Orfeo (22 page)

All the infected patients had indeed been on a catheter. All six hospitals were in greater Birmingham. All got their IV bags from the same supplier. Either someone had accidentally contaminated a batch, or America was under siege again. In normal times, most people could figure the odds. But the times would never be normal again.

Els’s eyes adjusted to the screen, the lone bright spot in the surrounding dark. He searched his name and found student ratings of his teaching, a recent Brussels performance of his forgotten chamber symphony, and old chatter about the 1993 premiere of
The Fowler’s Snare.
Searches on the Alabama outbreak led to a gigantic methane dome under the thawing tundra that was belching into the atmosphere massive amounts of greenhouse gas that would speed the process that released them.

Reporters speculated about why a retired adjunct professor of music had been manipulating human pathogens in his den. Neighbors attested to his quiet politeness, although one described him as standoffish and another mentioned the atonal sounds emanating from his house at odd hours. The Joint Security Task Force could not comment on ongoing investigations, but they were interested in any information concerning the whereabouts of Peter Els.

Opera buffa had turned seria. He had no choice. He had to return home and explain, if only to keep a jumpy country from going off the rails again. But he’d already explained everything to Coldberg and Mendoza, and still they’d raided him. Now the Alabama infections vindicated them. Threat once again kept the precarious democracy intact. Els would have to be punished, in proportion to the thrill he’d given the collective imagination.

A hundred yards off, through the dense maples, the windows of the neighbors’ cabin threw off an amber glow. The undergrowth on all sides boomed with calls and alarms, an animal
Visions Fugitives.
His frantic flight caught up with him, and Els fell asleep in the deck chair under the trees. The smart screen dimmed, then timed out, then slipped from his hands. Sometime in the night he woke, and, realizing where he was, blundered into the house to a soft bed. Toward dawn, from a sleep filled with epidemics, he heard the E Minor Prelude pulsing again. But not until the next morning—a brilliant, balmy, and innocent thing, like the first day of creation—did he find the phone again, lying on the grass as if it had fallen out of the sky.

There is no safety. There is only forgetfulness.

Even in dried-out memory, those years in Boston are fresh and green. Els and Maddy drive a seventeen-foot U-Haul trailer filled with their combined worldly belongings across Ohio and Pennsylvania to the doorstep of their one-bedroom apartment in the Fens. They port a queen-sized mattress up the stairs on their heads. Els fusses over his gravid wife, making her stop and rest every few steps. She laughs off his anxieties.
I’m pregnant, Peter. Not crippled
. In fact, the thrill of nesting gives her energy for three.

For Maddy, it’s an easy commute by T to Brookline and New Morning, the private freedom school modeled on Neill’s Summerhill. The starry-eyed school board hired her after she declared in her interview that a rich musical exposure could turn any child into a creator. By the time Labor Day rolls around, she’s showing. Her progressive employers pretend to be thrilled.

While swelling Maddy teaches junior high kids how to barrel through dissonant choruses and mallet their way to freedom on Orff instruments, Els picks up odd jobs. He gives private clarinet lessons. He hires himself out as a music copyist. He writes concert reviews for the
Globe
, at fifty dollars a pop.

At night, they watch classic thirties Hollywood films on the oldies station, on a tiny black-and-white set with tinfoil attached to the rabbit ears. Maddy quilts and Peter glances through scores while Barrymore tells Trilby, “Ah, you are beautiful, my manufactured love! But it is only Svengali, talking to himself . . .”

A week after Halloween, he lands a job beyond his boldest fantasies: gallery guard at Mrs. Gardner’s fake Venetian palazzo, half a mile down the Fenway. He can walk there in minutes. They pay him to stand motionless all day in the Spanish Cloister or the Gothic Room or the Chinese Loggia, guarding paintings and writing music in his head. Days of silent meditation contribute as much to his musical development as all his years in graduate school. For a decade, he has busied himself with intricate, ingenious forms. Now he begins to hear a stream—simple, broad, and adamant—purling beneath his feet.

