Orfeo

  Pitches cluster above the throbbing vibes. The piece has lasted twice as long as any self-respecting song and shows no sign of stopping. A voice at the next table says, Let’s get out of here. The boy points his rolled-up score at the ceiling. Can’t hear myself think! The woman he’ll lose but never quite forget smiles back, demurring. The boy stands and slips on his coat, halfway gone already. His friend takes longer to saddle up her backpack. Els watches, caught in the snare of these tangling lines. It’s clear in the way she follows her love to the café’s side door. She’s reluctant to leave with the thousand-year secret about to be revealed.

  She turns at the door, surprised by the song’s sudden brightening. She catches Els’s eye and frowns. He holds up two fingers in a covert wave. She waves back, baffled, and disappears into the night. She, too, will die wanting things she won’t even be able to name. Her shed boyfriend will look forever for a music that will revive this night. A few steps into the embracing air outside this café and they’ll both be bewildered, old.

  Outside the picture window, a copper moonrise. It hangs above the horizon, four times bigger than it should be. A fist wheels and flickers in front of the reddish disc: a bat, hunting by echo-map, flying in paths so skittish they seem random.

  A change of color pulls him back into the music. After so much phasing, circling around the same unchanging key, the switch to E flat minor comes like a thunderclap from a cartoon sky. Wittgenstein’s proverb—that one small thought—darts off into unprepared regions. The effect electrifies Els: one simple veer that changes everything. Where the replicating voices once chased one another down broad meanders, now they turn and flow back upstream.

  Melodic inversion: the oldest trick going. But it hits Els like naked truth. The sopranos chase each other up a cosmic staircase, driven higher by the lurching vibraphones. The phrases shorten and slow, like one of those boggling Einstein thought experiments with trains and clocks Els could never wrap his head around. Leading tones clash, hinged on the half step between natural and harmonic minors. How can simple, pulsing lines build to such tension, when they run nowhere at all?

  Voices leapfrog into chords that alternate between hopeful and unbearable. He glances up again, but the music has made no more imprint on these rooms than would a stranger’s death on the other side of the globe. The girl with the baize book searches the bottom of her mug for evidence into the theft of her cappuccino. The students with clamshells lined up in front of the plate-glass window haven’t budged. The barista flirts with the dishwasher, a Latino with a ponytail down to the tip of his scapula. The engineer in cargo pants sleeps like a baby, face pressed against his canary-yellow pad.

  A stutter in the vibraphones propagates itself. And now the meter, too, starts to evade Els. This phasing motor pattern mutates, a slow metamorphosis, slipping from one crystal lattice to another and another, turning into diamond under the constant pressing. The three high voices braid upward, stepwise by minor thirds, in a triple canon:

  How

  Small

  A

  Thought

  It

  Takes

  Then the parallel tenors rush back in. Twelfth and twenty-first centuries alternate, competing with each other. Those two broad streams flow together into a further sea.

  That glimpse of open ocean, at six minutes, lasts no more than a few sustained measures. When the splendor passes, it beaches Els again in this place, a visitor from the future come back to intercept his own past. He sits here, years too late, knowing everything. Music has turned out to be the very thing he was taught to scorn. All his fellow composers have scattered on the winds of changing taste. But the young are still here, still in a hurry for transcendence, still ready to trade Now for something a little more durable . . .

  Through the picture window, the bat hangs motionless in front of a frozen moon. Before Els can decide that he can’t be seeing right, the bat is gone. The sopranos start to swell again,

  To

  Fill

  A

  Whole

  Life . . .

  The words turn into open syllables. A moment of uncertainty, a wavering between keys: Does that D want to return to B minor, as in the beginning? Will the road lead back to E-flat minor, or leap free into a wilder place? The path bends again; E-flat in the soprano, followed immediately by a half step lower, and he’s flooded with loss, the sound of something said that can never be taken back.

  The dim rooms—these painted tables and ratty sofas, the window-long counter, the sunken mosh pit, the booths with their tawny lamps—fill up with generations, sitting beside Els. He feels the hundreds of years of café debate, the thousands of lives spent arguing over perfection. He hears the musical turf wars that will rage on long after all the debaters are gone . . . Those countless twenty-year-old songwriters, dead before he came here, and those eager heirs who won’t arrive for centuries yet: they’re all chattering on to each other, in the trance of these phasing canons, the slowly changing chords of all the adamant, brute-beautiful songs of the young still to come.

  Another modulation, and the ghosts disperse. He wants the piece to be over. Not because of the thrilling sameness: monotony could almost save him now. Because of the waves of connection lighting up long-dark regions in his head. He knows better, but can’t help it: these spinning, condensed ecstasies, this cascade of echoes, these abstract patterns without significance, this seamless breathing leaves him sure, one more time, of some lush design waiting for him.

