Orfeo (9 page)

Blood trickling out of bread at the siege of Tyre rallied Alexander’s beaten troops to victory.

Eighteen months pass: three short chamber works and two small song cycles. A young man huddles in a phone booth outside the student newspaper office. In his pocket is a wrinkled blue onionskin aerogram that has taken two weeks to reach him. The world has just escaped annihilation by a few beats. Nuclear silos in an aerial reconnaissance photo of an impoverished tropical island: Peter Els has other worries.

The aerogram is covered in a wispy, Elvish script. “Peter, Dear. Please don’t think I’ve turned promiscuous, here in Merrie England, but life seems to have gotten complicated.”

He waits to place the call until well past midnight, when the rates are low. It’s morning on the other side of the planet. No phone at the dorm, and he must come to this public booth with a fistful of coins. Judging by the abandoned campus streets, that nuclear exchange has already come and gone. The air is so bone-crushingly cold that his bare hand sticks to the metal phone faceplate when he takes off his gloves to dial.

She answers mezzo, muffled, and time-lagged, the gap it takes her voice to travel the length of the transatlantic cable.
Peter?

He shouts
into the receiver, and his own voice echoes back at him in a canon at unison.

From the first phoneme, it’s a terrible mistake. They speak like people playing bughouse chess. He asks for clarification, then elucidations to her clarifications, then glosses on her elucidations. His quarters pour into the slot at a staggering rate and he hears himself say things like,
First of all, I’m not shouting
. A week’s rent, then two, then three disappear, and still he can’t tell what this blithe woman is saying to him or what he’s supposed to do with a worthless degree in music composition and a minor in chemistry, without the sole audience that matters. He asks her what’s changed and she answers: nothing.

So everything’s finished, then? Dead?

Her silence says that even early death might be luckier than he thinks.

There’s something playing in the background, on her stereo, in her little stone room in a medieval college cloister on the other side of the globe. Mahler. Mahler at breakfast, and although she denies it, he knows she has company. Another set of eager, learner’s ears.

But even now, in this frosted phone booth, under a streetlight that steams in the sublunary cold, melodies occur to him—devices and forms he never could have come up with on his own. His swollen, graying fingers fumble with the aerogram. He wants to scribble out a mnemonic to help him retrieve these sounds, once the concert is over, but he’s too numb to grip a pen.

So it was all a lie,
he says.
It all means nothing.

The echo turns her voice into a stretto.
Peter
.
This has to happen. It’s something good, for both of us.

So this is it.

Stop being so dramatic. You’ll see me again. Life isn’t all that—

He needs two tries to settle the receiver back on the hook. His fingers are too weak to yank open the phone cabin door and free him. He fumbles out of the booth and starts to walk, down a street slick with black ice and empty of a single soul. His spine stiffens against the shock of the gelid night. He exhales, and air freezes to his upper lip. He breathes in, and it crystallizes on the walls of his lungs. He needs to go only six blocks. After two, he thinks: I’m in real trouble. He considers knocking on the door of the nearest house. But he’d be dead by the time anyone let him in.

He reaches his apartment, where his claws try to gain entry. His limbs are frostbitten, and by the time he gets inside, his face is numb. Even the icy tap water scalds like flame. His back has sprained itself from shivering. He crawls in bed and stays there for sixteen hours.

When he gets up, it’s to throw himself into work. Nothing can save him but a new piece—something bright and brutal and unforgiving.

Music, he’ll tell anyone who asks over the next fifty years, doesn’t mean things. It
is
things. And for all those years, in fifty-four pieces from fragments for solo flute and tape to full orchestra and five-part chorus, his music will circle around the same vivid gesture: a forward, stumbling surge that wavers, sometimes in a single measure, between the key of hope and the atonal slash of nothingness.

We will not sleep, but will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.
You’ll see me again.
But you’ll never know when. Hear that shifting, ambiguous rhythm, that promise of all things possible, and the ear is on its way to being free.

The miraculous mass at Bolsena, 1264: A fallen priest watched the host bleed on his robe during Communion. Faith restored.

