Orfeo

by Richard Powers

  A face brushes his earlobe. Raw charge ripples down his neck and into his shoulders. Maddy, purring, Had enough?

  He swings around to her. Serious? It’s just getting going.

  She waves at the surrounding chaos, her lips a boggy smile. She shouts something, but the words die halfway across the defile. He leans in, and she shouts again. I pretty much get the picture, Peter. Don’t you?

  The shout, too, is a kind of music. She stands with her head tilted, grinning at the gimmick all around them. The drumlins of her breasts beneath her Elizabethan blouse and the gap at the top of her hip-clinging jeans ought to be all the happening he needs. But there’s something here he can’t leave yet. His hands improvise in fake sign language: he needs to listen a little longer. She shrugs, asks him with a trill of her fingers if he’ll be okay walking home, pulls him to her by the lapels of his ratty bomber jacket, and kisses him. The old man of seventy standing next to them nods in recall.

  You do not need to leave your room. Don’t even listen. Simply wait. The world will offer itself to be unmasked. It has no choice.

  Time turns to nothing. His ears dilate. The longer Els stands still, the more the music pulls apart. His hearing sharpens, able now to pick out strands buried in the babble. Dixieland trombones. A descending lamento bass played on a fretless Fender. A psychedelic reworking of “Hand Me Down My Walkin’ Cane,” against the ceaseless banging on the lead pipe sculpture. Puccini mocks the furious electronic permutations of a piece by Matthew Mattison, whose old épater la bourgeoisie sounds housebroken in this surge of crazed elation. It’s Ives and his overlapping marching bands all over again.

  Hours pass. Midnight, but the crowd shows no signs of thinning. Something catches his eye, high up in the flanking stands: a man seated by himself, conducting. He cues the crowd with precise waves of his arms, the way young Peter once conducted his father’s vinyl Toscaninis. Els knows the man, though they’ve never met. Richard Bonner, doctoral candidate in theater arts, three years Els’s senior. Famous for directing last season’s deranged Midsummer Night’s Dream, set in an old folks’ home, and for coming to a peace rally on the Quad dressed as a sepoy from the Bengal Native Infantry, circa 1850.

  The invisible baton dips. The conductor’s fingers curl, demanding a crescendo. And on cue, the crowd delivers. Els watches this show above the show, until the lone impresario holding this spectacle together feels himself being spied on and turns to face his observer. Bonner’s hands point like two cap pistols at Els and click, like some Rat Pack singer playing the Vegas Sands. Then he waves at Els to come join him up in the stands for the aerial play-by-play.

  As Els draws near, Richard Bonner leaps to his feet and grabs his hand. Peter Els. As I live and breathe! What do you think? Should we all rush out and kill ourselves?

  Els confines himself to what he hopes is a fuzzy grin. The impresario pats the riser beside him and sits back down. Els takes the designated place. They sit and watch, up in the grandstands above the end of the world. Bonner’s hands can’t help scooping and directing. Now and then he issues a burst of color commentary.

  Above the noise of the Happening, Els can make out only a quarter of what the man says. Under the paving stones, the beach! Meet the fucking Jetsons, man! You know who supplied those weather balloons? Chanute Air Force Base. You know what else Chanute is supplying to the jungles on the other side of the world? No, of course you don’t. You’re a masterpiece guy, aren’t you? Gimme that old-time religion. People getting fragged in your living room, and you’re still trying to sweet-talk beauty into a quickie.

  All the while, Richard Bonner grazes on sweets he has squirreled away in half a dozen pockets. Smashed-up oatmeal cookies wrapped in wax paper. Good & Plenty out of the purple-pink box. These he shakes like Choo Choo Charlie and offers to Els, who’s surprised to find himself ravenous. They sit chomping candy and watching the revels, like they’ve known each other since the Pleistocene.

  Bonner sighs big, the contentment of someone who has come home at last. Say hello to the permanent future. You gotta love this shit.

  Do I? Els asks.

  Come on, bubala. It’s art.

  Art is not a mobocracy. It’s a republic.

  Do let art know that, huh? For its own good.

