Orfeo (44 page)

All night long, discovery lights up in scattered nodes across the Net. A sound engineer calculates how many DNA base pairs it would take to encode five minutes of symphonic music. Someone uploads five minutes of old VHS footage from a performance of
The Fowler’s Snare.
A couple who live a mile from Peter Els’s house in Naxkohoman fall violently ill, and detail their symptoms in their blog. A mass email starts to circulate, with links to information on what to do if you suspect you’ve been exposed to
Serratia marcescens.
“Please send this information to anyone you think might need it.”

A journalist wonders out loud on his Facebook page whether @Terrorchord is in fact Peter Els or just another anonymous fear-artist aiming for a couple of minutes of power. A semi-prominent morals policeman posts an eloquent rant on how music has been taken over by frauds: “Music that can’t be read, played, or listened to: now I’ve heard everything.” The post starts sprouting contrarian comments within ten minutes. Two mathematicians debate how hard it would be to decode the base-four music and play it back. Someone reports that government scientists have already isolated and sequenced the variant strain, which contains a gene for multiple antibiotic resistance. A young woman composer describes having heard the file that Peter Els spliced into the genome—a piece for small ensemble that’s breakneck and free.

By morning in California, the lines are humming. An activist from Maine argues that anyone who has altered a living germ line so recklessly should be put to death. A law student argues that the tweets themselves are a form of terrorism, and that by current practice, the perpetrator can be held in indefinite detention without trial. Writers on an obscure new music zine decide that for the first time in years, someone is singing a whole new song.

Here’s wishing all who read this, if they can get a lift, and the best of luck to you. Why in hell did you come, anyway?

Els sleeps in the Accord, in a slot behind the rest stop north of Lost Hills. He dreams of bumdom, that bulwark of American art. In his dream, ordinary people chatter to each other, millions of massed solos, in pitches and rhythms so rich that no scale or notation can capture them. All night long, the orchestra of long-haul freight whipping up and down the interstate accompanies him.

He wakes and heads north. He can reach his daughter’s place by evening. There is no plan. There’s only that old hobo tune: Make me down a pallet on your floor. When I’m broken and I got nowhere to go.

Missing me one place, search another.

A man sits in his car in a roadside rest area and types into a phone. He writes:
I started with a rhythm that said: “Move now. You’ll be holding still for a very long time.”
Then he presses post.

He tells about a piece that he wrote, a melody from a time that speech can no longer reach. He types of harmonies spreading through the piece in long, self-replicating chains. The messages go out to satellites and back down to servers that send them all across the face of the planet.

He says what the piece sounds like: Like the porous edge between hope and fear.
I tried to make my germ sound like the music I loved at sixteen, discovering a new monument every few hours. I tried to make it sound like a tune my five-year-old daughter once spelled out in colored blocks across the living room floor.

Every message, a melody. He tweets how he hired musicians, rehearsed and recorded the song for no one. Cars pull up next to his. People amble past his hood, suspecting nothing. They use the facilities. They buy lunch out of vending machines. They get back into their machines and drive away.

He goes on writing, of music converted into a string of zeros and ones, then converted again into base four. He writes of
Serratia
’s chromosome ring, five million base pairs long. He tweets how he divided those two numbers to produce a short key. Of how he had that key custom-made for him. Nothing you can’t order online these days.

The account grows happy, almost prolific. All in short, joyous bursts about how he turned a living thing into a jukebox—a sequence of meaningful patterns to add to the ones scored by billions of years of chance. He presses a button and the message sets out into the biosphere, where it will live and copy itself for a while. He tweets of how he let his music go. Of how it’s spreading in the air all around, in the grout of your bathroom tiles. A tune you might be breathing in right now, one you’ll never be able to hear.

The tweets condemn him.

I left the piece for dead, like the rest of us. Or for an alien race to find, a billion years after we go extinct.

I haven’t a clue what the piece will do. Nothing, probably. Maybe you’ll forget the thing is even there. After all, it’s only a song.

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

The listener gets red and feels the beating sun. The listener gets blue and sees the sky. The listener gets green and sets out to sea.

Colors pour into the mobile concert hall. They come from the radio at first: Strings in a rocking sigh. A long sustain, the sound of the day ending. Nothing left to be frightened of; nothing left to discover. But seven chords in, a shimmer of horn, and on the next measure’s pickup, a soprano sings:

Amor mío, si muero y tú no mueres,

Amor mío, si mueres y no muero,

no demos al dolor más territorio . . .

Love, if I die and you don’t,

Love, if you die and I don’t,

let’s not give sadness any more ground . . .

The words meander like a languid river. But soon enough a swirl of unstable harmonies pushes the sound into a wider place. This music, half a dozen years old, could be a hundred. It’s shot through with Mahler at his most serene. The few dissonances it admits to are dappled and transient, as if the perfected terrors of the last century changed nothing, and even now, even in this year, home might still be intact, and nearer than you think.

The rocking figure returns, doubled now by horn. In that pulse, the soprano finds her way back to the wide first theme:
no hay extensión como la que vivimos.
No place is greater than where we live. And for a few measures, down this stretch of generic interstate, it’s as good as true.

You’ve heard the piece before, three years ago, and on first listen, it sounded like mere sentiment. Movie music. Sprinkles of South American hue and charm, Villa-Lobos via Ravel. A place we couldn’t get back to anymore, even if it still existed. Now comes this radio reprise, served you by a programmer who likes to insist that first hearings are always wrong.

The culprits are known to you: Peter Lieberson, Pablo Neruda. But such names are at best composite pseudonyms. These phrases assembled over centuries, the work of more anonymous day laborers than history will ever credit. You’re in there yourself, down a branch of the self-spreading Net, stepfather of a fleeting mood or modulation, vector for new infections.

