The wind tunnel began to hum. As the wind rushing through its funnel-shaped walls picked up speed, the sound coming from the auto grill increased in pitch as though it were a chrome slide-whistle. Only a slide-whistle that gave up a haunting note: the first note from a new instrument, not unlike the quavering sound that can be elicited from the wet rim of a wine glass, only in the wind tunnel mechanically prolonged. Not the music of the spheres, nor that pathetic soundless music, but something between the elevator music and the beauty of the silent music played by the night sky. An ethereal tone that seemed to come from somewhere between the lowest sphere of heaven and the highest peak on earth.
Technicians, and model makers, and prototype fabricators and others that had helped to make the test a success let out a loud cheer. “Bravo! Bravissimo!” they shouted, turning to her to applaud.
“Yes!” she replied, fist in air. She had her instrument. Now all she needed was her Mallarmé to bring from it glorious musik.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
As though on cue, just as Mechanic arrived at the address Photographer had given him there was a sudden Crack!-thud and his car became as immobile as a tree. Walking out from behind the trunk, he immediately saw the problem: one of the welds that held the door under the axle as a ski had broken. The car listed badly to the front-passenger side, where the break was located, and the sight of it wearied him. After finding the note Photographer had left, telling him when and where to meet, he had set out in plenty of time. But as he pushed his car, he had gotten lost in his thoughts over recent events, and had forgotten completely about their meeting until coming out of his mental wandering, he discovered that his pushing had brought him to the correct block anyway. Then this—
The jack was still in the trunk, he considered, sitting down on the curb. It had been left there from the days when the car used to go about on tires instead of skis. But his welding equipment was back at his garage, of course, and the dilemma seemed to express his life. As he ran through various options for bringing the broken car and his welding equipment together—tow the car there? bring the equipment here?—a darkening self-doubt began to seep over him. Would repairing the ski be no different than making any repair? That is, if putting a door in the place of a tire kept people from taking wheels for granted, would repairing the ski help him take skis for granted? If familiarity could make anything invisible, he thought, growing sicker by the minute, had a car with skis for wheels become invisible to him? Was he no better than those philistines, as Photographer called them, who insisted on cars with tires? Just in a different, i.e., worse, way?—a hypocrite?
Rising, he circled his sagging car, wondering what to do, the questions only leading him down a labyrinth of further questions. Would having his car towed be any different than driving a car with wheels himself?… He didn’t know the neighborhood he was in, or even how far from home he had gone, but judging from the weariness of his muscles, the welder and the car were very far apart.
Photographer, he remembered, Photographer would know what to do and he was right here.
The building that the car had run aground before was plain even by IN standards, its windows boarded up in the manner of porno shops. Checking the address again, Mechanic confirmed that he was indeed in the right place. BOOKS said block lettering on the door.
Entering, Mechanic was surprised to see that the place was indeed a bookstore and not a bar. He didn’t know there were any bookstores in IN, or that they only sold repair manuals. The metal shelves of manuals were arranged by genres of machines, from hair dryers and pencil sharpeners all the way up to entire industrial plants. Wandering the aisles, looking for Photographer, Mechanic paused here and there to thumb through the occasional title that caught his eye. Most of them seemed to be just light reading, exploded diagrams and instructions for making repairs to machines that were so simple, the repair of them seemed intuitive. He couldn’t imagine anyone reading these books, let alone taking the time to write out the detailed instructions they contained. Others were for machines that performed functions so abstract he couldn’t even imagine what need had brought them into existence, or the principles that made them operate, let alone who the books could have possibly been written for.
Looking up at their spines as he walked, he accidentally kicked into a folding chair—a line of metal folding chairs that had been set up in the aisle near the back of the store. At the head of the line of four or five chairs was a podium and standing at the podium was Poet (Sculptor).
She went motionless when she saw that he saw her, glanced away, then back, then gave a little finger wave.
A rush of confusion went through him—the unexpectedness, the disorientation of suddenly coming upon her—but in the confusion was a sense of relief, coming upon a familiar face after the trials of the day. She did seem glad to see him. Still, unlike their encounter on the toll road and the comforting narrow bounds that the toll lane had put upon what he was supposed to say, making his way between the chairs and shelves of books on either side, the open-endedness of this situation filled him with terror. Should he just pretend he didn’t recognize her? Turn and run?—no, he realized, remembering the sad way his broken car listed out in the street. He had to say something, but what? “Are you?—” he tried, nearing. “Are you buying a book?”
‘No. Selling,’ she said, by way of shaking her head, then pointing to the name tag pinned to her work shirt: SALES ASSOCIATE.
“You work here?”
She smiled, nodding sheepishly.
Encouraged to see that the narrow aisle between bookshelves was very much like the lane of a tollbooth, he determined to not sound like the mo-ped he had been the last time. “Then can you show me where you keep your manuals on—On? On hydraulic brakes?”
“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” someone hissed rudely. Turning around, Mechanic found Photographer sitting in one of the metal folding chairs he had just walked past. Photographer whispered loudly, “There’ll be a book signing afterwards; you can ask questions then.”
