So everything’s finished, then? Dead?
Her silence says that even early death might be luckier than he thinks.
There’s something playing in the background, on her stereo, in her little stone room in a medieval college cloister on the other side of the globe. Mahler. Mahler at breakfast, and although she denies it, he knows she has company. Another set of eager, learner’s ears.
But even now, in this frosted phone booth, under a streetlight that steams in the sublunary cold, melodies occur to him—devices and forms he never could have come up with on his own. His swollen, graying fingers fumble with the aerogram. He wants to scribble out a mnemonic to help him retrieve these sounds, once the concert is over, but he’s too numb to grip a pen.
So it was all a lie, he says. It all means nothing.
The echo turns her voice into a stretto. Peter. This has to happen. It’s something good, for both of us.
So this is it.
Stop being so dramatic. You’ll see me again. Life isn’t all that—
He needs two tries to settle the receiver back on the hook. His fingers are too weak to yank open the phone cabin door and free him. He fumbles out of the booth and starts to walk, down a street slick with black ice and empty of a single soul. His spine stiffens against the shock of the gelid night. He exhales, and air freezes to his upper lip. He breathes in, and it crystallizes on the walls of his lungs. He needs to go only six blocks. After two, he thinks: I’m in real trouble. He considers knocking on the door of the nearest house. But he’d be dead by the time anyone let him in.
He reaches his apartment, where his claws try to gain entry. His limbs are frostbitten, and by the time he gets inside, his face is numb. Even the icy tap water scalds like flame. His back has sprained itself from shivering. He crawls in bed and stays there for sixteen hours.
When he gets up, it’s to throw himself into work. Nothing can save him but a new piece—something bright and brutal and unforgiving.
Music, he’ll tell anyone who asks over the next fifty years, doesn’t mean things. It is things. And for all those years, in fifty-four pieces from fragments for solo flute and tape to full orchestra and five-part chorus, his music will circle around the same vivid gesture: a forward, stumbling surge that wavers, sometimes in a single measure, between the key of hope and the atonal slash of nothingness.
We will not sleep, but will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. You’ll see me again. But you’ll never know when. Hear that shifting, ambiguous rhythm, that promise of all things possible, and the ear is on its way to being free.
The miraculous mass at Bolsena, 1264: A fallen priest watched the host bleed on his robe during Communion. Faith restored.
The night was short and fitful, and his brief stint of unconsciousness did little for Els. In the worst of his suite of dreams, he had to defend Shostakovich’s third string quartet from a public tribunal. The tribunal accused the piece of being elitist, irresponsible, formalist, and full of coded misanthropy. Els tried to show the judges how rich the thing was, how full of splendid horror. But the tribunal only added those qualities to the charges.
Then the prosecutor turned the case against Els himself. He produced letters to Clara and Maddy in which Els confessed to loving certain kinds of music because most people found them worthless and ugly. The case went against him as he watched, and jurors from all over the Web weighed in with contempt and proposed humiliations. The dream took Els by the throat, and he woke up sucking air. Even surfacing in his raided house felt like a relief.
Joint Security Task Force: a federal outfit. No real threat had happened anywhere in the country for half a dozen years. A retiree with a kitchen lab in a rural college town was the worst they had to deal with.
He rocked himself out of bed and attended to his body. In the bathroom, he decided to make some inquiries after all. He’d send an email to that colleague of his in the Law Department. Safer: he’d visit her office and lay out everything. Then he’d call the numbers on the business cards Mendoza and Coldberg had given him and begin the whole process of straightening things out. Dealing with bureaucracies required no more than the patience of an animal and the simplicity of a saint. He could fake both, for a while.
But first, his Monday ritual: the Crystal Brook walking loop, followed by blueberry pancakes. Then he could place some calls before the midmorning class on twentieth century landmarks that he ran each week at Shade Arbors, for people so old they were landmarks themselves.
