Orpheus Lost (9 page)

She swiveled out of his arms and picked up her tea. “I had my cell phone turned off,” she said.

“What happened? Where were you?”

“I ran into an old school friend. We got talking.”

“Until six o’clock in the morning?”

“I hardly think you are in a position to complain about secret excursions at night.”

“But you know where I go. To the Music Lab or the Marrakesh.”

“I’m exhausted,” Leela said. “I have to sleep.”

I need my passport, Leela thought urgently. I’ve got to have it. I can’t find my passport.

She was rummaging, panic-stricken, in her underwear drawer. She was still in the country of bad dreams. Where am I? she wondered, holding a silk camisole up to the light. Beyond the window, the maple was in earliest leaf. On one desk, in the corner of the room, were the typed pages of her grant proposal. On the other desk, in a messy heap, were pages scribbled with the score of Mishka’s
Incident in a Nightmare.

The bedroom came into focus.

The outlines of yesterday grew sharp. There had been an incident, yet another one. Leela had first heard of it about nine the previous evening in a deli in Harvard Square. She listened to customers talking: the death estimates, the body parts, the disruption. People had begun to speak of incidents the way they spoke of accidents on the pike: the frequency was distressing,
but such things always happened to someone else. There was a certain
frisson
, a low-level hum of anxiety that was more or less constant, especially in crowds, especially at sporting events, or in concert halls, or in the subway, but one had to get on with one’s life.

“Were you delayed?” the deli owner asked her. She was a regular in his store. “I heard the Red Line’s completely blocked.”

“I missed the whole thing,” Leela said. “Pure chance. I walked home along the river instead.”

“Jesus.” The deli owner shook his head, wondering. “All the way from MIT? That’s gotta be ESP.”

Was it? Leela asked herself. Was this premonition? In retrospect, she thought it must have been, though when she had veered away from the Central Square T-stop and headed down to the riverside footpath, it was the spring weather, pure and simple, that had lured her. She wanted to be out in the night air, not buried in an underground tunnel. She remembered thinking exactly those words:
not buried in an underground tunnel.
Besides, the constant rush of traffic on Memorial Drive meant the riverwalk was totally safe, safer than the subway at night.

At the deli in Harvard Square, she had bought smoked salmon and Greek salad and a bottle of wine. She had walked home, thinking languidly of a late supper and of passing Kalamata olives from her own mouth to Mishka’s, of licking red wine from his lips. “There’s been another incident,” she would tell him, and he would say, “I know,” and they would make boisterous love because they were alive and unharmed.

But then he would toss in his sleep. He would cry out. He would disappear again, and where would he be, and how long would she have to wait before he turned up, and what explanation would he give?

Perhaps he would already have gone missing.

She felt a sudden precipitous chill in the air.

A few blocks from her apartment, just as she was shifting the grocery bags to ease the drag on one arm, a black car had pulled up at the curb and a man in the passenger seat had got out and pushed something small and hard against her back.
Get in
, he had ordered. None of this had seemed real. She had spent the night talking to Cobb Slaughter, which seemed even less so. She learned that Mishka might or might not be her lover’s name. She learned that the mosque on Prospect Street in Central Square was said to have terrorist links, perhaps the night’s least surprising piece of news.

She remembered a headline from many months back in the
Boston Globe
:
MOSQUE’S TREASURER APPLAUDS ANTI-ISRAELI VIOLENCE. MOSQUE’S LEADER ENDORSES STATEMENT BY YUSUF ABDULLAH AL-QARADANI: “WE WILL CONQUER EUROPE. WE WILL CONQUER AMERICA. WE WILL CONQUER THE WORLD.
”

She remembered drawing the article to Mishka’s attention. Mishka had shrugged. “One rotten apple doesn’t wreck the whole crop. It’s like judging all Jews by Meir Kahane, or all Christians by the Ku Klux Klan.”

This was long before she had any inkling that one night she would follow him to that mosque.