  The party’s dying and Els hears himself turning earnest. Still, he wades in. It’s like he and this guy have been having this fight all their lives.

  People can’t stand too much anarchy. They need pattern. Repetition. Meaningful design.

  People? People will do whatever the times tell them to. I mean, look at you, man!

  Els does: long-sleeve paisley shirt, green bomber jacket, and brown corduroy bell-bottoms. Nothing unusual. Bonner is all black denim and leather, what Els would call a greaser.

  You can’t make people like psychosis, Els insists.

  Oh, please! Bonner points. I saw you down there digging it. It’s after midnight and you’re still here.

  You can’t even call it a piece. It’s a dead end. A one-off novelty.

  Bonner’s great right eyebrow shoots up, a cartoon arch. Man. Novelty’s our only hope. Surplus leisure time is the single greatest challenge to the industrial state. Right behind property-sharing Asians in black silk pajamas, of course.

  This thing will be finished after tonight. Over and done.

  Chunks of Good & Plenty fly from Bonner’s mouth. You jest! They’re gonna revive this every year, like Oklahoma or Carousel. They’ll be mounting nostalgic revivals of it in posh London museums in half a century.

  Calm falls over Els. He and this strange man, deep in a new country, the future beyond figuring. What is music, that he needs to bring it to heel? The Stock Pavilion, this backwater town, the whole experimental nation, have all gone stark, raving mod. But this lavish anarchy won’t hurt him. He can survive, even steal from it, and fashion a new song he can’t yet make out.

  Battered by cacophony, he grows huge. The thousand noisy tourists turn into a single organism, and then a single cell, passing millions of chemical signals a minute between its organelles. Plans blind us to the possible. Life will never end. The smallest sound, even silence, has more in it than the brain can ever grasp. Work for forever; work for no one.

  Bonner’s words yank Els from his trance. The best part of a piece like this? It doesn’t matter what anybody thinks. The whole planet could call this thing a con job. And the man would still be free.

  They get thrown out of the Stock Pavilion with the rest of the stragglers around two a.m., when the organizers of Musicircus start striking the set so that the place will be empty again by eight. That’s when the cows will be led back onto the showroom floor and the next generation of agricultural scientists—the future’s real masters—can go on learning how to keep a ravenous nation in beef patties.

  Bonner and Els, cast out into the midwestern midwinter, their ears ringing like mallet-struck glass bowls, make their way back across campus in the swirls of bitter wind. Deep in words, they weave and reel like drunks. They pause on a lamp-lit street corner, Bonner making elaborate points, jabbing Els in the chest for emphasis. Els tells Bonner about his new compositional hopes, with a detail he hasn’t yet tried on Maddy. He wants to use regions of cycling pitch groups to create forward motion without resorting to the clichés of standard harmonic expectation, but without falling into serialism’s dead formality.

  Listen to you, Maestro. You’re a damn centrist, is what you are. Admit it. And fasten your seat belt, baby. Both sides are going to beat your ass black and blue.

  Els tells Richard Bonner about Maddy, his bold Sinbad soprano in the tiny idealist’s body. He mentions the Borges songs, which he and Maddy are preparing for a recital in the new year. Bonner perks up.

  I’ll choreograph. The words issue from Bonner’s mouth in arctic cumulus puffs.

  It’s a song cycle, Els says. She just . . . sings.

  You need a choreographer. Send me the score on Monday.

  Els feels hung over,
having drunk nothing but mayhem all night. He takes leave of Bonner outside Maddy’s rooming house. They shake hands, a grip that Bonner turns into one of those thumb-clasping peace handshakes. Say yes to how things are.

  You’re a damn alien, aren’t you? Els tells the director. Outer space. Admit it.

  Bonner does. With gusto. And hugs his newfound associate good night.

  Els climbs the staircase of Maddy’s college commune, skirting a cairn of cat turd left in the center of the first-floor landing. She’s asleep under her most beautiful quilt, an array of suns and planets. He wakes her up, high on the now-audible future.

  You, the sleepy soubrette says. She presses her hair into the dip of his sternum. What time is it?

