Orfeo

  A click on the remote, and the music starts up. And one last time, in the bare opening notes, Els makes out the sounds of a death foretold. The death of a child he spent his life trying to revive.

  AT FIRST, THERE’S only a thread of frost spreading across a pane. Oboe and horn trace out their parallel privacies. The thin sinews wander, an edgy duet built up from bare fourths and fifths.

  The singer enters, hesitant, hinted by bassoon. She channels a man wrung out after a sleepless night, a father with nothing left to keep safe. Now the sun will rise so brightly . . .

  The sun rises, but the line sinks. The orchestration, the nostalgic harmonies: everything wrapped in the familiar late nineteenth century, but laced with the coming fever dream. Bassoon and horn rock an empty cradle. Scant, muted violas and cellos in their upper registers enter over a quavering harp. The line wavers between major and minor, bright and dim, peace and grief, like the old hag and lovely young thing who fight for control of the fickle ink sketch. The voice sings, It’s almost as if nothing terrible happened in the night!

  Nerves gather in the broadening orchestra, joined now by clarinet and bass clarinet. Then the killer touch, the daub that Els would have traded his soul to make. The ensemble falls away to two pianissimo strikes on the glockenspiel. Then two more. A child’s toy, a funeral chime, a light in the night all rolled into four soft, ringing high D’s.

  The lines of entwined oboe and horn return, but colored now with small, stray variants. The singer comes back, to claim that death is no more than a blot on a day that is everywhere bright and gathering. But she protests too much: When the chopped-up echoes of the opening duet reprise, shadowed now by the remorseless glockenspiel, the notes begin to go astray. The lines haunt each other in parallel intervals, perseverating, like a lone figure rocking in the corner, biting his sleeve.

  The verse starts again, but the tune veers off into a vacant elsewhere. Now the voice rises where it once fell, clashing against the oboe’s mirror inversion. You must not fold up the night inside you. You must drown it in eternal light! The singer struggles to do just that. The words try to push toward grace; the music drowns in grace’s opposite. Yet the whole ensemble holds out the hope that death itself may be a brilliant light, and kinder than anyone can suppose.

  In the fourth return of the instrumental interlude, the song turns deranged and the twentieth century begins. The orchestra sets off in a frantic ecstasy, gusting through chromatic swells and counterswells, shaking loose of all center, anchored only by a deep, droning pedal point in the horn.

  The frenzy breaks. Flute and oboe attempt the opening lines again, but they’re dogged now by the tolling glockenspiel. A small voice says, A little light has gone out in my tent. The notes set a path where their offspring must go: upward into the light, over the surrender of the strings and hollow harp. But the song stutters and catches. The voice drops out, while the surging orchestra carries the melody forward. Two measures too late, the singer rallies—Heil!—to welcome in the joyous light of day. The orchestra obliges, pushing toward redemption. But at the last moment it falls back into minor. The last word belongs to the glockenspiel, repeating the singer’s final note three octaves higher, throwing off glints from a place unreachable by grief or consolation.

  At eighteen, hearing these songs while holding Clara’s breasts was like graduating from the Crayola eight-pack to the rainbow box of sixty-four. At seventy, alone in the house with an untouched glass of scotch, Els can still make out, in the songs’ recesses, the germ of a freedom that isn’t done with him.

  Why should bottomless grief feel so bracing? The day is lovely; don’t be afraid. Over the decades, he’d read many theories about why sad music lifted the listener: The antibody theory. The sanctuary theory. Shadowboxing. Mastery by habituation. Mahler himself expressed pity for a world that would one day have to listen to these songs. Yet the cycle has sweetened Els’s life beyond saying.

  Don’t be afraid; the day is lovely. They have only gone out, and do not feel like coming home again.

