Orfeo

  Once such an infant opera would have flooded the folds of Els’s brain in spikes of color. Now he looked at a stilled sea.

  Els pointed to a speck of gray-black Sargasso. What’s that?

  Dr. L’Heureux nodded, confirming a diagnosis Els didn’t even know he’d made. That’s a lesion. A small dead spot.

  Dead?

  A small transient ischemic attack.

  The doctor pointed out another.

  The scans of many people your age show the same thing.

  Ah, Els said. So there’s nothing to worry about.

  Dr. L’Heureux nodded. Perfectly normal. Perhaps a lesion had taken out his sarcasm detector.

  Els asked how much of a person’s brain could be dead and still qualify as normal. The question confused Dr. L’Heureux. He seemed not to make a strong distinction between normal and dead. And all the medical evidence was on his side.

  Yet the tiny gray islands in his silver brain reassured Peter. Whatever musical facility he’d lost was not his fault. He wasn’t being punished. The scattered dead spots on the screen joined together into a pattern. The islands of silence shaped the still-surging ocean of noise around them. He’d always told his students that rests were the most expressive paints in a composer’s palette. The silences were there to make the notes more urgent.

  Dr. L’Heureux described the virtues of exercise. He mentioned possible medications and dietary changes. But Els had stopped listening. He asked, What about my musical facility?

  Dr. L’Heureux’s shoulders made a helpless appeal. He mentioned a name: acquired amusia. It had a variety of possible causes. There was no treatment.

  Something in his words tipped Peter off. A tone he could still hear.

  This is going to get worse?

  Dr. L’Heureux’s silence suggested that it would not get better.

  Els went home, into a world of changed sound. Listening to music felt like looking at a flower show through sunglasses. He knew when the intervals shocked or surprised, soothed or blossomed. He just couldn’t feel them.

  Rain and thunder, the sides of mountains bathed in flowing orange, frantic delight, the sizzle of cities at night, feasts of self-renewing tenderness, the heaven of animals: the most ravishing harmonies turned into secondhand, summarized reportage. Music, the first language, direct transcription of inner states, the thing words used to be before they bogged down with meaning, now read like a curt telegram.

  For a few days, he could still tell what sounded different. Then, little by little, he couldn’t. The brain got used to anything, and soon Els’s new ears were all he’d ever had. He listened less for subtle rhythms and harmonic contour, more for melody and timbre. Everything he heard was new and strange. Two-tone, four-by-four garage, rare groove, riot grrrl, red dirt, country rap, cybergrind, cowpunk, neo-prog, neo-soul, new jack swing . . . He’d never dreamed that people could need so many kinds of music.

  A year of listening to the new world confirmed him. He’d waited his whole life for a revolution that he’d already lived through and missed. The airwaves were full of astounding sound—a spectrum of grief, craziness, and joy so wide he couldn’t step far enough back to make sense of it all. As more and more people made more and more songs, almost every piece would go unheard. But that, too, was beautiful. For then, almost every piece could be someone’s buried treasure.

  His students grew younger and the music wilder, but Els went on teaching the same basic rules. While he trained students how to hear seventh chords in the third inversion, the globe went over the financial brink. The entire web of interlocking con jobs came unraveled. Trillions of dollars disappeared back into fiction. The college lost half its endowment. They asked Els to retire. He volunteered to keep teaching for free, but the law forbade it.

  He returned to the life of a sole proprietorship, but now without a way to pass the days. Still, the days passed, many in a major key. He had his phone calls with his daughter, whose every word delighted him. He had her gift, Fidelio, his elated companion on long walks nowhere. There was nothing more pressing to do all day, every day, except think about the question that his whole life had failed to answer: How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?

  At sixty-eight, Els could think about the question only a little at a time. He read what he could find—the distilled knowledge of hundreds of experts. He couldn’t follow all the physiology. The body had evolved to feel fear, hope, thrill, and peace in the presence of certain semi-ordered vibrations; no one knew why. It made no sense that a few staggered chords could make the brain love an unmet stranger or grieve for friends who hadn’t died. Nobody could say why Barber moved listeners and Babbitt didn’t, or whether an infant might be raised to weep at Carter. But all the experts agreed that waves of compressed air falling on the eardrum touched off chain reactions that flooded the body in signals and even changed the expression of genes.