Way too late in life, Els learned that the time to concentrate yourself was right before sunrise. His greatest art now was to walk two hours before the neighborhood woke. Moving his legs left him blissful. Had he discovered the routine in young adulthood, he might have long ago amassed a portfolio of playful, exuberant creations that pleased him and gave delight to others.
He threw on his workout clothes—baggy gray painter paints and maroon waffle shirt—and drank his tea in his traditional happy silence. Then he grabbed the Fiat keys from the hook by the back door and called the dog. The dog didn’t answer.
It made no sense in a grand, American way: driving a mile to walk three. When he pulled up to Crystal Brook Park, the predawn sky was beginning to peach. Someone in the throes of early womanhood was already out jogging on the macadam loop. Wildflowers covered the ground, their colors soft in the sentinel light. White snowdrops, yellow aconite, and a carpet of crocuses almost indigo ran alongside scattered blooms whose names Els didn’t know, although he’d seen them every spring for decades. The morning air smelled silly with possibility.
As soon as he began to walk, yesterday’s debacle softened and grew manageable. Coldberg and Mendoza now seemed like the bumbling twin bowler-hatted inspectors in Tintin. He fell in a hundred yards behind the jogging woman and started on his own small steps to Parnassus. Every few yards he caught himself looking for Fidelio, as if the dog had run off somewhere.
The park could have been a seventeenth century landscape painting. Nothing tied Els to the present except for the jogging woman. She had on a sports bra and shorts of some shiny, environment-sensing tech material. She ran like an anatomy lecture. In Els’s youth, a woman dressed like that in a town like this would have been arrested for subverting public morals. She seemed to Els preternaturally desirable. Happily, he no longer felt desire.
She lapped him as he reached the central transect. He picked up his pace, jogging for a while behind her. An old man of seventy chasing an almost nude girl through a dawn glade: a scene straight out of Baroque mythological opera. The shining form in front of him pulled away again, laying waste to sloth, anomie, idle thought, and metaphor.
White wires ran from the cuff on her arm into her ears. Jogging and the portable jukebox: the greatest musical match since tape hit the V8. A thousand and one nights of continuous hits, all inside a metal matchbox. When this woman reached Els’s age, mind-controlled players would be sewn into the auditory cortex. And not a moment too soon, because the entire nation would be deaf.
It seemed to Els that Mahler would have loved the MP3 player, its rolling cabaret. His symphonies, laced with tavern music and dance tunes, were like a vulgar playlist. The fifth Kindertotenlieder had its eviscerating mechanical music box, and Das Lied von der Erde was inspired by one of the earliest cylinders recorded in China. Real composers didn’t fear the latest mass-market recording. They used it. But how to use one and a half million new songs a year?
Once, Els had spent months cutting quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape with razor blades and splicing the snips back together. He’d programmed a computer to generate a string quintet using probability functions and Markov chains. At this jogging woman’s age, he’d believed that digital technology might save art music from the live burial of the concert hall. Now the concert hall itself needed saving.
He drifted underneath the giant trunks, their branches drift-netting the dawn sun. The hundred trees had all gone into the park at the same time, and, in a long largo, they�
��d begun to leave the place together. Every high wind now brought down another hulk. The park would be a very different proposition—a sunny, trivial one—by the time Els, too, vacated the neighborhood.
The goddess had no use for trees. Her knees, like twin pistons, rose high and clean. Tiny daubs of sweat coated her olive limbs. Through the trees, Els glimpsed her in profile. Her face, resolute but neutral, focused a good hour or two into the future. She looped back up the path behind him, a bright, cyborg Thanks issuing from her as she flowed past.
A tinny munchkin backbeat trailed from her earbuds in her wake. Els couldn’t make out the flavor of her bliss. This park, these advance spring flowers, the sixty-degree air stolen from paradise, were colored for her by invisible instruments that no one but she could hear.
She ran down the path ahead of him, now and then reaching across with her right arm and grabbing at the arm cuff, as in a tricky cross-hands Chopin étude. It dawned on Els: she was canceling songs.
