Orfeo (36 page)

In a flurry of brass, a group of the tailor King’s starving subjects flee the city. But the Prince’s armies pin them in the shallow meadows between the siege works and city walls. The refugees drag about, foraging the grass like desperate animals until they coat the ground with corpses. The music goes mad; sul ponticello harmonics slither through the strings.

Every player in the orchestra plunges into the surging tutti. The attackers enter a city turned to walking dead. They offer the citizens safe passage for surrender, then slaughter them the moment they lay down their arms.

Knipperdollinck and John, the amateur thespian, are tortured with red-hot irons and hung in cages from the tower of Saint Lamberti. But throughout his ordeal, the fallen savior makes no sound. His final aria—his last public performance—is total silence accompanied by a halo of strings.

The music falls away to a pianissimo mime. Then, from nowhere, it comes back glorious. The anticipation theme from the opening bars of the opera returns, anchored by the cellos and trombones. Augmented now, it unfolds in growing astonishment. A chorus of dead souls fans across the stage singing the
De Profundis
. The tune bends ten centuries of musical idiom into stunned wonder. Few in the first-night audience can follow the harmonic vocabulary. But the house breaks into applause as soon as the conductor drops his arms.

His colleagues force Els up onstage. He stumbles up in his white tie, blinded by the shining blackness. There’s sound everywhere, like the hiss of his father’s records that he woke to, as a child, on those nights when he’d fall asleep listening. He can’t make out what the static is saying or what this audience has heard. He hears only the cries of burning children, the snickering of fate, the great sucking sound of his endless vanity.

He looks out over the audience, sick. This is what he has wanted his whole life—a roomful of grateful listeners. And now the room wants something from him. An explanation. An apology. An encore.

Someone to Els’s right—a crazy man, an old friend—takes Els’s fist and lifts it into the air. To his left, a resurrected John of Leiden beams. The conductor, the choral director, the choreographer, all the assembled leads and chorus flank him. Massacred believers and besieging mercenaries hold hands and bow, smiling at each other and at Els, the maker, celebrated at last, vindicated after all his long years
outside
. Els turns and plows through the happy cast, trying to escape into the gap in the velvet curtains before the contents of his gut come up into his mouth. In this, too, he fails.

How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.

The man-made peak of Monks Mound loomed up from along the interstate. Once it had been the center of a city larger than London or Paris, a site for communal and dangerous art. Now it was part of a museum visited only by schoolchildren under duress. Its massive cone made Els want to turn off the highway, get out of the car, and climb. Cahokia seemed as good a place as any to be captured. But he was too close to his goal to be taken now.

The road bore hard to the right, and the Mississippi, without warning or comparison, spread in front of him. Water filled the landscape in both directions, and he saw that flowing lake as if he were the first fugitive ever to stumble across it.

The Voice took him by divine convolution deep into St. Louis’s southwestern suburbs. All Els had to do was stay on the road and obey. The neighborhood, when he reached it, surprised him: so different from what he’d pictured for thirty years. Stately homes sat back from the street behind moats of lawn. Brick and dressed stone, half-timbering, Federal, Tudor, Greek Revival, Queen Anne—houses as adept at faking styles as Stravinsky.

A weekday afternoon, and the streets betrayed no habitation. Even the corner park was empty. Everything human had taken itself indoors. The capering gray squirrels might as well have inherited the Earth.

The Fiat nosed up to the empty curb. Els had seen pictures over the years—his daughter and her parade of misfit friends, standing in front of the house in all seasons. Soft yellow lights shone out from the discreet façade. He sat in the car, thinking how this ambush might be the worst idea he’d had since setting up his home microbiology lab. He dialed the long-memorized number.

The phone rang, but the lights and shadows in the house didn’t change. At last, a deep, professional, and suspicious voice demanded,
Hello?

The once-soubrette had turned contralto.
Who’s calling?
Two accented eighth notes and a quarter: a descending fifth followed by a rising sixth. The soothing three-note tune turned exquisite, and Els took two beats too long to answer,
Maddy.

The rise and fall of her breath reverberated in the air of her cavernous house. Far away, Els heard what sounded like an exercise tape, the spritely orders of health fascism.

I’m sorry
, she said, unapologetic.
Who is this?

It’s Peter
, he said, not recognizing his own voice
.

Silence came from the other end, in timbres beyond Els’s powers to orchestrate. That was the thing about sounds. Even their absence had more shades than any ear could hear.

Peter,
she said.

He wanted to tell her: It’s all right; life happens.

But the ID says Kohlmann.

Yes,
he said, in a way that suggested how many parties might be listening in. She’d always had a good ear.

Where are you?
Maddy asked, her voice thick.

Half a laugh came out of Els.
Funny you should ask
.

For some seconds, she said nothing. Then the teal drapes in the front bay window pulled back, and there stood the partner of his youth, the one who’d believed in the mind’s ability to levitate the Pentagon. She put her hand to the glass. He did the same, from the driver’s side of the Fiat. She hung up.

All life long, he’d had that composer’s gift of being able to tell exactly how long a minute lasted. He counted four of them. At last he shut down the phone and started up the car again. There was no more plan. He’d drive until caught, in a motel somewhere in the Dakotas.

The car nosed from the curb. Then the house door opened. She had on a long olive shirtdress and gray tailored vest. She was thicker and shorter than he remembered. Her feet edged down the front flagstone path like the taps of a blind person’s cane.

She let herself into the Fiat, slid down into the passenger seat, and swung to him. She looked at his ragged face and shook her head.

Rule Number One,
he said.
Zag when they think you’ll zig?

