Orfeo

  she sang, on a tone row that flowed by like chant. Then the long phrase’s lyric answer:

  But I am the river.

  Each time the players rested, they passed various colored globes in slow arcs over their heads. Images painted them—stretched and compressed clocks, the throbbing sine wave of an oscilloscope, atomic nuclei, spinning galaxies. The tone row returned, transposed and inverted.

  Time is a tiger that devours me.

  Then the answering cantilena:

  But I am the tiger.

  At the third couplet, the images spilled over the musicians and onto the back wall: rebels in Biafra, riots in Detroit, bombers in Da Nang, and the young Che, who’d died only a few months before. Maddy, stilling her trembling limbs, sang like no one would ever hear.

  Time is a fire that consumes me. But I am that fire.

  The cycle of suspensions faded. The ghostly films, too, froze on a frame of a sinking supertanker, before going dark. The audience coughed and shifted again and checked their watches. Els wanted to slink off and be dead somewhere for a very long time.

  Then came the scherzo romp. Maddy sang the words about working for neither posterity nor God, whose tastes in art were largely unknown. The players passed around an eight-note figure, tricked up with every species of counterpoint Els could manage. The antics climaxed with singer and players all threatening to leave the stage in a combined hissy fit, but coming back together for the cadence.

  Listening, Els heard the total lie. He wrote for the future’s love, and for the love of an ideal listener he could almost see. He saw how he might expand the music, make it stranger, stronger, colder, more huge and indifferent, just as soon as this concert was over.

  But a breeze blew through the final song, and the skies cleared onto pure potential. Maddy gathered herself, as if laid out for her own funeral, at peace at last with the previous three outbursts. All dancing stopped, and the back wall hung on a single black-and-white photograph of a few diatoms a handful of microns wide, their silica casings carved like the finials of Gothic cathedrals. Above the piano’s pulse, the cello and horn overlaid a tune of outmoded yearning, like the start of Schumann’s Mondnacht, in disguise. Maddy sang a slow, stepwise rising figure, a blue balloon coming up over the horizon:

  We are made for art . . .

  The moment Maddy took up the tendril phrase, Els knew she was as dear to him as his own life. Talons gripped his ribs, and he felt a joy bordering on panic. He needed to know how this woman would unfold. He needed to write music that would settle into her range like frost on fields. They’d spend their years together, grow old, get sick, die in shared bewilderment.

  She nudged the phrase up another perfect fourth:

  We are made for memory . . .

  Something seized his arm. Richard. Els turned, but the man’s face was fixed on the stage, as if he hadn’t already heard the melodic prediction two dozen times in the last two days.

  The pianist broke off in the middle of an ostinato, stood up, and left the stage. Maddy reached out, palm up, but couldn’t stop him. The reduced ensemble kept turning over notes that now lined up to reveal themselves as a permutation of the delaying fragment that had opened the first song. The horn, too, grew forgetful; he stood and wandered, climbed down the front of the stage and into the audience. Maddy looked on, touching her cheek, unable to call him back. Puzzled, she carried on:

  We are made for poetry . . .

  The remaining trio turned oddly consonant. The oboist set her oboe on the music stand and left. The cellist carried on for a while, intrepid, with a figure lifted from the Bach D minor suite, while the percussionist haloed him on xylorimba. Then, succumbing to the inexorable, the cellist, too, set down his instrument, and walked up the aisle to the exit. Maddy, lost in thought, failed to notice. She stood alone onstage with the percussionist, who stuttered away on the wood block.

  Or perhaps . . .

  Maddy sang, shaking her head at the baffling melody and backing away, her arms drawing in as if sieving the wind:

  Or perhaps we are made for oblivion.

  The percussionist tapped a last dotted rhythm into his block of wood. The stage went black, and it took the house five enormous seconds to decide that the piece was done. Right before the applause, Els heard a nearby baritone whisper, Frauds.

  The clapping came from far away. The musicians reassembled for bows. Maddy shaded her eyes and stared out into the dark, looking for the perpetrators and seeing only shadows. Bonner yanked Els to his feet, where he bobbed several times like a water-drinking toy duck. Els turned to see his friend regarding the audience with cool amusement.