At the wooded edges of the pond to the south, the spring migration was gathering. Els counted the different calls, but lost track around eleven. Fresh, surprising music that escaped all human conventions: the very thing he’d spent his life searching for was here all along, free for the listening.
Off to his left, a crow cawed in the branches of a gaunt pine. Nearby, something small began to trill: an invisible soloist reinventing melody, as it had done for millions of years before human ears. Els trotted, light in the scattered racket of the morning chorus. The jogger appeared again through a clearing, still executing her merciless verdicts. She averaged half a minute between swipes—judge and jury in a kangaroo court. Every few dozen steps she condemned the Now Playing to the dustbin of history.
Her player must have contained thousands of tracks tagged by artist, year, genre, and user rating. A few menu clicks and she could be the Minister of Culture for her own sovereign state of desire. Yet she turned away twenty times as many auditioners as she let through. The explanation came to Els after another quarter mile: shuffle—the Monte Carlo game that had changed music forever. She was running through her several thousand tunes like random speed-date suitors. Songs were breaking over her in waves of wild accident—the mix-and-match mashup that was her birthright.
She rounded the southeast corner of the park, toward the high school, flicking away tunes like evolution’s demiurge. She was looking for something, the perfect sonic drug. And the medicine chest was endless: the laughing gas of a forties big band, a highball of brassy show tunes, punk heroin, techno-ecstasy, folk songs like a pack of tobacco, the hashish trance of Pali chanting, a caffeinated Carnatic raga, cocaine-tinged tango . . .
A player filled with her private reserve, and still the random shuffle produced dozens of songs in a row that had to be killed. Or maybe she was streaming on mobile broadband—3 or 4 or 5G, or whatever generation the race had reached by that morning. A server farm on the far side of the planet was piping down one hundred million tracks of recorded music into her blood pressure cuff, and none suited. The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste. How many tunes did anyone need? One more. The next new one.
All the bogus bacterial blood is a pigment called prodigiosin. From prodigiosus—strange, remarkable, wondrous—a prodigy.
The sun had risen and the neighborhood was waking. Car wheels a block away thrummed on the asphalt. Els rounded the park’s southwest corner and passed the driveway of a mock-Tudor house, where a man in navy sweats and a T-shirt—Gravity: Not Just a Good Idea—was putting two plastic trash cans the size of a Mercury space capsule out on the curb. The man waved to Els as if they knew each other. Els waved back, in case they did.
He’d see what he could discover, online. Maybe the ACLU had a hotline. Coldberg and Mendoza had no warrant. His rights had surely been violated.
The goddess came up behind him again, her step matching the latest beat coming through the thin white wires. A Persian tar improvisation to cure melancholy. A Ukrainian funeral lament. Every tune in creation lined up in her shuffled stream, waiting to take its ten-second turn.
Els stepped off into the grass as she shot by. Above him, in the branches, the air still rang with birdsong. Check the day. Drop it, drop it, pick it up, pick it up. What cheer, what cheer, cheer, cheer, cheer? Why don’t you come to me? Messy sprung rhythms spilled out over every bar line Els could draw for them. If any grand, guiding rule held these rhythms together, Els was too crude and long-lived a creature to hear it. The racket was like the local combined middle schools set loose with a copy of GarageBand. Surplus bothered no one here. The noise washed over him, brisk and urgent and shining.
Through that clatter came a news flash. Three strong notes descended in a major triad, then riffed on the tonic in a dotted rhythm:
Sol, mi, do-do-do-do-do-do-do . . .
A thing no bigger than a child’s fist was asserting a chord as brazen as any that a kid Mozart might plunk out prior to taking it through a maze of rococo variations. Els scanned the trees, but the perp hid. Maybe the bird had ripped off a playing child or heard the notes spill out of a summer convertible. Birds were big on mimicking. Mozart’s pet starling liked to mock the theme from his G Major Piano Concerto, K. 543. Australian lyre birds could mimic camera shutters, car alarms, and chain saws so perfectly they passed for real.
