These days? Serratia marcescens. It’s a motile, short-rod anaerobe.
Coldberg asked for spelling. Mendoza ran his finger across the top of a twenty-four-well microplate sitting on the table.
Is it a pathogen? Coldberg asked.
Els stood still and composed himself. No offense, but this stuff is all over your bathroom. The grout in your shower. The water line in your toilet tank . . .
You don’t know my wife, Mendoza said.
Coldberg glared at his partner, then at Els. Is it harmful to humans?
Everything was harmful to humans.
It can give you infections, yes. Urinary tract. Conjunctivitis. But you’d have to work hard to hurt yourself with it. They used it in school labs, back when I was a kid. The Army sprayed it on San Francisco.
When was this?
I don’t know. Fifty years ago?
You’re not the Army, Coldberg said. And Els realized that he might be in trouble.
Coldberg waved the pen again, as if it were a laser pointer. What exactly are you doing with all this?
The question that should have been asked some time earlier hung in the air. Els waved toward the pipettes on a wall rack he’d made from kitchen clamps. Learning about cell biology. It’s a hobby. It’s a whole lot like cooking, to tell you the truth.
You’re not a biologist?
Els shook his head.
But you’re manipulating the DNA of a toxic organism?
I . . . If you want to describe it that way.
Why?
There were scores of good reasons, and not a single one would be credible to this pair. In the year of Els’s birth, no one had even known what a gene was made of. Now people were designing them. For most of his life, Els had ignored the greatest achievement of his age, the art form of the free-for-all future that he wouldn’t live to see. Now he wanted a little glimpse. Billions of complex chemical factories in a thimble: the thought gave him the cold chill that music once did. The lab made him feel that he wasn’t yet dead, that it wasn’t too late to learn what life was really about.
He said nothing. Coldberg picked up a petri dish. Where’d you learn how to manipulate microorganisms?
You know, genetics is not all that hard. It’s a whole lot easier than learning Arabic.
A grace note passed between the agents. Coldberg’s scribbling stopped.
Where’d you learn Arabic?
I don’t know Arabic, Els said. It was a figure of . . .
Then what’s that?
Coldberg pointed to a framed manuscript page hanging on the wall in the dining room: half domes with smaller half domes tucked in line underneath them, like the scalloped arches of a Sinan mosque. Each niche was emblazoned in flowing Arabic.
Els pressed his right temple with two fingers. That’s a sixteenth-century Ottoman manuscript showing an old system of musical notation.
Coldberg took out his phone and began snapping pictures.
Mendoza asked, You called Emergency Services last night?
Els nodded.
Your dog died? The police told you to call Animal Control?
Els shut his eyes.
Animal Control has no record of any call from you.
God, Els said. You think I nerve-gassed my dog?
Where’s the body? Mendozza asked.
The body. The evidence. I buried her out back.
You were instructed not to do that.
I was, Els agreed.
They’re in there? Coldberg pointed at the incubator with his chin.
Els considered the question. He crossed over to the unit. They’re harmless, if handled right. He moved to open the cabinet door. He wasn’t sure what he meant to do. Open up a cell culture flask and sniff it, maybe. Prove that it was no worse a threat than most pets.
The agents rushed him. Mendoza placed his ample body between the incubator and the seventy-year-old anemic composer. Coldberg came up behind. Els froze.
Coldberg shut the incubator with one thick hand. We’d like to take this with us.
Els stood waiting for the request to make sense.
Are you saying I . . . ? Do you have some kind of a warrant?
No, Coldberg said. We do not.
Is this legal? Am I being charged with anything?
No. You are not.
Everyone waited. The agents didn’t move. Their deference surprised Els. He seemed to have some kind of power of refusal, a power that might be fatal to use.
It shouldn’t be unplugged, Els said.
The agents waited. Els clasped the back of his neck and nodded.
