Every seven days, Peter Els brings the man the best that his green soul can generate. Kopacz sits and scans Els’s systems in silence. Then he tosses the scores back, saying, Lots of traffic and no cops, or Too many peaks, not enough valleys. For days afterward, Els rages against the man’s glib dismissals. But a month later, he’s always in complete agreement.
Today Els brings a thing of antic splendor for solo piano. It feels fresh, quirky, and young, everything art ought to be. It’s an openhearted gamble, keen with both reason and love.
His professor looks at the first measure and grimaces. What is all this?
It’s a compact chromatic phrase, packed with every one of Western music’s twelve available notes, twice over. Els stole the idea from Henry Cowell, who may have stolen it from Scriabin, who surely stole it from someone even older.
Go to the piano, Kopacz commands. Peter does as told. He may be a budding revolutionary, but he’s an obedient one.
Hit a key.
Els reaches out one finger. Which . . . ?
The émigré presses one hoary hand over his eyes, as if the genocidal century has finally caught up with him and he can flee no farther.
Peter hits a key.
Thank you, his mentor says, oozing grace. What do you hear?
C? Peter tries. His brain scrambles for the real answer. C-two. Great C.
Yes, yes, Kopacz snaps. What else? Again!
Bewildered, Peter restrikes the note.
Well? Mother of God. Just listen.
Els strokes the key. He doesn’t understand. It might be a foghorn at night. It might be the singing radiator from his childhood bedroom. It might be the first note of the first prelude of the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. He strikes again, harder, but says nothing.
His teacher hangs his head and groans for civilization’s sad waste. Just listen, he begs. Stay inside the sound.
Els does. The building’s torrent of heating switches off, audible now that it stops. He hears the plosives of two people bickering. Down the hall, someone runs through the Adagio from the Pathétique. Someone else grinds out four measures from the Elgar Cello Concerto until it sounds like Fluxus. A soprano vocalizes in rapid chromatic swells and dips, the cartoon cue for seasickness. Something that sounds like a large cardboard box knocks against the brick wall at six-second intervals. Outside, a young couple flirts in muffled Spanish. Blocks away, a siren makes its way toward someone’s life-erasing disaster. Through it all, Karol Kopacz sits slumped at his desk, face in his hands, drowning in bitter music.
Els blocks him out and listens. He focuses until the note he keeps striking breaks in two. Obvious, what else is there, now that he stops assuming that there’s nothing else to hear.
I also hear C-three.
He braces for abuse. But his teacher barks in triumph.
Thank you. Maybe your ear does function, after all. What else?
Relief turns back into panic. Surely there’s more to the game. But since Peter can now hear the G above that octave C, a perfect fifth shining out like a ray through cloud, he’s forced to say so.
Go on, the displaced Pole commands. Now the game is flushed out into the open. Above that perfect fifth, a perfect fourth. Els has never before taken the fact seriously: hovering above any tone is twice that tone, and triple it, and on up the integers.
He has the map; he knows what islands must be out there, farther off at sea. He stops breathing and concentrates himself. Soon he thinks he can hear the C above the G above the C above the original C ghosting in his ear. He claims as much, and glances at his teacher for a reward. Kopacz’s curled fingers wave lazy ellipses in the air: Don’t stop now.
Higher still, there hides a major third, then a minor one, and out above that, the entire harmonic series. Els knows the sequence; he could cheat with impunity. But he’s still a beginner in his own life, saddled with virulent idealism. He won’t claim any pitch he can’t in fact hear.
It dawns on Els that even a newborn must feel suspense and resolution, tensions drawn from this series of concealed pitches that the ear detects without knowing. For a beat or two, he flirts with apostasy; maybe the laws of harmony aren’t a straitjacket imposed by random convention, after all. He strikes the key harder. It blots out the performance students down the hall, struggling to master their craft. He strains to extract that E above the third C, high up the rainbow of this single note. But the longer he listens, the more that pitch is lost in the angry hum of the fluorescent lights.
