Orfeo (38 page)

There were words, rich, inventive, and pitched. Someone shoved the other, and shoving became punches. All Els could remember in any detail was Bonner dusting himself off and getting back in his car. He promised to sue Els for everything he was worth. Worth nothing, Els only laughed.

All further contact between them went through a lawyer. Els stood his ground. He made sure
The Fowler’s Snare
would never be performed again. The fight merited a moment of gossip in musical circles. Then those circles moved on to morbid Eurotrash productions of Mozart with underwater nudity and thrilling new hybrids of rock and rave, Broadway and Bayreuth.

Els didn’t follow those developments. He was done with musical progress. He was done with Richard Bonner. This time the break was permanent. That much was obvious, the minute the dancer stood up bloodied from the gravel drive.

Two years after
The Fowler’s Snare
closed forever, the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City went down. Els heard the news on public radio while making dinner. There was talk of Arabs and hidden terror cells. But anniversaries are no accident, and Els knew at once just what slow war this attack continued. For the first time in two years, snatches of robust music formed in his mind. Lush instrumental passages, pushing outward in a mad rush: Act Four, he guessed, or Act One of an unwelcome sequel. The story was dark and resonant—worth splendid music. But by then Els believed that music’s job was to cure listeners of drama forever.

A letter arrived one day, forwarded from City Opera. It was from the pianist who’d premiered Els’s
Borges Songs
in graduate school. Once a weed-loving closet jazzer, the man now signed himself the dean of fine arts of Verrata College, a small liberal arts school in eastern Pennsylvania.
Fowler
had blown him away. “If you’re ever looking for a way to make ends meet,” the dean said, “you can always do some teaching for us.”

He didn’t need cash so much as he needed protection from the psych ward. Structured activity might keep at bay all the thoughts brought on by extended silence.

Verrata saved him and gave him the sustainable oblivion he needed. He moved back down to the Mid-Atlantics and took up the gristmill work of an adjunct professor. He taught five courses a semester: a mix of ear training, sight singing, and basic theory and harmony. His days were a gauntlet of Fixed-Do slogs, with him as tonality’s drill sergeant. Like every adjunct, he was a stone-dragging serf helping to build a very wide pyramid. But exploitation suited his need for penitence.

He threw himself into the crushing routine. A few semesters of teaching the rudiments of music made him realize how little of the mystery of organized vibrations he’d ever understood. The whole enigma unfolded in front of him, and he stood back from it as baffled as a beginner. He tried to tell his freshmen the simplest things—why a deceptive cadence makes a listener ache or how a triplet rhythm creates suspense or what makes a modulation to a relative minor broaden the world—and found he didn’t know.

Not knowing felt good. Good for his ear.

He still composed sometimes, at his desk between student conferences, or sitting in the thick of the college commons, although he never bothered to put any notes to paper. Tiny haiku microcosms spilled out of him, five-finger exercises in peace that fragmented into lots of beautiful, fermata-held rests.

Students came, learned, and left. Some suffered through their solfeggio exercises, masters of the taciturn eye-roll. But others he changed forever. To the best of his student composers, Els said,
Do not invent anything; simply discover it.
One or two of them understood him.

The years went by, and he worked as hard and well as he could. He gardened. He learned how to cook. He took up long morning walks. One day, his daughter called him out of the blue. She was passing through Philadelphia for a conference her start-up was attending. Els met her at a noisy chowder house. The diffident girl of twenty who’d spent long, secluded hours on dial-up bulletin boards in multi-user dimensions was having a ball inventing whole new imaginary worlds again. Only this time it was called entrepreneurship.

Five minutes of conversation with this short-haired, soft-suited, velvet-shirted stranger, and he was in love all over again. And weirdly comfortable, as if they’d gone on chatting away in their own language for all those missing years.

So what exactly is data mining?
he asked.

Okay,
Sara said, wiping the white linen napkin across her twisting lips.
Say you wanted to know how many hours a week midwestern urban professionals between the ages of twenty-five and thirty spend listening to crunk.

Wait,
her father said.
Start from the beginning.

A very good place to start.

She’d ended up much like her mother: solid, flourishing, in love with work. She came back out East four months later, and they went to New York to look at paintings together. Then the calls started. First every Sunday evening, then expanding to two or three times a week. She did enjoy him. But he was her project, really. She seemed to feel some need to look after him, a fix for all those years when he failed to look after her. She sent him a dog for his birthday. She bought him books and sent him discs and concert tickets. She vetted his television viewing and took him with her once to Hamburg. She did everything but say: Let’s make something, Daddy. Something good.

All the while, he worked. He had the esteem of his colleagues, the respect of his neighbors, and the occasional affection of his better students. After some years, it shocked Els to discover that, for the first time in his life, he was almost happy.

I bequeath myself to the dirt.

Near Amarillo, the sun dropped huge and bronze below the horizon. Els kept to the radio. One hundred outbreaks of avian flu throughout Bangladesh and Southeast Asia. Fatal cases in Egypt and Indonesia and Cambodia and Bangladesh and Dakahlia. Infected wild birds were showing up in the abandoned radioactive wasteland zones around Fukoshima. The newsreader couldn’t suppress the thrill in his voice. Something was happening, at last. If not this flu season, then the next.

Els pressed on past the city. The plan was to make it to Phoenix in one more push the next day. Anxiety stained his clothes, and he would have no fresh ones anytime soon. Home and comfort were no more than nostalgic folk songs. He’d badly misjudged the vast, callous vacancy of the West. The featureless Panhandle stretched out in front of him, da capo ad nauseum
.

