Orfeo (21 page)

Steam escapes their mouths, and, huddled together, they toast the vanishing year. Maddy pours the champagne into paper cones. Bonner insists they clink. Bubbly spills from the mushy flutes onto the frozen earth.

To putting the past to bed,
Richard toasts.

To waking the future,
Els says.

To staying in the Beautiful Now,
Maddy adds, although they’re already leaving.

They come across a cardboard box blowing through the snowy fields. They use it as a three-person toboggan, sledding down the only geological feature for two hundred miles that can be called a hill. Bonner tears the box into three pieces, which he distributes.

Hold on to these. We’ll reassemble right here, top of this hill, in fifty years.

Maddy laughs.
Synchronize your watches.

Walking home in the cold, toting his scrap of cardboard, pressed between his wife and wild friend, Els hears a piece in his head, music like the kind Schumann reported hearing as he slipped into madness—
an instrument of splendid resonance, the like of which has never been heard on Earth
. The harmonies are rich and braided, leading to an unprepared Neapolitan sixth, a rediscovery of naïve sequences, and the melody feels so inexorable that he knows it’ll be waiting for him intact when he next sits down to a sheet of virgin staff paper.

But when Peter wakes in the new year, he fails to remember even hearing the piece. By the time he does, a few days later, it’s too late to transcribe. All that’s left is a blurred contour, disembodied music hinting at something magnificent just out of reach.

I always loved best those tunes written for those who listen on other frequencies.

They’re still a trio later that spring, wandering the domed Assembly Hall, that cavernous radioactive mushroom that Cage and Hiller have filled with more happy pandemonium. Seven amplified harpsichords duel with 50 monoaural tape machines and 208 FORTRAN-generated tapes playing Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni, and Schoenberg, all sliced into short genetic chunks then recombined at random. Bonner and the Elses, in their fluorescent overalls—handed out free to the dazed visitors—gawk at a Stonehenge ring of polyethylene screens on which six dozen projectors cast thousands of slides and films. Outside, 48 more enormous screens circle the building’s quarter-mile circumference. They turn the whole colossal structure into a pulsating saucer that has come to Earth for refueling and a little galactic-backwater R & R.

The smell of pot seeps from the crowds camped out in the central arena. People lounge or wander about. It’s music, Els keeps reminding himself. Music that has reached the end of a thousand-year exploration.

Too much
, Maddy says.
My mind’s blown
.

Bonner flips his hands in the air, juggling invisible moons.
We could have done this, with a few more bucks
.

But the show is beyond Els. Cage, Hiller, and the army of believers who mount
HPSCHD
have disappeared into liberty. They refuse to impose decisions on any listener. Composition is no longer the goal; all that counts now is awareness, this flickering, specious present, a dive into raw phenomena. And that’s a plunge Els will never be able to make. Or so he figures, at twenty-eight.

Maddy strolls around the flying saucer, laughing. She stops to rag-pick the trash for interesting textiles. Peter follows in his wife’s happy wake. She has become a season ticket holder for the festival of weirdness Els has inflicted on her these last twenty months. He loves her steady refusal to descend to liking or not liking, those sentimental actions that have nothing to do with listening. Her awe at the range of human desire turns Peter himself back into a spectator in his own life. He falls into orbit beside her; Richard is off buying a poster, for a price determined by the I Ching.

Maddy hums to herself, a snippet of Mozart fished from the randomness. Mozart, the man who invented the musical dice game, two short centuries ago.

Peter,
she says, looking away, at a slide of the Crab Nebula. He knows what she’ll say before she says it. An oddness has come over her these last few days, a frightened flush, waiting for its moment. What else can it be? Nothing else is big enough for her to keep secret from him for so long.

Peter? Company’s coming.

He stops and listens, hearing, above the din, a small, high voice.

Peter?

You’re sure?

She spreads her palms, shrugs, and smiles.

When?

