Orfeo

by Richard Powers

  In fifty minutes, the sun shed enough energy to power civilization for a year. Six thousand people died; thirteen thousand were born. One hundred days of video were uploaded to the Web, along with ten million photos. Twelve billion emails went out, eight-tenths of them spam. A dozen of them involved terror plans, real or fantastic. The angel came and passed over again—eternity in an hour.

  During the last louange—that slow violin climb beyond the top stair—the group of old people sat lost in their own listening, braced against the rising pitch. They were an outlawed sect, a church-basement AA meeting, a study group prepping for the pop quiz of death.

  The music climbed up into nothingness, and ended. Els shut off the phone and looked up. His house was surrounded by yellow bunting reading do not cross. He’d sleepwalked across town to teach a class, when he should have driven straight to the main police station half a mile from his home and turned himself in.

  Well, he began. But someone shushed him.

  Lisa Keane held up one palm. Could we please just . . . ? Paulette Hewerdine pressed three fingers over her mouth, ambushed by the thought of an old and careless cruelty. Shields swung his head like a searchlight. Each held on, a little longer, to the silence of their choosing.

  The engineer Bock was first to speak. Holy crap. That was fifty minutes? I now know how to double my remaining life.

  No one seemed to need anything more from Els. For the better part of an hour, they’d done nothing but listen. There was nothing to do now but come up slowly enough to avoid the bends.

  The eight of them stood, shaking off one of those spells of syncope that old people grow skilled at covering up. They grinned at each other: What the hell was all that? Then the flood of talk, the partisan atmosphere of a première.

  Shields and Keane stood near the coffeepot arguing like undergraduates. Bock and Baroni were already halfway down the hall to the cafeteria, their arms windmilling, when Klaudia Kohlmann grazed Els’s shoulder. You going to give us homework?

  Her words woke Els. He called out to the stragglers, Listen—I may have to cancel next week. He pointed at his left wrist, which had not seen a watch for fifteen years. If you don’t hear from me by Wednesday, assume I’m tied up.

  Or (more Cage) “the mind may give up its desire to improve on creation and function as a faithful receiver of experience.”

  A Friday night in winter, late in ’67, and Peter rides shotgun in the borrowed secondhand microbus, a little frantic because the Happening started at eight—fifteen minutes ago—and neither he nor the luminous Madolyn Corr has the faintest idea where the Stock Pavilion is. They’re looking for a beaux arts, barrel-vaulted, red-brick, pre-slaughterhouse animal show rink on the south campus, down toward the round barns. No such place seems to exist.

  Maybe Cage made it all up, Maddy says. He’d do that, wouldn’t he? Some kind of Zen koan?

  Els peeks out from behind his fingers. I’m pretty sure that was a stop sign, he whimpers.

  We’re good! Maddy turns to him sidesaddle as the microbus swerves, and she gives his biceps a reassuring squeeze. We’re good!

  Only weeks ago, this assured, game, knowing girl from the North Country landed in the middle of Els’s life, and the film went from black-and-white to Day-Glo in a single jump cut. Last night, in her bed, that fresh new continent, she perched over him, mock-worried, taking his face in her hands like a surgeon takes a wound under the loupes. She squinted at him, cooing, Mr. Composer. What is it? What’s wrong? Behind the muscles of his own face, he could feel the evidence she laughed at—the perilous open prospects, the wonder bordering on pain, and how could he explain it? This bright confusion, the discovery that he might have a real companion in this life, after all.

  I’m happy, he told her.

  You sound surprised.

  You have a good ear.

  She took his hand in the dark. What is it that you do with your fingers all the time?

  What?

  She showed him, tapping out rhythms with her second finger on the pad of her thumb.

  Oh, that! Nervous habit.

  You look like the Buddha making a mudra.

  He hadn’t done it for years, not since Clara. He didn’t even realize he’d started up again until that moment. The taps—miniature pieces, rushing out to populate the future.

  I’m singing.

  Mr. Composer, she said, crawling on top of him. You got something to sing about?