Coldberg and Mendoza unplugged the incubator, wrapped it in duct tape, and carried it off. Els stepped aside, hearing the stacks of culture flasks rattle as the incubator went by. The colonies would be smashed and scattered before the two opera buffa extras got the box down to Anti-Terror HQ.
They passed the cloud chamber bowls, that seven-foot rack of sinister-looking, sawn-off carboys invented by Harry Partch, the hobo outsider. The agents set down the incubator long enough for Coldberg to snap more pictures. Els tapped the chimes, which rang out with excruciating microtones. It reassured no one. The agents carried the incubator out to the trunk of their black sedan. Els followed them out.
We’re going to ask you not to go anywhere for a couple of days, Mendoza told him.
Els stood in the parkway, shaking his head. Where in the world would I go?
Partch on the piano: “Twelve black and white bars in front of musical freedom.” I found an instrument free of all such bars.
He sat at the dining room table, stunned. He had to do something, but there was nothing useful to do. It crossed his mind to call an acquaintance, Kathryn Dresser, who worked on constitutional law at the college. But home invasion wasn’t Dresser’s field, and Els didn’t know her all that well. He’d never engaged a lawyer for anything, not even his divorce. Calling one now felt criminal.
He felt like suing. But righteousness would only incriminate him. Coldberg and Mendoza’s cards bore the address of a government building in Philadelphia, a generic email contact, and a phone. He’d failed to get any other information. He’d let two strangers come into his house and walk off with his lab equipment, no questions asked.
It wasn’t clear how much trouble he might be in. Perhaps the impounding was a routine precaution. The best thing was to keep still and see how things played out. Let the Joint Security people run their checks on him and on Serratia, his bacterium of choice. Let them comb through every datum collected on him in the course of seventy years and discover that he’d never even gotten a speeding ticket. Nine or ten days from now, long enough to punish him for making them waste valuable public resources on a false alarm, they’d ship the incubator back, dinged up and emptied out.
The day was shot for any real effort. His last week of work was ruined. Els drained off his nervous energy in the yard, deadheading daffodils and splitting the early hostas. He moved half the huge Blue Angel that filled the bed under the front bay window to the center of Fidelio’s grave. It would be beautiful there, by this time next spring.
When he could move no more plants around without doing damage, Els went inside and got on the computer. There, he made the rounds of his bookmarked DIY bio sites, to see whether the community of amateur researchers had any advice for a situation like this. One site mentioned a recent rise in legal confrontations. It linked to a grassroots group for citizens’ rights to do science.
A few clicks, and Els found himself scanning a recipe for getting ricin from castor beans. Botulism from stockpiles of cosmetics. Ebola from any of half a dozen obliging cults. Fifty minutes on the Net and he wanted to arrest himself.
But all the garage genetics sites agreed: a person could assemble a respectable plague for far less than five thousand dollars, without needing any fancy gene splicing. Spreading the plague, however, would be a problem. One link led to another, and before long, Els was lost in the whole Amerithrax saga, its byzantine plots—all
the mysteries surrounding those seven spore-filled letters. He’d forgotten about that nightmare—one of the largest investigations in history. The topic might have made a first-rate CNN opera.
Amerithrax led him to the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. From Tokyo, two clicks landed him on a rooftop in Miyako City, watching cars and trucks and warehouses and apartment buildings turning into driftwood on a hump of gray water that would not stop surging inland. A whole neighborhood tore loose and shot down the rapids. As the cell phone film panned, a stack of frothing water overtook the camera and the shot went black.
Els scanned down the long columns of related videos: Latest eyewitness. Tape captures eerie sounds. Most dramatic compilation. Survivors recount terror. Some clips had been clicked on a million times, some once or twice. Overnight, this carousel of catastrophe.
Among the hundreds of two-minute clips, right between Moment tsunami hits and Japan bids to save power plant, a prodigious automated sorting algorithm had inserted the bleakest of errors. Or maybe a human curator planted the link, a sadistic joke on the theme of disaster: a video that had gone viral on the day of the quake, racking up 62,700,312 views in the few days since. Els clicked and became number 62,700,313.
