Orfeo

  But his daughter likes the song, and she’s all the audience he needs. Sara is his experiment in what the ear might come to hear, when raised on sounds from a happy elsewhere. She giggles at his sudden melodic turns. Her face crinkles in puzzled glee. Her turn now to ask him: What are you saying? But it’s only music on a summer’s evening, even as a bouncy ballpark organ floats into the window, blown through the air from Fenway, the bat’s crack, the distant whispered roar of a crowd, and a berceuse that leaves the saucer-eyed girl squealing in primal delight.

  Outside the apartment, there are gas lines, wildfire inflation, the Middle East heading to Armageddon again. But inside, their days bring the real dramas. A cough. A fever. A fall against the coffee table that makes her bite through her lower lip. Two short years ago, he wanted to write music that changed what music was. Now he just wants to keep his daughter from changing too much, too fast.

  Pushing Sara’s stroller through the Victory Gardens, Els sees with terrible clarity the hubris of his twenties. He can’t for his life imagine why he ever signed on for the full Faust ride. For years, he’s struggled to write something thorny and formidable, as if difficulty alone ensured lasting admiration. Now he sees that what the world really needs is a lullaby simple enough to coax a two-year-old to lay down her frantic adventure each night for another eight hours.

  On the playground near the art museum, Sara stands and chants to the sky: “This Old Man.” The words are babble, the rhythm rough, and the melody little more than a crayon smear. But to Els, the old man is as recognizable as God. Rebelling is itself a passing fashion, as fragile as any. Hemlines rise and fall, but the present is forever convinced it has found the Tailor’s pattern. The manifestos of Peter’s twenties—the movements and lawless experiments, the crazy climbs up onto the barricades—feel like a tantrum now, like his daughter refusing to take her nap. Who can say what the academy champions these days? Els has been away too long to know. But he knows that cool will give way to warm, form to feeling, as surely as a leading tone tilts forever toward the tonic. Music cut from new whole cloth? No such material. The emperor will always be as naked as a jaybird, as nude as Sara slapping the waves of her bath, shrieking those patty-cake melodies she makes up on the spot.

  The girl is in love with music. At four, she blossoms with solfeggio. By four and a half, she stumbles through the Mozart Sonatina in C with what strikes her besotted father as real feeling. She plays for him, improvised instruments: Horns made of rubber shower hose. Oatmeal boxes strung with rubber bands. The game must always go a certain way, and she never gets tired of playing.

  What am I saying, Daddy? she demands, and lays into the piano with every finger she has.

  He listens. You’re saying, “Okay, Mom; I’ll eat green food.”

  Yes! Maddy calls from the kitchen.

  No! Sara shouts, and tries more furious chords.

  I know! You’re saying, “I’m tired and I want to go to bed.”

  Wrong! she says. Try again! And her tune goes as frantically jagged as anything Els has written.

  Wait, he says, tipping his head to hear. Keep going. I almost have it. You’re saying, “I’m loved, and life is good!”

  The music collapses, suddenly bashful. She turns her face away from him, her mouth crumpled in a shy maybe.

  FIVE YEARS IN the Fens apartment pass like the Minute Waltz. His fellow Illinois grads have scattered into university music labs across the U.S. He listens to their gnomic tapes, studies their gnostic scores. Musical resistance still strikes him as worthy. Between Nixon, the endless war, and a radio spectrum filled with bland self-pity and sales jingles, there’s more to resist than ever. But he listens, and can’t get traction.

  One night, bent over the low kitchen radio, nursing a bowl of butter pecan while the ladies sleep, he hears the spectral wails of Crumb’s Black Angels, for electric string quartet. Thirteen images from the dark land, barbaric and glorious, a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse. The sounds come from another galaxy. Infinite sonic possibility unfurls in front of Els, and he can’t move. He can’t even think which way he would move, if he could.

