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

the next driver, hard-pounding techno-trance socking out from her pugilistic-sound system. These and a thousand other drivers passed by his booth, the utter joy they took from her art—if it wasn’t as invisible to them as their very breath—telling him how utterly uninterested they would be in the stuff of his art. Some didn’t even bother to hide the disgust they felt toward him for breaking the dream of driving as he did being there as he was to take their toll.
$1.00                          $1.00
$1.00
    $1.00
    Hand out, dollar in, hand out, dollar in. . . . The mechanical repetitiveness of extending a hand, retracting a dollar, then extending a hand became a kind of mantra to him, lulling him to thought. He had a lot to think about. Soon, he would finally finish the hydraulic bouquet he’d been constructing for Designer, and the thought of the moment when he would actually give it to her filled him with dread. She was so big—such an influential artist while he was?—What?
    $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00. . . .
    A fool for thinking that what she did and what he did could ever be married? $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00;
    $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00, $1.00. . . .
    Photographer and Composer might say it didn’t matter, especially Photographer. But deep down, with the world voting in dollars, and voting for her and her invisible cars, only a true fool would not have doubts.
$1.00
    $1.00
    $1.00
    $1.00
                 $1.00. . . .
    A horrid thought suddenly brought him up by the short hairs: What if a person could only see what he had seen by crawling under a car to see it?
    As if summoned by fate to illustrate what he was thinking, he spotted a figure far below, at the base of the hill, laboring to push a bicycle up its steep grade.
    What if crawling through sludge, exhaling to collapse your chest so that you could squeeze into the narrow space afforded by a jack was the only way to see it? he thought, watching her. He could tell that it was definitely a her, pushing her bike up a hill that made walking easier than pedalling. Cars whizzed past, honking their horns as angrily at her as they honked at him and his car.
    Maybe if Designer found a way to bring what he saw out into the light for everyone, they would see something, but it wouldn’t be It. The possibility made him shudder.
    Then he held his breath. As the bicyclist neared, he could see that it was Poet (Sculptor).
    He could also see why she was pushing her bicycle. Unlike modern OZ bikes with their featherweight construction and delicate derailers that made pedalling uphill easy, her bike seemed to have been designed by a boiler company. Its brown, primer-colored frame had the rigidity and heaviness of the bridge’s girders and made easing it into the line of cars waiting to pay their toll awkward for her.
$1.00           $1.00 $1.00
    She moved, in the line, a little closer.
    Perspiration painted big oval stains on the underarms of her work shirt, its sleeves rolled up and revealing sinewy forearms. She had used duct tape to make a bicycle cuff on one leg of her standard, factory-uniform trousers.
$1.00     $1.00
             $1.00
    Then she was close enough for him to see strands of hair matted on her forehead, brush marks in the paint of her bicycle, her bicycle obviously having been painted by hand with leftover house paint.
    “Hello,” he said, as she came up to his booth.
    She smiled, nodded her hello back, breathing hard to catch her breath, her face flushed, her flat chest huffing. She was radiant from the exertion. He hadn’t noticed how beautiful she was till the work of climbing the hill pointed it out.
    “One dollar, please,” he said. She dug around in the mouth of a homemade metal purse that looked like a fish; its scales were overlapping, flattened bottle caps.
    One, two, three, four. . . .
    Watching her count out pennies, reading her lips as she did so,