He lingers for entire afternoons in front of Vermeer’s
The
Concert
, listening to that still trio’s silent harmonies. The bowed head, the wave of the singer’s curved fingers conduct the strains of frozen music for no audience but him, in this distant future. Soon enough, those players, too, will go missing forever.

Richard Bonner writes letters now and then, from his illegal loft in SoHo. A few times he even calls, despite the ruinous expense of long distance. He’s always either euphoric with new projects or ready to press the button that will vaporize humanity. Once, he sends a small commission Els’s way—a request for a two-minute piece to accompany a gallery installation. The job pays nothing, but it’s Els’s first contribution to the downtown scene.

December comes, and with it, a snow that paralyzes Boston. Maddy is huge; she waddles about toting a globe on her outthrust pelvis. When her time comes, their car-owning next-door neighbor is nowhere to be found. Peter must run out in the street and flag down a passing Buick, to hitch a ride to the hospital.

Then infant Sara is there, in all her blotchy astonishment. They huddle in their snowbound cocoon: twin parents bowed over a minuscule wailer, who changes by the hour. Els writes no music for two months; he’s nothing but diapers and basinet and back-patting, getting that living tube to burp. His daughter mewls and cackles, and that’s all the concert he needs. Maddy lies around the apartment languorous, hypnotized, enslaved by this parasite that turns her into a brainless host. They all three do nothing but live. Even yanked awake in the dead of night, Els finds this life finer than any art. These six weeks—the fullest he’ll ever live. But the prelude is over in a few brief bars. Maddy’s back conducting the chorus at New Morning by Washington’s birthday.

Peter takes a leave from the museum to stay home and raise his infant girl. When Maddy returns from work each night to swallow up Sara, Els fusses.
Careful; you’re scaring her. Wash your hands first!

The sea slug learns to locomote, shoving herself across the floor on four floppy limbs. Her lips burble and whir, like her mother’s humming in embryo. Peter takes his girl everywhere, in a papoose strapped across his chest. He sings to her all day long. He sings her to sleep each night, as she chants along and reaches for the pitches where they float in the air. “Hot Cross Buns” and “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider”: What more music could a person ever need?

From the start, she’s her own creature. Everything goes in her mouth. What can’t be eaten is there only to test her will. And Sara won’t be thwarted. She’s born a conductor, and the world is her orchestra. She cues the giant adults with her index finger:
You: get over here! Me: over there!
Life is a puzzle to shift and slide until the solution, so clear already in this infant’s mind, comes free.

Her parents find the bossy Von Karajan game hilarious, the first few hundred times. Then exhausting. Then a little scary. One tough night, after a two-hour epic bedtime war of attrition, Peter and Maddy lie slumped against each other, wasted zombies. The air is stained with baby reek—spit-up and talcum. Peter gazes up at the plaster-cracked ceiling, an alternate notation system he can’t read.

She has a will.

Maddy flops backward on the bed.
And she always finds a way
.

Plays me like a Strad.

Me, too. How’d she learn that so fast?

Look at us. Remember when the hardest thing in the world was writing a grant?

Maddy breathes out, her soubrette long gone.
Not the life you were hoping for, is it?

No,
Peter agrees, a little surprised.
It’s far more.

”But my lamps were blown out in every little wind. And lighting them, I forget all else again.” (Tagore)

He starts to write again. A scribbled gesture one day, then a theme, then a few measures. Over several months, he sketches a short scherzo for small ensemble. In the wilds of stay-at-home fatherhood, music changes. His little tricks and signatures soften and expand. He’ll sit working at the electric piano in the corner of the bedroom while his daughter plays on the other side of the wall, rapping at her tiny xylophone, imitating him, chanting the pitchless pitches of infancy.

He crosses over into her room, and she blooms. She slaps the mallet on the shiny metal keys in ecstasy.

What are you saying, Sary-bear?

The name makes her rap faster, gladder. The keys ring out—red, purple, sea-green.

What’s that? Say it again!

She shrieks and strikes at all the keys in the rainbow.

Wait. I know! You’re saying
. . .

He helps her hold the mallet. They touch the keys together in the magic order. He sings.

There once was a girl named Sar-a!

She laughs and grabs her hand free, hits the keys that she’s already hearing.

