Orfeo

  In the afternoon, almost back to his Allegheny hideout, he pulled into a convenience center off the interstate. He bought gas again, paying in cash this time. Security cameras seemed harder to search than credit card databases. The store’s smells left him faint with hunger. Amid the aisles of saturated fats and corn syrup he found a shelf of omegas and antioxidants, stranded through some demographic miscalculation. He stocked up, feeling oddly excited, as if on a long-delayed holiday escape with his national parks passport waiting to be stamped. The meal went down in four minutes, in the corner of the truck stop parking lot.

  At the intersection with I-79, in a Zen trance, Els turned south. He followed the signs to Pittsburgh, guided by shaped chance. A rush hour construction snarl slowed him to a crawl. At last he broke and resorted to the radio.

  The dial swarmed with ecstasy, dance, and rage. Els shied away from music, keeping to the shallows of talk. But the talk washed over him, unintelligible. Two think-tank economists had written a book arguing for the abolishment of the Department of Education. A congresswoman likened the EPA to al-Qaeda. A spokesman for a citizens’ action group called the New Minutemen threatened reprisals if the President’s fascist health care bill wasn’t trashed. The spliced-together monologues played in his ears like an experimental radio theater piece from 1975.

  The shakes set in as he hit that narrow finger of West Virginia. The sun had fallen, and his body was succumbing again to the absurdity of hunger. Somewhere in the dusk of eastern Ohio he pulled off at a rest stop. He ate dinner out of vending machines and slept in the reclined driver’s seat, using a rain poncho he found in the trunk for warmth. Sleep went no deeper than a series of loosely affiliated stupors. The envelope of noise in which he floated—the grind of eighteen-wheelers, the vampire cleaning crew who readied the facility for the next day’s assaults—combined in a spectral chorus. He came awake a little after four a.m. hearing Penderecki’s Hiroshima threnody, a piece he hadn’t listened to for twenty years.

  Morning was long, flat, and straight, with the sun at his back. A double dose of coffee, donuts, and headline radio powered him through Columbus. The fragile alliance between Cairo’s Copts and Muslims was falling apart, days after they’d protected each other from the regime’s police. A twenty-five-year-old Korean beat his mother to death for nagging him about computer games, then played on for hours, charging the session to the dead woman’s card.

  Toward noon, outside a town called Little Vienna, long after the AM chatter plunged him into his own chronic focal difficulty, Els heard his name coming out of the radio. Fatigue and malnourishment couldn’t explain the hallucination. A Pennsylvania college professor was wanted for questioning regarding the deaths of nine Americans by bacterial contagion. And as exhibit one of evidence against him, music poured out of the car’s five speakers. Twelve measures of baritone aria:

  Nothing is more beautiful than terror,

  More terrible than His coming.

  All that is high will be made low . . .

  The second act of The Fowler’s Snare: John of Leiden, King of the New Jerusalem, reaching his crazed zenith. The sole recording Els knew of had sat in the bottom of a cardboard box in his various closets for eighteen years. Some enterprising journalist had found another copy and discovered the incriminating passage. The music had long gone unheard by all but a few listeners. Now it made its belated radio debut, for a panicked audience of hundreds of thousands.

  Eighteen years on, Richard’s libretto—that pastiche of Rilke and Isaiah—made Els wince. But the singer’s expansion of the germ motif sounded righteous, even brazen. A good melody was a miracle, with all the surprise inevitability of a living thing. A strange sensation warmed him, and it took Els a moment to name it: pride.

  The orchestration cut through his interstate haze—eighty people blowing and sawing away, while a lunatic praised the beauty of terror. The tune was a clear incitement to violence, and Els felt himself being hung in the court of public opinion. Contemporary opera making it onto AM radio: such was the power of threat Level Orange.

