Orfeo (7 page)

A few clicks, and Els found himself scanning a recipe for getting ricin from castor beans. Botulism from stockpiles of cosmetics. Ebola from any of half a dozen obliging cults. Fifty minutes on the Net and he wanted to arrest himself.

But all the garage genetics sites agreed: a person could assemble a respectable plague for far less than five thousand dollars, without needing any fancy gene splicing. Spreading the plague, however, would be a problem. One link led to another, and before long, Els was lost in the whole Amerithrax saga, its byzantine plots—all the mysteries surrounding those seven spore-filled letters. He’d forgotten about that nightmare—one of the largest investigations in history. The topic might have made a first-rate CNN opera.

Amerithrax led him to the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. From Tokyo, two clicks landed him on a rooftop in Miyako City, watching cars and trucks and warehouses and apartment buildings turning into driftwood on a hump of gray water that would not stop surging inland. A whole neighborhood tore loose and shot down the rapids. As the cell phone film panned, a stack of frothing water overtook the camera and the shot went black.

Els scanned down the long columns of related videos:
Latest eyewitness. Tape captures eerie sounds. Most dramatic compilation. Survivors recount terror
. Some clips had been clicked on a million times, some once or twice. Overnight, this carousel of catastrophe.

Among the hundreds of two-minute clips, right between
Moment tsunami hits
and
Japan bids to save power plant,
a prodigious automated sorting algorithm had inserted the bleakest of errors. Or maybe a human curator planted the link, a sadistic joke on the theme of disaster: a video that had gone viral on the day of the quake, racking up 62,700,312 views in the few days since. Els clicked and became number 62,700,313.

At his click, the room filled with a vivacious, pitch-corrected, and jaw-droppingly sunny little song. On Els’s screen, a thirteen-year-old singer woke up, went to the bus stop, joined her friends in a convertible, and visited a suburban house where an upper-middle-class teen party was in full swing. As the clip rolled, the hit count rose by ten thousand viewers. Shaking off the song, Els searched for an explanation. The Web teemed with ten thousand parodies, reactions, tributes, covers, homages, analyses, and news segments about the global phenomenon.

He looked up. It was past dinnertime, and he was starving.

.  .  .

THE LEBANESE MEZE restaurant not far from campus was hopping. But the oblivious crowd was just what he needed after his morning’s run-in with the law. Noises everywhere—ice sliding from pitchers, a rumble of silver on stoneware, the diffuse, rolling chorus of clientele swapping their strands of gossip—like one of those mad Stockhausen pieces composed in a fireworks-testing facility. Drink your wine with a glad heart, for God accepts your works.

Els asked for a table near the center of the room. Maddy had always accused him of being a closet extrovert.
You are the Thomas Merton of music
.
You want to live in a hermitage in Times Square, with a big sign pointing to you reading, hermit.

Els smiled at the accusation, decades downstream. He imagined his wife across the table, shaking her head at the fix he’d gotten into. They had lived together for a handful of years, each year leaving them a little less explicable to each other. And still he sometimes joked with her ghost or sounded her out on the latest strangeness. Once Maddy had admired his compulsive need to make music; by the end, it merely baffled her. Garage genomics would have struck her as total madness.

You don’t hate the public, Peter. You need it. You want people to come drag you out of your cave and make you play them something.

Once, in his late twenties, in the full flush of skill-driven freedom, he wrote a hermetic, harmonically adventuresome song cycle for piano, clarinet, theremin, and solo soprano on texts from Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China.” The third song ran:

You do not need to leave your room.

Only sit at your table and listen.

Don’t even listen;

simply wait, be quiet,

still and solitary.

The world will offer itself to be unmasked.

It has no choice;

it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

The songs were performed twice, seven years apart, for a dozen puzzled listeners each time. That was the kind of music Els wrote: more people onstage than in the audience. Sometime in the late nineties, after the disaster of his three-hour historical drama
The Fowler’s Snare
, Els destroyed the only copies of many of his scores, including “The Great Wall”
songs. The cryptic music now existed nowhere but in his ears. But he could hear it again, even above the restaurant din. He’d forgotten how jagged and eerie the whole cycle had been, how bent it was on its prophecy. He regretted destroying the piece. He could brighten the songs now. Give them room to breathe. A little light; some air.

