by BRIAN HALL
The recording ends. He slips the disk back into the sleeve. Is Gen back? Maybe he could help her put the groceries away. He turns out the desklight, heads up the stairs. He again considers calling Mark, but he still can’t think of a good reason. Maybe he could ask him about that second subject in the last movement, why it sounds so American. Mark always understood music better than Vernon. He tries not to regret that Mark became an astronomer rather than a concert pianist. Another contest Gen won, though he shouldn’t think of it that way.
At the top of the stairs, Vernon listens. “Gen?”
Silence.
He finds himself thinking for some unaccountable reason—maybe it was RCA’s red seal—of a naval rule he first learned in the service: Red, Right, Return. Meaning, when your ship is returning to port, keep the red buoy on your right. How clever, the person who devised that rule, with its alliterative mnemonic to help even the idiots. Vernon has always admired simple ingenuity more than he can ever get anybody else to understand.
* * *
• • •
Another evening. The autumn weather has turned cold. Vernon is going through the house closing storm windows. He can’t handle the leaves in the yard anymore. He used to rake them to the roadside and burn them. Mark loved watching that when he was little, jumping up and down and flapping his arms. Then the town outlawed burning, and it took a week to bag it all. Now a lawn company does it. Three or four young men that look Latino will arrive unannounced on a November day and clear the whole property in five hours.
A wet and windy night. The old sashes rattle, scaring Yolanda, who’s hiding under the living room couch. No idea where Llosa is, but Vargas is staying in Vernon’s vicinity. Gen is at Carlos’s apartment again. Seems the old rogue has a cold. She’s gone to brew him tea with lemon and honey, make him comfy, warm his ascot.
Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep . . .
Vernon finds himself at the end of his circuit in the dining room they never use, where the old upright is. Mark used to practice for an hour before school, then another hour in the afternoon. What a diligent kid. Vernon sits at the piano. (She dotes on him—that ridiculous ascot.) He finally got around to learning a few weeks ago what a Neapolitan sixth was, so he picks out a C minor chord, then plays the N6, which is what steely-eyed music men call it. Beethoven inserted the Neapolitan sixth several times into the Moonlight Sonata, and when Vernon was listening to a performance by Claudio Arrau the other day, he actually managed to hear it. Which made him feel pretty good. Cat on his chest, Neapolitan sixth in his ear—the life!
Vernon depresses the keys of a C minor chord gently, so that the strings don’t sound. Then he whoops. The sound floating from the piano is a C minor chord. Magic. “Everything we do is music,” John Cage used to say. Now Vernon depresses the damper pedal, so that all the strings are free to vibrate, and barks, “Testing!” A recognizable ghost of his own particular vocal timbre rises from the casing. Is he just imagining it or, if he speaks a short word quickly enough, can he discern the actual word coming off the strings? “You!” he barks. “Me!” Nope, he’s imagining it.
Charles Ives loved his father. Alone among the unimaginative members of their family, he and George Ives were kindred spirits. Ives’s father was a Civil War trumpeter and afterward a town bandleader, and he lived Cage’s idea a hundred years before Cage. He tried to imitate the clacking of a train’s wheels on a violin. He knew that the sound of the church bells near his house was a mix of tones and overtones, so he searched for a combination of keys on the piano that would reproduce it. He owned a slide trumpet, made specially for him, so that he could follow a church congregation up or down in pitch, no matter how far off-key they sang. Years later, his son composed a psalm setting in which one chorus remains in the starting key while a second modulates upward. It’s intended to recall the revival meetings of Ives’s youth, where spiritual excitement caused people to sing sharp. Father and son. Toward the end of his composing life, Charles Ives said that whenever he wrote music he heard somewhere in the back of his mind a brass band with angelic wings. He was thinking of his father’s band.
Vernon touches the keys again. He has wanted for years to find a combination of notes that sounds like a train whistle. Like Ives’s father, he has never found it. He remembers when he was a boy lying in bed, listening to the Norfolk & Western coal train coming into town. Half a mile from his house, by the old colored cemetery, the belt line split off from the main line, and the engineer would sound the whistle before hitting the switch. Vernon will never forget that sleepy clatter and the squealing cry. Different engineers voiced it differently, depending on how they pulled the cord. Julian would be dead asleep in the other bed. He always went out like a light.
That little house with its trio of silly gooses and his poor, patient father. Everyone but Vernon hung on him like a clutch of drowning children. When his father died, Vernon was the only one left with a lick of sense, and he understands now, looking back, that his lifelong project has been to avoid letting them drag him under, too. He saw his sister Patty as little as possible. Julian handed him the gift of his betrayal over the school money, so Vernon could wash his hands of him. And when his mother lost her teaspoonful of wits and never said anything anymore but “Isn’t that nice?” and “Have we met?,” she was rolled into a nursing home near where Patty lived with her husband, Ray, and vegetated there for twenty years. In lieu of visiting, Vernon sent money. Patty also avoided her mother. After all, she’d grown up with her. It was son-in-law Ray who went twice a week, sat with her, consulted with the staff. Over the years he managed to keep writing letters to Vernon, despite never having anything to report. Everything we do is music.