A flyspeck town near the New Mexico border beckoned, and he pulled off. A mile and a half up a dark road he found a mom-and-pop place with a sign whose half-darkened neon letters read like Martian script. A Holiday Inn Express beckoned from across the way, but Els chose the churlish motel without a second thought. Fifteen hours of solo driving: the sensation was not unlike sitting through a fifty-year-old experimental art film five times in a row. His vision swirled, and the asphalt of the parking lot as he baby-stepped across it bobbed like the sea. Only the thought of lying down forever kept him moving.

A single-story elbow of rooms bent around the weed-shot parking lot. The building had seen better times, but the times could never have been too good. A line of windows hid behind heavy curtains, and the roar of retrofitted air conditioners kept up a steady drone. The insects in the air, the plane overhead, and the blood coursing in his ears combined into a spectral masterpiece.

A bouquet of Pine-Sol filled the tiny lobby, with its walls of stucco and knotty pine. Behind the ironing board of a front desk, a sun-beaten old man in chinos and a tee reading Outta My Face preempted the guest before he could say hello.

Cash only, tonight.

The man’s voice was a wondrous, geared machine. Els said,
Deal.

The proprietor didn’t even pretend to paperwork. The eleven most hated words in the English language: I’m from the government, and I’m here to collect your receipts. But politics and art made strange bedfellows, and Els was fine with allies wherever he found them.

The room smelled of tobacco and microwave popcorn, but the bed was soft, and Els felt lucky beyond saying. He opened the particleboard closet and stood in front of it, feeling the urge to unpack. The absence of a bag made that difficult. His head buzzed and in his ears, the slap of tires against the seams in the highway continued to beat out a steady andante.

A TV tilted from the wall like an altarpiece. He flipped it on, for tranquilizing. The headline news channel featured a pet care business that was booming in the advent of the Rapture, only weeks away. He turned on the smartphone. The FBI could zero in on the device and raid the room, so long as they let him take a hot shower first. Searching on his name produced too many citations even to skim. It left him vaporous, diffused, and a little exhilarated. He chucked the phone on the bed, stripped, went into the funky, pine-paneled bathroom, and got under the spray.

The pelt of hot water against his skin sizzled like cymbals. The ringing in his ear changed pitch as he clenched his jaw. Toweling dry, he heard the great night music from Bartók’s
Concerto for Orchestra
so clearly that he was sure it came through the motel walls. He stood and listened. The piece, its thick brocade of brass, seemed to him uniquely worth saving from the last century’s runaway bonfire. Making such a thing could justify a life. But the piece was a charity commission, and the maker died a miserable pauper’s death a year and a half later, mourned at his funeral by eight people including his wife and son.

Fatigue pulled Els down to the bed. With what strength remained, he set the clock radio for five a.m. The minute he slipped under the coarse, pilled sheets, he heard Chopin’s
Vision
. Groping on the bedstand to shut it off, he saw his own name on the glowing screen: Els, S.

He fumbled the phone on and mumbled,
Sara.
Something like his daughter’s voice came back at him.

Daddy. Oh, God, what are you doing?

He thought he might still be sleeping, his head on the pillow. Maddy must have given her the number from off of the caller ID. Technology, family, love: prisoner of them all.

He said,
Hey, Bear. You okay?

Daddy, what’s wrong with you?
Her voice was strange and hoarse.

Don’t worry. I’m fine.

Where are you? Wait. Don’t say anything
.

Your mother told you that I—

Shut up,
she said.
Don’t, don’t, don’t
.

He held the phone in a stunned silence. Data everywhere.

What the hell did you think you were doing?
she said. Then:
Don’t answer that.

She said nothing more for a very long time. At last she bleated,
You haven’t done anything. You’re innocent.

He sat up and flicked on a light, as if there were a reason.

I don’t think so,
he said.
Not anymore.

They have nothing on you. Nothing that would stand up.

Google me,
he said
.

God! I’m Googling you ten times an hour.

His daughter, his ducats.

It’s all garbage
, she said, desperate
. Scared people spouting shit.

That’s just it. I’ve panicked millions. I’m going to release a new killer strain.

Dad. Shut up and listen. Just tell them the facts.

If he’d ever possessed something so quaint, he’d long ago mislaid it.

You have support. Powerful people. They’re saying you’re the victim of a paranoid culture.

Serious?

Plead ignorance. You got sucked up into a stupid hobby. Naïve and misguided. It’s obvious. Your whole . . .

She didn’t need to complete the thought. His whole life—naïve and misguided. A long apprenticeship for this final act of bad judgment.

I’ve found you representation,
she said.
The best. The firm that defended that microbiologist performance artist in Buffalo. They’ll work pro bono, for a cut of any damages. Hold on. I need my notes.

Something rose in him through his fatigue: the spiraling perpetual motion of the Bartók finale. He filled with pride for this remarkable woman, his one perfect composition, however little credit he could take for the finished work.

Her phone clunked as she picked it up again.

The sooner you do this, the easier it’ll be to clear things up. You were frightened and ran. They’ll understand that.

Yes, he thought. If they understood anything, it was fear. Lightness came over him and he said,
You used to write music, remember? You invented a whole system of notation using your colored blocks. You were amazing.

Please
, she said.

I just saw your mother.

She mentioned.

I told her I made a mistake.

You did,
Sara said, the words skidding in pitch.
Stop making more, and we’ll forgive you.

Okay. I can do that. I can surrender.

Don’t call it that.

What should I call it?

Fixing things
, she said
.

He must have started to doze already, even before goodbyes, because the next thing he knew, it was five a.m. and the clock radio was playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” so soft and sad and slow and minor and faraway that the haunting tune might have been Fauré’s
Elegy
.

If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles.

Her face is a Renaissance profile against the October sky blazing through his office window. She waves two fingers at the score on the screen in front of her, and a sinuous duet pours out of the speakers, sung by a MIDI patch of sampled human voices standing in for virtuoso singers who don’t yet exist.