I don’t know. December? We’ll find out. Peter? Don’t worry. We’re good. We’re good! We can do this. Everybody does.

He jerks, objecting.
No, that’s not . . . This is incredible. The two of us? Are you kidding?

She has to laugh at him, standing there, overcome, his eyes like outer planets. And that’s how Richard finds them moments later.

Laughing gas?
Bonner says.
They’re giving away laughing gas somewhere?

HPSCHD
runs for almost five hours. Several thousand people wander through. Two months later, men walk on the moon. Four more weeks, and half a million people gather on a farm in upstate New York for a weekend of rain, mud, and music. By then the trio has abandoned Champaign-Urbana—the Elses for Boston, where Maddy gets a job teaching singing in an elite junior high, and Bonner for Manhattan, to squalor and a gauntlet of unpaid positions in experimental theaters.

And on the first day of winter, Els meets his burping, giggling, raging, laughing, squalling daughter, her tiny foot between his fingers an astonishment he can’t take in. This perfect, working creature, self-assembling, self-delighting, the brightest whim that could ever exist, and he’ll never make anything to compare to her for pure wonder.

What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what has become of the women?

Els followed the Voice. He did as She instructed, down to the pointless twenty-minute detour through Clarion. The gadget found its trio of geosynchronous satellite beacons twenty-two thousand miles high, and triangulated from them the one spot on Earth where Els could be. From there, it skimmed through a digitized database of eight million miles of road and took Els to the one place on Earth he wanted to go. Giving in to machine navigation was an infantile luxury. And the Voice came through in the end, dropping him off on the stoop of the Kohlmann summer cottage just before dark.

The abandoned wasp’s nest hung right where Klaudia said. Els extracted the key and let himself into a room reeking of nature and vacation. The lodge was lined in cedar-paneled nostalgia and furnished in cushioned pine from the fifties. The whole house showed signs of hasty evacuation. Football jerseys and high-tech sneakers lay scattered about. Stray lights had been left on, which Els went about turning off before he sat down to collect himself.

He found nuts and cereal in the pantry, and a dozen apples in the refrigerator crisper. He helped himself to a glass of Finger Lakes Chardonnay and some frozen pound cake. The washing machine stood in a utility room off the back of the kitchen. He stripped off his painter pants, waffle shirt, and stale underwear. Then he stood under the shower in the rustic bathroom, naked, sagging, and scalded, waiting for explanation.

Fed and clean, he had no need of anything but sleep. But sleep wouldn’t come. He rooted around the possessions of his unknown benefactors, scavenging for diversion. Magazines abounded—old
Smithsonian
s
and
Outdoor
s
,
as well as scattered issues from more specialized offerings. It seemed possible to append the word
magazine
to any string of words—
Not Your Grandfather’s Clock Magazine; Power Balance Holographic Wrist Channeler Magazine
—and still come up with a product that needed only the right focus group to find its way into circulation.

Reading wasn’t possible. All Els was good for was music. Shelves in the front room held three dozen jewel boxes—road trip listening, left here in the vacation home alongside battered Parcheesi sets and moldy quiz books. Ripped copies of Ella Fitzgerald’s Verve Songbooks, They Might Be Giants, Sonic Youth, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a smattering of emo, albums by Wilco, Jay-Z, the Dirt Bombs, the Strokes, and Rage Against the Machine. There was a time when the proliferation of so many musical genres left Els cowering in a corner, holding up the
Missa Solemnis
as a shield. Now he wanted alarm and angry dream, style and distraction, as much ruthless novelty as the aging youth industry could still deliver.

He found a disc by a group called Anthrax, as if some real bioterrorist had planted it there to frame him. He looked around the cottage for something to play it on. In the kitchen he found a nineties-style boom box. He slipped the disc into the slot and with a single rim shot was surrounded by an air raid announcing the end of the world. A driving motor rhythm in the drums propelled virtuosic parallel passages in the guitars and bass. The song came on like a felon released from multiple life sentences. The melodic machete went straight through Els’s skin. It took no imagination to see a stadium of sixty thousand people waving lighters and basking in a frenzy of shared power. The music said you had one chance to blow through life, and the only crime was wasting it on fear.