  Els swirls his scotch and listens through the other four songs. His favorite passages shine and die. The second song, shifting through keys and meters, between clarity and cloud. The third song, with its Bach-like trio sonata that mimics the mother’s unsteady steps: When your mother walks through the door by the candle’s light, you always come in too, slipping in behind her . . . And that song’s end, its wayward cadence on the dominant: he knows it cold, but still the run-up chills him. Someone came up with these chords. Someone remembered the sound of false recovery.

  The fourth song, in radiant E-flat, always felt like the first flash of real light in the whole cycle. But tonight it’s a klezmer-tinted, lurching folk dance. They’ve just gone out for a long walk. They’ve only gone on ahead of us. The day is beautiful. The final phrases ascend into bright uplands, the music almost escaping to the distant sunny hill the words describe, alongside two small children who can’t be bothered to turn around and wave.

  Then the storm. Does it make him a depressive, that he loves the storm best of all? The thrill of lightning, of an ambulance, of safety crumbling away. The full orchestra, at last—the wrenched strings, the plummeting winds—pumps out a tempest. In the interludes between each stanza, the storm blows out of control: at first nothing, then four bars, then eight. The voice ratchets up—in this weather, in this weather, in this weather—rising in each successive entry, from a monotone D to an E to a G. In this raging, in this horror, I would never have let the children out!

  Guilty survivor, beating up on himself. The music locates the storm inside the singer’s mind, like the one in Peter Grimes, another work that Clara gave Els in that year of miraculous discoveries. The song’s storm isn’t the one that takes the children; this is a later gale, long after the fact. I would never have let the children out in such weather. I’d worry that they might die. Now there’s no reason to worry about anything.

  Fifty-two years of listening, and Els still can’t say how the thing is done. How the notes find that precise signature of doubt and hope. The bliss of giving up. Grief too great to be bought off by the promise of an afterlife. A song that predicts the end of its own tradition. But this time through, near his own cadence, Els no longer hears the prediction buried in the songs, but only the memory of discovering them once, at the end of youth. Of Clara stroking him, the storm of eighteen.

  Clara laid it all out for him, after the songs ended: How two years after the premiere, Mahler’s own five-year-old Maria died of scarlet fever. How the composer’s shattered wife took up with another man. How Mahler himself died soon after, of a diseased heart, at fifty. And three years on: the war, the death of a generation, the collapse of the absurd empire whose end his music had long foretold . . .

  Peter learned the sequel soon enough: How the dead Maria’s half-sister, Manon, the daughter of Alma and the man with whom she betrayed Mahler, died three decades later, of polio. How Alban Berg brought the dead sister back to life in his Violin Concerto, an atonal miasma that climaxed in a chilling Bach chorale. How music blurred the line between prophecy and recall.

  Els wraps himself in the rising storm, feeling the madness one more time. The children were taken away from me. I had no say. The crazed gale draws up short. It hangs on a diminuendo; the clarinet, contrabassoon, and harp shrink to nothing. And here is where Clara broke off in mid-caress and grabbed him. The skin on the old man’s forearm puckers, where the ghost of the girl takes hold.

  Then the damning glockenspiel, mute for three songs, silent for so long that the ear forgets the forecast from song one. Child’s toy, funeral chime, a light in the night. A bell from out of the pitch-black; a shock but no surprise. A sound that makes hope sound primitive.

  Hear that? Clara said, her voice as serene as the singer’s now is. A music box. From the nursery.

  The music turns sickly sweet. The storm lifts in a heartbeat, and the sky in all directions clears. The singer says, They rest, they rest in their
mother’s house. But everything about the eerie music box insists, You dream.

  For years after that first listen, Els read everything on the Kindertotenlieder he could find. He even struggled through articles in German. Every analysis insisted that the last song ended in otherworldly consolation. He knew beyond a doubt that it did not. Something more was happening in those final measures, and to hear it, all a person had to do was listen. He searched for a long time for someone to confirm the eviscerating lilt of that final, music-box lullaby. Years passed, the articles piled up, and at last Els reached the one possible conclusion: music said only what the ear could bear to hear.