With two brisk tweaks of pitch the bird launched another descending arpeggio, like a pranking Beethoven having one over on the audience:
Fa me do-do-do-do-do-do-do . . .
The bird might as well have chirped Eureka or sketched out a circle in the dirt with a twig in its beak. Much of twentieth century music had been lost to the idea that the diatonic scale was arbitrary and exhausted, part of the bankrupt narrative that had led to two world wars. Nothing mattered but finding a new language. Now this feathered thing sat up in the branches, singing its triads and making a fool of him. Evolution had its innermost needs, tens of millions of years old.
The goddess startled Els; he couldn’t imagine how she’d lapped him again so soon. She saw him standing paralyzed under the trees and stopped. She pulled the white wires from her ears.
Are you okay? Her accent—thick, nasal, and Mid-Atlantic—came straight out of Philly.
Els pointed. The bird answered for him, its perfect phrase. The goddess’s eyebrows pulled down; her lips twisted.
White-throated sparrow! She opened her mouth wide, and a clear, bright alto poured out. Poor Sam Peabody-peabody-peabody . . .
The bird answered, and the imitator laughed.
Thank you, Els said. I’ve never heard that one.
Oh-migod. I love that bird. I wait for him, every spring.
She backed away, turning on one heel as if she’d never broken stride.
Wait, Els said. The lone benefit of age: you could ask anything and frighten no one. He raised both hands and pointed at each ear. What are you listening to?
She should have jogged off without saying another word. But the young knew that life would henceforth be forever lived in a fishbowl, and they liked it that way. The names of her tracks were doubtless being beamed to her social networking page, even as she nixed them.
The buds lay draped across her shoulder, like a stricken stick insect. She took them in her fingers.
I’m sorting through some new stuff. Tagging things for later.
I hope you have a tag for “sooner,” too?
The words wrinkled her forehead. Song came from the trees. Sam tried out a fresh new triad. Delight distracted the girl, and she forgot the question.
When she looked back down, Els grinned. Why listen to anything else, if you can hear that?
The goddess laughed, not getting the joke.
You have a lovely voice, Els said. He wanted to say: Worth waiting for every spring.
Pleasure reddened the jogger’s face. Thanks.
She edged away. Els ached to call her back.
Faust’s parting shot to life: Stay awhile; you’re so beautiful. But then, he felt like saying that to everything, these days. She smiled, put the buds back in her ears, waved, and looked again up into the tree, at the invisible maker. Then she turned back to the jogging track, and, like so much else that Els took for granted on that disastrous morning, vanished forever.
Prodigiosins kill fungus, protozoa, and bacteria. They might even cure cancer. Their red is the color of pure possibility.
It’s 1963, Els’s final month at that massive musical factory pumping out performers from the fields of rural Indiana. All winter long, he’s studied with Karol Kopacz, and now it’s spring, his last undergraduate May. Old Klangfarben Kopacz: Polish by way of Argentina, one of those aging terrors from the era of cultural giants who died in the war and were resurrected in the Americas, the marble guardians of a lost art. From what Els can tell, Kopacz hasn’t put a note in front of the public for twenty years. The man seems to care nothing for music anymore, though he knows it better than most people know how to breathe.
Els sits in his mentor’s office in a corner of the Old Music Building. Every surface of Karol Kopacz’s lair, including the baby grand, is heaped high with moldering books and papers, loose scores, records long divorced from their cardboard sleeves, brass Shiva Natarajas, a broken bandoneón, a stringless oud, plates of forgotten sandwich, and a framed photo of an almost handsome younger man underneath the bear paw of Stravinsky that Kopacz has never bothered to hang. Channels through the clutter lead from the door to the desk, the desk to the piano, the piano to the veined leather love seat where cowed composition students sit and take their weekly beatings.
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