In her back-into-focus apartment, Leela looked at her watch. It was one o’clock in the afternoon. The apartment was empty. On the fridge door, behind the Mozart magnet, were two notes. The first one said:

Berg called. He wants you to call him back. You missed your session at 10 a.m. and he was pretty worked up. He said, and I quote: “I trust she remembers the grant proposal is due next week, but
revisions are necessary first.” I told him you were sick. Too sick to let him know you were sick. I thought that was the best excuse. Mishka.

The second note said:

I’ll be working late again in the Music Lab. Don’t wait up. Mishka.

Leela removed this note and set it beside the coffee machine while she measured water and ground espresso.
Late again at the Music Lab
, which was where he had claimed to be the night she had followed him to the mosque. She made coffee and sat staring out the window at the horse-chestnut tree. She had a word for this stage of new leaf: the parsley stage. Frilled ruffs of green, baby green, celery green, sprouted from every knuckle on every branch, the spacing always perfect. Like the stops on a flute, mathematically ideal, as Berg—who had called—might say.

Berg
called? Berg never called her at home. He left notes, scrawled in thick black pencil, on pale yellow sheets.

Need to discuss passage on harmonics. This section flawed. 10 a.m. Thursday. Berg.

She would find these peremptory messages in her departmental box. She gulped at her coffee. She pulled the telephone toward her and dialed his office. She imagined microphone ears in the drapes and promptly hung up.

She got up from her chair and left the room. In the bedroom, she pulled down the blind. Would that help? She
stood on a chair and draped a pillowcase over the light fixture that dangled from the ceiling in one corner. She looked in the closets. She looked under the bed. She could not see any foreign object.

She gathered up sheets of paper from the messy pile on Mishka’s desk. The sheets were lined with staves and scribbled over with the draft notes of the composition in progress. In one of the margins, Mishka had scribbled:
Bach meets Saladin
. On another page, beneath the heading
Rūmī
, he had copied the lines of a poem:

At the time when we shall come into the garden, thou and I.

The stars of Heaven will come to gaze upon us:

We shall show them the moon herself, thou and I.

Thou and I, individuals no more, shall be mingled in ecstasy…

Below this there were notes:

1. Check Rūmī translations with Siddiqi.
   
2. Prepare critiques of ghazal compositions for Siddiqi’s seminar.
   
3. Persian Classical CDs in Music Lab. (Catalog; make copies.)
   
4. Write paper for conference: Comparison of Persian dastgah system with Western octave.
   
5. Incident: experiment with fusion of Western octave and dastgah system. Possible in same piece?
   

Leela went to her own computer and summoned up Google and typed in
Rumi
.

Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī
, she read on a website,
who died in 1273, was the greatest mystical poet of Persia and also one of the supreme masters of Sufism. In current brands of fundamentalist Islam, Rūmī and Sufism are condemned as Western-influenced corruptions.

She then visited the Harvard School of Music website and scrolled through the faculty listings. She found Siddiqi, Abdul-Hakeem, Distinguished Professor, who was teaching a course in History of Persian Classical Music. She clicked on his email address.
Dear Dr. Abdul-Hakeem Siddiqi
, she typed. She stared at her screen. If Cobb’s information was reliable, Mishka, along with the suicide bomber, was auditing Dr. Siddiqi’s course. Perhaps Mishka went to the mosque as part of a course assignment. It might be that simple.

Dear Dr. Abdul-Hakeem Siddiqi:

I am curious to know
, she typed,
whether your junior colleague Mishka Bartok, whom you possibly know by the name Mikael Abukir—he has a post-doc, but I believe he is auditing your course—has ever discussed…

But what did Mishka ever discuss besides music?

She erased her message. She clicked CANCEL
.

She knew everything and nothing about Mishka Bartok.

She knew the taste of his skin. She knew the sweet smell of him before and during and after making love, she could summon up those fragrant stages at will. She knew what it was like to be enclosed in the haunting cocoon of his music—early Baroque, high Baroque, his own compositions, which Leela could only describe as Baroque Postmodern—and she would simply sit with her eyes closed and listen.

Then he would switch to the oud and play for hours. He would sit cross-legged on a cushion on the floor.

“Is that required?” Leela joked. “Oud players have to sit on the floor?”