  The very next night—heaven’s DJ toying with him—it’s George Rochberg’s third string quartet. Rochberg, rigid serialist, now serves up a bouquet reeking of lyric consonance, right down to bald-faced imitations of Beethoven, Mahler, and Brahms. It’s like a heretic giving the benediction: a serious composer surrendering, turning his back on the last hundred years, and sinking into prettiness.

  And yet: what courage in this backsliding. Els shakes his head at the loveliness of the florid finale. It makes him remember old pleasures condemned for reasons he can’t now retrieve. The piece sounds naïve at best, at worst banal. But strangely willing to sing.

  Afterward, the announcer explains: Rochberg’s young son, dead of a brain tumor. Now the archaic tonality makes perfect sense. The real mystery is how Rochberg could write anything at all. If something happened to Els’s daughter, fast asleep on the other side of the bedroom wall, composing would be done forever.

  MUSIC GETS AWAY from him. In this one town alone, fantastic new inventions premiere every week at dozens of venues on both sides of the Charles. From a distance, it’s hard to tell the Brahmins from the bohemians. Els no longer needs to; he and his daughter wander hand in hand through the rose bower in the Fens, chattering to each other in a secret language, collaborators in a whole new genre of spontaneous invention.

  Let’s make something, he tells her.

  Make what? she asks.

  He picks a fallen flower out of the dirt. Let’s make a rose nobody knows.

  She pouts, lip like a slug. What do you mean?

  Something good.

  Good how? she says, but her face has already begun to guess.

  Good slow, he suggests.

  No, she corrects. Good fast.

  Okay. Good fast. Something that’s never been. You start.

  She sings a little. He adds some notes. They walk and invent, and the day is the song they’re making. They finish the piece at the keyboard when they get home.

  IT BECOMES THEIR rolling litany. Let’s make something. Make what? Something good. Good how? Good and grumpy? No: Good and gentle. Good and treelike. Good like a bird.

  Maddy catches them out one evening, giggling at some private nonsense over dinner.

  What is it with you two? What’s the big secret these days?

  Secret what? Els says, words that send his daughter into hysterics.

  Sara holds her finger up, japing. Tips her head. Secret good!

  Maddy swats at them. Fine! Be that way.

  Jealous? Els asks.

  Maddy stands and clears the dishes. Forget I asked.

  Sara, anxious: No, Mom! You can know. We’re making things.

  What kind of things?

  Songs. Songs that nobody knows.

  HE FINDS THE girl on the day after Christmas, under the small blue spruce filled with popcorn strings and paper ornaments, laying out her new alphabet blocks in patterns on the floor. She spaces them at varied distances, in gaps that she adjusts and readjusts until each one is perfect.

  Els watches awhile, but can’t break the code. Bear? What are you making?

  They’re our songs, she tells him. Look.

  And she shows him how the system works. The distance between blocks, the height in the line, the colors like the keys of her xylophone: she’s invented notation. Written down secrets for the distant future, for no one, or for anyone who wants to hear. Els can’t stop looking—at the blocks, at the score, at the girl. It’s music from out of something that, a few dozen months before, was nothing but the sequences hidden in a single cell.

  I wanted music to be the antidote to the familiar. That’s how I became a terrorist.

  We need a bigger place, Maddy says. She’s six. She can’t keep sleeping in a walk-in closet.

  Beyond arguing. Yet moving out of their apartment for a larger one, down the Green Lin
e toward Coolidge Corner, feels to Peter like a perp walk out of Eden at angel’s sword point.

  Sara starts school at New Morning, where Maddy is now assistant director for the arts. Quilting has fallen by the wayside. Els returns to part-time at the museum. He picks up more copy jobs; he spends weeks at a time transcribing other people’s notes and articulations, bar by bar, into clean, perfect systems of staves. He loves the work, a chameleon trying on alien colors.

  But at night, in an office carved out of the Brookline apartment’s guest bedroom, Els starts work on his first real piece in three years. He tinkers after midnight, teetering between splendor and defeat. Over several weeks, a new style takes shape, one he only slowly begins to hear. Except the style isn’t new at all. He remembers describing it to Richard Bonner almost a decade ago, on a dark, frozen campus in the middle of the cornfields.