At his click, the room filled with a vivacious, pitch-corrected, and jaw-droppingly sunny little song. On Els’s screen, a thirteen-year-old singer woke up, went to the bus stop, joined her friends in a convertible, and visited a suburban house where an upper-middle-class teen party was in full swing. As the clip rolled, the hit count rose by ten thousand viewers. Shaking off the song, Els searched for an explanation. The Web teemed with ten thousand parodies, reactions, tributes, covers, homages, analyses, and news segments about the global phenomenon.
He looked up. It was past dinnertime, and he was starving.
. . .
THE LEBANESE MEZE restaurant not far from campus was hopping. But the oblivious crowd was just what he needed after his morning’s run-in with the law. Noises everywhere—ice sliding from pitchers, a rumble of silver on stoneware, the diffuse, rolling chorus of clientele swapping their strands of gossip—like one of those mad Stockhausen pieces composed in a fireworks-testing facility. Drink your wine with a glad heart, for God accepts your works.
Els asked for a table near the center of the room. Maddy had always accused him of being a closet extrovert. You are the Thomas Merton of music. You want to live in a hermitage in Times Square, with a big sign pointing to you reading, hermit.
Els smiled at the accusation, decades downstream. He imagined his wife across the table, shaking her head at the fix he’d gotten into. They had lived together for a handful of years, each year leaving them a little less explicable to each other. And still he sometimes joked with her ghost or sounded her out on the latest strangeness. Once Maddy had admired his compulsive need to make music; by the end, it merely baffled her. Garage genomics would have struck her as total madness.
You don’t hate the public, Peter. You need it. You want people to come drag you out of your cave and make you play them something.
Once, in his late twenties, in the full flush of skill-driven freedom, he wrote a hermetic, harmonically adventuresome song cycle for piano, clarinet, theremin, and solo soprano on texts from Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China.” The third song ran:
You do not need to leave your room.
Only sit at your table and listen.
Don’t even listen;
simply wait, be quiet,
still and solitary.
The world will offer itself to be unmasked.
It has no choice;
it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
The songs were performed twice, seven years apart, for a dozen puzzled listeners each time. That was the kind of music Els wrote: more people onstage than in the audience. Sometime in the late nineties, after the disaster of his three-hour historical drama The Fowler’s Snare, Els destroyed the only copies of many of his scores, including “The Great Wall” songs. The cryptic music now existed nowhere but in his ears. But he could hear it again, even above the restaurant din. He’d forgotten how jagged and eerie the whole cycle had been, how bent it was on its prophecy. He regretted destroying the piece. He could brighten the songs now. Give them room to breathe. A little light; some air.
He lifted his water glass and toasted the ghost sitting across the table from him: Guilty as charged. No one in the noisy room heard him.
AT HOME, HE had no lab to occupy his evening. He switched on the giant flat-screen. Sara had gotten it for him for his seventieth birthday, to keep him on progress’s forced march. On the vibrant high-def screen, a cloud of radiation drifted toward the largest urban conglomeration on Earth, just as in the worst disaster movies of his youth.
Els switched to a documentary on western wildlife. The soundtrack—a mythic, pentatonic meandering—bugged him, and he switched again. One click, and he landed on a corral full of string-bikini models whacking each other with giant foam hands. He killed the set and vowed to remove it from the room tomorrow, as he’d promised the doctor at the insomnia clinic he would do, months earlier.
The book on his nightstand opened to where he’d left off the night before. He stopped each evening at the top of the left-hand page, the end of the first paragraph—one of a thousand foolish, useful habits Madolyn had taught him. His wife was still so present in his habits that he couldn’t believe they’d been apart now for four times longer than they’d been together.
Els lay on his back in the enormous bed, trying to conjure up Maddy’s face. Her features had become one of those cheerful études from another century whose melodies he could remember only by spelling out the intervals.
