Orfeo (25 page)

Maddy sighs in the rising steam.
You could make more per hour by tuning pianos.

He tries to remember when he last saw her quilting. A Romanian folk tune, harmonized in modal contrary motion, issues from the other room. The tune sounds to Peter like the final word on longing. Maybe he
should
make a living tuning pianos.

It’s a step,
he tells his wife, more gentle than defensive
. If the film runs . . . it might lead to . . .

Woman washing dishes. Not softly.

Maddy, he’s paying me . . .

Really, Peter?
She turns to face him.
A thousand dollars? Minus commutes to New York? Train tickets, restaurants, hotel rooms . . . ?

WHAT’S THE TIMBRE of this piece? Two slight instruments, say oboe and horn, their intervals trickling out through the open window into the vacant autumn courtyard. Two parents, keeping their voices low to keep from disturbing the rustic song their little girl plinks out in the adjoining room.

Peter’s words are flinty. He tastes them as they leave his mouth, the tang of things to come.
You never liked him, did you?

He feels himself serpentine. Creation’s Rule Number One: Zag when they think you’ll zig. But Maddy’s surprise is honest, flushed out in the open.

Who—Richard? Richard’s a perfectly charming poseur. He’ll have all the fame he wants, soon.

I can’t believe I’m hearing this. The man’s our closest friend.

This isn’t about Richard. You’ve had . . . you’ve been at this how long? And you’ve written half a dozen short pieces that have been played a total of five times.

His hands marimba. He reaches across the table for hers, then stops. For two measures, nothing.

And now I have a commission for something substantial. This is what we’ve been sacrificing for. A chance to break out.

Break out?
She laughs a single, sharp high A.
Peter: It’s experimental music. The game’s over. Nobody’s listening. They never will.

So what are you saying? You want me to pitch it all?

Her head takes two full swings before he sees she’s shaking it. Her lips form a stillborn smile.
Adulthood, Peter.

The provable world holds her hostage, and she can’t cross back over to him. Raising a child has brought her to this brute pragmatism. Any one of her needs make his look like puerile fantasy.

The girl wanders in, her body hunched and furtive. She takes his hands.
Dad? Can we make something?

Make what? he’s supposed to say. Instead, he says,
Soon, sweetie.
She goes back to the living room and pounds on the keys.

From the sink, Maddy says,
You could do what every other living composer has to do. Get a university job. And on your summer breaks . . .
She turns and holds her hands up, dripping dishwater.
Write whatever music floats your boat.

The folk song from the other room breaks off in midphrase. Els cups his ears, then his nose. He breathes into the mask he’s made. Then his fingers push up and over his forehead.

I could,
he concedes.
But
I’d need more pieces on my résumé. More performances. This film score would make me more competitive.

Competitive! You’ve never even tried. How many positions have you applied for, in the last six years?

He feels no need to answer. He has fallen into a place equal parts panic and peace. He searches for a line of Cage: “Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight.” But the line won’t save him.

What are you afraid of, Peter?

Failure. Success. The wisdom of crowds. Knowledge of what his notes must sound like, to everyone who isn’t him.

Calamity from the living room: Sara slamming her patty-cake mitts across four octaves. In one smooth ball-change, Maddy turns back into supermom, gliding into the living room.
Hey, hey, hey. What are you doing, lady?

I’m playing something and nobody’s even hearing it!

That’s as good as it gets, Peter Els wants to tell his daughter. Creation’s Rule Number Four. Little girl, anywhere, without an audience: so long as no one listens, you’re better than safe. You’re free.

There is another world, the world in full. But it’s folded up inside this one.

He couldn’t stay in the cottage. If the Joint Task Force tracked him here, they’d trash the place without hesitation. Kohlmann would be drawn into the middle of his nightmare. She, too, might be held until cleared—an accessory to terror, the hidden half of the Naxkohoman sleeper cell.

For one more night, Els slept in the bed of his unmet benefactors. He kept off the Web and ducked all calls from Klaudia. No more data hostages. The next morning, he scavenged a last breakfast and took stock. He had half a tank of gas, the clothes on his back, and Klaudia’s smartphone, which he was now afraid to touch. In his wallet was the two hundred dollars he’d taken from the cash machine the morning of the raid.