What might a listener never know about this song? How it was composed for the woman who sings it now. How she led the composer to this love, this poem.
Love, if you die . . .
How the singer died just months after this premiere.

And does it change anything in these phrases, so shameless and lavish, to know that the composer is next? He’ll be dead in a few days. That’s why the radio plays these songs: a eulogy in advance. But listen, and the music forecasts another passing, one even older than the harmonies it uses.

Decades ago, this man, too, wrote like a believer in the infinite future. He studied at the feet of fearsomely progressive masters. Music poured out of him, splendid with math and rigor, music like a formal proof, heady stuff admired by dozens, perhaps even hundreds of discerning connoisseurs. He reveled in all those once-required shibboleths, now given up as so much discredited zeal. But
this
song—ah, this one will travel, go everywhere, get out and see the world, and even the tone-deaf will hear something forgotten in it.

So what to do with that failed revolution, the hundred years of uncompromising experiment? The need for something beyond the ordinary ear: Disown it? Discipline and punish? Shake your head and smile at the airs of youth? No: Strangeness was your voluntary and your ardent art. You fought alongside the outsiders for something huge, and knew the odds against you. No take-backs now. No selective memory; no excuses. There’s only owning up to everything you ever tried for, here at the end of the very long day.

But what to do with
this
—these love songs, the autumnal harmonies hurting your chest? What to call it? A repudiation. A return. A hedge. A sellout. A deathbed conversion. A broadening. A diminishment. Music to kill the last fifty miles of a cross-country drive.

Call it nothing, then, or call it music, for there are no movements or styles or even names for the sounds that wait for you, where you’re headed. Listen, and decide nothing. Listen for now, for soon enough there’ll be listening no longer.

The music tenses. A quick raising of stakes, a nervous drawing in: a gesture stolen from somewhere, sure, but where? From no one in a position to sue. The touch of conventional suspense breaks the spell; you would have built a different contrast. And that’s the curse of a life spent looking for transcendence: nothing real will ever suffice, nothing that you won’t want to tweak. And yet, and still—another swell, a rhythmic fault line, a change of instrumental color, and you think:
Why not?
Then even approval gives way to simple hearing.

El tiempo, el agua errante, el viento vago . . .

Time, flowing water, shifting winds. The dying composer has gone on record: he wants to apologize to generations of his students for leading them down a mistaken path. Wrong back then, the music says, but righted at last, here at the finish line. It’s a happy enough story, and one that should hold until the flock wheels next and the changing winds of fashion declare again who’s in, who’s out, who loses, and who wins. There will be reverses still; that’s how music works. Listen, only listen, and do not worry too much about keeping score. Reunion has you now, for a while, and a while is all you get. The grip of this enchantment lasts no more than a moment.
Pudimos no encontrarnos en el tiempo
. Love, we might never have found each other in time.

They thaw you, the rays of this late sun. But soon enough these harmonies, too, will set and cool. Even beauty exhausts itself and leaves the ear wanting other sounds. Need will turn to something harder, some training ground for the difficulty to come
.
But for a while, this song,
this
one.

The first, expanding figure returns one more time. All the notes align, and it’s like you’ve written them yourself. Not here, not in this life, not in the world where you worked and lived. But maybe in the one you might have reached, in time.
Esta pradera en que nos encontramos
. In this meadow where we meet. The long, luxurious lines forecast your past and remember your future in detail. You can’t imagine how you missed the fact, for all those years. It might have been okay, even fine, to have written something so simple and pacific. To have made a listener want to be more than she is.

And yet: You did what you did and made what you made. Here you are. And to tell the truth, this meadow had its moments.
Oh pequeño infinito!
O little infinity! We give it back. We give it back.

YOU STAND IN the evening rain, on the steps of her trim gingerbread. The Voice got you here, a last, best act of navigation. She opens, a woman in the foyer of middle age. Her face freezes in the happy irritation she’s prepared for someone else. She, your cells’ lone heir and executor, is busy with joys and fears you don’t even have the right to ask about. But now her whole task is you. She swallows her half scream back down her throat and pulls you inside.

There’s anger and there’s excitement. Hurried questions, distress and fuss thrust at you, along with a serving of noodles left over from a dinner for one. She towels dry your hair. The words pour out of her, unbearable. But they won’t need bearing for long.
Are you feverish? What happened to your lip? What’s wrong with you? Jesus, Daddy, try to eat something.

She’s living in a two-page spread from a furniture catalog. The townhouse is as clean as a C major scale. The curtains have just been ironed. The throw pillows pile up on the sectional in chilling symmetry. Photos of her crossing finish lines in tech clothing and various stages of pain grace the walls. Four posture-correcting ladder-back chairs surround the dining room table as if they’ve been lined up with a ruler. An umbrella stand flanks the front door and, next to it, a shoe rack with several identical coral-colored running shoes. All a gift from you, this rage for rational management. It’s what happens when you teach an eight-year-old that nothing—nothing at all—is secure.

But there’s a piano, too. A six-foot baby grand, its keyboard open, Schumann’s
Scenes from Childhood
on the music rack, and the lid open on the short stick. It doesn’t seem possible.

You’re playing again? Why didn’t you say anything?

She doesn’t answer. She’s at the window, glancing up and down the street, then pulling shut the curtains.

On the near side of the music rack is a photo: A young man and woman amusing themselves together. The man crouches over a toy piano, arms above his head, fingers poised to pounce on the tiny keys. The woman holds up one hammy palm, eyes closed, her mouth a ringing
O!
You knew those kids, knew the photographer. How long did it last, that amateur duet? Not even ten years, from start to finish.
Pero este amor, amor, no ha terminado
. But this love, Love, has no finish line.