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

thing to think, would have liked to live in OZ.
    “Listening to the slide whistle,” Composer was saying, “we understand how illusory are the borders of any single ‘note.’ We understand how it is only through an appeal to the most artificial of conventions, the musical score, the constraints of hearing, that the composer of the audio spectrum makes us come to believe in this sleight-of-hand called music.” He paused to take a slow drag on his cigarette, letting the smoke whistle out. “A-sharp or B-flat?”
    Mechanic couldn’t help but notice how Designer hung on his words. Dressed down in a faux work shirt tailored to show off her figure, her hair was pulled back under a matching stoker’s cap. It accentuated the clean design of her face—square chin and a model’s cheekbones. Stealing glances at her foreign-import proportions, he could distinguish through her dungarees the outline of leggy legs, as sleek and elegant as her own designs. One leg dangling over the other, they ended in shoes designed to resemble work boots only not so much that it wouldn’t be obvious that she didn’t actually “work” (in the way the word was used in IN); her faux work boots were too petite to contain the steel reinforcing that real boots needed to protect toes from being crushed by a dropped beam. Even if her work shirt had had her name stitched over its pocket like a real work shirt instead of the “Grrrr-l” that was actually embroidered there, even if she wore greasy coveralls, the bar patrons gawking at her could have told she wasn’t from IN, Mechanic knew, Mechanic being one of them.
    He considered his own pinstriped mechanic’s coveralls. Then he considered the pipe-fitter’s jacket and turtleneck Composer wore. Though they both bought their clothes at the same resale and vintage boutiques of gas-station attendant uniforms and high-voltage-proof hip-waders, the work shirts that Mechanic wore looked like work shirts, while Composer’s work shirts somehow came off as fashion. Why? Mechanic wondered, looking from the lifetime of premium, not standard, health benefits written in the luster of Designer’s blonde hair, to the straightness and whiteness of Composer’s teeth, to both of their creamy-smooth skins: skin that looked perpetually new unlike repainted hoods and fenders that always showed a trace, especially when the light was right, of earlier crumples that could never be hammered out completely.
    “Aesthetic decisions have real-world consequences,” Composer said, speaking up to be heard over the argument growing around one of the standard coin-operated pool tables found in all the bars of IN. “By preventing audiences from slipping into the passive, dreamlike trance of listening, by forcing them to instead work for every note with their eyes, they apprehend the constructed nature of music. That is, as they follow one of my scores, they see how there is nothing natural about it—or any music. March music, for example. While our passions are being excited by the rhythms of march music, its stirring melodies of fifes, bugles, and drums, we also absorb, usually unconsciously, how natural it is for there to be a military to play it.”
    One of the guys playing pool was a sinewy rat of a sheet-metal worker, sheet-metal workers always having massive forearms from scissoring their shears through tin all day but not the biceps that come from heavy lifting. His partner, the big guy, was a jackhammer operator with a paunch like all jackhammer operators developed to help absorb recoil. It flattened against the pool table when he leaned in to take a shot. The two of them were playing Dunk-a-Drunk 8-Ball, so whoever lost had to chug a shot of standard whiskey. The jackhammer operator was losing. And the more he lost, the drunker he got, the more he lost, the drunker he got, the more he lost & Etc. Every time he threw back another drink, his wiry opponent took the opportunity to chalk a fingertip with one of the blue