The night was short and fitful, and his brief stint of unconsciousness did little for Els. In the worst of his suite of dreams, he had to defend Shostakovich’s third string quartet from a public tribunal. The tribunal accused the piece of being elitist, irresponsible, formalist, and full of coded misanthropy. Els tried to show the judges how rich the thing was, how full of splendid horror. But the tribunal only added those qualities to the charges.

Then the prosecutor turned the case against Els himself. He produced letters to Clara and Maddy in which Els confessed to loving certain kinds of music because most people found them worthless and ugly. The case went against him as he watched, and jurors from all over the Web weighed in with contempt and proposed humiliations. The dream took Els by the throat, and he woke up sucking air. Even surfacing in his raided house felt like a relief.

Joint Security Task Force: a federal outfit. No real threat had happened anywhere in the country for half a dozen years. A retiree with a kitchen lab in a rural college town was the worst they had to deal with.

He rocked himself out of bed and attended to his body. In the bathroom, he decided to make some inquiries after all. He’d send an email to that colleague of his in the Law Department. Safer: he’d visit her office and lay out everything. Then he’d call the numbers on the business cards Mendoza and Coldberg had given him and begin the whole process of straightening things out. Dealing with bureaucracies required no more than the patience of an animal and the simplicity of a saint. He could fake both, for a while.

But first, his Monday ritual: the Crystal Brook walking loop, followed by blueberry pancakes. Then he could place some calls before the midmorning class on twentieth century landmarks that he ran each week at Shade Arbors, for people so old they were landmarks themselves.

Way too late in life, Els learned that the time to concentrate yourself was right before sunrise. His greatest art now was to walk two hours before the neighborhood woke. Moving his legs left him blissful. Had he discovered the routine in young adulthood, he might have long ago amassed a portfolio of playful, exuberant creations that pleased him and gave delight to others.

He threw on his workout clothes—baggy gray painter paints and maroon waffle shirt—and drank his tea in his traditional happy silence. Then he grabbed the Fiat keys from the hook by the back door and called the dog. The dog didn’t answer.

It made no sense in a grand, American way: driving a mile to walk three. When he pulled up to Crystal Brook Park, the predawn sky was beginning to peach. Someone in the throes of early womanhood was already out jogging on the macadam loop. Wildflowers covered the ground, their colors soft in the sentinel light. White snowdrops, yellow aconite, and a carpet of crocuses almost indigo ran alongside scattered blooms whose names Els didn’t know, although he’d seen them every spring for decades. The morning air smelled silly with possibility.

As soon as he began to walk, yesterday’s debacle softened and grew manageable. Coldberg and Mendoza now seemed like the bumbling twin bowler-hatted inspectors in Tintin. He fell in a hundred yards behind the jogging woman and started on his own small steps to Parnassus. Every few yards he caught himself looking for Fidelio, as if the dog had run off somewhere.

The park could have been a seventeenth century landscape painting. Nothing tied Els to the present except for the jogging woman. She had on a sports bra and shorts of some shiny, environment-sensing tech material. She ran like an anatomy lecture. In Els’s youth, a woman dressed like that in a town like this would have been arrested for subverting public morals. She seemed to Els preternaturally desirable. Happily, he no longer felt desire.

She lapped him as he reached the central transect. He picked up his pace, jogging for a while behind her. An old man of seventy chasing an almost nude girl through a dawn glade: a scene straight out of Baroque mythological opera. The shining form in front of him pulled away again, laying waste to sloth, anomie, idle thought, and metaphor.

White wires ran from the cuff on her arm into her ears. Jogging and the portable jukebox: the greatest musical match since tape hit the V8. A thousand and one nights of continuous hits, all inside a metal matchbox. When this woman reached Els’s age, mind-controlled players would be sewn into the auditory cortex. And not a moment too soon, because the entire nation would be deaf.

