Orfeo (32 page)

Richard slumped back in the Shaker chair, his neck against the top slat.
Something’s happened, Peter
.
The game’s gone flat. I’m playing myself. Formula transgression. Turn the crank, and out come the little predictable spurts of stylized outrage.

Els stacked the dirty dinnerware, studying the problem as if it were the Sunday crossword.

Doesn’t sound like anything I can help you with.

Richard manacled Els’s wrist.
Don’t game me, asshole. You want me to tell you I need you?

Els withdrew his trapped wrist, sat, and steepled his fingers to his lips.

Don’t
give
me that Buddha shit either,
Bonner said.
You remember everything
.
We used to discover things. Laws of science. We worked for God, once, you and me. And anyone who didn’t like it could go save themselves.

As Els remembered it, God’s preferences had been largely unknown to them. Yet he held still and listened.

Bonner slipped into a fantasia for the audience of one.
The whole globe’s convulsing. But this country is walking around in a gauzy, super-sized, antidepressant-laced, MTV-fueled cocoon. Game Boys and Party Girls
.
Fuck: I’m not making art. I’m just the next consumer-friendly dose of distraction for people who’re bored by halftime spectacles.

You want something,
Els said
.

Bonner looked at him, startled by the insight.
Dying for it.

And you don’t know what.

Oh, but I do. I want to wake people from their dream of safety.

And you think I can help you do that
.

You’re the only person I’ve ever met who wants more than I do. Look at you! Not afraid to torch your entire life. Writing for no one.

Els didn’t bother to correct either lie. He stood and took the dirty dishes into the kitchen. He returned with two cartons of ice cream and two spoons. Bonner grabbed a spoon and set to work on both cartons at once. Els just watched, thinking the man might be abusing some prescription drug.

He said,
You are a miserable human being. Why should I put myself through that again?

Bonner nodded mid-scoop, agreeing with everything.
Because your stuff with me is the best work you’ve ever done.

You’ve got a problem, Richard.

You don’t say.
Bonner raised his spoon in the air and sang,
News, news, news, news, news, news, news has a . . . has a . . . has a kind of mystery . . . !

So what is it? You’re a repressed queer? Is that your great secret?

Bonner swung the spoon like fencing foil.
Oh, fuck off. Queer, straight: Who makes these things up? Is anybody anything?

You’re manic?

Bonner dove back into the box.
What does that even mean?
He fished for bits of nut in the melting mass of cream.
We’re either hungry or dead. Don’t talk to me about finer distinctions.

Els went back into the kitchen to put the kettle on and fill the sink with hot suds. A large mammal was foraging around the trash on the back porch. He didn’t bother to scare it away. When he returned to the dining room with tea, Bonner was still launching his frontal assault on the melting cartons. Els picked up the other spoon and started in. He leaned on his elbows and poked at the butter pecan, as if conducting a flea orchestra.

Every time we’ve worked together, you’ve ended up insulting me.

Every time? Oh, come on. That’s bullshit.

Els flipped the spoon across the room and stood. Bonner grabbed his hand.

Peter. I have to. Everything satisfying disgusts me. I have to keep . . .

Els sat and rested his hands in his lap. He stared at his small white draftsman’s table in the next room. Bonner followed his gaze. A thought drifted through Els like a crane across a Chinese landscape painting. He held up a finger, and vanished. After some minutes, he returned with a square of torn cardboard.

Bonner took it.
What the hell’s this? Some kind of concept piece?

Els waited. Recognition was slow in coming.

Oh, Jesus. You’re kidding me. You saved . . . ?
Bonner started to laugh—stress hysterics.
Didn’t I say you were the one person crazier than me?
He sobered, looked up at Els, and squinted.

Els squinted back.
How do you plan to sell City Opera on an unknown composer?

I told them you were the only person I’d work with. Now shut the fuck up and let’s make something.

Bonner tugged Els down the dark road where he’d left the rental. Then the two of them drove the quarter mile back up the hill into Els’s driveway. Richard got out and took two hulking green duffel bags from the trunk. He offered one to Els. Peter looked at the vintage military issue stenciled with a long Polish name.

Are you moving in?

What’s it to you, Maestro? Come on. Could you give me a hand, here?

Yes: I’m guilty of playing God. But thousands of such creatures have already been composed, and millions more are coming.

In the morning, when Els came out to the kitchen, Bonner was in the front room jabbing and thrusting. Els thought another squirrel had come down the chimney at night and Richard was chasing it. Richard loped around in a vulpine circle, then made several klutzy lunges. He looked like a teenage boy writhing in a private sports fantasy. Els fought back a horrified laugh. The man was inventing. Coping. Call it dance.

That morning, they packed a lunch and walked through snow calf-deep up into the mountains. Els figured Bonner would be gasping for air after twenty minutes, but Richard held tough. He talked straight through the two-hour climb, his words steaming in the January air. He laid out what he wanted for the opera. He’d spent his entire life fleeing from narrative, and now he discovered, to his surprise, that it might not be too late to embrace the kind of storytelling that the world craved
.

Els proposed biography. The life of Thomas Merton—the contemplative mystic who inspired millions with his thoughts on inner divinity but who never contacted his own illegitimate child. Bonner shot down the idea without explanation. Els then suggested the chemist Gerhard Domagk, who tested his newly discovered sulfa drug on his dying daughter, was arrested by the Gestapo for winning a Nobel, and ended up aiding the Nazi cause.

Where do you come up with these things?
Bonner asked.

A guy can read a lot when he lives alone.

Bonner plowed through the drifts, considering. At last he said,
No touching human intimacy. Let’s face it, Maestro. Neither one of us knows shit about being a human. Not our thing.