  After twelve seconds—a broadcast eternity—the aria faded out. The news went on to a story about the boom in black market Adderall sweeping America’s high schools. Els killed the radio. His hands bounced on the wheel. All at once, seventy seemed perilous. He eased his foot off the accelerator. A lion-maned woman on a cell in a dinged-up Volvo pulled out to pass him. A bulging Ford Expedition shot through behind her; two towheaded boys in the backseat flicked obscene gestures as they passed. A caravan filed by, each occupant turning to gawk at the gray-haired moving violation. Els looked down at his speedometer: he’d slowed to forty-eight. A lone highway cop, running his plates for going too slow, would finish him. “Prophet of Beautiful Terror, Apprehended.”

  By pure will, he forced the car back up to sixty-two. He flipped the radio on again and fished for pop tunes. He didn’t stop until the gas tank made him. At a truck stop, he stocked up on shrink-wrapped sandwiches. Then he pressed on through Indiana into eastern Illinois. He pulled off for the night at a roadside motel on the north edge of Champaign-Urbana, not ten miles from where he met his wife, conceived his daughter, and befriended the one man in all the world whose opinion still mattered to him.

  It seemed as good a place as any to be caught and held forever.

  Listen deep down: most life happens on scales a million times smaller than ours.

  He spent his nights composing for Richard. First the film soundtrack, then a pitched percussion accompaniment for a brittle but thrilling piece of voice theater that never made it beyond a few Village apartments. By then Els was going down to New York every few weeks. Maddy never tried to stop him; she was just his wife, after all. But she refused to drive him to the bus station. This is your baby, Peter. You do what you need.

  At home, he worked at the electric piano, under headphones, deaf and muted to the world. Sara stamped on the floor in the next room, jealous of this thing he was trying to raise from the dead. Once she came to him and demanded, Let’s make something.

  Daddy is, Daddy said.

  No, she shouted. Something good.

  Good how?

  Good like a rose that nobody knows.

  They tried, but the rose had plans of its own.

  Then one night Maddy, too, stopped by with a commission. She came into his study, so much more slender and circumspect than she’d been in her grad student days, and grazed her fingernails across his back. She glanced at his score in progress and smiled, all their proxy skirmishes of the last few months forgiven. Write me a song, she said.

  She meant: Something singable, not art. No occult noises for gatherings of alienated prestige-mongers. A tune that could play on the radio, steeped in desire and mystery. The kind that most people need and love.

  Come on, write me something, she said. Almost soubrette again. Something simple. Her eyes said: One last romp. Her mouth said: Bet you can’t.

  PETER TOOK THE dare and slept on it. The next morning, while guarding Titian’s Rape of Europa from vandals, he fashioned a melody out of all the rules from Intermediate Theory that he’d long ago discarded. He built his air on top of an expansive descending bass. Anchored by a stirring pedal point, it leapt free to a surprise stunning chord right before the half cadence. The irresistible hook, like a bruised cloud blowing off in a June breeze, left behind a blue swathe that caught the heart and lifted it into a bird’s-eye view of things to come. Song, just song, the enigma of it, the warmth and longing. The three-minute forever.

  He took the melody home with him, planed and trued it, fitted it up with irresistible harmonies, and played it for his wife. He had no words: only scat, on a melody that sounded more discovered than invented. By the end, he had his two girls singing descant on the chorus and laughing out loud.

  Sara couldn’t get enough of the trivial tune. Even Maddy was caught humming the hook around the apartment. The earworm was as brutal as a bad case of flu. Maddy shook her head at the song’s total del
ight. Oh, you missed your calling!

  So he had. A dozen such tunes over the course of a career, and he might even have saved lives.

  The realization softened and saddened them both. It’s good, Peter, Maddy admitted. It’s really good. And for the first time in months, so were they.

  Two days later, Peter told his wife that he needed to head down to New York again for a few days, to talk with Richard about a new ambitious work. Maddy recoiled from the announcement. She looked like he’d French-kissed her, only to bite through her tongue. But she recovered quickly enough.

  Do what you like, she told him. But be ready to like whatever you do for a very long time.