  Time for every freedom the miracle year offers. Maddy is logy at first, but game, won over by his need, so fresh and fierce, here, a few hours before dawn. She falls asleep again the minute they’re over the finish line. He lies, arms around her, frantic with hope and eager for a future that fills with astonishing new things.

  Saturday morning is on him, from one measure to the next. When light pours in through Maddy’s hand-made curtains, he rises and dresses and heads across the Quad to campus town, where he forages for breakfast. Coffee, donuts, two oranges, and a Daily Illini. The proof of what already feels like a brief mass hallucination splashes across page one: “Musicircus Rocks Stock Pavilion.” Below it, a smaller headline proclaims, “Johnson Demands Honorable Peace.”

  He brings his breakfast treasures home to a woman just now stirring. She opens her eyes on him as he hovers over her student bed, breaks into a grin, and throws her arms around his neck. An old folk song crosses his mind, one that will take him thirty more years to turn into variations: What wondrous love is this, oh my soul?

  Partch: “I went south toward any god who softly whistled . . . the one spot where I would ‘choose to abide’ was already far behind.”

  He sat beside Klaudia on the bench in Shade Arbors’ front oval. Soon-to-be-dead people gardened in nearby plots, and clouds of pollinators grazed the air like it would be everywhere forever spring. Els’s erstwhile therapist and late-life fling faced him and grimaced. Have you been handling farm animals?

  I’m sorry. My workout clothes.

  Sweating like a pig. Something’s the matter.

  He rubbed his face. Seems I’m in a little trouble.

  She looked at him slant. What trouble could such a man get in? Reckless archaism. Arpeggiating under the influence. Presto in an andante zone.

  He told her of his morning. The facts came out of his mouth, as implausible as any sounds he’d ever made.

  She shook her head. They raided your house?

  A squad in hazmat suits, yellow police tape circling his lawn: all a bizarre invention. The agents had been after someone else. Someone dangerous.

  The police raided your house, and you came to teach your class.

  You were all waiting. Nowhere else to go.

  I don’t understand. Laboratory equipment? Some kind of fancy chemistry set?

  He wanted to tell her: there were, in a single cell, astonishing synchronized sequences, plays of notes that made the Mass in B Minor sound like a jump-rope jingle.

  What on earth were you doing?

  He’d been trying to take a strand of DNA, five thousand base pairs long, ordered to spec from an online site, and splice it into a bacterial plasmid.

  Learning about life, he said.

  Klaudia stared, as if the sweet nonagenarian needle-pointer across the hall from her had pulled out from under the bed a box of merit badges from the Schwesternschaften der Hitler-Jugend.

  Why do this, Peter? She’d asked the question often, back when she was still pretending to be his therapist.

  Why write music that no one wants to hear? It kept me out of trouble.

  Don’t be coy. What were you doing?

  As far as Els knew, the nonsense string would live alongside the bacterium’s historical repertoire, silently doing nothing. Like the best conceptual art, it would sit ignored by the millions of trades going on in the marketplace all around it. With luck, during cell division, the imposter message would replicate for a few generations, before life got wise and shed the free rider. Or maybe it would be picked up, inspired randomness, and ride forever.

  Nothing, Els said. Call it composing. Proof of concept.

  What concept?

  It didn’t seem to matter now.

  Are you a terrorist?

  His head jerked back. Klaudia appraised him. Well? Are you?

  He looked away. Oh, probably.

  Who taught you how to modify cells?

  I just follow the recipes.

  How did you learn enough to—

  I audited a class. I read four textbooks. Watched fifty hours of instructional clips. It’s all pretty straightforward. No one seems to realize how easy.

  From a lifetime away, he heard himself tell a government agent: Easier than learning Arabic.

  How long have you been . . . ?

  He dipped his head. I started two years ago. I wasn’t . . . doing anything else. I came across an article about the DIY biology movement. I couldn’t believe that amateurs were altering genomes in their garages.

  I can’t believe people breed poisonous snakes in their basements. But I feel no compulsion to join them.

  He couldn’t tell her: He’d missed his calling. Science should have been the career, music just a hobby. He’d lived through the birth of biotech, that whole new art. He might have lived a useful life, contributed to the age’s real creative venture. Genomics was right now learning how to read scores of indescribable beauty. Els just wanted to hear, before the light in his tent went out.

