Orfeo

  A voice said, What are you doing? Els gasped and dropped the shovel.

  Startled by that startle, the voice called out, It’s me.

  Standing on a lawn chair, the neighbors’ eight-year-old peeked out over the slats of the wooden fence. Eight-year-old children, wandering around unsupervised in the middle of the night. Els couldn’t remember the boy’s name. Like all boys’ names in the age of social networking, it began with a J.

  What’s that? J asked in a silky whisper.

  I’m burying my dog.

  In that?

  It’s like a grave offering.

  J knew all about grave offerings from multiplayer online games.

  You can bury them in your yard?

  She liked it back here. Nobody has to know, right?

  Can I see it?

  No, Els said. She’s peaceful now.

  Els picked up the shovel and scooped dirt into the hole. J watched, rabid with interest. He’d seen several thousand deaths already in his young life. But a careful burial was the wildest novelty.

  The hole became a modest mound. Els stood over it, looking for the next step in this ad hoc service.

  She was a good dog, Fidelio. Very smart.

  Fidelio?

  Her name.

  That’s long for Fido or something?

  This dog could sing. This dog could tell pretty chords from harsh ones.

  Els didn’t mention that she preferred the harsh ones.

  J looked suspicious. What did she sing?

  Everything. She was very broad-minded. Els took the flashlight and waved it toward the fence. You think we should try to sing something for her?

  J shook his head. I don’t know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.

  I wanted to remember how life really worked and see if chemistry still wanted something from me.

  Eight-year-old Peter hides in the pantry of his mock-Tudor home, cowering in his Gene Autry pajamas, spying on his parents, flouting every law of God and man. He doesn’t care about being caught. He’s doomed already, anyway. The Reds had exploded an A-bomb weeks before, and Karl Els has told the assembled fathers of the neighborhood, over ribs barbequed in an enormous pit, that the planet has another five years, tops. The cookout is the neighborhood’s last hurrah. With the ribs gone, all those condemned fathers and their wives gather around the Els Hammond chord organ, a gin glass in every other hand, a chorus of sloshed innocents singing goodbye. They sing:

  There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s Stream,

  and the nightingale sings ’round it all the day long.

  Big brother Paul is asleep in the attic bedroom, one story above. Susan frets in her crib at the foot of the stairs. And Peter stands in the surge of these chords, listening to America’s farewell song. The notes float and rise. They turn speech as pointless as a radio ventriloquist. Light and darkness splash over Peter at each chord change, thrill with no middleman. The pitches topple forward; they fall beat by beat into their followers, obeying an inner logic, dark and beautiful.

  Another milky, troubled chord twists the boy’s belly. Several promising paths lead forward into unknown notes. But of all possible branches, the melody goes strange. One surprise leap prickles Peter’s skin. Welts bloom on his forearms. His tiny manhood stiffens with inchoate desire.

  The drunken angel band sets out on a harder song. These new chords are like the woods on the hill near Peter’s grandmother’s, where his father once took them sledding. Step by step the singers stumble forward into a thicket of tangled harmonies.

  Something reaches out and trips the tune. His mother’s fingers lose their way. She stabs at several keys, all of them wrong. The gin-waving singers tumble laughing into a ditch. Then, from his hiding place, the pajama-boy sings out the pitches of the lost chord. The ensemble turns to face the intruder. They’ll punish him now, for breaking more rules than anyone can count.

  His mother tries the suggested chord. It’s startling but obvious—better than the one she was searching for. The gin-soaked singers cheer the child. Peter’s father crosses the room and nips him on the rump, sends him back up to bed with a suspended sentence. And don’t come back down unless we need you again!

  TWO MONTHS LATER, young Peter stands clutching his clarinet in the wings at his first citywide competition. Every pleasure, he has already learned, must turn into a contest. His mother wants to spare him the gladiator ritual. But his father, who—so claims brother Paul—killed a German rifleman in the war, declares that the best way to protect a boy from public judgment is to subject him to heavy doses.