  Deep in his stuffed armchair, Els read about the chemical cascades that music set off inside the body of a listener. Sometimes, he felt as if that night with Clara by the banks of the Jordan River back in Bloomington had never happened, and he’d stayed a chemist instead of heading down music’s mirror fork.

  People now made music from everything. Fugues from fractals. A prelude extracted from the digits of pi. Sonatas written by the solar wind, by voting records, by the life and death of ice shelves as seen from space. So it made perfect sense that an entire school, with its own society, journal, and annual conferences, had sprung up around biocomposing. Brain waves, skin conductivity, and heartbeats: anything could generate surprise melodies. String quartets were performing the sequences of amino acids in horse hemoglobin. No listener would ever need more than a fraction of the music that had already been made, but something inside the cells needed to make a million times more.

  In the fall of 2009, while fast-walking Fidelio around the long loop of the arboretum, Els watched a wet oak leaf fly through the air and stick to his windbreaker. He peeled it free, studied its surface, and saw rhythms inscribed in the branching veins. He sat down, a little dazed, on a boulder at the side of the path. His hand grazed the rock’s surface, and the pits played pitches like a piano roll on his skin. He looked up: music floated across the sky in cloud banks, and songs skittered in twigs down the staggered shingles of a nearby roof. All around him, a massive, secret chorus written in extended alternate notation lay ripe for transcribing. His own music had no corner on obscurity. Almost every tune that the world had to offer would forever be heard by almost no one. And that fact gladdened him more than anything he’d ever written.

  Fidelio strained at the leash. The tug pulled Els to his feet and dragged him toward the duck pond. The dog splashed into the water, her paws churning up a pattern of dotted rhythms and accented attacks. Duets, trios, even a brash sextet spread outward across the pond’s surface. The tiny maelstrom of intersecting ripples contained enough data to encode an entire opera. Find the right converting key and the score might tell any musical story there was: Man uses tunes to bargain with Hell. Man trades self for a shot at the lost chord. Man hears his fate in the music of chance.

  His whole history, recorded in a few haphazard splashes of water: the idea was mad. But music itself—the pointless power of it—was mad, too. A six-chord sequence could chill a soul or make it see God. A few notes on a shakuhachi unlocked the afterlife. A simple tavern sing-along left millions longing for their nonexistent homes on the range. A hundred thousand years of theme and variations, every composer stealing from every other, and none of it had any survival value whatsoever.

  Grace was pouring out everywhere, from hidden sounds, into Els’s damaged auditory cortex. And all that secret, worldwide composition said the same thing: listen closer, listen smaller, listen lighter, to any noise at all, and hear what the world will still sound like, long after your concert ends.

  Fidelio pulled at the leash, a more present need. The banks of the pond were damp, and Els’s shoes sank into the muck. He took
a stick and scraped the mud from his soles. Each scrape flung away millions of species of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, micro-algae, actinomycetes, nematodes, and microscopic arthropods—billions of single-cell organisms, each pumping out tens of thousands of different kinds of proteins. This torrent, too: chemical signaling, mind-shattering tone clusters, deafening festivals of invention for anyone who cared to attend.

  Somewhere in the billions of base pairs in those millions of species there must be encoded songs, sequences that spoke to everything that had ever happened to him. Music to abandon a wife and child by. The lifelong rondo of a friendship gone wrong. Hermit songs. Songs of love and ambition and betrayal and failure and repentance. Even the evening hymn of a retired industrial chemist whose one regret was living so far from his grandchildren.

