him in those moments, her arms out in victory, hair whipping behind in the breeze, and the contrast made him wonder why both the going up and the coming down was so difficult for him.
In the evenings he worked on abandoned cars, unleashing his frustration and fantasies on their bodies. In the morning, he would push his car uphill, other cars whizzing past, their horns blaring as he imagined he was leaving IN. Yet at day’s end, he would return, the bumper of his car straining to escape his grip, his heels dug in to slow its descent as he was dragged behind by gravity and inertia.
Returned by nature to the garage he had set out from that morning, he would sit on its lift at the center of its concrete floor—an inmate of his own life, yet also its exile. Banished by whom? he wondered, operating the hydraulic controls of the lift to rise. By himself, he knew, by his former life as a mechanic which he no longer fit. By his lack of imagination. The lift locked in its upper-most position, the same height—and no more—that it reached every time. By his inability to escape into the life of an artist, like Composer or Photographer, he had to admit, but also through the fault of his parents for not escaping for him and giving him a different life: peasants before him whose generic stock seemed to infuse his very cells… .
His hands had already grown to a size and thickness that allowed their calluses to fit the locations of worn spots on the tools he inherited. His fingerprints, yellow swirls on work-hardened pads, made his hands resemble his father’s so much that he had to blink to clear his mind and make his hands become once again his own. If having hands that “were his own” even made any sense.
“We are literally star dust,” Photographer had said, explaining how the surface of the earth was the accumulation of billions of years of cosmic dust that had fallen from space: cosmic dust, or dirt, that mingled with the dust of all of their fathers and mothers, too, nourishing the plants and animals we eat, becoming the stuff of our cells, which once they die, return to dust. “All ancient cultures express this singular truth in their creation myths,” he had said, “the Hebrews punning Adam—first man—with Ad-ahma, or dirt/earth, the Latins punning Humans with humus, mud again. Did you know that ninety percent of household dust is comprised of dead skin cells?” he asked. “Think of it, everywhere we look, dirt is turning into men and women who are turning into dust. What story could be more surreal than this, if by ‘sur’ we mean ‘Super’ and not ‘Un’?” When Mechanic said he did not know, Photographer continued to explain how Poet (Sculptor) grasped the dust-to-dust palindrome more profoundly than any of them: this was why she took up dirt as her language; not all things can be said in every language even if language always shapes what is said. What she had to say was best put in a vocabulary of loam, of soil, of mud, of dust, of humus, of earth, of ground, of adobe, of alluvium, of silt, of clay, of sand, of sediment… .”
Considering Designer?… Did this mean he had more or less hope for her?
He looked at the grime that blackened the lifeline in his palm. In anger he flung the tools off of the bench. How he wished he could just go back to repairing cars again. He hammered his anvil. Had he known the curse that was about to enter through his eyes the day he had worked on that trannie, he knew, picking up the very screwdriver he had used to unbutton it, he would have used the screwdriver to instead gouge himself blind. He looked down into the glinting star of its point, bringing it slowly toward his eye… .
A low moan came from the night outside the garage.
A prowler? He picked up his father’s hammer, and tripped out into the yard, stubbing his toe over that small mound of dirt that kept appearing before his door: a small, breast-shaped hump that he leveled each time he tripped over it but that kept reappearing like some stubborn weed: a persistent weed-seed below, no doubt, trying to push up into the light.
The wind had shifted. Whereas earlier it had smelled of sludge, telling him that it blew from the east where the oil dump was located, he could now smell the stench of sulfur from the steel mills that took up all of the useable shoreline of IN’s land-locked lake. The sky in that
direction throbbed with the deep, reddish-brown of meat that had gone bad, the glow coming from the pouring of an ingot, he knew. But the red sky had never before throbbed in rhythm with the sound of heavy breathing—coming from?—
When he shielded his eyes from the glare of the security light buzzing over his back door, he could see—the dogs. The dogs had come back. Instead of running off to live in OZ as he had imagined, they had come home to him. And one, the bitch, was lying in the cage panting—pregnant—her swollen belly rising and falling like the exhaust lid of a diesel engine throbbing heavily in idle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Designer tingled as technicians wheeled the metal mockup of the grill she had designed into the wind tunnel. This time for sure, she thought, her mind reeling with discarded sketches, then blueprints, as she watched the technicians bolt the carless grill to a test stand. She moved to the observation window that ran along the wind tunnel’s length. Scores of clay mockups filled the room around her: prototypes that were actually half grills, the model-makers saving time by making only the left side of each prototype, then placing it against a mirror so that she would have the illusion of seeing the whole. Looking into these mirrors reflecting mirrors, she caught sight of that monstrosity someone had sent her and that now rested beside the bay doors, waiting to go out with the trash: a huge mangle of welded fenders and other parts from cars she had once designed, now disfigured and multiplied nightmarishly in the labyrinth of mirrors. Someone had used a welding torch to sign it, A Secret Admirer, and the sight of it gave her a chill. If it was an admirer, and not a psycho, why hadn’t he used his name? Why had he mailed her the butchered parts of her children the way a sick-o might mail the ears or nose of a kidnapped child back to the mother?…
IN & OZ: A Novel Page 7