Orfeo (18 page)

He sat beside Klaudia on the bench in Shade Arbors’ front oval. Soon-to-be-dead people gardened in nearby plots, and clouds of pollinators grazed the air like it would be everywhere forever spring. Els’s erstwhile therapist and late-life fling faced him and grimaced.
Have you been handling farm animals?

I’m sorry. My workout clothes.

Sweating like a pig. Something’s the matter.

He rubbed his face.
Seems I’m in a little trouble.

She looked at him slant. What trouble could such a man get in? Reckless archaism. Arpeggiating under the influence. Presto in an andante zone.

He told her of his morning. The facts came out of his mouth, as implausible as any sounds he’d ever made.

She shook her head.
They raided your house?

A squad in hazmat suits, yellow police tape circling his lawn: all a bizarre invention. The agents had been after someone else. Someone dangerous.

The police raided your house, and you came to teach your class.

You were all waiting. Nowhere else to go.

I don’t understand. Laboratory equipment? Some kind of fancy chemistry set?

He wanted to tell her: there were, in a single cell, astonishing synchronized sequences, plays of notes that made the Mass in B Minor sound like a jump-rope jingle.

What on earth were you doing?

He’d been trying to take a strand of DNA, five thousand base pairs long, ordered to spec from an online site, and splice it into a bacterial plasmid.

Learning about life,
he said
.

Klaudia stared, as if the sweet nonagenarian needle-pointer across the hall from her had pulled out from under the bed a box of merit badges from the Schwesternschaften der Hitler-Jugend.

Why do this, Peter?
She’d asked the question often, back when she was still pretending to be his therapist.

Why write music that no one wants to hear?
It kept me out of trouble.

Don’t be coy. What were you doing?

As far as Els knew, the nonsense string would live alongside the bacterium’s historical repertoire, silently doing nothing. Like the best conceptual art, it would sit ignored by the millions of trades going on in the marketplace all around it. With luck, during cell division, the imposter message would replicate for a few generations, before life got wise and shed the free rider. Or maybe it would be picked up, inspired randomness, and ride forever.

Nothing,
Els said
.
Call it composing.
Proof of concept.

What concept?

It didn’t seem to matter now
.

Are you a terrorist?

His head jerked back. Klaudia appraised him.
Well? Are you?

He looked away.
Oh, probably.

Who taught you how to modify cells?

I just follow the recipes.

How did you learn enough to—

I audited a class. I read four textbooks. Watched fifty hours of instructional clips. It’s all pretty straightforward. No one seems to realize how easy.

From a lifetime away, he heard himself tell a government agent:
Easier than learning Arabic
.

How long have you been . . . ?

He dipped his head.
I started two years ago. I wasn’t . . . doing anything else. I came across an article about the DIY biology movement. I couldn’t believe that amateurs were altering genomes in their garages.

I can’t believe people breed poisonous snakes in their basements. But I feel no compulsion to join them.

He couldn’t tell her: He’d missed his calling. Science should have been the career, music just a hobby. He’d lived through the birth of biotech, that whole new art. He might have lived a useful life, contributed to the age’s real creative venture. Genomics was right now learning how to read scores of indescribable beauty. Els just wanted to hear, before the light in his tent went out.

Kohlmann gazed at him as she had years ago, when he was paying her to dismiss his nameless anxieties.
Are you crazy?

The thought has crossed my mind.

You didn’t think the authorities would be a little jumpy, so near to Jihad Jane’s base camp?

I wasn’t thinking jihad, at the time.

Kohlmann groaned and palmed her eye sockets.
Peter—couldn’t you have taken up bridge, like the rest of us? Continuing ed courses?

A tremor in her dowel forearm, and Els realized: she had Parkinson’s. He’d seen her weekly for eighteen months and had never noticed. They’d spoken about nothing all that while aside from
The Rite
and
Pierrot.

I’m going to have a cigarette now
, Kohlmann said.
I’m fifteen minutes overdue.

You’re smoking? Since when did you start smoking?

Don’t nag. I quit for twenty years, by promising myself I could start again at seventy-five.

Kohlmann lit a cigarette and took an enormous drag. They sat silent, combed by a breeze. In the sky above, a contrail spread into frayed yarn. She let out the smoke, sighing.

They raided your house and missed you. Are they total fuckups?

Any other day of the week, they’d have had me. But on Mondays I’m always out before dawn.

Didn’t they think . . . ?
She read some faint inscription off her fingernails.
You’re going to make things a lot worse by running.

The word shocked him. He wasn’t running. He was sitting in a gated retirement community, waiting until it was safe to go home and take a shower.

The task force people said they weren’t charging me with anything.

You think there’s no warrant for you now?

No one has served one yet.

He had two choices: turn himself in wherever suspected bioterrorists were supposed to turn themselves in and disappear into the wasteland of legal detention, or make himself scarce for a few days while the FBI discovered that he was doing nothing that thousands of other garage genetic engineers around the country weren’t doing. By Friday, the fire drill would be over.

He told Klaudia as much.

You might as well sign a confession. They’ll ruin what’s left of your life, just to make a lesson of you.

I haven’t broken any laws. They’re not going to waste their time on sunset hobbyists. They have real terrorist networks to go after.

Klaudia turned her cigarette around and peered into the burning end. Her face wrinkled and she shook her head
.

What?
he demanded.

Her hand traced the air, pointing at threats on the horizon.
Excuse me, but a lot has happened in this country while you’ve been away.

He looked off toward the garden plots, where a doddering field gang prepared the beds for tomatoes and squash. It seemed a substantial leap of faith, to believe you’d still be there for the harvest.