Book signing? Poet (Sculptor) was standing behind a podium, an open book on the podium, a microphone adjusted to her height, and the truth of what was happening dawned on Mechanic. She was giving a?—A reading?—a poetry reading?
“Oh, I’m sorry!” he exclaimed, stumbling to take a seat—where?—upfront? All three of the chairs in the line were empty and it was hard to decide. Agitated, Photographer motioned for him to sit in the one before him. “I didn’t realize!…” Mechanic stuttered, stumbling into it.
She nodded that it was okay, that no harm had been done, then continued.
“Where have you been?” Photographer snapped, leaning forward to whisper sharply in Mechanic’s ear. “Didn’t you get my note?” As was his custom, he had tied it to a brick and then dropped the brick onto the roof of Mechanic’s house so he would be alerted by the racket of the dogs it would set off. “You were supposed to have been here twenty minutes ago.”
“I-I got lost,” Mechanic whispered back. Poet (Sculptor) stood at the podium, turning pages, her eyes and finger moving down each page as she silently read. “Why didn’t you tell me she was giving a reading?”
“She’s not the type to brag,” he answered cryptically. “But it’s good you’ve come. I don’t know where Composer is… .”
Composer, Mechanic thought heavily.
“…it’s the last book she created before she took up dirt as her medium. The publisher—a small experimental press—brought it out two years late,” Photographer explained, “so it’s important we support her. She was supposed to go on a book tour, but this was the only store that would have her. And they only did it because she works here.”
Watching her silently read from her work, her lips moving, Mechanic began to understand how Photographer communicated so easily with her, how his own parents had found the need to speak lessen as their fifty-year marriage wore on until finally all they had to do to let the other know what they were thinking was to be in the sa
me room. Somehow, sitting there before her, not expected to speak, under no pressure to carry his end, or both ends of a conversation, it was easier to listen. Or rather, an understanding of what she was saying would come over him though she spoke no words, the wrinkle of her forehead speaking volumes, as did the arch of an eyebrow, a frown, or twitch so subtle that he would never have even seen it before, looking down at his shoes as he struggled to come up with something to say.
Afterwards, the two men went up to congratulate her, and Mechanic thought that at least now he knew that she was a poet. But her book, The Machine That Never Works: A Manual, was thick as his fist, and shaped like a schematic symbol for—what? A valve? A heart? That is, it was a sculpture, and opening it he expected its inside to be blank: for if what she read resulted in silence, what she read must have been blank. She wasn’t mute. He had asked Photographer about that after meeting her and according to him she actually had a beautiful reading/singing voice. It’s just that after taking up dirt as her medium, she wouldn’t use it any longer. Unless there was something really worth saying. And her silence did point out how trite, how unnecessary most, if not all, conversation actually was. But this book was her work, after all, so if she didn’t speak it, what else could she possibly consider worth saying?
But the book wasn’t blank at all. When he opened it up, visual poems poured out: warranty cards, blueprints; a wiring-harness diagram folded out into a geodesic dome the size of a breadbox: a book of poetry that was a sculpture, or a sculpture in the form of a book that was poetry? Thumbing through its pages, trying to imagine what machine all the documents and drawings could refer to, he began to wonder if by “works” she meant “works right.”
Photographer grabbed the book from his hands, then handed it to her for an autograph.
“I would like to buy a copy also,” Mechanic said, drawing out his wallet, miffed by the way Photographer had snatched the book away.
Poet (Sculptor) pretended as if she hadn’t heard him, her tongue stuck out in concentration as she fashioned a dedication to Photographer in the book’s flyleaf—more of a drawing than a signature.
“Are you sure?” Photographer asked. “Each book is twenty-five thousand dollars, you know.”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars?” Mechanic repeated, looking at the two limp bills in his billfold.
“And it’s sold. As in ‘Sold out.’ The entire print run has sold out.”
“Your book has sold out?” Mechanic repeated, incredulous. And not a little relieved. “That’s fantastic!”
Poet (Sculptor) shrugged.
“Of course there was only one copy,” Photographer said, making Mechanic afraid that he had accidentally slighted her again, that she had shrugged out of embarrassment for having such a small print run. “Mine.”
Or was she embarrassed for him, shrugging to minimize her victory because she was a good sport, a good winner, having sold every copy while she knew the difficulty he was having in getting an audience for his work. She looked back down into the elaborate signature/dedication she was drawing for Photographer.
“When the philistine publisher who held her manuscript hostage learned how much the book would cost to produce,” Photographer was explaining, “they tried to back out. They claimed that the special dies and plates that were needed to make her manuscript into the three-dimensional book she wanted would bankrupt their little kitchen-table operation. But she had a contract, and if she eliminated the sculptural nature that made her book her book it wouldn’t be her book. It would be nothing, so what would be the point? It was difficult, very difficult, huh?” he asked Poet (Sculptor). Her smile twisted into a wry look as though remembering a war story, or a story of a mass migration that had turned out well, though it was nonetheless still painful. “Many times she nearly gave in but I wouldn’t let her eliminate a single Braille dot,” he said, winking happily at Poet (Sculptor). “Unfortunately, its production costs did consume all of the publisher’s assets, and in the end, the strain to bring out this one copy cost them their office, that is their kitchen, along with the rest of the business, that is their house.