  People came up to Els after, wanting to take the measure of this audacity. They wanted to get up close, to see if he’d really escaped. Someone put his arms around Els’s shoulders and said, That was something. Someone said, So interesting. Someone said, I liked it, I think. Els thanked and grinned and nodded, seeing no one.

  A bald man in a gabardine suit decades out of date slunk up and whispered an emaciated thank-you. Els offered his hand, but the man held his up as if they were defective. I don’t often get to hear, he murmured, something so . . . He backed away, flinching in gratitude.

  A six-foot-tall woman who looked like deposed royalty squeezed his shoulder from behind. Els wheeled, and she asked in a Spanish accent, What was that supposed to be about?

  Around him in the emptying hall, clots of people were grooming and seducing each other. Els smiled at the majestic woman and said, About twenty-four minutes.

  Her eyes flashed. It seemed longer somehow, she said, and turned into the lingering crowd.

  Mattison emerged from a nearby cabal. He saluted Els with two fingers. You have them all scratching their heads. The most praise his mentor would ever give him.

  Across the thinned room, Els saw Bonner seated in the empty first row, staring at the abandoned stage. Richard didn’t turn when Els dropped into the seat beside him.

  “Made for oblivion,” Richard said, in an odd monotone. Check. Now what?

  Els sat playing castanets on the pads of his thumbs. We could take it on the road. Bloomington. Hyde Park. Ann Arbor.

  Could, Bonner said, meaning no. All his mania from the last half dozen weeks had collapsed into mere agitation. His eyes fixed on a series of invisible one-reelers projected in front of him.

  Pleased? Els asked.

  What’s that?

  I said, are you pleased?

  And I said, what’s that?

  Somewhere in Bonner’s skull, across great, arid expanses all the way to the horizon, the shit-storm of invention was gathering again. The hall had emptied. At last the composer stood and said, See you?

  Richard nodded, but to some other question.

  Els caught up with Maddy, out in the foyer with three of the musicians. She was flushed and floating, astonished to have run the gauntlet and survived.

  Well, she said, when Els came up. That was an experience!

  What she means, the oboist said, is, “Never again!”

  I liked your chart, the cellist told Els. But I still think it’d be sweeter without the fire drills.

  The oboist laughed. You know what Stravinsky said at the premiere of Pierrot? “I wish that lady would shut up so I could hear the music.”

  The group wrangled for a while over music’s soul, as performers will do before heading out for weed and beers. The pianist and horn player were already at Murphy’s, half a pitcher ahead of everyone. The percussionist drummed on Els’s shoulder.

  Time to get wasted. You two coming?

  Maddy looked at Els, who begged off. Mind if I go? she asked.

  Can I talk to you for a minute first?

  Meet us over there, the percussionist called over his shoulder as the trio disappeared.

  It was good, Peter, Maddy said. Those songs have something. I heard new things in them, even tonight.

  Els helped her into her long buckskin coat. From behind, he clasped her upper arms. You were
unreal.

  She softened and backed into him. Was I?

  From another planet. Madolyn. I love you.

  She scrunched her neck and smiled. You love those songs.

  I saw something in you tonight. Something I didn’t know was there.

  No, she said, and would not meet his eyes. That was performance.

  We should get married. Join our lives.

  She studied the score etched into the linoleum floor, humming, frantic but soundless.

  Move somewhere neither of us has ever been. Find a place and make it ours. Read to each other at night. Take care of one another.

  He pressed every button she had. Discover America. Turn life’s rags into a bright quilt. Levitate the Pentagon.

  She shook her head at his list, the way she had at the end of the fourth song. She clamped his wrist in a polygraph grip and scrutinized his eyes.

  Let’s walk.

  Snow was falling, compounding the already knee-high drifts. They walked for a long while, in talk that quieted into something like telepathy. And by midnight, Peter Els was thawing in his love’s bed, hurting with a hope he’d never felt. He was twenty-seven, too old now for selective service, and engaged to be married. And the future held music so fine and clear all he needed was to take dictation.