It seemed to Els that Mahler would have loved the MP3 player, its rolling cabaret. His symphonies, laced with tavern music and dance tunes, were like a vulgar playlist. The fifth Kindertotenlieder had its eviscerating mechanical music box, and
Das Lied von der Erde
was inspired by one of the earliest cylinders recorded in China. Real composers didn’t fear the latest mass-market recording. They used it. But how to use one and a half million new songs a year?

Once, Els had spent months cutting quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape with razor blades and splicing the snips back together. He’d programmed a computer to generate a string quintet using probability functions and Markov chains. At this jogging woman’s age, he’d believed that digital technology might save art music from the live burial of the concert hall. Now the concert hall itself needed saving.

He drifted underneath the giant trunks, their branches drift-netting the dawn sun. The hundred trees had all gone into the park at the same time, and, in a long largo, they’d begun to leave the place together. Every high wind now brought down another hulk. The park would be a very different proposition—a sunny, trivial one—by the time Els, too, vacated the neighborhood.

The goddess had no use for trees. Her knees, like twin pistons, rose high and clean. Tiny daubs of sweat coated her olive limbs. Through the trees, Els glimpsed her in profile. Her face, resolute but neutral, focused a good hour or two into the future. She looped back up the path behind him, a bright, cyborg
Thanks
issuing from her as she flowed past.

A tinny munchkin backbeat trailed from her earbuds in her wake. Els couldn’t make out the flavor of her bliss. This park, these advance spring flowers, the sixty-degree air stolen from paradise, were colored for her by invisible instruments that no one but she could hear.

She ran down the path ahead of him, now and then reaching across with her right arm and grabbing at the arm cuff, as in a tricky cross-hands Chopin étude. It dawned on Els: she was canceling songs.

At the wooded edges of the pond to the south, the spring migration was gathering. Els counted the different calls, but lost track around eleven. Fresh, surprising music that escaped all human conventions: the very thing he’d spent his life searching for was here all along, free for the listening.

Off to his left, a crow cawed in the branches of a gaunt pine. Nearby, something small began to trill: an invisible soloist reinventing melody, as it had done for millions of years before human ears. Els trotted, light in the scattered racket of the morning chorus. The jogger appeared again through a clearing, still executing her merciless verdicts. She averaged half a minute between swipes—judge and jury in a kangaroo court. Every few dozen steps she condemned the Now Playing to the dustbin of history.

Her player must have contained thousands of tracks tagged by artist, year, genre, and user rating. A few menu clicks and she could be the Minister of Culture for her own sovereign state of desire. Yet she turned away twenty times as many auditioners as she let through. The explanation came to Els after another quarter mile: shuffle—the Monte Carlo game that had changed music forever. She was running through her several thousand tunes like random speed-date suitors. Songs were breaking over her in waves of wild accident—the mix-and-match mashup that was her birthright.

She rounded the southeast corner of the park, toward the high school, flicking away tunes like evolution’s demiurge. She was looking for something, the perfect sonic drug. And the medicine chest was endless: the laughing gas of a forties big band, a highball of brassy show tunes, punk heroin, techno-ecstasy, folk songs like a pack of tobacco, the hashish trance of Pali chanting, a caffeinated Carnatic raga, cocaine-tinged tango . . .

A player filled with her private reserve, and still the random shuffle produced dozens of songs in a row that had to be killed. Or maybe she was streaming on mobile broadband—3 or 4 or 5G, or whatever generation the race had reached by that morning. A server farm on the far side of the planet was piping down one hundred million tracks of recorded music into her blood pressure cuff, and none suited. The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste. How many tunes did anyone need? One more. The next new one.

All the bogus bacterial blood is a pigment called prodigiosin. From
prodigiosus
—strange, remarkable, wondrous—a prodigy.

The sun had risen and the neighborhood was waking. Car wheels a block away thrummed on the asphalt. Els rounded the park’s southwest corner and passed the driveway of a mock-Tudor house, where a man in navy sweats and a T-shirt—Gravity: Not Just a Good Idea—was putting two plastic trash cans the size of a Mercury space capsule out on the curb. The man waved to Els as if they knew each other. Els waved back, in case they did.