IN & OZ: A Novel by Steve Tomasula

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 same room. Somehow, sitting there before