Orfeo (33 page)

Els hears the next caller’s fury before she speaks three words.
This man,
she says,
creating germs in his own laboratory—people have died, and this man needs to be found and stopped before he harms anyone else.

The host asks his guests to comment. The watchdog says,
At very best, this is a case of an amateur modifying a toxic microorganism without really knowing
—

The writer cuts in:
Amgen does that all the time. Monsanto
.
Half our corn and ninety percent of our soybeans are biohacked, and we put them in our mouths on blind faith
.

Amgen
is run by trained scientists, not a retired musician working at the kitchen sink with no idea what he’s doing
.

Trained scientists have produced more disasters than all the amateurs combined
.

The blast of an air horn like something out of
Götterdämmerung
drives Els across the lane. In his rearview mirror, an eighteen-wheeler rides up his tailpipe. He jerks right. The semi blasts past him, wailing. When the truck pulls back in front of Els, the driver hits the brakes. The front of the Fiat kisses the truck’s bumper.

The watchdog is talking.
He has panicked the whole nation.

The nation has been panicked for ten years. And if spreading panic is the measure, every news anchor is a terrorist
.

The host patches in another caller. A trembling woman says that scientists were behind the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Els pulls one stuck hand off the wheel and kills the radio. An exit floats into view, and he takes it. He hits the rumble strip twice on his way up the ramp. He follows a local road for a long time, trying to regain control of his body. He pulls into a gas station in Vandalia that clings to the intersection of two empty state highways. He fills the tank and hands the cash to a bearded anarchist who looks like he wouldn’t turn in Hitler.

Els sits at a picnic table behind the station, under a blue spruce, nursing a turkey wrap and flipping through a copy of the
Times
that the convenience center stocked by accident. He finds himself on page A10: “Homebrew Genetic Modifier Heard Beat of Different Drummer.”
The article psychoanalyzes Peter Els’s biohacking by considering his decades of audience-hostile avant-garde creations. A little vomit spasms into Els’s mouth. He folds up the paper and leaves it on the picnic table, under a stone.

He opens the door to the Fiat, and a voice shouts,
Hey!
Els turns, hands rising. The wild-bearded anarchist stands in the doorway of the gas station, rigid. It’s a relief, almost, caught at last. The fugitive motif has gone on too long. He’s tired. He smiles at his accoster, surrendering.

I forgot
, the man says.
You get a free drink with that turkey thingie.

Els sits in the parked car, his hands revolting. The free drink, his alibi, splatters when he brings it to his lips. Through the windshield, he watches a family of four parade into the convenience mart. The little girl, her sweatshirt advertising a megachurch, fixes him in a telephoto gaze. Arrest is just a matter of time. What he has done and what he has failed to do must both be paid for. The good of the many demands it.

Kohlmann’s phone has ridden beside him on the death seat since Champaign. He takes it and turns it on. Too late for the traceable device to hurt him. He has only eighty miles to St. Louis, and his destination. The Joint Task Force can have him, once he finishes there.

His fingers flail at the on-screen keys. He punches in an address memorized years ago. It has always been a little fictional, no place he would live to see. But the Voice figures out the route in seconds, door to door. All he needs to do is accept the GPS’s higher power.

The route unfolds in front of him—an hour and a half. His limbs are clammy and his skin metallic. He pries open the glove compartment. A stack of loose CDs spill out onto the passenger side floor, none of them what he needs. He leans over into the chaos-strewn backseat and rakes through dozens more cracked and unhinging jewel boxes, finding nothing that can help him.

Then he remembers: all the tunes in the world are his. He plugs the smartphone into the car stereo and pecks in his search. The piece bubbles up with a few pokes of his index finger. It’s music that will get him as far as he needs to go. Shostakovich’s Fifth—a condemned man writing the accompaniment to his own execution.

Serratia
can split several times an hour, when conditions are right. Double a few times, and soon you’re talking real numbers.

The overture begins with almost nothing: one oboe, one English horn, and one bassoon. They play in unison at first, a theme filled with anticipation borrowed from a mass by Ockeghem. The unison divides; one melody becomes two, then two become four, rising and stretching. Dawn in the free city of Münster, Northern Rhineland, January 1534.

The first tradesmen trickle through the Prinzipalmarkt. Vendors set up their stalls, and customers congregate. Two violas join the reed trio. An ermine-trimmed noble draws a retinue across the market square to a swell in the trombones and cellos. Over the course of several dozen patient measures, dawn turns into full-on morning.

Streets radiate from the prosperous plaza, lined by step-gabled houses and pinnacled façades. To the east, the commanding Gothic Rathaus. To the north, the cathedral spire. Brisk commerce fills the marketplace. The orchestra begins a vast prolation canon—copies of a single germ, sped up or slowed down, pitched at various intervals. The tangle of lines gives way to pulsing chords. Then the shock of a baritone cuts through the sound:

Fire, air, the rain, the sun—the Lord made all things common, for our shared joy.

The fireplug preacher Rothmann, in his dark robes, mounts the stone bank rimming the plaza’s fountain.

Whoever says “This is mine, that is yours”—that man steals from you!

Some of the chorus stop their buying and selling long enough to shush him. They sing of recent calamities throughout the empire that must not reawaken. Rothmann’s baritone shines out above them.

God gave us the world, whole. We’ve wrecked it, and fight over the crumbs. No wonder you’re miserable—all of you!

A trio of merchants caution the preacher, above the massed strings. They say the years of chaos must stop. The city needs peace and prosperity; all else is rabble-rousing noise. The words form islands of triadic consonance in the orchestra’s atonal surge.