  Eleven minutes in—the endless dominant pedal point in the organ, the scraping seconds in the tenors—and the piece breaks through into a clearing. The three sopranos slow so much that their message stretches out almost past hearing:

  H

  o

  w

  s

  m

  a

  l

  l

  a

  t

  h

  o

  u

  Each change in the phased melody, now falling again, as it did in the beginning, flows through the bobbing tenor line. Figure swaps with ground, and back again. Tenors and sopranos envelop one another. Canon and organum at last merge. The two halves of this braid, across their eight-century gap, weave together so seamlessly it’s clear now how they were shaped from the start solely for this reunion.

  The piece spreads outward, its pitches like recombinant germs. The notes condense, incandescent. Shifting harmonies blaze into an old man’s head. Layered parts swell and fall, split and multiply, collide and detonate, filling a life too small to hold them.

  At a booth six feet away, a balding student of thirty sits in front of a brushed silver laptop, staring at Els. He’s one of those brilliant Asperger cases who come to town to study political economy and stay forever, working for the rest of their lives as bag boys at the Co-op. He squints through his Lennon glasses, taking Els’s measure. Then he bows his head and taps his keys.

  A moment later, he peeks again. A glance at Els, a glance at his browser. Maybe it’s nothing; Els has lost the ability to figure. He rises and drifts across the room, a diagonal feint toward the orders counter. There he comes about, back to his surveillant, and heads for the door. As he reaches it, the interminable quarter hour of proverb ends. Voices that poured in waves out of the café’s speakers fall silent. Els keeps walking, past the creamery station, along the orders counter, through the packed and noisy tables, out into the bracing air.

  He trots to the car, head down, feeling eyes on him. He reaches the Fiat and realizes where he is. Two hundred yards to the south is the Old Music Building, where he once lived. In a minute, he’s standing in front of the Beaux Arts temple with bach, beethoven, Haydn, and Palestrina carved in the pediment. Palestrina no longer seems so laughable. Haydn now seems the odd man out. Another hundred years, and who knows? The group mind may scoff at that interloper, Bach.

  He drifts behind the building to the Quad, that spot where the two long southern diagonals cross. The
place where, once, in another life, on an ice-bound January night at the beginning of creation, a young man told him, Half of life’s problems would be solved if only one of us had a vagina.

  They form in front of him: his friend, his wife, his daughter. People who loved him, who believed he’d do good things. In the mild April mist, he thinks: All I ever wanted was to make one slight noise that might delight you all. How small a thought it took. How small a thought.

  He stands on the X and stares down the long diagonals at the prospect of a life sentence. He can die in prison a public enemy, a musical Unabomber, reviled and ridiculed for a simple act of curiosity. Or he could try again.

  Stray undergrads, their smartphones glowing, drift through the dark. The Asperger political economist in the Lennon glasses has already called in his coordinates. Someone has tracked the Pennsylvania plates and staked out his car. But for a moment, nothing can touch him. He was made for this fugitive life, destined for it four decades ago. Made to return here, da capo, after so long a time away. Made for art, made for memory, made for poetry, made for oblivion.

  THE RECEPTION DESK is empty and breakfast not yet out when he comes down before dawn the next morning. He leaves his key card on the empty counter. And he’s fifty miles west on I-72 before he admits to where he’s going.

  The only harmless works are sterilized, and the only safe listeners are dead.

  His music changed during those years in the woods. He embraced those gestures that had threatened him only a few years before. Minimalist, with maximal yearnings. He layered ecstatic melodies over driving syncopations, as if something unparalleled were coming, right around the corner. Now and then, a piece got heard in New York or abroad. By the end of the globalizing eighties, Els had developed what, in the dim light of a few cryptlike new music venues, looked almost like a reputation.

  Stretched out in a rocking chair one evening in the North Conway Public Library, taking a break from reading about medieval heretics, he spotted a baby-fat face sprouting out of the collar of a batik shirt on the cover of an arts magazine on the wall-length rack. The hairline had eroded and a pair of ridiculous blue goggles gave him the look of a cartoon professor. But the face japing at Els from across the room was as familiar as shame.

  He crossed the room like a dancer in a trance and opened to the cover article. His eyes skipped across the page.

  Bonner’s violent elation is among the few games in town grandiose and surreal enough to compete with this year’s headlines . . . His limb-jutting, head-swiveling choruses dance through Tiananmen, chain across the Baltic states, and climb on the sledgehammered Berlin Wall, before most of us have even registered the events.

  The list of the man’s achievements read to Els like parody: a revival of Gershwin’s Oh, Kay!, with the Prohibition bootleggers changed to South Bronx crack dealers. A Handel Xerxes that came straight from Idi Amin’s Uganda. A Glimmerglass succès de scandale casting Nancy and Ron Reagan in a phantasmagoric Verdi Macbeth. Bedlam-filled ballets featuring Iranian revolutionaries, prancing running backs, and camouflaged Sandinistas—spastic kaleidoscopes of rapture and cataclysm. A sidebar in large type quoted Bonner: “The best art always feeds gossip.” The idea seemed to have earned him an international reputation.