Mishka smiled but did not deign to answer as his left hand fingered the chords. In his right he held not a bow, but a long pick shaped like a quill. “It’s called a
risha
,” he told her.

“When did you learn to play the oud?”

“I’ve been playing for years.”

“The math of the rhythm blows my mind, but you never play chords on your oud. No harmonics.”

“No. Persian music’s melodic and rhythmic, not polyphonic. Totally different system.”

“So what’s the attraction? I don’t understand.”

“My father played the oud. He was a singer.”

“Ah, I’d forgotten. But he died before you were born.”

“Right.”

“Do you have relatives on your father’s side?”

“I do, yes.”

“Are they in Australia?”

“No.”

“Where are they?”

“Beirut, I believe. We have no contact.”

“Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to meet them?”

For answer, Mishka played complicated rhythms on the oud.

“That’s not a wholly adequate answer,” Leela teased.

“Music’s the way I talk.”

“Want to play me again?”

But exactly what game was he playing?

She knew everything and nothing about him.

She also knew everything and nothing about Cobb Slaughter.

Apparently.

He had told her years ago that she knew nothing about him. He had told her that many many times.

She knew it was true and yet she realized she had never believed it.

She opened her wallet. Behind the clear plastic window which showed her ID was a hidden pocket. She reached in with her index finger and thumb and pulled out her contraband: three photographs, old ones, dog-eared, the color fading. She had not looked at these photographs for a very long time, though she was always aware of their presence. One photograph showed her father and her mother seated rather awkwardly on chairs beneath a pecan tree. Her parents were laughing. Leela, a child of six with fiery corkscrew curls, was nestled into her mother’s lap and was leaning toward her father and pulling at the pocket of his shirt. She remembered with the utmost clarity what she expected to find: the brownie in her father’s pocket. This brownie was not something to eat; he was related to goblins. “He’s very shy,” her father said. “He always hides. His name is M’sieur de Crac de Bergerac.”

Leela’s little sister Maggie was present in this family photograph as the bulge beneath her mother’s shift.

“Only the baby can see the brownie,” Leela’s father said.

He always laughed and winked when he said this, and Leela had kept the photo for two reasons: it was the only one she had of her mother, and it was proof that once upon a time, her father laughed.

In the second photograph there were three people, all standing, in the shadow of the pecan. Leela’s father looked somber, his thoughts on eternity. Though he had his hands on the shoulders of his daughters—Leela was on one side, Maggie on the other—he was thinking of something else. His eyes were half closed. He might have been praying for his wild and
wayward ten-year-old and for four-year-old Maggie. Leela was gesturing to someone outside the photograph, to Cobb, on whom she had pressed the Kodak instamatic and her orders.

The third image was of Leela and Cobb, arms entwined. They were fourteen years old and had just placed first and second in the Math Prize.

Leela tucked the photographs into her bra and lay on her back on the bedroom floor. She felt the thump-thump of her heart against the glossy-paper image of her mother. What she smelled was the rotting floor of a veranda in Promised Land, a sweet fungal smell. She heard birds calling. Her eyes followed the slow curve of wasps through magnolia trees.

“Have you ever been stung by a wasp, Cobb?” she asked drowsily.

“Yes,” he said. “Have you?”

“On my eyelid once. It swelled up as big as an egg. I couldn’t see.”

They were on the floorboards, side by side on their backs, studying stains on the pulpy ceiling of the veranda of the derelict Hamilton house. They were seven years old.

“What can you see?” Cobb asked.

“I can see a parallelogram.”

Cobb said, “It’s not a parallelogram. It’s a coffin.”

“It can’t be a coffin. You can’t have a crooked coffin. It would have to be a rectangle to be a coffin and it’s not.”

“I’m not looking at that one. The one I’m looking at is a coffin.”

What he saw, Leela knew, was the box where his mother lay, still open for viewing.

Leela rolled over and stroked Cobb’s hair. “I’m so sad about your mama, Cobb.”

“I can see a rattlesnake,” he said.

“Where?”

“Up there near the post. The curly brown stain.”

“That’s not a rattler, it’s a river.”

“It might be the Styx,” Cobb conceded. “Like Mr. Watson told us. When people sail over it they don’t come back.”