  Richard had secured funds from his fairy godmother to put together a chamber ballet oratorio based on the transhumanist Fyodorov. The plan called for five veterans from the Judson Dance Theater, eight Tribeca new music militants, and four singers—SATB—performing in shifts over the course of twelve hours. Els would do the music, of course: he was now part of the Bonner package deal. They called the project Immortality for Beginners.

  Some new, brutal urgency was taking shape in a Lower Manhattan slammed by an oil crisis, mugged by inflation, tattooed with Day-Glo tags, whacked out on blow, buried under uncollected trash, and sliding into bankruptcy. Punk had blown the top of pop’s skull off, and downtown concert music was on high alert. The scene was stripping down—postminimal, pulsed, machinic. The music grew a skin of brushed steel and smoky glass. It sounded to Els almost nostalgic, like a holy cantillation for a city slipping down into the East River ooze.

  Richard kept a bed for Els in a third-floor studio above a junk shop on the Lower East Side. So long as you came and went in sunlight and kept the lock bar wedged against the front door, the place was as safe as houses. Els squatted there when he came to town to hammer out his cosmic collages with his collaborators. He could have stayed anywhere; he lived, in those days, inside his swirling Fyodorovian choruses, with their vision of an evolved future that would come to know all things, control all atoms, perfect the body, stop death, and revive every person who ever lived. The mad Russian’s Common Cause spelled out everything Els had once wanted from music: the restoration of everything lost and the final defeat of time.

  But immortality proved lethal. Maddy met every new announcement of another New York trip with stoic and pleasant nods. He’d spend the train ride down in awe of her, of her growing, no-nonsense poise. Her self-possession seemed the equal to every upheaval. She’d given him years to make his mark—so many of them—and he hadn’t delivered. And yet there was nothing, absolutely nothing at all he could gift her back, except this holdout search for what the world wouldn’t give.

  One evening back in Brookline, Peter looked up from his score-in-progress to see New Morning’s new principal across the room in a baggy cardigan, at work at her own desk on urgencies he knew nothing about. Camped at his feet, which she clung to these days, his third-grader was busy drawing maps of Umber, an invented world that Sara spent all her free time populating. Umber had races and nationalities, politics and languages, catastrophic wars and great eras of peace. It survived contagious pandemics and man-made depressions. It had folk songs for every race and an anthem for every nation. Maddy worried about the girl’s obsession with the place. But Peter wanted to tell his daughter: Yes: make something good. Live there.

  And sitting at his desk, scoring his systems for half a handful of listeners, Peter realized that he lived on the very best planet available. Music was pouring out of him, music that danced and throbbed and shouted down every objection. Composing was all he wanted to do, all he could do, and he would do it now with all he had.

  Maddy? he said.

  She looked up, alerted by his gentleness.

  We could live there. Start new. Just like—

  Where? Sara asked, excited. New York?

  Maddy’s mouth twitched, ready to smile at the punch line. She didn’t say: Don’t be ridiculous, Peter. She didn’t say: You know I can’t leave my job. She didn’t ask what the hell he was thinking. She just stared at him, incredulous and very, very tired.

  The way he’d remembered it, everything happened in that shared glance. On that downbeat, he left a wife who’d given him a decade of unearned patience, abandoned a daughter who wanted only to make things with him, and stepped out into free fall. For nothing, for music, for a chance to make a little noise in this world. A noise that no one needed to hear.

  For years, he blamed Fyodorov, those choruses from the growing oratorio, with their slow, progressing ecstasies as inevitable as death. Whatever we love will live again. Every disastrous adventure in this life would be cloned and resurrected. Everyone who ever lived would get a better second act. All his vanished lake-splashing cousins, his loner father and lonely mother, the teachers he needed to impress, the friends he never dared open to, the endless parade of museum visitors, mute and motionless as the paintings he guarded: all would be brought back to life and made whole. Countless failed hopes, forever redeemed by the right sequence of notes.