  He talks Maddy through the sketch—a piece for piano, clarinet, theremin, and soprano, to words from Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China.” The piece consists of regions of mutating rhythmic fragments dominated by fixed intervals, constantly cycled and transposed. The intervals build to a peak of dissonance before relaxing into something like denouement. There’s no fixed tonality, but the sequence still propels the listener’s ear through a gauntlet of expectation and surprise. The method feels like a way forward, a middle path between romantic indulgence and sterile algorithms, between the grip of the past and the cult of progress.

  “The Great Wall” fits together, stone by stone. He plays sections for Maddy on their little forty-four-key electric piano, trying to get her to sight-sing. It’s not hard, even for a voice that hasn’t sung much in recent years. And it’s interesting enough to go over well at one of the contemporary music venues in Cambridge or Kenmore. They’d only need two other players; Peter could manage the clarinet part himself.

  You do not need to leave your room.

  Only sit at your table and listen.

  Don’t even listen;

  simply wait, be quiet,

  still and solitary.

  The world will offer itself to be unmasked.

  It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

  Maddy nods at the guided tour. She smiles at his crimes and clever reconciliations. Her eyes spark with the memory of old campaigns the two of them waged together, not all that long ago. For a moment, her face is that humming girl’s, the pageboy who was game to run through anything. But when they reach the end of the read-through, she’s the assistant director of New Morning School’s arts program again.

  It’s very intense, Peter. I wish I had time to learn it.

  He finds a group of whacked-out New England Conservatory classico-jazzers, who program the piece on an evening at Brown Hall. The audience is the usual hardy few who frequent such premieres, hungry for some transcendent thing that the human mind may never produce. On the night of the premiere, Maddy begs off. We can’t take a six-year-old to a two-hour avant-garde concert. She’ll melt down.

  Why should she be any different than everyone else? Peter asks.

  His wife wants to smile, but can’t quite manage. I’m sorry, she says. We’ll listen to the tape? Later?

  Sure, he answers. All the time in the world.

  Wish me luck, he tells his daughter, on the way out the door.

  No! Sara says. No luck without me!

  The piece goes over better than Peter hoped. In fact, seated in the audience, he hears the clarinet slip free for a moment of the churn in the theremin and set off on a line that surprises him with its grace. He can hear all the sparkling false relations, the spin of a piano sequence that wants to get out and see the world. Edgy yeses; chance deliverance. And then, that glorious downbeat when the soprano wades in to wash it all away. For a moment, something: Something good. Good free. Good growing. The world at his feet.

  The serialists in the audience smirk. The aleatory people are nonplussed. But two or three of the nonaligned are . . . well: call it moved. A fierce, redheaded ectomorph wrapped in a black knit shawl corners him afterward, her eyes alight.

  It’s about isolation, isn’t it? The power of indifference.

  She’s a luscious vampire, craving anything with warm blood. Els’s brain issues emergency orders to all provinces: drool, gape, grovel. It boggles him that a woman like this could want anything from any composer, let alone him.

  Music isn’t about things, he says. It is things.

  She scrunches her face, flinches, and before Els can clarify, she corners the theremin player and asks him for a demo.

  Peter comes home with phone numbers and dates for future concerts and even a business card from a conservatory dean, with a dangled half promise of a commission. He shows Maddy. Musicians with business cards. Like little kids with car keys.

  Sara jumps, grabbing for the paper trinket. I need that for me!

  He toys with his little girl, spider-style, then gives her the card. He doesn’t need it, anyway.

  Maddy puts a palm on Peter’s chest, to slow him. He’s flying, it’s true. But he has received more adult attention tonight than he’s gotten since he left school. Shocking, to feel how much he’s missed it. A germ motif blows through his cortex, an old prophecy that he somehow forgot.

  Maddy takes the dean’s business card back from her objecting daughter. She studies it, excited. But she doesn’t hum.