The moment he used his credit card or withdrew more cash from an ATM, they had his coordinates. His every transaction went straight to searchable media—part of an electronic composition too sprawling for any audience to hear.

He got in the Fiat and took the interstate back toward Naxkohoman. On the outskirts of town, he followed the familiar state highway spur until he was twenty miles northeast of his house. And there, at the drive-through of a bank branch he often used, he took out another five hundred dollars, the most the machine allowed. From behind a window of smoky glass, a video camera turned him into a short film with no soundtrack aside from the Fiat’s furtive engine.

The thousands of moving parts of the digital passacaglia, the packets of proliferating information, circulated in a way that he couldn’t hope to understand. His plan was crudeness itself: keep moving, and leave as few footprints as possible. He pocketed the ejected stack of cash, glanced sideways into the dark lens, and rolled the Fiat back onto the road.

Two blocks from the bank, he stopped and gassed. He paid with his card, since his bread-crumb trail already led to this block. Do you need a printed receipt? No, thank you. Then he got back on I-80 west. The shallow meanders of highway focused him. He drove for a long time, emptied of thought, as marked as an endangered creature wearing a tracking tag.

In the afternoon, almost back to his Allegheny hideout, he pulled into a convenience center off the interstate. He bought gas again, paying in cash this time. Security cameras seemed harder to search than credit card databases. The store’s smells left him faint with hunger. Amid the aisles of saturated fats and corn syrup he found a shelf of omegas and antioxidants, stranded through some demographic miscalculation. He stocked up, feeling oddly excited, as if on a long-delayed holiday escape with his national parks passport waiting to be stamped. The meal went down in four minutes, in the corner of the truck stop parking lot.

At the intersection with I-79, in a Zen trance, Els turned south. He followed the signs to Pittsburgh, guided by shaped chance. A rush hour construction snarl slowed him to a crawl. At last he broke and resorted to the radio.

The dial swarmed with ecstasy, dance, and rage. Els shied away from music, keeping to the shallows of talk. But the talk washed over him, unintelligible. Two think-tank economists had written a book arguing for the abolishment of the Department of Education. A congresswoman likened the EPA to al-Qaeda. A spokesman for a citizens’ action group called the New Minutemen threatened reprisals if the President’s fascist health care bill wasn’t trashed. The spliced-together monologues played in his ears like an experimental radio theater piece from 1975.

The shakes set in as he hit that narrow finger of West Virginia. The sun had fallen, and his body was succumbing again to the absurdity of hunger. Somewhere in the dusk of eastern Ohio he pulled off at a rest stop. He ate dinner out of vending machines and slept in the reclined driver’s seat, using a rain poncho he found in the trunk for warmth. Sleep went no deeper than a series of loosely affiliated stupors. The envelope of noise in which he floated—the grind of eighteen-wheelers, the vampire cleaning crew who readied the facility for the next day’s assaults—combined in a spectral chorus. He came awake a little after four a.m. hearing Penderecki’s Hiroshima threnody, a piece he hadn’t listened to for twenty years.

Morning was long, flat, and straight, with the sun at his back. A double dose of coffee, donuts, and headline radio powered him through Columbus. The fragile alliance between Cairo’s Copts and Muslims was falling apart, days after they’d protected each other from the regime’s police. A twenty-five-year-old Korean beat his mother to death for nagging him about computer games, then played on for hours, charging the session to the dead woman’s card.

Toward noon, outside a town called Little Vienna, long after the AM chatter plunged him into his own chronic focal difficulty, Els heard his name coming out of the radio. Fatigue and malnourishment couldn’t explain the hallucination. A Pennsylvania college professor was wanted for questioning regarding the deaths of nine Americans by bacterial contagion. And as exhibit one of evidence against him, music poured out of the car’s five speakers. Twelve measures of baritone aria:

Nothing is more beautiful than terror,

More terrible than His coming.

All that is high will be made low . . .