  He does. And the somethings are all her. She can blow away a year’s worth of his fear with a single amused pout. She pulls him out of himself, into the broader neighborhood, the worldwide scavenger hunt. Her groove is wide and sure enough to hold them both.

  A BITTER NOVEMBER night, the pitch-black edge of campus, and Maddy guides the microbus filled with amplifiers and cables belonging to the band she sings for—a psychedelic quintet called Vertical Smile—across the frozen sheets of street as if she’s piloting a one-seat Skeeter ice boat across the frozen lakes of her Minnesota childhood. All the while she hums, under her breath, the B-side of the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”: “Why.”

  Oblivious, she chants the tune, as if her id were mumbling a sexed-up rosary. Her humming is what has set this hook so deep in him. Six weeks earlier, Els tacked up a three-by-five card on the notice board at Smith Hall. Looking for clear-voiced high soprano to read through four hard new songs. Must not be afraid of strange. Madolyn Corr was his lone responder. She showed up at the practice room at the arranged time, overly confident of her attractions: five-foot-four, with a pageboy, in a green velour miniskirt. They read through his piece together from the pencil-scrawled score. Peter struggled through the accompaniment and Maddy Corr stopped every few measures to say, I’m not sure the human voice can do that. Soon the score bore so many corrections that reading it was like doing paleontology.

  Her sound was witty, almost comical. She had a nice, warm soubrette, but a hint too light and Papagena for his Borges songs. What he wanted was spinto, or even a coloratura. But Els was grateful for any voice at all that could hit the notes. They woodshedded together for two hours, he for his piece and she on the promise of nothing but pizza and beer. When they got to the end of the fourth song, she stood next to the piano bench, happy-frowning, the look that, years later, he’d call her frog face.

  Well?

  Well, what?

  Well, what do you think?

  She considered the question for too long.

  Pretty eerie.

  And that was all she gave him—a kiss-off reply that should have furled his sails for good. He would have sent her away with professional thanks and never seen her again, if not for that promise of pizza and beer. Half an hour later, waiting for their deep-dish mushroom and running out of gossip about the local musical pecking order, she started humming to herself, happy but unaware, her eyes periscoping the crowded room, checking out the men. She looped through a little four-bar phrase, again and again, and the phrase she looped through, without thinking, was from Peter’s third Borges song, the sudden lyrical announcement:

  He did not work for posterity,

  nor did he work for God,

  whose literary preferences were

  largely unknown to him.

  And Peter, who’d written the songs for forever and for no one, but also to strike remorse in the heart of the woman who’d cut him loose from across the Atlantic four years earlier, now wanted only to put his ear up to the clavicle of this other, warmer woman and hear what there was inside her so worth humming about.

  Doing anything later? he asked.

  Depends, she answered, her mouth full of melted provolone. How much later?

  For two weeks they walked everywhere, under the color-shot trees and out into the harvested fields. The last few deciduous flares of October played against clear eggshell skies, and Els’s adopted town had never looked so beautiful. Maddy Corr told him about her favorite harebrained scheme.

  Know what would be a total trip? Take a dozen friends up t
o my family’s fifty acres in Crow Wing County and farm it. It’s sandy as hell, but you could grow cranberries. There’s a cottage, a barn. The chicken coop could be winterized. Farm by day, make music under the oaks at night!

  Els shook his head at the miracle of her. You have a dozen friends?

  She laughed, thinking he was joking. How about you? Forbidden fantasies, Mr. Composer?

  But Els had none, unless it was to have already written Ligeti’s twenty-part, micropolyphonic Requiem before Ligeti did.

  Maddy’s eyes crossed a little when he went on too long about harmonic structure. She had no need to talk about music, only to make it. But in her presence, Els couldn’t help himself. He told her about every sketch lying dormant in his workbooks. She laughed and dared him toward her, fingers fluttering underhand. Bring it on, champ. Let’s see what you got.

  She showed him her latest art: a quilt bigger than both of them, pinwheels of azure and ochre. She wrinkled up her nose. Learned how to do this from my maiden aunt when I was twelve. Kind of an old lady hobby, isn’t it?