The corner of her lip twisted. Neither leaned in, in the slightest.

What are you doing here, Peter?

He stared at her, flooded with the past. She flicked the back of her hand toward the windshield and said,
Drive.

He drove, to her direction. They followed a suite of quiet residential streets, emerging onto a commercial boulevard. They said nothing, as if they were a sunset couple taking their ten thousandth car ride together in this life. He wanted to give her the wheel, to see if she still drove like she was sailing an ice boat across a windy northern lake.

I’ve missed you, Maddy
.

She sniffed and scratched her nose.
Please. No nostalgia. It’s unbecoming in a bioterrorist.

She guided him into the parking lot of a mall the size of a breakaway Balkan state. Els panicked.

I can’t.

You’ll be fine,
she said.
No one’s looking for a couple.

He angled the Fiat into a slot and killed the engine. He turned to look at her.

You’re beautiful
, he told her.
Perfectly unchanged.

Oh, Christ! You never could see, could you?
She held her sagging arms out and tipped her head forward, revealing her roots. The lines around her lips and eyes were cuneiform cuts in baked clay. Els shrugged.

Seeing is overrated
.

They sat in the parked car, hands in laps. Down the lane in front of them, a woman pushed a cart loaded with a cardboard box big enough to live in. Maddy peered forward, intent on something Els couldn’t see.

Well,
she said
. You can’t have done what they’re saying you did.

I think I must have,
Els said.

You’ve just turned some stupid misunderstanding into a federal offense by acting like a criminal.

A foolish hope welled up in Els. She was always so wise. The windows were fogging up. Maddy painted idle petroglyphs on the passenger-side glass.

Modified bacteria? Phht. You can’t even microwave a bowl of tomato soup.

No
, Els said.
I did that
.

She shook her head.
Impossible.

Any intelligent college kid—

Oh, Peter. I don’t believe this.
Her hand snaked out, fending off the fact. They were seventy years old. They’d been divorced for a third of a century. But here they were, fighting on their first date.

Have they charged me with anything specific?

The hand came back down over her eyes and massaged her forehead.
Lordy
.
And I thought you were naïve at twenty-five.

You thought I . . . ? You were the wild idealist.

She looked out the window, at a different past. On the sidewalk in front of the burnished brass and black granite entrance, three women riding Segways handed out red, white, and blue tote bags. Half a dozen children dressed as boarding school wizards trotted into the mall, late for some arcane experiment. Maddy shook her head.

And you’re the biggest threat to national security since that propane-filled Pathfinder in Times Square.

He started to cackle. Maddy turned to him, and the fear in her face fed his laughter. His eyes watered at his absurdity, and he couldn’t stop. She put a hand on his knee. The shock of her touch sobered him. He raised his arm and caught his breath.

Sorry. It’s the stress. Losing it.

She tugged on his trouser crease.
Come on. Let’s get some food into you.

A carousel spun in the center of the food court, a swirl of colored lights, mirrors, and a calliope. At one end of a large ellipse of food stalls, four bulky men clad in denim and sweatshirts played guitars and sang into mics, songs to listen to while driving across desiccated places in trucks very high off the ground. At the other end, a chorus line of child wizards were getting gunned down one by one by the voice vote of a merciless crowd.

With awful ease, Maddy secured two slices of pizza and a pair of fizzy drinks. They sat across from each other at a red molded table that would still be around long after the race had cooked itself to death. Four dozen people ate at nearby tables. A few hundred drifted around the ring of franchises. Most of them had seen his picture all week long. But none noticed him.

From across the table, he looked at the woman who had driven to Boston with him in a seventeen-foot rental truck, while carrying his child. A minute of gazing, and it seemed she’d had crow’s-feet and paper skin and liver spots for as long as he’d known her.

So how much trouble would you say I’m in?

Maddy considered the question from a vantage far away.
Oh, they want to put you in jail for a very long time. You’re the perfect bogeyman.

Graves, her placid features seemed to say, were just the thing for dancing on.

People are buying gas masks. Purification pills. You’re the toast of the Internet.

Yes,
he said.
Finally famous.

She flipped a piece of melted cheese back onto her slice and squinted at it, a horoscope.
So you really did this thing.

What thing?

Genetic whatever.

Yes.

You modified the DNA of a living thing?

He shrugged.
Hundreds of companies do that every day.

Why, Peter? What ever possessed you?

A tune he couldn’t name issued from the twanging guitars of the old men in denim on the soundstage.

It’s astonishing,
he said.

What is?

The things that happen down there.

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

He couldn’t begin to tell her. Life
.
Four billion years of chance had written a score of inconceivable intricacy into every living cell. And every cell was a variation on that same first theme, splitting and copying itself without end through the world. All those sequences, gigabits long, were just waiting to be auditioned, transcribed, arranged, tinkered with, added to by the same brains that those scores assembled. A person could work in such a medium—wild forms and fresh sonorities. Tunes for forever, for no one.

He pleaded with her, palms bared.

Not you, Peter
.
You’re doctoring toxic organisms?

More throbbing counterpoint poured out of the PA system from down the concourse in the heart of the mall. It collided with the power rock from the stage, the calliope, and the chorus of beeps and chimes from a hundred smart and mobile devices. He could no more hear his thoughts than he could see the constellations at noon.

A middle-aged couple sat down at the next table, sharing a soft-serve cone and holding hands like teenagers. But Maddy didn’t lower her voice.

Was this some performance piece? Some kind of avant-garde stunt? Getting your revenge on the thankless public by scaring them shitless?

He barked a single-syllable laugh.
That would be an idea.

Then what? Have you broken any laws?