“But the true bottom line is that the book came into the world in the form it was meant to be, I was able to buy it, and since the publishers put such a high price on the book, they will be sure to reopen their doors. Or at least open a new kitchen-table operation under a different name. So you see, it was a win-win situation!”
Mechanic said nothing, remembering how his own mechanic’s business had gone under. Would he have been better off compromising? What would that even mean? Making every other repair regular? Repairing every car half way?… He sighed heavily, wishing he had looked harder for a way to stay out of the tollbooth… .
“Don’t look so disappointed,” Photographer said, turning the book to look when she had finished the dedication, “now that the book has sold out, there’s sure to be a second printing. We are in negotiations with the publisher right now. Or at least will be once they return my calls, isn’t that right?” Photographer didn’t allow her to release the book as he took it from her, though. Instead, he took Mechanic’s hand and placed it on top of hers. “Now that the publishers realize what they should have thought of before they even went into publishing,” he said, bobbing the book in cadence with their hands upon it. “Your art, your life, your love is not the place to be timid.” He pronounced the words solemnly, looking directly at her as though he was some kind of judge, or minister conducting a ceremony with the book between them, and the emotionless mask that her face became, the way her eyes refused to meet Mechanic’s was as meaningful as some secret handshake he had been allowed to participate in, if not understand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“When I took my job at the tollbooth,” Mechanic lamented to Photographer, back in Photographer’s camera-house after the reading, after the two of them had labored for the rest of the day to get his broken car back to Mechanic’s garage, “I thought I would enjoy swimming in a sea of cars.” The oceanic hiss and rush of cars on the bridge continued its accompaniment beneath their feet. “But I didn’t figure on how depressing the drivers could be, only concerned with getting from point A to point B, never giving their vehicles a thought unless it was to gild these lilies by the addition of fuzzy dice, or toy dogs whose heads bob up and down.”
“Tsk, tsk,” Photographer sighed sympathetically. “Perhaps you would be happier in a less people-oriented line of work, like gravedigger.” He poured Mechanic another cup of tea.
“Sometimes I feel like such a fool.” He pointed to his name stitched over his shirt pocket. “The toll-road uniform is exactly the same as my old mechanic’s uniform. I didn’t even have to change clothes.”
“Ach, don’t be so hard on yourself,” Photographer scoffed, hearing none of it. “What else were you to do?—Go on making ‘repairs’? Only a werewolf can write like a court reporter all day and howl poems at the moon by night. That’s why I quit making photographs with film entirely.”
“But even if I take off this uniform,” Mechanic said, trying to make his point clearer, “under my clothes my body is still the same.”
Photographer pulled his chair closer. “Listen my friend, let me tell you a story. At my darkest moment, when all the world told me that I was crazy for wanting to change the world with my movies—Ha!—I began—like you—to wonder if in fact black was white and white, like they said, black. But chance, or Zeus, or fate or whatever it is that sends to us what we most need in our hour of need, sent to me a story from my youth, the story of Adam’s Peak: the highest point on earth, protruding from The Garden of Eden to a height halfway between the strife of the earth’s surface and the serenity of the lowest sphere of heaven, the moon. From this peak, it was said, Adam could hold the entire world in one, unframed view—and I clung to this story as if my life depended on it. This is why I moved to this house atop the toll bridge. At the time, it was the highest point around, even higher than OZ. A person could see all the way t
o the sea from this spot. But then, of course, OZ grew like a new mountain range, blocking the view. No matter, that was also about the time I realized I was losing my sight.”
“What do you mean you’re losing your sight?” Mechanic asked, recalling a creeping stiffness in his own fingers that made it increasingly difficult to hold a wrench.
Photographer nodded. “I am going blind.”
“No!”
“All those years of standing in the place of film, focusing light on my eyes, is making them useless. So I practice by closing my eyes. And I discovered that if the essence of photography is seeing, the essence of seeing is the mind.”
“You mean you are actually losing your sight?”
“From that day on, I determined to make a genre of photography no one else could see, one that when I died, would die with me—and that, my friend, is the essence of art. And of life.” He paused a moment, then added, “And that is also why she has feelings for you.”
“She?” A wild hope went through Mechanic, thinking for a minute that Photographer had meant Designer. But seeing him nod solemnly, it became clear why Photographer had insisted he attend the meeting of the Anti-Billboardistas; why he had called him a blockhead that night after the concert; why he had been agitated at Mechanic for nearly missing a reading. All of these instances had one common denominator. “She told you that?” he asked.
“Not in words, of course.” He pulled something out from under his chair. A bicycle chain. One of its links was missing. And Mechanic came to know that it was from her bicycle and that she wanted him to fix it.
Only a few short months ago, he would have known what to do with a clarity that he had never had before or since. A friend who would ask him to make a repair could be no friend. Could be only an enemy, a brute without the slightest understanding of him or his work. And Photographer would have agreed. But now, looking at the rusted chain draped between Photographer’s two fists, its stiff links bowed into the outline of a valentine, Mechanic was so confused he wanted to cry.
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