  Something magical to it: rags into riches, scraps into art. Els ran his fingers over the intricate design, its moons and suns and stars. Does it mean something?

  Maddy snorted and wrapped the thing around him. It means you don’t have to be cold at night, if you don’t want to. That night they slept under it together, and it turned out she was right. Soon after, she began to steal his shirts and work them into her next, more dazzling design.

  Nights with Maddy were a slow build. In a few small steps, she taught Peter the cadence of her desire. They moved on her kapok mattress like a single, eight-limbed thing. All the fragments of Els’s desire came together like that effortless fugato Mozart’s Jupiter had predicted, back in childhood. And for the first time in years, Clara’s decision to leave Els for dead felt luckier than anyone could have guessed.

  Without meaning to, he told Maddy Corr about a pan pipe dream all his own. They were lying in bed, site of all their best discussions. I want to write music that will change its listeners.

  Change how?

  Move them beyond their private tastes. Bring them to something outside themselves. He lifted one arm into the air, the wistful reach of a thwarted lover. Does that sound crazy?

  She reached up, too, and drew his skyhook hand back down to her chest. Crazy’s up to you.

  I’m not sure what that means.

  Those hundred thousand peace protesters, trying to levitate the Pentagon?

  Okay, Els said. I get it. Crazy.

  No! She crushed his fingers in hers until he winced. They could have done it, if they’d really wanted to. Science is built on stranger things.

  He rolled over and draped his arms over the fall of her hip. Keep talking, he told her. I’m listening.

  Cage again: “What is the purpose of writing music? . . . A purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play.”

  Four weeks on, Els and this humming woman slalom in the dark, late for the evening’s spectacle, searching for a building they can’t find. They have directions, but the hopeless kind of directions midwesterners give: north, south, east, west. Left and right would be too easy. It’s as if the brain of every farmer out here in the endless Cartesian plan of prairie is magnetized. Maddy is a bubble of tantric bliss behind the wheel, forever a sightseer in her own life. She pilots the microbus like a dogsled, and Els won’t live to see twenty-seven.

  Her ear always hears him, in every key. She turns to look, takes his elbow, and smiles. The microbus skids sideways down the street, sending an oncoming car to the curb.

  You’re worried about being late? For somebody who consults the I Ching to answer journalists’ questions?

  I don’t want to miss anything.

  A week ago, at a gathering in the student union, Els heard Cage tell a distraught composer, If you want to order creation around, that’s your problem, not mine. Well: guilty as charged. Creation is much in need of ordering. That’s what Els thought composing meant. But Cage’s creation has other plans, and Els just wants to understand them.

  Three months ago, at the performance of Cage’s Concerto for Prepared Piano, Els watched the pianist crawl under the instrument and wallop it with a mallet. Someone in the audience began to scream. The widow of a venerable School of Music professor stormed up onstage and started hurling chairs at the soloist. The police arrived and hauled the widow away as she shouted, Ladies and gentlemen, this is no laughing matter! But everyone around Els in the hall just chuckled and applauded, sure that the antics were all part of the piece in question.

  There! Els yelps, and points off into the dark, where clumps of people converge on a dappled brick cow palace wrapped in pools of light. The Stock Pavilion. That afternoon, the building was full of sheep being led through a ring in front of a judges’ reviewing stand. Tonight, it’s the venue for Musicircus, a multimedia extravaganza staged by the master of chance, who has, for the last half a year, been leading this land-grant university to hell twelve ways to Sunday.

  Maddy coaxes the microbus into a parking spot. The pavilion throbs when they step out, even from half a block away. They make their way to the crowded doorway, where bursts of thunder and light escape the building every time the doors open. A dazed clump of people already bail out of the building, shaking their heads, palming their ears, and discharging some top-shelf profanity.