  You think they might have something for you?

  Two beats, and he decodes her. She means: a real job. She makes no open charge. She doesn’t have to. He hasn’t pulled his weight in their little workers’ cooperative since Sara started preschool. Not unless you counted the hours spent staring at the brutal blank page, pushing note heads around on five-lined paper, trying to recover a fugitive language that no one would understand, even if he did discover its grammar. Clear, now: his wife has no reason to count those hours as anything other than an expensive and self-indulgent glass bead game.

  The key was futility. Music, pointless music for a while, will all your cares beguile.

  Trees, rolling hills, hours of speckled light, and a cottage stocked with food all confused him into forgetting he was a criminal. On the second morning, he walked at random into the national forest and found himself on a trail along a swollen creek. The trees were still leafing, and the stream cut through sandy outcrops the color of indolence.

  Three miles down the trail, the gravity of his situation hit home. He imagined the charges against him. Obstructing a federal investigation. Evading arrest. Cultivating a known pathogen. Indulging in patent insanity. Even as he hiked, investigators pored over their labeled biohazard bags, looking for links to the multiple hospital deaths. Farce, calamity, and government agencies: it would make a great sequel to his one foray into opera.

  He sat down on a rotting log gilled with lichen and fungi. All around him, new hardwoods greened out from the carpet of last year’s dun leaves. The creek scouring its rocky bed sounded like things Els once made with computer-doctored tape loops.

  A young couple came down the trail, waving a furtive hello. They glanced away, caught in guilty pleasure on this stolen weekday. When their high-tech jackets disappeared into the undergrowth, a great emptiness took hold of Els. He felt as thin, flaked, and shiny as gold leaf on a reclining Buddha.

  He stood and stumbled back the way he came. The woods were far from wild. Where deep blends of hemlock, oak, beech, and pine once ran all the way to the seaboard, only a few managed stands of black cherry and maple remained. The public owned the thin layer of topsoil, but the subsurface mineral rights were in private hands. Drilling had started up again—fracking, shale extraction—more ingenious gleaning, for fuels ever harder to reach.

  Chopin’s prelude greeted him as he came through the cottage door. The device went mute by the time he found it. Its screen showed three missed calls from Klaudia, no messages. His finger hovered on the callback button. But he couldn’t cope yet with any new developments.

  He punched in his daughter’s num
ber. The keys bleated—a retro audio joke—with the old dual-frequency touch tones that had once delighted little Sara. Often in Brookline he’d played phone-pad tunes to make her laugh, until a comic jig he invented rang through to Emergency Services. Perhaps that false alarm, decades old, still sat in some ancient police database. There were composers from as late as the eighteenth century who left behind no record beyond a baptismal entry. Even Beethoven had no birth certificate. But Els’s footprints were everywhere. People three hundred years from now could discover which performance of The Rake’s Progress he’d bought online.

  He needed only to hear Sara’s voice. When they’d last talked, he still had his house, innocence, and anonymity. His life’s biggest crisis was choosing music for his dog’s funeral. Since then his brain had become a sustained cluster chord. Two minutes of his fiercely sensible daughter would clear his head.

  His finger stopped on Sara’s sixth digit. He killed the device and set it down. From what little Els had read, Patriot legislation had ended the restrictions on search and seizure. If Joint Security Task Force was trawling for his chatter, they’d be listening to his daughter.

  Els launched the phone’s browser and searched again. Hits on his name were growing as fast as any virulent culture. The president of Verrata College promised full support for the investigation and called on Peter Els to surrender for questioning. The online site where Els bought his custom DNA claimed he’d given them a college lab procurement number. That was a lie; anyone with a Visa could have bought everything he did.

  A pop culture blog linked to a list of books raided from Peter Els’s house. Good Germs, Bad Germs. Plagues and Peoples. Someone had cherry-picked the titles, out of a thousand books in his library, for maximum fear and thrill. Coldberg, Mendoza, and friends were leaking him. The government wanted him hung in public.