The second act of
The Fowler’s Snare
: John of Leiden, King of the New Jerusalem, reaching his crazed zenith. The sole recording Els knew of had sat in the bottom of a cardboard box in his various closets for eighteen years. Some enterprising journalist had found another copy and discovered the incriminating passage. The music had long gone unheard by all but a few listeners. Now it made its belated radio debut, for a panicked audience of hundreds of thousands.

Eighteen years on, Richard’s libretto—that pastiche of Rilke and Isaiah—made Els wince. But the singer’s expansion of the germ motif sounded righteous, even brazen. A good melody was a miracle, with all the surprise inevitability of a living thing. A strange sensation warmed him, and it took Els a moment to name it: pride.

The orchestration cut through his interstate haze—eighty people blowing and sawing away, while a lunatic praised the beauty of terror. The tune was a clear incitement to violence, and Els felt himself being hung in the court of public opinion. Contemporary opera making it onto AM radio: such was the power of threat Level Orange.

After twelve seconds—a broadcast eternity—the aria faded out. The news went on to a story about the boom in black market Adderall sweeping America’s high schools. Els killed the radio. His hands bounced on the wheel. All at once, seventy seemed perilous. He eased his foot off the accelerator. A lion-maned woman on a cell in a dinged-up Volvo pulled out to pass him. A bulging Ford Expedition shot through behind her; two towheaded boys in the backseat flicked obscene gestures as they passed. A caravan filed by, each occupant turning to gawk at the gray-haired moving violation. Els looked down at his speedometer: he’d slowed to forty-eight. A lone highway cop, running his plates for going too slow, would finish him. “Prophet of Beautiful Terror, Apprehended.”

By pure will, he forced the car back up to sixty-two. He flipped the radio on again and fished for pop tunes. He didn’t stop until the gas tank made him. At a truck stop, he stocked up on shrink-wrapped sandwiches. Then he pressed on through Indiana into eastern Illinois. He pulled off for the night at a roadside motel on the north edge of Champaign-Urbana, not ten miles from where he met his wife, conceived his daughter, and befriended the one man in all the world whose opinion still mattered to him.

It seemed as good a place as any to be caught and held forever.

Listen deep down: most life happens on scales a million times smaller than ours.

He spent his nights composing for Richard. First the film soundtrack, then a pitched percussion accompaniment for a brittle but thrilling piece of voice theater that never made it beyond a few Village apartments. By then Els was going down to New York every few weeks. Maddy never tried to stop him; she was just his wife, after all. But she refused to drive him to the bus station.
This is your baby, Peter
.
You do what you need.

At home, he worked at the electric piano, under headphones, deaf and muted to the world. Sara stamped on the floor in the next room, jealous of this thing he was trying to raise from the dead. Once she came to him and demanded,
Let’s make something
.

Daddy is,
Daddy said.

No,
she shouted.
Something good.

Good how?

Good like a rose that nobody knows.

They tried, but the rose had plans of its own.

Then one night Maddy, too, stopped by with a commission. She came into his study, so much more slender and circumspect than she’d been in her grad student days, and grazed her fingernails across his back. She glanced at his score in progress and smiled, all their proxy skirmishes of the last few months forgiven.
Write me a song,
she said.

She meant: Something singable, not art. No occult noises for gatherings of alienated prestige-mongers. A tune that could play on the radio, steeped in desire and mystery. The kind that most people need and love.

Come on, write me something
, she said. Almost soubrette again.
Something simple.
Her eyes said: One last romp. Her mouth said:
Bet you can’t.

PETER TOOK THE dare and slept on it. The next morning, while guarding Titian’s
Rape of Europa
from vandals, he fashioned a melody out of all the rules from Intermediate Theory that he’d long ago discarded. He built his air on top of an expansive descending bass. Anchored by a stirring pedal point, it leapt free to a surprise stunning chord right before the half cadence. The irresistible hook, like a bruised cloud blowing off in a June breeze, left behind a blue swathe that caught the heart and lifted it into a bird’s-eye view of things to come. Song, just song, the enigma of it, the warmth and longing. The three-minute forever.