  Inside, it’s something out of Dante. The cavernous oval swarms with people gone feral under the waterfalls of light. Bands, dancers, and actors perform on platforms throughout the space. Down on the show floor, milling past the livestock judging stands, spectators jostle, jockey, flinch, and wince, grinning, wigging, gaping, shrieking, and freaking at the happy havoc. They drift in a giant clockwise whirlpool, like Mecca hajjis circling the Kaaba, around a tower of rubber tubes and lead pipes in the center of the show floor, on which they take turns banging.

  Maddy clutches Peter’s arm. He pulls her close, and together they plunge into the bacchanal. Above them, in the steel trusses, floats a corona of balloons ranging from tiny exclamation points to weather gondolas. An old man presses past them, closer than he needs to, smiling at Maddy and Els as if possessing a great secret. A roar goes up nearby. By the time Els steers them to the cause, the roar has floated farther downstream. A thrilled kelpie races around, trying to herd the wayward humans into something like a flock.

  Up on a pipe-fit scaffold, a woman singer in a red velvet gown tries to negotiate a forlorn duet with a dancer on a platform several feet away. Any signals they send each other are swallowed up in the caldera of noise. Nearby, a string quartet saws away at atomized messages for no one. Muffled shouts erupt from a further platform. Els turns to see a scarecrow slashing a silver flute through the air like he’s threatening to kill someone.

  Maddy points: high on the wall at the far end of the pavilion, like a tender Big Brother or clowning Chairman Mao, a man’s giant face sweeps from a scowl to a manic laugh and back again. The film loops, and Els stares at the seamless transformation, three, four, five times in a row. Nothing changes, except for the Imp Saint’s litany, playing through Els’s head: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. But Els never makes it to eight, let alone sixteen. Maddy, frisky now, draws him deeper into the maelstrom.

  They explore, like a vicar and his wife who’ve stumbled upon the parish’s routine underground orgy. They run across three colleagues from the School of Music, an acquaintance from Cine Club, and two neighbors from Maddy’s rooming house, blitzed out of their minds and giggling. An alto who sings with Maddy in concert choir snags them from behind. They lean in close to hear her. She points to the dancers on platforms above the turning crowd. That’s Claude Kipnis! That’s Carolyn Brown!

  Who’re they? Els yells back.

  The alto shrugs. Famous people!

  Children scream in meteoric arcs across the
crowded floor, batting at fallen balloons. In the stands behind the oval livestock gauntlet, a few shell-shocked loners take cover, plugging their ears. Part of Els wants to flee, too. But most of him needs to be here, in the belly of this beast.

  Each inhalation of craziness fills Els’s veins with something dark and viscous. If this is music, then he’s lost. If this is composition, then everything he has tried to write is wrong. Musicircus: Cage’s latest way of saying how noise is music by its maiden name. But in this insane din, Els can’t for the life of him remember why that idea held such promise once. This night wants to strip him of every belief, to pull him down into mere sensation, the place of no desire, of pure listening.

  But listen to what? To the eve of destruction. To the air raid siren of things to come. To the explosion of Els’s own quaint and laughable ambitions. To a deafening freedom.

  Then, drifting on the human current, bumming a match to light his cigarette and gossiping with a spectator, there’s Cage, twenty feet away. Els has been close to him before, but never like this. He tugs Maddy toward the perpetrator, ready for art. But coming in starboard, hard and low, a gray eminence cuts across their bow. A formidable woman who has attended every Germanic chamber concert Els has ever slunk into confronts tonight’s ringleader. She shouts at the startled composer with such stentorian force that she might be yet another circus act, called for by the coin-tossing score.

  Mr. Cage. Are you a fraud?

  Cage presses his brow, examines his cigarette, and looks off to the strobing lights that bounce off the drifting balloons. His face clears, relieved. No.

  He casts his cigarette to the pavilion floor and stubs it out with one toe. Something religious to the gesture. Smiling, he slips through the crowd and back up on a performance platform, where he joins a quintet pouring water into different-sized bowls and tapping them, taking their time cues from an elaborate piano roll. Els stands in front of the platform, watching the Kabuki mimes tap at their liquid-filled bowls. For a moment, in some America deep in his neocortex, he can hear every ringing pitch the mute bowls make.