Richard knew only that he wanted something epic—a story that swept the cast up into a collective fate. Something that would shatter the audience. Something with sweep.

Historical drama
, Els said.
People at war with things as they are
.

That’s it,
Richard declared.
I knew you were my monkey.

In the snow, dotted by long stretches of silence, Bonner’s vague fancies solidified. Els listened, now and then interrogating. He led them up to a ledge overlooking Crawford Notch. They stopped to share hot noodle soup right out of the thermos. The gorge was luminous, blanketed with snow. Els kept telling Bonner to look, but Richard was busy.

Maybe the
Challenger
explosion,
he said.
No, okay, you’re right. How about the fall of one of these Eastern strongmen? Ceau
ş
escu. Honecker.

After half a dozen slugs of soup and several more proposals—Jonestown, the Red Brigade—Bonner grew fidgety.
I’m dying here, man. And you aren’t helping.

You want ecstasy,
Els said.
Transcendence.

Is that asking too much?

You want real opera.

Bonner nodded.

Real, all-out, outrageous opera, a hundred years out of date. But you’re trapped in current events.

The words struck Bonner like a revelation.
Jesus, you’re right. I’m stuck in the damn headlines.

In the death grip of the present. When what you really want is Forever.

Maestro.
Bonner put down the thermos.
I’m listening.

Els gazed out on the pristine vista.
No contemporary politics
.
Something old. Alien. Uncanny
.

Go on,
Bonner commanded. And Els did.

Siege of Münster
,
1534.

Bonner held his frozen hands in the soup’s steam and grinned.
Let’s hear.

They broke camp and headed back. The snow started up again, and darkness fell well before they reached the car. But by then both men were deep in details, lost to the clock. When they got back to the house, Bonner was faint with hunger. But he refused to break for dinner until Els finished the story.

Els sent him to bed with books. Richard read all night and didn’t wake until noon the next day. Despite the hour, he insisted on his loping workout before the day could begin. Afterward, the two men began to outline a three-act libretto.

When they finished the outline two days later, red-eyed and covered in salt-and-pepper stubble, they looked like twin prophets of their own deranged sect.

I knew this already
, Bonner said, tapping the sheaf of paper and shaking his head.
I was looking for this, before I even knew I was looking
.

He was still mystified as they packed the car.
This is it, Peter. Euphoria versus the State. Like the damn thing was waiting for us. How the hell did you ever come across it?

I told you. Live alone, and you come across a lot.

The two men stood by the rental in puffy down coats, planning to meet again in another month, after Bonner had briefed the City Opera brass. Bonner wanted to draft the libretto himself. Using primary sources, he could have a first draft in three months. Els assured him that there was plenty of music to write, even in advance of the first words.

Richard got in the car and started it. The rental’s tailpipe spit a plume into the clear air. Then the director got back out and grabbed the composer, as if they were still young.

Peter? Thank you.

Els waved him away. He stood until the car disappeared down the tree-lined road. Then he went back inside the cabin to the piece he’d been working on for months—the stacks of staff paper on his drawing table with their hundreds of sketches for the first act of that same opera the two men had just mapped out together.

Life fills the world with copies of itself. Music and viruses both trick their hosts into copying them.

The radio names him twice in the first two hours out of Champaign. A government spokesperson says that scientists are trying to determine if the bacteria taken from the home of Peter Els, the so-called Biohacker Bach, have in fact been genetically altered. Els waits for the speaker to admit that the strain that killed the patients in Alabama wasn’t his. Instead, the announcer returns to say that, in yet more bacterial news, the deadly outbreak of
E. coli
in Germany may have come from tainted Spanish vegetables.

Through the Fiat’s windows, miles of stark black tillage begin to green. Nothing about the spare beauty looks like a country under any kind of threat. But at ten a.m., on a syndicated public radio interview program, Els learns just what he has unleashed.

The show is on the dangers of garage biology.
A rash of hospital deaths
, the host begins.
Supermarket contaminations in several countries. A do-it-yourself genetic engineer working with toxic microbes, now on the run from the authorities
. The sounds reach Els from a great distance, as if the whole segment is one of those sampled, chopped-up, looped, and reassembled song quilts that are again all the rage, half a century after their invention.
How scared by all of these stories should you be?

For insight, the host welcomes a Bay Area writer whose book on the growing amateur microbiology movement Els has read. The man talks of garage scientists numbering in the thousands.

Who are these people?
the host asks.

The writer gives a frustrated chuckle.
Lots of folks. Libertarians, hobbyists, students, entrepreneurs, activists. They’re old-style citizen scientists in the spirit of Jenner and Mendel. This is cheap, democratic, participatory biotech. Closing it down would be a mistake.

The show turns to the director of a safety watchdog group, who maps out the worst-case scenario.
The problem is
, she says,
between mail-order synthetic DNA and a kitchen stocked with a thousand dollars of gear, an amateur could create a new lethal pathogen. Given how many people want to harm this country, biopunk is one of the greatest threats facing us
.

The writer laughs her off.
Skiing is hundreds of times more dangerous.

A bipartisan Washington commission on WMDs and terrorism predicts a major bioterror attack in the next couple of years
, the watchdog says.

The host asks,
What can we do to prevent that?

We need to build on the success of the TSA
, the watchdog answers.

The writer howls.
The TSA hasn’t detected a single terrorist action since its inception!

That proves their effectiveness
.

The host throws open the call-in lines. The first caller asks if this killer
E. coli
in Europe is a terrorist act. Both experts say no. The caller hangs up unconvinced.