Others come to Rothmann’s defense.
The man hurts no one. Let him preach what heaven tells him.
The merchant trio become a sextet, a plea for harmony, productivity, wealth. But the preacher laughs them off in a swelling solo:

Peaceful? Productive? The Prince-Bishop wants you productive! Producing for the Prince. Fools! For peace, you’ve traded away your souls.

The ill, the oppressed, the unemployed, and the merely spiritual begin to flock to Rothmann’s side. Old clashes break out across the stage. The cast splits into a freewheeling double chorus, its two factions feeding the rising excitement. Chords stack up and melodies clash above a turning ground bass. Each time the cycling figure returns, its texture thickens. Rothmann shouts above the fray—curt and thrilling melodic anagrams of the original, aching theme.

God put joy into your body—real joy! Live in the light. Live in full beauty. Live in the common air.

A sudden modulation into a remote harmonic region, and four men on horseback appear from the wings. At their head is the tailor’s apprentice, John of Leiden, a charismatic man with a flowing beard. To a brass fanfare, in a heroic tenor, he leads his posse in a motet. They come from the Netherlands at the bidding of Jan Matthias, the baker turned prophet, who has identified Münster as the place where God will begin the world’s end. Rothmann, they sing, is clearing the way for the long-delayed heavenly kingdom.

Rothmann embraces them, and together, in long, brazen lines of modal melody, they sing in ecstatic counterpoint:

Mine and Thine, Thine and Mine?

Live in light! Live in beauty!

There is no life without dying into the One.

Where else to place your hope, your joy, your love?

One false world is ending,

The true one will soon arrive.

No fulfillment but in hunger.

No safety but through danger.

Ready yourself: the day is here.

In the building passacaglia, Rothmann works his way downstage to join John of Leiden. He asks the prophet to baptize him again, to give him the danger of rebirth. He and John sing a buoyant duet, each line based on a different tetrachord. John leads Rothmann to center stage and into the marketplace fountain. The singing stops and the orchestra falls silent.

A solo cello starts up Luther’s baptismal chorale,
Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam
. The two men enter the fountain up to their waists. A second cello harmonizes the first in simple fifths and thirds. The Dutchman lowers Rothmann until the preacher goes under. Strings now play all four lines of the chorale, its harmonies nudged by accidentals into a mad experiment. Rothmann stays underwater way too long. He lunges back up, gasping and dripping. The orchestra launches a triumphant treatment of the chorale in the driving harmonies from the early 1990s, the sounds of the falling Wall.

The spectacle awes the market crowd. An old woman asks for her own full immersion. She sings the most haunting aria of the first act:
So near the grave, I find this birth.
Together, John of Leiden and Rothmann baptize her. Two weeping girls in their teens demand to be next, while tradesmen stop to witness.

A trill in the flutes alerts the stage. The woodwinds rush forward through a flurry in the horns. A march unfolds, so forceful that even the skeptics are caught up in it. More bodies plunge into the fountain. The reborn emerge from the water and wander offstage in a state of grace. Once in the wings, they run back behind the flats, slip into dry clothes, and reenter stage right, as newcomers to the commotion. So the chorus multiplies until belief is everywhere.

The march carries the crowd along on a public flood. A clear key—E major—emerges, rich with the vengeance of shared faith. Believers and unbelievers, foreigners and natives, prophets and merchants, the elect and the damned, swirl together in a frenzied tutti.

By now even the untrained ear can hear how all the scene’s material—the opening theme, Rothmann’s aria, John of Leiden’s motif, and Luther’s chorale—fit together into this gathering chorus. As the ever-renewing crowd plunges into the pool, Rothmann and the Dutch messengers, lifted up by the circling strings, sing a simple, unison, Gothic lullaby drawn from the words of Saint Paul:

Darkness is passing,

The night is over,

A new dawn makes its way.

My piece might be all around you, and you’ll never know. Cellular songs everywhere, by the hundreds of millions.

The terror of an empty auditorium, two weeks before opening. Two thousand five hundred empty seats. Four and a half rings of balcony, stacked up like a beehive. Scattered bodies dot the sea of red. Els cowers near the front of the house while, onstage, dozens of builders put the last touches on the City of God.

He has needed forty months to deliver 170 minutes of music. During those years, the war that has lasted since his childhood comes to an end. The evil empire crumbles into a dozen-plus countries. All the world’s data weaves together into a web. In the desert on the far side of the planet, Els’s country goes to war, made godlike by technology. The apocalypse of smart bombs and computer screens would all have made for dazzling opera if Els hadn’t already been busy with one—an opera as strange to the present as the present has become to him.

His work is over now. The brainstorming, the interminable phone conferences, the fights over cuts and simplifications. The score has been frozen for weeks, past fixing. Still, he hangs around in the cavernous hall, sitting twenty rows back from the orchestra pit, keeping the final stages of production together on the sheer force of his teeth-gritting will.

Behind the singers, in the recesses of the great stage, carpenters complete the cathedral’s west portal. Siege engines slide by on dollies. Artisans in overalls snap a pair of volutes into place on a towering flat that hangs from a batten. It panics Els, still, to count the people employed to bring to life something that began on his cabin’s drawing table. He still can’t quash the urge to jump up and shout, Oh, no, thank you! Please don’t bother.

The goal seemed simple enough: raise the dead and make them sing. And Els has done that, these last three years. His ghost dictation filled hundreds of pages. For forty months, he has hoarded the pile of manuscript, showing it to his collaborators only under threats of violence. Every few months, he glimpsed something worthwhile in the growing score. Once, near the finish, he caught his breath at the sounds of real inspiration.

Bonner and his thugs came and took the pages away from him by force. And somehow in the course of a few more months, the team of craftsmen have turned his obscure secret formulae into theater. He’s stunned, sitting in the crepuscular hall, to discover how good the first act sounds—how often it captures the bright, poisonous, ample world he lived in during his thousand-day trance.