  Someone calls Peter’s name. He stumbles onstage, his head full of helium. Bowing to the room of utter blackness, he loses his balance and staggers forward. The full house laughs. He sits down to play his piece, Schumann’s “Of Strange Lands and People.” His accompanist waits for a nod, but Peter can’t remember how the tune starts. His arms ooze jelly. Somehow his hands remember the way. He blows through the piece too fast, too loud, and by the time he finishes he’s in tears. The applause is his cue to run offstage, humiliated.

  He ends up in the bathroom, puking his guts into the toilet. Vomit flecks his clip-on bow tie when he comes out to face his mother. She wraps his head into her breastbone and says, Petey. You don’t have to do this anymore.

  He pulls free of her, horrified. You don’t understand. I have to play.

  He wins second prize in his age group—a pewter G clef that his parents put on the mantelpiece next to his brother’s 1948 little league Division B fielding trophy. Three decades later, the thing will turn up wrapped in newspaper in his mother’s attic, a year after her death.

  I’d been hearing that tune for sixty years. Musical taste changes so little. The sound of late childhood plays at our funerals.

  Carnegie Elementary, Fisk Junior, Rockefeller High: Peter Els survives them all, propelled from Dick and Jane to gerunds and participles, the Monitor and Merrimac, Stanley and Livingstone, tibias and fibulas, acids and bases. He memorizes “Hiawatha’s Childhood,” “Ozymandias,” and “The New Colossus”; their rich dotted rhythms fill the dead spots of his late afternoons.

  By twelve, he masters the mystic slide rule’s crosshair. He toys with square roots and looks for secret messages in the digits of pi. He calculates the area of countless right triangles and maps the ebb and flow of French and German armies across five hundred years of Europe. Teachers rotate like the circle of fifths, each of them insisting that childhood give way to accumulating fact.

  He loves his music lessons best. Week by month by year, the clarinet yields to him. The études his teachers assign unlock ever more elaborate and enchanted places. He seems to be something of a native speaker.

  It’s a gift, his mother says.

  A talent, his father corrects.

  His father, too, is obsessed with music, or at least with ever-higher fidelity. Every few months, Karl Els invests in clearer, finer, more powerful components until the speakers cabled to his vacuum tube stereo amp are bigger than a migrant worker’s bungalow. On these he bombards his family with light classics. Strauss waltzes. The Merry Widow. The man blasts, “I am the very model of a modern Major General,” until their pacifist neighbor threatens to call the police. Every Sunday afternoon and four nights a week, young Peter listens to the records spin. He combs through the changing harmonies, now and then hearing secret messages float above the fray.

  And it’s on his father’s stereophonic rig that Peter, age eleven, first hears Mozart’s Jupiter. A rainy Sunday afternoon in October, boggy hours of excruciating boredom, and who knows where the other kids are? Upstairs listening to The Blandings or The Big Show, playing jacks or pickup sticks, or spinning the bottle down in Judy Breyer’s basement. Deep in Sunday malaise, Peter works his way through his father’s micro-groove records, looking for the cure to his perpetual ache that must be hiding somewhere inside those colored cardboard sleeves.

  Three movements of Symphony 41 pass by: destiny and noble sacrifice, n
ostalgia for a vanished innocence, and a minuet so elegant it bores the bejeezus out of him. And then the finale, its four modest notes. Do, re, fa, mi: half a jumbled scale. Too simple to be called invented. But the thing spills out into the world like one of those African antelopes that fall from the womb, still wet with afterbirth but already running.

  Young Peter props up on his elbows, ambushed by a memory from the future. The shuffled half scale gathers mass; it sucks up other melodies into its gravity. Tunes and countertunes split off and replicate, chasing each other in a cosmic game of tag. At two minutes, a trapdoor opens underneath the boy. The first floor of the house dissolves above a gaping hole. Boy, stereo, speaker boxes, the love seat he sits on: all hang in place, floating on the gusher of sonority pouring into the room.

  Five viral strands propagate, infecting the air with runaway joy. At three and a half minutes, a hand scoops Peter up and lifts him high above the blocked vantage of his days. He rises in the shifting column of light and looks back down on the room where he listens. Wordless peace fills him at the sight of his own crumpled, listening body. And pity for anyone who mistakes this blinkered life for the real deal.