  Listen, Clara said. These are the deaths that start everything.

  Mahler to Bruno Walter: “How dark is the foundation on which our lives rest!”

  He killed the player and called his daughter. Stupid superstition. But a simple enough safeguard, with no downside. It was three hours earlier on the Pacific Coast. She would already be hard at work, preparing for tomorrow morning. They had talked three days before. But that was then.

  Sara was VP for research of the second-largest data-mining firm in the Northwest. Her company figured out how to make advertisements chase their target users around the Web and read their minds. In her spare time, she competed in standard-course triathlons. Her fortieth birthday present to herself had been surviving a double Olympic distance out in Hawaii. She sat on the board of two museums. She spent her vacations volunteering for an NGO that transferred obsolete supercomputers to sub-Saharan countries. She wasn’t married; she wasn’t even single. Men who weren’t scared of her were usually sociopaths.

  Els got her voice mail. Lifetimes ago, in the seventies, when Sara was still a child and Els was still her father of record, he’d hung up in alarm the first time he called a friend and got a machine. It took him years to stop bellowing at answering tapes—repeating, spelling out his name, falling into fatuous improvisation or flustered silence. These days, it shocked him to get a live person.

  It’s your father, he told the machine. Give me a ring.

  He hadn’t even crossed the length of the room to the kitchen when she called back.

  What’s wrong?

  It’s Fidelio, he answered. She’s dead.

  A pause came across the line. For decades in the classroom, Els had told his composition students that rests were the most powerful elements in a composer’s palette. The negative space, that little, ambiguous leap before the Heil. The silences were the thing that the notes were powerless to reach.

  How?

  A stroke, I think. I didn’t get an autopsy.

  I’m sorry, she said. She was good to you.

  Another prolonged fermata, the only sound he could bring himself to make. At last she said, Are you okay?

  Sar? he managed. I’ve been thinking. There’s an opening at Shade Arbors.

  You’ve taken up golf?

  A gated thing, south of the college.

  Gated thing.

  A condominium association. You know. There’s a bar and a restaurant right there. They even have a gym.

  You want to move into a nursing home?

  Not a nursing home. Retirement community. The nurses are only there if you need them.

  Are you crazy?

  You told me you don’t like me living alone.

  I meant rent out the back bedroom or hire a girlfriend. Not move into some assisted living death trap.

  This house has a million stairs. You don’t want me falling and breaking a hip.

  Please. No one falls and breaks their hips. That was, like, a nineties television scare campaign. You’re seventy years old. Seventy’s nothing. Seventy is the new forty-five.

  Do you remember how you could never go to bed without hearing Saint Anthony preach to the fishes?

  Don’t change the subject. You don’t need this. You’re young. Healthy. I can get you a new dog.

  How’s your mother? he asked.

  She has a Facebook page, Dad. You can stalk her there.

  What are you listening to these days? He’d always relied on Sara to tell him what was happening in the world of real music.

  Listening? She laughed. I listen to Bloomberg. When I have time. Swear to me you aren’t moving anywhere.

  He swore.

  I’m so sorry about Fidelio, she said. She was a good one.

  She’s only gone out, he wanted to say, and doesn’t feel like coming home.

  I’ll find you another. I’ll get on it tonight. How do you feel about border collies?

  He could hear her clicking keys, already searching, even before he said good night.

  I wanted to believe that music was the way out of all politics. But it’s only another way in.

  The thermal cycler, acquired for a few hundred dollars online, was getting some good PCR product yields. He couldn’t wrap his brain around what happened inside the quarter-thimble reaction tube: the fragments cleaving, the jumbled bases assembling themselves onto the exposed templates, the strands of DNA doubling and redoubling, exploding into incomprehensible numbers. The thought of it made him feel religious.