He lifted his water glass and toasted the ghost sitting across the table from him:
Guilty as charged
. No one in the noisy room heard him.

AT HOME, HE had no lab to occupy his evening. He switched on the giant flat-screen. Sara had gotten it for him for his seventieth birthday, to keep him on progress’s forced march. On the vibrant high-def screen, a cloud of radiation drifted toward the largest urban conglomeration on Earth, just as in the worst disaster movies of his youth.

Els switched to a documentary on western wildlife. The soundtrack—a mythic, pentatonic meandering—bugged him, and he switched again. One click, and he landed on a corral full of string-bikini models whacking each other with giant foam hands. He killed the set and vowed to remove it from the room tomorrow, as he’d promised the doctor at the insomnia clinic he would do, months earlier.

The book on his nightstand opened to where he’d left off the night before. He stopped each evening at the top of the left-hand page, the end of the first paragraph—one of a thousand foolish, useful habits Madolyn had taught him. His wife was still so present in his habits that he couldn’t believe they’d been apart now for four times longer than they’d been together.

Els lay on his back in the enormous bed, trying to conjure up Maddy’s face. Her features had become one of those cheerful études from another century whose melodies he could remember only by spelling out the intervals.

He took up the open book, and once again, for another night, he trained his mind to settle in and read. It took some time to build up a rhythm. The sense of concentrated elsewhere filled him with that primal pleasure: seeing through another’s eyes. But after some paragraphs, a clause swerved and slid him sideways into a drift, a soft passage several pages on, in the middle of the right-hand page, a sense-rich description of a man and woman walking down a street in Boston on a July night, reprised, in misty da capo, again and yet once more, his eyes making their closed circuit, hitting the right margin’s guardrail, looping back around and trying the line again, tracking along the circuit of text, slowing then slipping down the stripped cogway of slick subordinate clauses, retrying the sequence until his dimming sight again found traction—the man, the woman, a moment of regretful truth along the esplanade—before snagging and starting the fuzzy looping climb all over again.

At last, after who knows how many round trips, he jerked awake. And the words on the page, before Els’s now-focused but disbelieving eyes, marshaled like troops on a parade ground and solidified, only to reveal no man, no woman, no night, no Boston, no exchange of intimate insight, but merely a Bulgarian writer describing the secret will of crowds.

He put down the book, shut off the light, and settled his head deeper into the pillow. As soon as the room went dark, he came wide awake. The floorboards snapped and blasted like an exchange of gunfire, and the furnace shuddered like a great engine of war.

I chose my host organism for the most naïve reason: it had a colorful history. That color was red.

Of love’s Pangaea, no more than a few scattered islands remained above water. And of Clara Reston, who listened to eight-hundred-year-old conductus as if it were a news flash, he remembered little that couldn’t fit into a five-minute student song. But she had turned Els into a pilgrim listener. Before Clara, no piece had any real power to hurt him. After, he heard danger everywhere.

The composers Els returned to at seventy—Pérotin, Bach, Mahler, Berg, Bartók, Messiaen, Shostakovich, Britten—were the ones that Clara taught him to love at nineteen. But along the way from exposition to coda, he’d betrayed them all. There were years in youth when all Els wanted was to write a piece so perfect it would cripple Clara with remorse. In middle age, he’d wanted only to give her back something, for all she’d given him.

He never thought it strange that she had no friends. She’d jumped out early and alone into adulthood, long before he himself glimpsed their coming eviction from adolescence. He wondered sometimes if her life hid some spooky domestic secret that left her so precocious. She had life’s concert and all its program notes memorized, long before the performance started.
Peter! You’ll love this one.