  At six minutes into the amazement, the five galloping melodies align in a quintuple fugue. Lines echo and overlap, revealing where the music has been heading from the opening Do. They plait together too tightly for Peter’s ear to make out everything that happens inside the five-way weave. The sound surrounds him, and Peter is immanent, inside it all, a small but crucial part of everywhere.

  When silence sets him down once more, he no longer believes in the place. He wanders around dazed for the rest of the afternoon. The family house denies that anything just happened. His lone proof is on the record, and for the next three days, Peter wears out the vinyl with dropping the needle onto it. Even his father yells at him to listen to something else. He falls asleep nightly to the cascade of notes. All he wants to do forever is to take the magnificent timepiece apart and put its meshed gears back together again. To recover that feeling of being clear, present, here, various and vibrant, as huge and noble as an outer planet.

  Jupiter beckons, but each visit is a little weaker. Within a month, Peter gives up, trapped again on the unrelenting Earth. He rattles through the rooms and slams the doors of the split-level ranch. He bikes in fury, up and down the cluster of streets lined with homes just like his, streets that twist along each other like a thumbprint whorl. Tunes trickle out from kitchen windows, melodies as savory as the scent of brisket and cabbage. But Peter has no patience for them anymore. His ear has left and gone elsewhere.

  He falls out of step with the neighborhood. The pleasures of others begin to baffle him, given where he’s been. Sports feel like pointless seesaws, movies grow way too cheery, and loud cars depress him. He hates the gray, flat, fake, cardboard worlds of TV, although once, to trance himself, he sits and gazes for half an hour at a screen of boiling static, a message from deep space. And even after he kills the tube, he goes on staring at the shriveling periscope in the center of the screen, a portal to that place he can’t get back to.

  By thirteen, Peter Els is out of sync with the whole eight-cylinder, aerodynamic zeal of America. He no longer cares whom his tastes embarrass. He needs nothing but his math and his Mozart, the maps back to that distant planet.

  One endless June Saturday in Peter’s fourteenth year, his brother Paul and friends abduct him from his bedroom and drag him down to the half-finished basement, where they lash him to a barstool and make him listen to 45s on a portable turntable the size of a steamer trunk. “Maybellene.” “Earth Angel.” “Rock Around the Clock.” They force-feed him hits, sure that they can break the kid and remake him into something a little less square. They even toss around the idea of shock therapy.

  Come on, cat. Pull your head out of your ass and listen.

  Peter tries. That one’s great, he says. Nice walking bass.

  He does his best to sound enthused, but the posse sees through him. They drill another tune into him: “The Great Pretender.” It’s a catchy sing-along that turns into Chinese water torture after the first chorus.

  So what’s the problem this time, knucklehead?

  There’s no problem! It’s just that . . . He closes his eyes and calls out, downbeat by downbeat: Tonic. Subdominant. Dominant. Those guys need to learn some new chords.

  Criminetly. What’s wrong with the chords they got?

  Nothing at all, if those three make you happy. But what’s happiness, compared to an earful of forever?

  It’s not about the chords, Paul spits.

  It doesn’t go anywhere, Pauly. It just sits there, circling the drain.

  Circling . . . ? Are you bat-shit deaf? His brother gets that faraway look: the sledge, the sex, the drill of infant rock. You can’t hear that? Freedom, you dried-up little turd!

  Peter hears only harmonic jail.

  The tribunal puts on “Blue Suede Shoes.” Peter shrugs: Why not? Peppy dimestore fun. His refusal to swoon maddens his older brother. Paul cocks back his arm to brain the punk with a Magic 8-Ball. But an ecstasy of backbeat sweeps him up, and he calls out, Listen to that. Jeez! Does music get any better?

  He flicks the cannon shot across the drum-flooded basement. Peter catches it, bows his head, and reads the plastic fortune-teller’s reply:

  CONCENTRATE AND ASK AGAIN.

  All my life I thought I knew what music was. But I was like a kid who confuses his grandfather with God.

  A boy treads in the shallows of a summer lake. Sky and pine in all directions, the buzz of noisy relatives. The air has the heft of vacation, with Peter back in the early rehearsals for his life.