He took up the open book, and once again, for another night, he trained his mind to settle in and read. It took some time to build up a rhythm. The sense of concentrated elsewhere filled him with that primal pleasure: seeing through another’s eyes. But after some paragraphs, a clause swerved and slid him sideways into a drift, a soft passage several pages on, in the middle of the right-hand page, a sense-rich description of a man and woman walking down a street in Boston on a July night, reprised, in misty da capo, again and yet once more, his eyes making their closed circuit, hitting the right margin’s guardrail, looping back around and trying the line again, tracking along the circuit of text, slowing then slipping down the stripped cogway of slick subordinate clauses, retrying the sequence until his dimming sight again found traction—the man, the woman, a moment of regretful truth along the esplanade—before snagging and starting the fuzzy looping climb all over again.
At last, after who knows how many round trips, he jerked awake. And the words on the page, before Els’s now-focused but disbelieving eyes, marshaled like troops on a parade ground and solidified, only to reveal no man, no woman, no night, no Boston, no exchange of intimate insight, but merely a Bulgarian writer describing the secret will of crowds.
He put down the book, shut off the light, and settled his head deeper into the pillow. As soon as the room went dark, he came wide awake. The floorboards snapped and blasted like an exchange of gunfire, and the furnace shuddered like a great engine of war.
I chose my host organism for the most naïve reason: it had a colorful history. That color was red.
Of love’s Pangaea, no more than a few scattered islands remained above water. And of Clara Reston, who listened to eight-hundred-year-old conductus as if it were a news flash, he remembered little that couldn’t fit into a five-minute student song. But she had turned Els into a pilgrim listener. Before Clara, no piece had any real power to hurt him. After, he heard danger everywhere.
The composers Els returned to at seventy—Pérotin, Bach, Mahler, Berg, Bartók, Messiaen, Shostakovich, Britten—were the ones that Clara taught him to love at nineteen. But along the way from exposition to coda, he’d betrayed them all. There were years in youth when all Els wanted was to write a piece so perfect it would cripple Clara with remorse. In middle age, he’d wanted only
to give her back something, for all she’d given him.
He never thought it strange that she had no friends. She’d jumped out early and alone into adulthood, long before he himself glimpsed their coming eviction from adolescence. He wondered sometimes if her life hid some spooky domestic secret that left her so precocious. She had life’s concert and all its program notes memorized, long before the performance started. Peter! You’ll love this one.
She applied to college in Indiana, to study cello with Starker in America’s best string program. Without a second thought, young Peter followed her. He didn’t even have a fallback school. His stepfather wouldn’t pay for him to major in music; Soviet science threatened the country’s very existence, and as Ronnie Halverson saw it, any able-minded eighteen-year-old had a duty to join the counteroffensive. And so, deep in the late fifties Midwest, Els set off after a bachelor of science. Better things for better living through chemistry.
Freshman year exhilarated him. He sat in the auditorium alongside four hundred other chemistry students while the lecturer scribbled down blackboards full of spirit writing from the world inside this one. The labs—titrating, precipitating, isolating—were like learning to play a wayward but splendid new instrument. Matter was thick with infolded mysteries waiting to be discovered. Coming from the lab, stinking of camphor, fish, malt, mint, musk, sperm, sweat, and urine, Els smelled the heady scent of his own future.
He still studied clarinet. In his second semester, he bested a dozen performance majors for a chair in the top undergraduate orchestra. The other woodwinds refused to believe he was wasting himself on test tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks. Clara just shrugged at his perversity. She glanced at him sometimes from across the orchestra, at her stand in the cellos, her patient smile waiting for him to discover what she already knew.
To Els, music and chemistry were each other’s long-lost twins: mixtures and modulations, spectral harmonies and harmonic spectroscopy. The structures of long polymers reminded him of intricate Webern variations. The outlandish probability fields of atomic orbitals—barbells, donuts, spheres—felt like the units of an avant-garde notation. The formulas of physical chemistry struck him as intricate and divine compositions.