  Kohlmann gazed at him as she had years ago, when he was paying her to dismiss his nameless anxieties. Are you crazy?

  The thought has crossed my mind.

  You didn’t think the authorities would be a little jumpy, so near to Jihad Jane’s base camp?

  I wasn’t thinking jihad, at the time.

  Kohlmann groaned and palmed her eye sockets. Peter—couldn’t you have taken up bridge, like the rest of us? Continuing ed courses?

  A tremor in her dowel forearm, and Els realized: she had Parkinson’s. He’d seen her weekly for eighteen months and had never noticed. They’d spoken about nothing all that while aside from The Rite and Pierrot.

  I’m going to have a cigarette now, Kohlmann said. I’m fifteen minutes overdue.

  You’re smoking? Since when did you start smoking?

  Don’t nag. I quit for twenty years, by promising myself I could start again at seventy-five.

  Kohlmann lit a cigarette and took an enormous drag. They sat silent, combed by a breeze. In the sky above, a contrail spread into frayed yarn. She let out the smoke, sighing.

  They raided your house and missed you. Are they total fuckups?

  Any other day of the week, they’d have had me. But on Mondays I’m always out before dawn.

  Didn’t they think . . . ? She read some faint inscription off her fingernails. You’re going to make things a lot worse by running.

  The word shocked him. He wasn’t running. He was sitting in a gated retirement community, waiting until it was safe to go home and take a shower.

  The task force people said they weren’t charging me with anything.

  You think there’s no warrant for you now?

  No one has served one yet.

  He had two choices: turn himself in wherever suspected bioterrorists were supposed to turn themselves in and disappear into the wasteland of legal detention, or make himself scarce for a few days while the FBI discovered that he was doing nothing that thousands of other garage genetic engineers around the country weren’t doing. By Friday, the fire drill would be over.

  He told Klaudia as much.

  You might as well sign a confession. They’ll ruin what’s left of your life, just to make a lesson of you.

  I haven’t broken any laws. They’re not going
to waste their time on sunset hobbyists. They have real terrorist networks to go after.

  Klaudia turned her cigarette around and peered into the burning end. Her face wrinkled and she shook her head.

  What? he demanded.

  Her hand traced the air, pointing at threats on the horizon. Excuse me, but a lot has happened in this country while you’ve been away.

  He looked off toward the garden plots, where a doddering field gang prepared the beds for tomatoes and squash. It seemed a substantial leap of faith, to believe you’d still be there for the harvest.

  Kohlmann waved the glowing cigarette at him like a laser pointer. He remembered why they weren’t a couple.

  Everyone’s an enemy now. The Swiss detained Boulez for something he said in the sixties about blowing up opera houses. John Adams told the BBC that his name is on a list. The authorities harass him every time he flies.

  You’re joking. Why?

  Because of Klinghoffer.

  Els had to laugh: the name John Adams, on a sedition list. Ironies turned on ironies, like the moons in a hand-cranked toy solar system. Once, he’d sat on a panel at Columbia, a fatuous firebrand of thirty-seven, claiming that composers had a moral obligation to be subversive. The best music, he pronounced, was always a threat. He winced now at the manifesto. But still, his skin prickled at the news that a composer had made the government watch list.

  Adams, Els said. Fabulous music. A handful of transcendent works. He’ll live.

  Klaudia stopped making love to her cigarette’s last millimeter. Live?

  Her voice was thick with sardonic notes. Music with intricate harmonies, complex rhythms? You might as well write a medical thriller in Mayan glyphs.

  She waved her hand over him, the Pope rescinding a blessing, and launched into an account of a terrorism arrest in Albany—a missile sale where all the missiles belonged to the FBI and all the terrorists were bribed into purchasing them. Els didn’t hear. He was savoring the idea that art—an Adams masterpiece—could still be dangerous. It gave him unearned cachet, being dogged by the same Homeland Security hounding Adams. At that moment, someone was combing through the archives for data about Peter Els, scanning his scores to see if he’d ever written any music that might alarm the Joint Security Forces.