  They wed two weeks later at the Urbana courthouse. Richard Bonner was their lone legal witness. They would suffer their families’ anger later. No one else had to hear this promise.

  Maddy made her own dress, of apricot taffeta, pinned with an orchid that cost a week’s worth of Peter’s stipend. Peter dressed in cambric and corduroy. Richard wore his usual black leather. He was there with Els, in the courthouse bathroom, for the retching.

  If I didn’t know better, Bonner said, keeping Els’s head from banging the faucet, I’d say you have stage fright.

  Els could only groan.

  What are you afraid of? I’m assuming you’ve already seen her naked.

  Oh, Jesus. Richard. What if I’m wrong for her? What if this isn’t meant to be?

  Es muß sein, Maestro.

  What if I ruin this woman’s life?

  Oh, that would be awful! Especially after swearing to use your powers only for good.

  Richard, what am I doing?

  You’re leaping, Peter. For the first time in your life. And it’s a thing of beauty.

  Bonner sponged the flecks off Els’s collar with a paper towel, then frog-marched him down the courthouse hall alongside the suspects in blue jumpsuits and handcuffs being led off to their own arraignments. Maddy grabbed him outside the courtroom and shook him. We’re good, Peter. Really good! She was radiant throughout the service, and every word the judge pronounced threatened to send her into another giggling bout. Afterward, on the street, Richard serenaded them on a silver kazoo wrapped in pink ribbon. Bach’s Wachet auf: It seemed to Els a very good tune, one that a person might still do all kinds of things with.

  And even the least threatening tune will outlast you by generations. There’s pleasure in knowing that, too.

  That year is a chance-built symphony. A string of scabrous nightclub burlesques. A psychedelic double album made up of the wildest percussive tracks. Els hears about Tet one afternoon after teaching his ear-training class. Johnson’s bombshell lands not long after.

  Bonner directs a mad, high-speed Man and Superman, with incidental music by Els. But his madness is a bagatelle compared to the nightly news: King killed. Rolling riots in every city. The Columbia takeover. The Battle for Paris. Resurrection City on the Washington Mall. Warhol shot. Kennedy killed.

  Bonner gets arrested in a campus bar for standing on a table and peeing in a beer mug for Peace. Els and Maddy bail him out.

  While yippies trash the stock exchange and the Soviets crush the Prague Spring, Els composes thirty-six variations on “All You Need Is Love,” in the style of everyone from Machaut to Piston. He and Bonner stage a play-in of the “Love Variations” in front of Smith Hall, under the frieze carved with Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, and Palestrina. One hundred performers read through a nonstop tag-team performance.

  Something’s happening here. The world egg threatens to crack open. Els’s music cracks open, too, trying to say what’s going on. He and Bonner mount a cabaret in the courtyard of the Illini Union for Turn In Your Draft Card Day. They work up an Eisler-Weill drag show called I’m a Stranger Here Myself.

  On New Year’s Eve, Bonner forces the old married couple out on a freezing midnight picnic, deep in the South Farms, under the stars. The trio sit on the iron ground and eat cold lentils, sardines on celery, and frozen Twinkies.

  A meal fit for lunatics and saints, Bonner declares. Olympian, he leans back on his elbows. Who knew a guy like us could have such friends?

  Steam escapes their mouths, and, huddled together, they toast the vanishing year. Maddy pours the champagne into paper cones. Bonner insists they clink. Bubbly spills from the mushy flutes onto the frozen earth.

  To putting the past to bed, Richard toasts.

  To waking the future, Els says.

  To staying in the Beautiful Now, Maddy adds, although they’re already leaving.

  They come across a cardboard box blowing through the snowy fields. They use it as a three-person toboggan, sledding down the only geological feature for two hundred miles that can be called a hill. Bonner tears the box into three pieces, which he distributes.

  Hold on to these. We’ll reassemble right here, top of this hill, in fifty years.

  Maddy laughs. Synchronize your watches.