Many years ago Els had made a vow to run from no art but let every track play through to its end. He looked out the window, past the gravel drive, through the stand of birches, remnants of the vast, vanished northern hardwood forest, listening to this droll Armageddon. The band had been around for half of Els’s life, servicing the need for anarchy written into people’s cells. He wondered which of this middle-class, outdoorsy family was responsible for the disc. Probably not Mom, although the thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone’s desire.

The song was one long, joyous jackhammer assertion of tonic. Surprise was not its goal, and the pattern laid down in the first four measures drove the tune on in a storm surge. But after two minutes, it sprouted a hallucination in the relative minor floating above the thrash, and for several notes Els thought the band, in a fit of real anarchy, had thrown Chopin’s E Minor Prelude—the “Vision”—into the cement mixer, like Lady Gaga quoting
The Well-Tempered Clavier
.

Els paused the disc, but the Chopin persisted. Four measures, with a little altered voice-leading at the end, turned back on themselves in an endless, lamenting loop—one of those tuneful fragments that signaled the onset of a temporal lobe seizure. But the sound came from somewhere in the house. He wandered through three different rooms before finding it: Klaudia’s smartphone. The one that had guided him here.

Words hovered on the screen: “Incoming Call, Kohlmann, K.” He pressed the answer icon, and held the world’s portal up to his ear.

You’re all over the news
, Kohlmann said, trying for sardonic but landing on scared.

Yes
, Els said.
I saw the camera trucks this morning
.

This morning. It wasn’t possible.

Klaudia said,
Google yourself. The clips are up already.

Of course they were. Retired professor of music flees scene of terrorism raid. Verrata College officials express dismay.

What else?
Els asked.
You sound . . .

Your bacteria. You said they were harmless.

Something slurred in his brain.
I said the species wasn’t dangerous in ordinary situations.

Storm troopers were assaulting the cabin, from the direction of the kitchen. Els set the phone down and headed toward the invasion. He’d pressed the pause button on the boom box, and the pause had chosen that moment to time out. He looked for eject, and in the onslaught of sound couldn’t find it. He yanked the cord from the wall, then walked back to the bedroom and retrieved the phone.

Back. Sorry.

What the hell was that?

Your grandsons’ music.

Ach. We’re finished, aren’t we?

What about my bacteria?
Els asked.

Nineteen people in hospitals across Alabama have been infected with your strain. The CDC says nine people dead.

A long caesura, the sound of what terror would be, when it grew up.

My strain? In Alabama?

Kohlmann read from another screen:
Serratia marcescens. That’s the one, right?

There was nothing to say, and Els said it.

The FBI wants to talk to you.

This . . . none of this makes sense. The FBI told the press what bacteria I was culturing?

But he didn’t need reminding: Everybody was the press now. Everyone knew everything, as it happened.

The journalists think I . . . ? They can’t be that stupid. Were all these patients on IV drips, by any chance?

Google it,
Klaudia told him.
That’s what the FBI is doing, I’m sure.

Jesus,
Els said
.

And call me
.
They can’t trace you to my phone, can they?

About your phone
, he said.
Chopin?

What can I say? It does something to me. Play that at my funeral, please?

He promised. But he wasn’t sure an audience with chronic focal disorder would sit through it.

A friend says: “I just heard the strangest song ever.” Do you run away or toward?

He sat out back behind the cottage on the edge of a maple grove, his head bowed over the device. In the dark, with that lone beam of white splashed across his face, he read the accounts. Nineteen Alabamans sick and nine dead. Nine people out of a hundred thousand annual American deaths by hospital infection—more than car wrecks and murders combined. The public, drowning in data, might never have registered the story. But he had turned accident into something panicworthy.