  The way he saw it, Els was leaving nothing; there was nothing in life he could leave. He and his daughter would walk once more through the Victory Gardens, giving all the rose varieties ridiculous theme songs. He and his wife would sing together again, old inventions from student days. Sooner or later, all men will do and know all things.

  All dead wrong, of course. Life turned out to be one shot, stray and mistaken, a single burst scattered on the air.

  He held his wife’s eyes, waiting for her to see.

  Yes! his daughter shouted, from her pads full of scribbles on the floor. Let’s go someplace. Someplace good.

  But Maddy heard another tune, nearer and louder. No, she said. Not me. I live here.

  HE TOOK HIS girl to her favorite soda fountain to tell her. He ordered her a Black Cow: a work of art that demanded every atom of her eight-year-old attention. He told her, Your mother and I still love each other. And we both love you more than ever. It’s just. She has work she has to do. And so do I.

  Hold it, the girl said.

  Nothing’s going to change. We’ll still make things together. Still be like we always were.

  Wait, Sara shouted. Soon the shout was full-voice shrieking. He couldn’t make her stop, and when she did, the silence was worse. It said, as clear as silence ever said anything: Never ask me to make things with you again.

  A grammar but no dictionary, sense but no meaning, urgency without need: music and the chemisty of cells.

  Richard consoled Els, when he got the news. Sorry, Maestro. I truly am. We loved that woman. I thought the three of us would be together forever.

  Thought wrong, Els told him.

  Lost the one with the vagina, Richard said.

  Looks that way.

  And the kid. Oh, geez.

  Bonner palmed his face and pressed long and hard. At last he said, Well, you have your work. Maybe she’ll come around.

  Peter Els joined the community of souls in orbit around Richard Bonner. He surrendered to a collaborative excitement not altogether distinguishable from panic. Inspiration came at him from the strangest places, and there were days when he could pull marvelous sequences of notes out of a subway conversation. He had his work, and there was no end of work, work so good that it felt, sometimes, like death.

  ELS STILL SAW them often, his wife and daughter. But Maddy was no longer his wife, and six months on, Sara had fled to some farther, imaginary planet. Maddy wouldn’t take the girl to New York. Els had to come up to Boston, staying in rentals in Somerville and Jamaica Plain. On his third visit after the separation, he asked the sullen child for the latest news from Umber. He always did. It was like asking how things were with her friends.

  The girl gave a pragmatic shrug. Bingo and Felicita went to war.

  Yes? Els said. That’s happened before, right?

  She shook her head. They didn’t stop, this time.

  By autumn, Sara asked to quit piano. Maddy, enlightened
educator, didn’t resist. She and Peter fought about the decision over the phone.

  What a waste, he said. She’s twice as musical as I was at her age.

  And . . . ?

  And she’ll kick herself later, when she grows up.

  His ex-wife said, You want to give her adulthood without regret?

  Soon other crises made the piano seem child’s play. The girl swallowed a fistful of aspirin—to see how it would feel—and wound up in the ER. She poured fingernail polish on a friend’s new platform shoes and called another girl she knew a limp dildo.

  A what? Peter asked his ex-wife. Does she even know—

  I asked, Maddy interrupted. She was a little hazy on the details.

  Peter’s suggestions for how to handle the girl no longer counted. He’d thrown away his vote the day he packed up his four crates of salvage from the Brookline apartment. He was the cause, and never again a cure.

  Maddy stayed perfectly pleasant over the phone, and, in person, the most cheerful of distant acquaintances. The posture, impeccable: Here’s your daughter; have her back by dinner. Graceful, stately. Maddy, too, had missed her calling. She should never have left the stage.

  She broke the news to Els long-distance, with the studied levelheadedness that was now her art. She’d married Charlie Pennel, the longtime superintendent of New Morning. Peter knew the man. His wife had worked for him for years.

  The ink on their divorce papers was still wet. You might have told me in advance.

  Really, Peter? Why is that?

  How long has this been in the works?

  He could hear Maddy’s amusement in her mouth’s small muscles. Peter! What are you suggesting?