  Walking home in the cold, toting his scrap of cardboard, pressed between his wife and wild friend, Els hears a piece in his head, music like the kind Schumann reported hearing as he slipped into madness—an instrument of splendid resonance, the like of which has never been heard on Earth. The harmonies are rich and braided, leading to an unprepared Neapolitan sixth, a rediscovery of naïve sequences, and the melody feels so inexorable that he knows it’ll be waiting for him intact when he next sits down to a sheet of virgin staff paper.

  But when Peter wakes in the new year, he fails to remember even hearing the piece. By the time he does, a few days later, it’s too late to transcribe. All that’s left is a blurred contour, disembodied music hinting at something magnificent just out of reach.

  I always loved best those tunes written for those who listen on other frequencies.

  They’re still a trio later that spring, wandering the domed Assembly Hall, that cavernous radioactive mushroom that Cage and Hiller have filled with more happy pandemonium. Seven amplified harpsichords duel with 50 monoaural tape machines and 208 FORTRAN-generated tapes playing Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni, and Schoenberg, all sliced into short genetic chunks then recombined at random. Bonner and the Elses, in their fluorescent overalls—handed out free to the dazed visitors—gawk at a Stonehenge ring of polyethylene screens on which six dozen projectors cast thousands of slides and films. Outside, 48 more enormous screens circle the building’s quarter-mile circumference. They turn the whole colossal structure into a pulsating saucer that has come to Earth for refueling and a little galactic-backwater R & R.

  The smell of pot seeps from the crowds camped out in the central arena. People lounge or wander about. It’s music, Els keeps reminding himself. Music that has reached the end of a thousand-year exploration.

  Too much, Maddy says. My mind’s blown.

  Bonner flips his hands in the air, juggling invisible moons. We could have done this, with a few more bucks.

  But the show is beyond Els. Cage, Hiller, and the army of believers who mount HPSCHD have disappeared into liberty. They refuse to impose decisions on any listener. Composition is no longer the goal; all that counts now is awareness, this flickering, specious present, a dive into raw phenomena. And that’s a plunge Els will never be able to make. Or so he figures, at twenty-eight.

  Maddy strolls around the flying saucer, laughing. She stops to rag-pick the trash for interesting textil
es. Peter follows in his wife’s happy wake. She has become a season ticket holder for the festival of weirdness Els has inflicted on her these last twenty months. He loves her steady refusal to descend to liking or not liking, those sentimental actions that have nothing to do with listening. Her awe at the range of human desire turns Peter himself back into a spectator in his own life. He falls into orbit beside her; Richard is off buying a poster, for a price determined by the I Ching.

  Maddy hums to herself, a snippet of Mozart fished from the randomness. Mozart, the man who invented the musical dice game, two short centuries ago.

  Peter, she says, looking away, at a slide of the Crab Nebula. He knows what she’ll say before she says it. An oddness has come over her these last few days, a frightened flush, waiting for its moment. What else can it be? Nothing else is big enough for her to keep secret from him for so long.

  Peter? Company’s coming.

  He stops and listens, hearing, above the din, a small, high voice.

  Peter?

  You’re sure?

  She spreads her palms, shrugs, and smiles.

  When?

  I don’t know. December? We’ll find out. Peter? Don’t worry. We’re good. We’re good! We can do this. Everybody does.

  He jerks, objecting. No, that’s not . . . This is incredible. The two of us? Are you kidding?

  She has to laugh at him, standing there, overcome, his eyes like outer planets. And that’s how Richard finds them moments later.

  Laughing gas? Bonner says. They’re giving away laughing gas somewhere?

  HPSCHD runs for almost five hours. Several thousand people wander through. Two months later, men walk on the moon. Four more weeks, and half a million people gather on a farm in upstate New York for a weekend of rain, mud, and music. By then the trio has abandoned Champaign-Urbana—the Elses for Boston, where Maddy gets a job teaching singing in an elite junior high, and Bonner for Manhattan, to squalor and a gauntlet of unpaid positions in experimental theaters.