  For raw materials, Els relied on a pair of online shops that would have struck him as insane two years ago. One was named Mr. Gene, like some bargain reseller or used-car salesman. Between the two sites, he could buy all kinds of made-to-order materials without breaking the bank. Do-it-yourself bio: the latest mushrooming cottage industry. A computer, a credit card, and a little patience, and a person might customize a living thing.

  Life at the smallest levels, its pointless overabundance, the sheer profligacy of its chemical signaling: he had no wilder an art to witness, before he died. As he worked, a line from a letter that Mahler once sent to his faithless Alma hummed in his head: We are brought back to ourselves by solitude, and from ourselves to God is only a step . . .

  He went to bed late and woke soon after falling asleep. Fortunately, he needed little sleep anymore. When the sun came up the next morning, it was almost as if nothing at all had happened in the night.

  Once, I’d hoped to make thousands of runaway pieces. They failed to run away. This one did. It’s all around you now, in the billions.

  Two men in navy two-button suits, one of them holding a leatherette portfolio, appeared at the front door a little past eleven o’clock, the morning after the improvised funeral. They looked like counterfeit Jehovah’s Witnesses. Electioneering was still months away, and the pair were too well dressed for fund-raising. Someone must have been telling lies about Peter Els. The line occurred to Els and broke across his lips. He was still grinning when he opened the door on the overdressed duo.

  They handed him business cards: Coldberg and Mendoza, with the Joint Security Task Force. Coldberg rubbed the fingernails of his right hand with his thumb. Mendoza had a tiny smear of egg yolk in the crook of his lips.

  Mendoza said, We’ve received a police report about bacterial cultures in the house.

  I see. Els waited for the question.

  Coldberg fiddled with his ear, searching for some miniature audio hardware that had been swiped while he wasn’t looking.

  Is that accurate? Mendoza asked.

  Yes, Els said. That’s accurate. Lots of bacterial cultures in the house.

  Can we come in? Coldberg asked.

  Els tipped his head sideways. It’s a hobbyist lab. I’m not stealing anyone’s patents.

  The agent asked again. Els stepped aside and watched two pairs of Blüchers cross the transom.

  At the sight of the back room, Mendoza stopped. What’s all this gear for?

  Els’s turn to be nonplussed. You don’t know?

  We’re not scientists, Mr. Els. You’re the expert, it seems.

  Els showed them the PCR machine. He tried to explain how it worked—the cycles of denaturing and annealing—but the agents lost interest.

  Coldberg pointed. That’s your centrifuge?

  I made it from a salad spinner. And I modified the rice cooker to distill wa
ter.

  And that over there, with the wires?

  That’s for gel electrophoresis. It’s . . . it tells you how big your molecules are.

  Your molecules?

  Your snippets of DNA. What have you.

  You work with DNA?

  The question was so artless it made Els laugh. It’s everywhere, these days.

  What’s behind the door?

  Before Els could object, the two agents stepped into his clean room and contaminated his homemade laminar flow hood.

  Coldberg waved a thick black pen around the room. Where’d you get all this? His voice had a note of admiration.

  Els told him. There was nothing—nothing at all—that a person couldn’t get from some obliging five-star vendor.

  How much did this set you back?

  Less than you think. It’s amazing what you can get for nothing, in auctions. All those bankrupt biotech start-ups . . . Penn State was dumping a bunch of perfectly good scopes just because they were a few years old. I picked up a three-thousand-dollar cell incubator for two hundred and ninety bucks on eBay. The low-temperature freezer was my biggest-ticket item, believe it or not. Everything together cost less than five thousand dollars.

  Five thousand?

  Els shrugged. That’s one Mediterranean cruise. Or one big-screen television, five years ago. Of course, the reagents can add up, depending on where you get them.

  The word had a bad effect on Mendoza. Els regretted using it. But he’d broken no laws. No serious ones, anyway.

  What reagents do you work with? Mendoza asked.

  Els listed a few. Coldberg drew a pad from his portfolio and addressed the tip of his pen. What kind of bacteria are you stocking?