Kohlmann waved the glowing cigarette at him like a laser pointer. He remembered why they weren’t a couple.

Everyone’s an enemy now. The Swiss detained Boulez for something he said in the sixties about blowing up opera houses. John Adams told the BBC that his name is on a list. The authorities harass him every time he flies.

You’re joking. Why?

Because of
Klinghoffer
.

Els had to laugh: the name John Adams, on a sedition list. Ironies turned on ironies, like the moons in a hand-cranked toy solar system. Once, he’d sat on a panel at Columbia, a fatuous firebrand of thirty-seven, claiming that composers had a moral obligation to be subversive. The best music, he pronounced, was always a threat. He winced now at the manifesto. But still, his skin prickled at the news that a composer had made the government watch list.

Adams
,
Els said
. Fabulous music. A handful of transcendent works. He’ll live.

Klaudia stopped making love to her cigarette’s last millimeter.
Live?

Her voice was thick with sardonic notes. Music with intricate harmonies, complex rhythms? You might as well write a medical thriller in Mayan glyphs.

She waved her hand over him, the Pope rescinding a blessing, and launched into an account of a terrorism arrest in Albany—a missile sale where all the missiles belonged to the FBI and all the terrorists were bribed into purchasing them. Els didn’t hear. He was savoring the idea that art—an Adams masterpiece—could still be dangerous. It gave him unearned cachet, being dogged by the same Homeland Security hounding Adams. At that moment, someone was combing through the archives for data about Peter Els, scanning his scores to see if he’d ever written any music that might alarm the Joint Security Forces.

Then he remembered. He
had
written such a thing: his disastrous historical drama,
The Fowler’s Snare.

I think I should make myself scarce
, he said
. A couple of days. Give them some time to sort my laundry.

Her look iced him. Els rubbed his nose and tried again.

It’s just . . . I’ve got this thing about handcuffs.

Kohlmann stubbed out her cigarette on her shoe sole and slipped the butt into her back pocket. She fished in her striped Incan jerky bag and removed the smartphone.

I suppose this makes me an accomplice after the fact.
She handed him the device, waving it away.
There’s a map thingie in there. Knows where you are. Let me give you an address.

He took the device and played. He stroked and pinched the screen, typing with his thumbs the way Fidelio used to sing. He pulled up the mapping app. The former music box was now a compass needle floating above the site of Shade Arbors, Naxkohoman, Pennsylvania. She dictated an address, which he keyed in. A thin green line materialized, running from the needle off the screen.

Klaudia Kohlmann smacked her forehead with the butt of her hand.
Shit. You’ll need the charger.

She rose and hobbled toward the facility. At the automatic glass door, she wheeled around.
Don’t even think about moving.

More Partch: “I heard music in the voices all about me, and tried to notate it . . .” That’s all that I tried to do, as well.

Els cradled the four-inch screen. Driving instructions unfurled alongside the postage-stamp map, too small for seventy-year-old eyes to read. He looked up, toward the garden plots. The air droned like the tinnitus that had plagued him in his sixties and made him want to mercy-kill himself. One low trill split into two, a minor second. The interval turned metallic. A moment more, and the pitches collapsed back into unison.

The ringing resumed, a Lilliputian air raid. The new chord bent into more grating intervals—a flat third, widening to almost a tritone—a glacial creation like Xenakis or Lucier, one of those cracked Jeremiahs howling in the wilderness, looking for a way beyond. The sky-wide trill filled the air with sonic pollen, like the engines of a fleet of interstellar spaceships each the size of a vanilla wafer. It filled the air at every distance, too sweet for locusts or cicadas. Bats didn’t shriek in broad daylight, and birds didn’t sing in chorus. Something abundant and invisible was playing with harmony, and Els turned student again.

A quartet of Shade residents came through the sliding glass, William Bock among them. Seeing his teacher, the ceramic engineer stopped to listen.
Holy crap! What’s that?

The guessing began, but no theory held up. In the distance, children with pennywhistles, wind clacking the branches, the hiss of pole-mounted power transformers, a murmuration of starlings, rooftop ventilation units, a muffled marching band drilling on a school football field miles away.

That’s how Lisa Keane, dressed for gardening, found them, a geriatric flash mob standing on the front walk, looking skyward at nothing.

Frogs
, she told them.
Tree frogs. Singing to each other
.

Amphibians improvising, toying with fantastic dissonant choruses: it seemed no less outrageous to Els than his own life.

I can’t tell you what species,
Keane said
. Two dozen dialects, in these parts.

Els asked,
What are they saying?

Oh: The usual
.
It’s cool and moist. We’re alive. Come here. What else is there to sing about?

This was the woman whom music didn’t move. Els closed his eyes, transcribing airborne harmonies from a time when sending a message over distance was life’s best feat. Listen to this: listen to
this
.

How long have they been going?

Oh, I don’t know. A hundred million years?

No
.
I mean . . . how long, this year?

The ex-Benedictine calculated.
Off and on every morning for the last month.

Bock said,
Get out of town!

In another minute, the miracle wore thin and the group wandered off to the shuttle bus. Soon only Keane, Els, and a bent man who moved like a broken-winged eagle were left clinging to the harsh serenade.

At last Kohlmann returned, dangling a power adapter.
Oh, geez. What now?

Els pointed treeward at the strobing sound. Kohlmann scowled.

Ach—nature, again? The whole thing is out of control.

Tree frogs
, Keane said.

It surprised Els: the ex-nun had a crush on the transactional analyst.

Okay,
Kohlmann conceded
. Tree frogs. And we need to know this . . . why?