  Els turned from the pond and tugged the dog back onto the macadam loop. Cars shot up and down the nearby street. A low-slung Mustang slunk by, spilling over with a cranked-up anthem of pounding love. Fidelio dashed about in ecstasies, chasing butterflies, barking at phantoms that operated on frequencies Els couldn’t hear. Panting to keep up, with only half the animal’s legs, Els slipped the leash off the retriever’s neck—a little violation of the law that hurt no one and carried at most a nuisance fine. The dog shot toward a sycamore a hundred yards away and stood at the base, barking, as if her happy, pitched howls might induce her prey to hurl itself out of the branches and sacrifice itself to the circle of life.

  And in that moment, the idea came to him. It assembled itself in Els’s head as he stood and watched Fidelio baying: music for an autumn evening, a ring of thanksgiving, with no beginning or end. He’d signed on for the full ride long ago, and all that remained was to be true to the dreams of his youth and take them to their logical extreme. He could make his great song of the Earth at last—music for forever and for no one . . .

  A few days earlier, on the radio, lying in bed before falling asleep, he’d heard soundtracks extracted from DNA—strange murmurings transposed from the notorious four-letter alphabet of nucleotides into the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale. But the real art would be to reverse the process, to inscribe a piece for safekeeping into the genetic material of a bacterium. The precise sounds that he inscribed into the living cell were almost immaterial: birdsong, a threnody, the raw noise of this arboretum, music spun from the brain that those self-replicating patterns had led to, four billion years on. Here was the one durable medium, one that might give any piece a shot at surviving until alien archaeologists came by to determine what had happened to the wasted Earth.

  Digitize a composition into a base-four strand, then put the tape inside the player. You’d have to allow for the slow drift of mutation that reworked every genome. But that endless change in the musical message would be more like a feature than a bug. As far as Els knew, the medium was virgin territory. Soon it, too, would be covered with graffiti. But he could get there early and play for one last moment in a newfound land. No storage medium longer-lasting than life.

  He would spend his remaining days seeing what might be done in the form, and learning to hear a little of life’s great ground bass along the way. With a little time, patience, a web connection, the ability to follow instructions, and a credit card, he might send a tune abroad again, into the very distant future, unheard, unknown, everywhere: music for the end of time.

  Els dropped to his knees, patted the ground, and whistled. Fidelio came bounding back, delirious with frantic and unqualified love. Els leashed the dog, bundled her back into the car, and drove home with an urge to work that he hadn’t felt since his opera had fallen into earthly politics years ago. He’d heard a way that he might redeem, if not the past, then at least his youthful sense of the future. Making things felt strange again, and dangerous. Patterns might yet set him free.

  That evening, he set to work ordering parts for a home laboratory.

  And filter and fibre your blood.

  He’s sure the game is over the minute he walks into the clinic. The night clerk looks up from the reception desk, alert. Els gazes back, with the courage of one already lost.

  I’m here to see Richard Bonner.

  The clerk keeps eying him. I’m sorry. We’re closed for visits.

  I’m his brother. It’s a family emergency. I’ve driven all the way from Texas.

  The clerk gets on the phone. In a moment, he says, Mr. Bonner? Chuck here. Sorry to call so late. Your brother is here? To see you? From Texas?

  In the endless pause, Els edges back toward the foyer. The clerk cradles the phone to his face and examines Els. Which brother?

  Els rolls his eyes. Pure Verdi. Peter, he says. How many does he think he has?

  The clerk repeats the name into the phone. He waves his hand while talking, for no one who can see. Invisible gestures—like music for the deaf. The wait stretches out. The clerk shakes his head and listens. Els gauges the distance to the front door.

  The clerk hangs up and smiles. I’m supposed to send the bastard through.

  The facility is opulent. A central lounge with leather couches and a beaded cathedral ceiling opens up onto a cactus garden. There’s a tiny library with magazines and paperbacks. The women’s wing leads down a pale raspberry hallway; the men’s is hunter-green. Dozens of ink and watercolor washes of animals in a peaceable kingdom line the hall. Past the nurses’ station, through a half-open door, is a small lab, its shelves full of glassware and boxes of medication.