E, Kopacz taunts, in a half reverie. Another G. B-flat above that.
Peter can’t tell if the man claims to hear those pitches, or if, like a high-energy physicist, he’s simply asserting their theoretical existence. Audible or not, they’re all present: every pitch in the chromatic scale. Sweet stability and crashing discord, the palette for everything from sultry seduction to funeral mass, and Peter has gone his whole life hearing nothing but the fundamental.
Kopacz holds Els’s composition up in the air with his left hand. He smacks it with the wiggling fingers of his right. How many busy little notes do you need to play at once? Use a single C, and be done with it.
Peter glares, but his teacher doesn’t notice. The man busies himself with pushing back the frenzied referendum of his white hair. He slumps in his broken Bauhaus chair and commands, Now: C-sharp.
When the bell rings, ending the lesson, it sounds to Peter Els like the Tristan chord. He drops the score of his frenetic piano prelude in the green dumpster behind the Music Building, on top of scraps of drywall, a broken desk, and bales of waste office paper. He retreats to his dorm cell and digs in. From behind the union, the bullhorn-led call-and-response of a demonstration floats across Dunn Meadow. The chants for justice sound, in his ear, like ardent folk choruses begging to be orchestrated.
He works late, purging his style of all its superfluous flash and dazzle. He lets the phone nag on, a burr that becomes a whole parfait of pitches. Unanswered knocks on the door ring like tympani. The muffled joy of two new LPs released that very week seep through his cinder-block walls, two wildly different records that will go on to remake the world and leave a wake of nostalgia for decades to come. He hears these sounds the way Debussy heard his first gamelan band.
His desk drawer squeak turns into a tone poem and the hinge of his dorm room door soars like a Heldentenor. Briefly, Els’s music retreats into a staggering simplicity. But two months later, he’s back to his arcane self, the lesson lost, or not so much lost as tucked away, in a whole spectrum of overtones beyond his ear’s ability to hear.
M. H. Gordon gargled Serratia and recited Shakespeare in the House of Commons, 1906, to see if speech spread germs through the air.
In the Fiat on the way back, Els resisted the urge to turn on the radio. Not that the news frightened him anymore: by the time the Apocalypse came, we’d all long since have habituated. But the ride home took only five minutes, and anything he might learn about the Libyan no-fly zone or the Fukushima radiation cloud was not worth the further atomization of his brain. Two years earlier, he’d come across the first reports about chronic focal difficulty, from a source he could no longer remember. Since then, he’d tried to take his media in nothing smaller than fifteen-minute doses.
The account of the thirty-eight-year longitudinal study had shaken him: Two researchers, one now dead, had spent thirteen thousand days in blinding tedium, testing people. The study was more rigorous than elegant. But the brute data were undeniable. Over almost four decades, people in every North American demographic had lost, on average, somewhere around one-third of their “sustained focusing interval.” The two researchers—whose names Els failed to retain—documented significant declines in how well people could filter out distractions and attend to simple tasks. The country’s collective concentration was simply shot. People couldn’t hold a thought or pursue a short-term goal for anywhere near as long as they could a few years before, back in the waning days of analog existence.
Th
e blogs bounced the story around for half a dozen days. Then chronic focal difficulty disappeared into its own symptoms. Collapses in phytoplankton and fish populations and honeybee hives, bedbugs and cyberworms, obesity and killer flu: life was awash in too many disorders to pay any one of them more than a few minutes’ mind. But the study gave Els the same shudder he’d felt the day he first saw a list of the top one hundred terms that passed through the world’s largest search engine. Soon afterward, he began choosing silence over any kind of background listening.
In silence, he drove back home. He saw the commotion just before turning onto Linden. His first thought was that his next door neighbor had had another heart attack. Two cream-colored, windowless vans sat in Els’s drive. A sedan stretched alongside them, in the parkway. Streamers of yellow tape cordoned off his house in a geometric proof gone wrong. The repeating, black, all-caps words—do not cross—hummed in the wind.