She comes from the present er-a!

She hums hard, whacking as many keys as she can reach.

The future had better beware-a!

Yes, she screeches: That’s it. That’s exactly what I’m saying.

He goes back into his bedroom, to his own keyboard, where he steals from her, those scattered fa-do-sol-la fragments of deep origin. She toddles in, tries to help, pushes keys for him.
No, darling,
he says.
This is daddy’s piece.
But it isn’t, really. Everything is hers.

By day’s end, he has the start of a new berceuse, which he tests on her at bedtime. She’s the only hearer the piece may ever have. Who else would listen to such a thing? It’s too wild for the billion lovers of radio tunes, too blissful for the handful who need their music recherché.

But his daughter likes the song, and she’s all the audience he needs. Sara is his experiment in what the ear might come to hear, when raised on sounds from a happy elsewhere. She giggles at his sudden melodic turns. Her face crinkles in puzzled glee. Her turn now to ask him:
What are you saying?
But it’s only music on a summer’s evening, even as a bouncy ballpark organ floats into the window, blown through the air from Fenway, the bat’s crack, the distant whispered roar of a crowd, and a berceuse that leaves the saucer-eyed girl squealing in primal delight.

Outside the apartment, there are gas lines, wildfire inflation, the Middle East heading to Armageddon again. But inside, their days bring the real dramas. A cough. A fever. A fall against the coffee table that makes her bite through her lower lip. Two short years ago, he wanted to write music that changed what music was. Now he just wants to keep his daughter from changing too much, too fast.

Pushing Sara’s stroller through the Victory Gardens, Els sees with terrible clarity the hubris of his twenties. He can’t for his life imagine why he ever signed on for the full Faust ride. For years, he’s struggled to write something thorny and formidable, as if difficulty alone ensured lasting admiration. Now he sees that what the world really needs is a lullaby simple enough to coax a two-year-old to lay down her frantic adventure each night for another eight hours.

On the playground near the art museum, Sara stands and chants to the sky: “This Old Man.” The words are babble, the rhythm rough, and the melody little more than a crayon smear. But to Els, the old man is as recognizable as God. Rebelling is itself a passing fashion, as fragile as any. Hemlines rise and fall, but the present is forever convinced it has found the Tailor’s pattern. The manifestos of Peter’s twenties—the movements and lawless experiments, the crazy climbs up onto the barricades—feel like a tantrum now, like his daughter refusing to take her nap. Who can say what the academy champions these days? Els has been away too long to know. But he knows that cool will give way to warm, form to feeling, as surely as a leading tone tilts forever toward the tonic. Music cut from new whole cloth? No such material. The emperor will always be as naked as a jaybird, as nude as Sara slapping the waves of her bath, shrieking those patty-cake melodies she makes up on the spot.

The girl is in love with music. At four, she blossoms with solfeggio. By four and a half, she stumbles through the Mozart Sonatina in C with what strikes her besotted father as real feeling. She plays for him, improvised instruments: Horns made of rubber shower hose. Oatmeal boxes strung with rubber bands. The game must always go a certain way, and she never gets tired of playing.

What am I saying, Daddy?
she demands, and lays into the piano with every finger she has.

He listens.
You’re saying, “Okay, Mom; I’ll eat green food.”

Yes!
Maddy calls from the kitchen.

No!
Sara shouts, and tries more furious chords.

I know! You’re saying, “I’m tired and I want to go to bed.”

Wrong!
she says.
Try again!
And her tune goes as frantically jagged as anything Els has written.

Wait,
he says, tipping his head to hear.
Keep going. I almost have it. You’re saying
,
“I’m loved, and life is good!”

The music collapses, suddenly bashful. She turns her face away from him, her mouth crumpled in a shy maybe
.

FIVE YEARS IN the Fens apartment pass like the
Minute Waltz
. His fellow Illinois grads have scattered into university music labs across the U.S. He listens to their gnomic tapes, studies their gnostic scores. Musical resistance still strikes him as worthy. Between Nixon, the endless war, and a radio spectrum filled with bland self-pity and sales jingles, there’s more to resist than ever. But he listens, and can’t get traction.