  Call it late afternoon, but hours before dark. This far north, near the solstice, the sun hangs for days near its zenith before dropping into dusk. The lake fills with swimming children: an Elsfest—that annual jag that his errant family branch rarely dares attend. Elses from across the States lay claim to the southern shore of this northern water. Thirty yards out, kids swarm a plywood float lashed to empty oil drums, like ants massing a melting sugar cube. Shore-hugging uncles fish beer bottles from an ice-filled zinc trough and open them on the trough’s handle. Aunts and worse stretch out on beach blankets in a suntan assembly line. Elses in all directions. Not even Peter’s father can identify the whole bevy of relatives. One tiny Russian device—even a conventional one—would finish off the family name.

  Midsummer comes with a crystalline theme that Peter has been practicing to death for days. He woke this daybreak and woodshedded for hours, up in his hillside hideout, on the Evette & Schaeffer clarinet his father found for him at an estate sale. By the time he joined the others down at the lake, summer’s theme was burned deep into his brain.

  His clarinet is the one thing Peter would take with him to the moon or a desert island or prison. His fingers come home to the keys; he practices even here, under the waves of this summer lake. He can swell, launch leaps, race up and down the tube in runs that feel invincible. Playing is like solving a perfect proof—QED.

  The tune under his fingers this summer is the new national anthem of his desire. He’ll perform it next month in his downtown debut, with twelve older players. The piece is everywhere, in the bobbing water, in the raft-swarming chatter. He loves that dance suite like he loves his mother, who lies up on the shore of this upstate lake in her gappy one-piece suit with the little skirt that makes her look like a Ponchielli hippo ballerina. He knows the music better than he knows his father, there on his lifeguard rotation, Lucky Strike in one hand and Carling Black Label in the other, conducting the Els uncles in a verbal brawl.

  Peter can’t name the secret of the suite’s power. But somehow its first few notes, like the rays of sunrise over eastern mountains, lay down a foundation for all the developments to come. They return at the end, layered against an old Shaker hymn tune, to make a sound bigger than any country. He can’t say how that simple return produces a release so spacious and shattering. He knows only that
the piece predicts even this blazing afternoon, these bracing lake breezes. Peter has tried to imitate them, jotting down his own chords on systems of clean staff paper—a boy’s pencil sketch of the stupor that dizzies his head each time he hears this piece’s openness.

  He will love this music to death. In a few more years, he’ll snort at its sentiment and mock its stirring progressions. Once you’ve loved like that, the only safe haven is resentment. Peter won’t realize until too late that all he ever wanted was to move a listener the way these variations moved him.

  But the throats of his dozens of younger cousins scream another soundtrack altogether. One by one they scramble up on the raft, swivel their broomstick hips, shout, I’m all shook up! and jackknife into the water. The older kids take up a game called smear the queer, dunking whoever dares hold an orange beach ball. Bodies plunge. Yelps spatter the air. Peter clings to the float’s algae-coated ladder, keeping his fingers safely underwater. Horseflies as big as hummingbirds nip at his nape.

  He watches Minnesota cousin Kate carve her manic path through the swarm. Who knew that such surprise could move about on two bare legs? Peter has scribbled her name with ballpoint deep down in the soles of his All Stars, where no one but he will ever know the word is hidden. He has dreamed of her haunches and the backs of her knees. Now she’s everywhere at once in this water war, colluding, colliding, cannonballing through the air, crawling back onto the float and hitching up a slipped strap as if her apricot tit didn’t just go sunning. Her Mayday cries quicken Peter’s flesh, and the kick of her scissoring legs matches that ballet suite running through his brain. Her smile plots the next escapade even before her last one is finished.

  Up on shore, around the hissing grill pits, the Els patriarchs wage a war of their own. Their words reach Peter above the shrieks of the raft battle. The women, from their sun chaises and mah-jongg tables, shout at their spouses to give it a rest. Can it. Or better: bottle. Hey Mabel—Black Label! Peter’s three favorite aunts—two real ones and one aunt’s companion, a trio who sing each night around the campfire, reliving the glory years of their Andrews Sisters knockoff act, when their shiny-tight added sixth chords once backed for Sinatra himself—start belting out “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.” Half the Els Tabernacle Choir joins in on, “Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.”