Men in white hoods and hazmat suits carried equipment out of his front door. A trio in business suits directed traffic. Coldberg stood at the top of the concrete steps, swiping at a mobile device. Through the gap between the houses, in the far corner of Els’s backyard, two more hazmat suits were digging up Fidelio’s grave.
Els edged the car to the curb, his hands fighting the wheel. The scene might have been a European shock-opera staging of the final scene of Boris Godunov. Men in puffy white space suits stacked his belongings in storage bins, which they labeled and photographed and placed in the backs of the vans. They moved with practiced efficiency in their hoods and gloves, like biohazard beekeepers. One of the hooded foot soldiers toyed with Els’s digital lab scale. Another cradled Els’s computer tower as if rescuing an infant from a fire. A box of lab glassware sat in the front lawn. On top of it, in a sealed two-gallon Ziploc, lay Els’s sixteenth-century print of Arabic music.
The squad went about stripping his house, as if in an installment of bad reality TV. Els wanted to run out of the car and shout down the intruders. Instead, he sat watching the impossible scene in a haze of presque vu. The middle-aged flight attendant across the street stood in her yard shooting pictures with a cell phone until one of the dress-suited men crossed over and made her stop. A triumphant shout came from the backyard excavation. Els slouched down on the car seat, shading his face. When the man in the suit turned back to the house, Els eased the Fiat away from the curb and out into the open street.
He had to think. In a sweep of left turns, he rounded the adjacent block. A wartime image of the inside of his house popped into his head: CD jewel cases strewn on the floor, books riffled and cast around, the cloud chamber bowls shattered, lab equipment and chemicals confiscated in a hundred labeled baggies. Pictures and papers, sketches for aborted compositions, all picked over by white-suited troops.
Four turns on, he nosed back down Taylor, up to Linden. From half a block away, he watched a hazmat suit on his roof stick a pole down his chimney. Another was testing Ziploc samples with a handheld meter out of the rear of one of the vans. In the backyard, two men scraped mud from his ex-wife’s quilt and collected it in sample bottles. At their feet was a ten-gallon plastic storage box filled with a lump of muddy ochre. Fidelio.
Els hung at the corner stop sign. He needed time. He’d broken no laws. Coldberg and Mendoza had charged him with nothing. They’d only told him to stay close. He needed an hour to calm down and prepare a story. The Fiat pulled straight through the intersection and kept on going.
He drove at random. To clear the static in his head, he flipped on the radio. An Emmy-award-winning actor was holding his ex-wife hostage in her Aspen condo. Els found himself on the western edge of campus. He could park and go find Kathryn Dresser, for legal advice. But she’d only tell him to put his faith in the hands of the same authorities who were gutting his house for no reason.
Campustown’s commercial strip loomed up on his right, and he turned in. Students drifted in front of his car like targets in the easy levels of a video game. The street stank of fried food. He’d had nothing to eat since the night before. He parked at a meter that still had forty minutes on it, and for an instant he felt like this was his lucky day.
In the corner of a chain coffee shop he sat and nursed breakfast: frothy almond milk and a blueberry muffin as big as a small ottoman. Tension turned his waffle shirt rancid with sweat. Through speakers mounted around the room came a thumpy, hypnotic, overproduced, swollen, irresistible river of lust. The groove looped around three pitches—tonic, minor third, and tritone—while a singer chanted dense, allusive words in shifting, irregular rhythms.
The best thing to do was to turn himself in. His picked-through belongings would prove his innocence. But Joint Security agents had his notebooks, full of their fantasias on bacterial modification. They had his computer, with its cache and browsing history. Hours from now, they would identify the sites he’d visited the previous afternoon—the ricin recipes; the anthrax.
Back out on the sunlit street, campus felt foreign and diffident. Students in shorts and tees, their bared limbs sporting wholesome tattoos, swerved around him without looking up from texting. Els took the diagonal path toward the Music Building. A small, voluble, promiscuously friendly professor of violin walked toward him, waving. Coming here was madness; he spun around and fled.