  In disbelief, Els tracked down every magazine mention of Richard Bonner that the library owned. So when, a couple of months later, early in the new year, Bonner came stumbling up Els’s gravel drive near dusk, it seemed like just another coup de théatre. The diatribe started from twenty yards away.

  How the fuck is anyone supposed to find this place? There aren’t any house numbers. No damn street names. And you’re living in some kind of reconditioned chicken coop.

  Els stood in the door of his besieged home. Bonner jogged up and bear-mauled him. He kissed Els Russian-style. Then he shoved him back into the cabin.

  Look at this: The works! Electricity. Furniture. Running water. I’m crushed, Maestro. I thought this was supposed to be the woods.

  What are you doing here? Els asked. How did you get my address?

  Bonner twisted Els’s head one way then the other. Hmm. This whole nature fad agrees with you.

  Els tore free. Thought you’d just pop in, after six years? Seven?

  Bonner pouted and dropped his hand. Could be.

  You remember the last thing you said to me?

  Hey! Statute of limitations.

  My music was shit and always would be.

  I know. I’m a pig, aren’t I?

  Bonner broke away and toured the room. He picked up and sniffed a fireplace log. He ran his fingers down the spines of Els’s books. He glanced out the window at some invisible assailant. The man had put on maybe thirty pounds.

  Amazing trip up here, he said. Got me a five-hour education in West Coast hip-hop.

  Bonner stopped fiddling, crossed to Els, and rested an elbow on each of his shoulders. How would you like to help ruin my career?

  I take it you’re staying for dinner, Els answered.

  ELS POACHED A WHITEFISH. Richard contributed a bottle of Malbec out of the trunk of his car, two fistsfuls of dietary supplements, and an account of his latest coup. Els listened in monosyllables.

  It seems, Richard said, that City Opera wants a work for their 1993 season.

  Els had to laugh, and did.

  I know, Bonner said. Not possible, right? The kind of thing they offer to real artists. Not punk boho kids.

  Bravo, Richard. You’ve arrived. What’s the piece?

  You’re not listening, dickhead.

  And then Els was. The opera board had decided that a bankable iconoclast of Bonner’s rep might revive a dying house on controversy alone. They’d given him carte blanche to settle on a libretto and choose a composer.

  I told them I want you. They think I’m nuts.

  Only when his chunk of fish went down did Els bother to say, They’re right.

  But they hired me to be nuts. You see the beauty here?

  Night had fallen. Outside, above the town’s holdout lights, the mountains darkened. A raiding raccoon clicked across the roof shingles. An owl sang half a mile away.

  Don’t make me beg, Bonner said.

  When could I ever make you do anything?

  Richard slumped back in the Shaker chair, his neck against the top slat. Something’s happened, Peter. The game’s gone flat. I’m playing myself. Formula transgression. Turn the crank, and out come the little predictable spurts of stylized outrage.

  Els stacked the dirty dinnerware, studying the problem as if it were the Sunday crossword.

  Doesn’t sound like anything I can help you with.

  Richard manacled Els’s wrist. Don’t game me, asshole. You want me to tell you I need you?

  Els withdrew his trapped wrist, sat, and steepled his fingers to his lips.

  Don’t give me that Buddha shit either, Bonner said. You remember everything. We used to discover things. Laws of science. We worked for God, once, you and me. And anyone who didn’t like it could go save themselves.

  As Els remembered it, God’s preferences had been largely unknown to them. Yet he held still and listened.

  Bonner slipped into a fantasia for the audience of one. The whole globe’s convulsing. But this country is walking around in a gauzy, super-sized, antidepressant-laced, MTV-fueled cocoon. Game Boys and Party Girls. Fuck: I’m not making art. I’m just the next consumer-friendly dose of distraction for people who’re bored by halftime spectacles.

  You want something, Els said.

  Bonner looked at him, startled by the insight. Dying for it.

  And you don’t know what.

  Oh, but I do. I want to wake people from their dream of safety.

  And you think I can help you do that.

  You’re the only person I’ve ever met who wants more than I do. Look at you! Not afraid to torch your entire life. Writing for no one.

  Els didn’t bother to correct either lie. He stood and took the dirty dishes into the kitc
hen. He returned with two cartons of ice cream and two spoons. Bonner grabbed a spoon and set to work on both cartons at once. Els just watched, thinking the man might be abusing some prescription drug.

  He said, You are a miserable human being. Why should I put myself through that again?

  Bonner nodded mid-scoop, agreeing with everything. Because your stuff with me is the best work you’ve ever done.

  You’ve got a problem, Richard.

  You don’t say. Bonner raised his spoon in the air and sang, News, news, news, news, news, news, news has a . . . has a . . . has a kind of mystery . . . !

  So what is it? You’re a repressed queer? Is that your great secret?

  Bonner swung the spoon like fencing foil. Oh, fuck off. Queer, straight: Who makes these things up? Is anybody anything?

  You’re manic?

  Bonner dove back into the box. What does that even mean? He fished for bits of nut in the melting mass of cream. We’re either hungry or dead. Don’t talk to me about finer distinctions.