  Els passes a room with a movie screen, then a small gym where a handful of ancient women grind away on treadmills while youthful aides take their vitals. In a sunny atrium, four gray-haired men in golf shirts and khaki slacks hunch over a table playing an elaborate board game involving thousands of colored cubes. Two younger men with stopwatches and clipboards observe.

  Richard stands in a doorway at the end of the long hall. He looks like he’s wearing stage makeup, the greasepaint formula for old age. He grabs Els by the shoulders, scrutinizing the effects of seventeen years. He wags his head, refuting the evidence.

  You’re supposed to be in hiding. Did I get that wrong?

  It’s Bonner, but it isn’t. He’s inches shorter. Something around the eyes has been ravaged. Els looks down and sees the interstate still sliding by beneath him. He’s too blasted to form words. Bonner pulls him to his chest in an awkward clutch. The release is abrupt and a little confused.

  Richard’s mouth comes open, laughter without sound. He studies Els, puzzled. Look at you. Quite a pickle you’ve gotten yourself into, Maestro. Come on. I’ve got stuff to show you.

  He pulls Els into the room. Number 18 is a narrow country. There’s a twin bed, a desk and chair, a tiny dresser, a wall-mount TV, and a wheelchair-accessible bathroom. Richard crosses through the deluxe dorm room to a stack of papers. He picks through the teetering tower. Nothing is what he’s looking for. Els sits, unbidden. An intentional tremor takes Richard’s hands—a vibrato so wide it can only be a side effect of the experimental drug. He’s beyond frail, hulled out, fighting for that lone resource of any consequence, focus.

  A shout of triumph—Ha!—and he waves the prize aloft. Here we go. He crosses to where Els sits and hands him the article. It’s about a squad of CIA analysts—self-styled “vengeful librarians”—who spend their lives combing through several million Web posts a day.

  What do you think? Richard says. Our next . . . our next thing. Show.

  Before Els can even stammer, Richard shoves more recent clippings into his hands. There’s an article about the installation artist Ai Weiwei, now languishing somewhere in a Chinese prison for tweeting a post that played on the word jasmine. There’s an article on a blockbuster film about a runaway pandemic, set to be released on September 11. There’s an article about a man arrested for building a nuclear reactor in his kitchen. And, of course, several articles about the Biohacker Bach.

  They all fit together, Richard says. We just have to find out how.

  His words are rushed, shorthand. There?
??s not much time, and the task keeps getting bigger, the longer they put it off. He implores Els, ambitious, impatient to knuckle down and concentrate, while concentration is still possible.

  Els’s tinnitus starts to blare. Yellow highway lines pulse in his eyes. He can hear Bonner’s words, but he can’t understand them. He looks back down at the articles in his hand: Someone’s trying to send him a message, but in a language of weird blips and bleeps. Some unreadable, avant-garde thing.

  Wait, he says. You knew I was coming?

  Richard blinks. No. Did someone say I did?

  They look at each other, an arms race of bewilderment.

  Richard breaks first. Oh. You mean . . . come here, eventually? Oh, eventually, sure. I knew.

  He pats the provinces of his body, looking for a hidden cookie to pop in his mouth. He’s the kid from the stands of the University of Illinois Stock Pavilion on a cold night in 1967, shouting lunatic manifestos into the maelstrom. Under the paving stones, the beach.

  Richard grins, reading his collaborator’s mind one last time. Forgiven? Again?

  Nothing to forgive.

  I’m sure there is, Richard corrects. I just can’t . . .

  No. You were only . . .

  Els doesn’t know how to say what his friend was. What this one aggravating, insufferable man managed to bring into his life.

  You were an asshole, is all. Always.

  Richard shrugs. How was I to the music?

  I think you might have loved it, Els says.

  Bonner walks to the window and peeks out through the blinds. What was the big one called? The opera?

  Early Alzheimer’s looks, to Els, much like his old friend. The Fowler’s Snare.

  That’s it, Richard says. That’s from the Bible or something? And there was one, lasted for hours, in New York? Something about bringing dead people to life?

  Els himself needs half a minute to remember. Bonner turns back into the room, searching again. Why did you want to quit all that?