He hurried back to the car and headed to an ATM on the other side of campus. The screen of the drive-up cash machine threatened him with several choices. Els withdrew two hundred dollars. How soon would the transaction be traceable? A video camera behind the smoky glass gaped at him, and he brushed the bangs from his eyes.
He drove to the public library, three blocks away. It was empty at this hour, except for mothers with small children, other retirees, and street people. In a carrel near the first-floor periodicals, he settled in to clear his head. Two months before, in this same spot, he’d read a magazine article about new Patriot Act provisions. Something about the government being able to keep citizens confined indefinitely on no evidence. All he could remember from the story now was the phrase “hold until cleared.”
In another few hours, the news would break. Els headed to the stacks on the second floor. He stood in front of the life sciences, running his finger down the spines, inventorying the titles he’d checked out over the two years since his obsession began. A memoir by the top scientist in the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program. A social history of plagues. A book called Escape from Evolution. With a few keystrokes into the right databases, an investigator could find every incriminating title that Peter Els had read over the last ten years.
A groan escaped him. The sound startled an ashen librarian with dancer’s hands who sat at the reference desk near the top of the stairs.
Is everything all right?
Yes, Els said. Forgive me.
He got back into the car and drove. Coming down Linden, he saw the local news channel vans from two and a half blocks away. He panicked and turned left on Taylor. The crime scene shrank to nothing in his wake.
Researchers sprayed Serratia in hospitals, to study bacterial drift. Biology students rinsed in it, to watch it travel by touch.
Clara had told him how Mahler sent the young Alma Schindler the manuscript of the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony without any explanation. Alma sent it back, inscribed with the word “Yes.” Weeks later, they married. That’s how it was to have been for Peter and Clara. Then Clara went to Oxford to study music on a full scholarship, where, in quick succession, she chalked up a trio of men whose accomplishments made Peter’s look like amateur hour.
Clara never bothered to tell Els the rest of the Mahler courtship fable. Only when Alma entered Gustav’s life did his music descend into real despair. Battles, lies, betrayal, death. All the stoic affirmation of the young songs and symphonies—What the Universe Tells Me, etc.—ran smack into incurable bitterness. Adorno called Mahler ein schlechter Jasager: a poor yes-sayer. Once Alma entered his life and the two of them began flaying each other raw, Mahler could do nothing b
ut continue saying the word, with less and less conviction or cause. And deep in his own free fall, young Peter kept listening to the music, well beyond the point where its poor and desperate yes could help him.
The Army used Serratia for decades to test bioweapons: San Francisco, New York subways, Key West. But I’m the wanted criminal.
Until Els stood in that phone booth after midnight, pleading with a stranger on another continent, the coins freezing to his hands, he had nothing like a yes of his own worth saying. Then Clara left, and the real music came. It was one of those arcane exchanges people in operas make with mysterious visitors. The moment the woman with the four feet of hair abandoned Peter to life alone in the barren Midwest, strange, vital, viral creations began pouring out of him.
Every one of those pieces was a message aimed at that now-alien woman. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses. If the least of his manuscripts had ever come back to him penciled with so little as an exclamation mark, Els would have been at Heathrow two days later, in debt to the tune of a transatlantic flight, ready for whatever hope Clara wanted to dangle in front of him.
Instead, he headed off alone to make a new base camp in that little Darmstadt in the prairies. Champaign-Urbana in the early 1960s: an island in the archipelago of I-80 avant-garde, a breeding ground for mutant musical strains surrounded by hundreds of miles of corn, soybean, and rural, religious America in every direction. The perfect place for six more years of school.
A golden age was breaking out in that progressive boondocks. The adventurers who taught composition—Hiller and Isaacson, Johnston, Gaburo, Brün, Hamm, Martirano, Tenney, Beauchamp—made up new rules as fast as they could break them. The infamous Festival of Contemporary Arts and the first electro-acoustic facility in America turned the whole scene into a brilliant party. The spell of math and the pull of charged particles: Els recognized the place even before he hit town.
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