IN & OZ: A Novel by Steve Tomasula Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    So he concluded one day, trying to square his inner being with the loss of his outer business, If Thomas Alva Edison was a mechanic, he didn’t want to be a mechanic. If Archimedes was a mechanic, he didn’t want to be a mechanic. If Da Vinci was a mechanic, he thought, he’d give it a chance. But he didn’t need “customers” to do so—not if, as Photographer claimed, it was looking that made the photographer, or dancing the dancer.
    Without giving it any more thought, he got up one morning, put on his mechanic’s boots, and his mechanic’s uniform, but instead of opening his shop, he walked past the empty dog pen, walked past the oil stains in the empty driveway where customers once lined up with their foul plugs, and blown gaskets. He got behind his own car and pushed it out onto the road, signaled for a U-turn, then began the long, arduous climb up the grade that became the bridge he lived beneath where up-above he took a job as a tollbooth attendant.
    If he could no longer repair cars, truly repair them and not just make offending parts invisible, then he could at least appreciate them, and do his own work, the work no one would pay him to do, on his own time, as poets and philosophers have always done. Rather than participate in what had become for him unbearable, he would stand in a tiny booth at the middle of the bridge that connected the flatland of IN with the floating world of OZ, midway between earth and sky, collecting tolls from the passing motorists while the planets aligned, and perhaps, the one audience who mattered the most came out to meet him halfway. And so he did, seeing her hand in every sensuous fender, every perky headlamp and all the quarter panels, door trim and the rest that ebbed, then flowed through his lane.
        
In IN, Desire was as simple as stripes on a bar code, Fulfillment as baroque as a loan.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
    “Composers who insist upon working within the audio spectrum,” Composer said, “would do well to study that most perfect of concert instruments, the slide whistle.” He, Mechanic, and Designer, but not Photographer, Photographer having refused to come along, were in one of the many industrial taverns of IN, smoking standard cigarettes, and drinking standard alcohol that tasted to Mechanic like antifreeze. He himself would have never chosen this tavern, which only went by the name DRINK BOOZE. Especially not as a place to meet such a non-standard woman as Designer. But the dirtier the bar, the more directly its income was tied to the factory payroll, the more Composer and Photographer seemed to like it. He had always dismissed this aspect of their taste as just another of the many things he didn’t understand about them. But it became especially baffling when he learned that Composer and Photographer had both been born in OZ and educated in OZ and still had the money to live in OZ, their families made up of wealthy OZ professors and business people, even doctors and judges—a fact he should have realized from the first time they shook hands, their hands being as soft as the foam rubber of luxury-car seats. Unlike his own standard mechanic’s hands. Or the hands of his mechanic father. Or the hands of his mother who had to carry heavy pots of cabbage every day of her life. Or, come to think of it, the hands of everyone he had ever known growing up in IN. This legacy of hands was why he, but neither of them, was concerned about finding actual work. That is, the kind of work that was dull and/or dirty and/or dangerous and/or demeaning and so no one wanted to do and would therefore pay to have done for them, unlike making music or art—what they also called their “work.” But it didn’t explain why they had chosen to live in IN, while he, if he had ever thought of it which he never did, it being such an impossible