She applied to college in Indiana, to study cello with Starker in America’s best string program. Without a second thought, young Peter followed her. He didn’t even have a fallback school. His stepfather wouldn’t pay for him to major in music; Soviet science threatened the country’s very existence, and as Ronnie Halverson saw it, any able-minded eighteen-year-old had a duty to join the counteroffensive. And so, deep in the late fifties Midwest, Els set off after a bachelor of science. Better things for better living through chemistry.

Freshman year exhilarated him. He sat in the auditorium alongside four hundred other chemistry students while the lecturer scribbled down blackboards full of spirit writing from the world inside this one. The labs—titrating, precipitating, isolating—were like learning to play a wayward but splendid new instrument. Matter was thick with infolded mysteries waiting to be discovered. Coming from the lab, stinking of camphor, fish, malt, mint, musk, sperm, sweat, and urine, Els smelled the heady scent of his own future.

He still studied clarinet. In his second semester, he bested a dozen performance majors for a chair in the top undergraduate orchestra. The other woodwinds refused to believe he was wasting himself on test tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks. Clara just shrugged at his perversity. She glanced at him sometimes from across the orchestra, at her stand in the cellos, her patient smile waiting for him to discover what she already knew
.

To Els, music and chemistry were each other’s long-lost twins: mixtures and modulations, spectral harmonies and harmonic spectroscopy. The structures of long polymers reminded him of intricate Webern variations. The outlandish probability fields of atomic orbitals—barbells, donuts, spheres—felt like the units of an avant-garde notation. The formulas of physical chemistry struck him as intricate and divine compositions.

Alongside courses in structure and analysis, he sneaked in an elective in music composition. Harmonizing chorales and realizing figured bass felt a bit like algebra. He wrote minuets in the style of Haydn and imitation Bach da capo arias. For Clara’s twentieth, he scored “Happy Birthday” à la late Beethoven. For New Year’s Eve 1961, he gave her his most elaborate trinket yet: a Brahms intermezzo treatment of “How About You?” Clara read through the gift, shaking her head and laughing at a thing so obvious to everyone but its maker.

Oh, Peter. For a bright boy, you’re so clueless. Come on. Let’s play through it.

He tried to explain the plan to Clara. He could graduate with a guaranteed bench job in industry while still making all the music body and soul needed. But she looked away with her maddening sextant look, out to the horizon and over the curve of the Earth, at a future that she could see and he could not.

They spent their every spare minute together. Clara got them reviewing music for the
Daily Student.
Under the anagram byline Entresols, they championed dozens of new recordings as if they were Adam and Eve naming the animals. Their friends—those who didn’t throw up their hands in disgust at that breakaway state of two—called them the Zygote. While the best and brightest headed for civil rights sit-ins, Peter and Clara camped out in the music library listening room, following along in the score of Strauss’s
Four Last Songs
while Schwarzkopf sang “Im Abendrot”:
We’ve gone through need and sorrow, hand in hand . . .

Clara ran point in their discoveries, reconnoitering. She brought Els prizes for dinner: crazy Gesualdo madrigals or brilliant horn passages from late nineteenth century tone poems. And even as Peter scrambled to master her expanding repertoire, Clara blew on ahead of him and found more.

They sang up close, right into each other’s mouths, bending pitches into near-miss dissonance. The grate of those beats sawed straight into their brains. They had not yet seen each other naked. But that shared resonance in the plates of their skulls was as intimate as any sex.

Clara knew her destiny and never wavered. She studied with the demanding Starker, and although the man made her weep almost every week, he led her to tricks of the mind and the wrist that left her playing like an angel.

Music alone, for Clara, had the power to peel away the lie of daily life. She wasn’t sure who Adenauer was, and she didn’t understand why Glenn deserved a ticker tape parade. But a few measures of the
Grosse Fuge
held more raw truth than a month’s worth of headlines. The force of her pitch-driven Platonism gave her a power over Peter. He had hunches; she had convictions. It was never much of a contest. She had only to smile at his churchgoing, and from one Sunday to the next, he quit his family’s faith. With little more than a cocked eyebrow, she got him to grow out his flattop and trade in his button-downs for pullovers. And on a late March night near the end of his sophomore year, she took the war for his soul into the heart of the enemy camp.