Vernon checks the clock on the kitchen wall. Eight-thirty. Chattering and drinking. Hola, Carlos! His cold won’t keep him away from the wine. If he even has a cold.
He heads down to the study, leaving the door at the top of the stairs ajar so that Vargas can pretend to remember some unrelated thing he needs to accomplish in the basement. And people say cats have no personality. Of course he went to his mother’s funeral. He’s not that bad. None of the older relatives were still around to object, so they cremated her. It was the last time he saw Julian, who was there with Peter, his boyfriend of many years. Vernon understands that homosexuals are just people, and he agrees they ought to have their rights. Peter, as far as Vernon can tell, has made Julian happy, which is no easy task. He only wished, at the funeral, that Peter hadn’t been so goddamn poofy.
Here’s a terrifying detail from the bombing of Nagasaki: years after the radiation victims were cremated, it was discovered that their ashes had turned pitch black.
He pulls down the Lindsay box. Time at last for Opus 130.
There’s that thing Oppenheimer always claimed he thought at the moment the first bomb exploded at Trinity, a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” What a dandified fancy-pants. What he really said at the time, according to witnesses, was, “It worked.” Which reminds Vernon of something he read in an oral history book about Hiroshima. A Japanese man from an outlying area climbed a hill on the morning after the bombing and looked out over the plain where the city was supposed to be. He was so stunned, the only thing his mind could formulate, over and over, was, “It’s gone.”
It worked.
It’s gone.
In the moments after the bomb went off at Trinity, while other scientists were gazing awestruck at the mushroom cloud and Oppenheimer was ransacking his mind for a pretentious quote, Fermi was dropping scraps of notebook paper and watching how far the wind from the blast carried them. From that, he made a rough calculation of the kilotonnage of the explosion, and came within a factor of two of the correct answer. Simple ingenuity. There won’t even be any Hiroshimas.
Vernon opens the box. He bought the Lindsay Quartet recordings in 1984. Two years later he was diagnosed with
Parkinson’s, and he hasn’t bought any Beethovens since. Maybe he realized, with nine sets, that he already had more than he could take with him. Typical Musical Heritage Society—the recording quality is good, the performances are great, the packaging is shit. Get this, they actually managed to put the wrong labels on the disks. Opus 130 is on the disk labeled as 132. 132 is labeled 131. 131 is labeled 130. Unbelievable. Vernon slips out the right fucking disk because he relabeled them, maintaining order and minimal standards in the universe.
There’s something the physicist Freeman Dyson liked to quote, something from a children’s book about an imaginary land: “There’s a dreadful law here—it was made by mistake, but there it is—that if anyone asks for machinery they have to have it and keep on using it.” Vernon was dragged into Star Wars in his final years at work. He’d thought he’d escaped all that, but the Air Force was still paying his salary. Tracking ICBMs by their infrared emissions is difficult because infrared saturates the Earth’s atmosphere, but ICBMs also produce UV, about which Vernon is one of the world experts. His bosses at the lab told him that if we wanted to continue to get funding, he had to convince the brass that his research would help them shoot down missiles. So there he was, a fat old man with his obsolete Ivorite Keuffel and Esser slide rule, and his spotless research in his innocent filing cabinet, standing in front of a bar of blockheaded generals and lying to them like Herman Kahn. Our end is in our beginning.
He lowers the needle.
The more Vernon has listened to this piece—perhaps forty times so far—the more convinced he is that Beethoven was wrong to listen to his dumbass friends and divorce the Grosse Fuge from it. Apparently others think so, too, since many quartets, like the Lindsay, have reverted to the original version. Not that Vernon understands the Grosse Fuge. Far from it.
Jesus, he loves the way these four Brits play. The second movement, the Presto, is one of those driving pieces Beethoven conjures out of nothing, the tiniest shred of a motif. The third, the Andante, oh god . . . it’s so beautiful. The first statement of the theme (is it a gavotte? an allemand?) is by the viola, and in the old days of first-violin tyranny you could never hear it properly. (Wait—could it be a bourrée?) There’s a moment where the music halts on a chord in a new key and then executes these dropping fourths that sound like an annunciation, like the end of a recitative in Messiah just before the trumpet sounds (We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye) and then a couple of measures later, everyone stops playing except for the first violin, which hits an accented note that sounds completely out of the key, Vernon has always wondered if it’s a tritone, but . . . Holy shit! He just now figured it out, just this moment—it’s a Neapolitan 6th!
Mark, listen—!
Time rushes on, to the fourth movement, Alla danza tedesca, serene and lovely, and then the side is over. Vernon sweeps Vargas off his stomach—the cat pooled against the score, blocking the bottom stanza with his butt—gets up to flip the record. “No,” he says to Vargas, walling off his lap with the sheet music. “I mean it.”
Now the Cavatina. Beethoven told an acquaintance he had never written anything that moved him so much. In the middle there’s an eerie passage he marked “Afflicted,” in which the lower instruments keep time in glacial eighth-note triplets like the tick of a cosmic clock, while the violin, in conflicting sixteenths, plays a halting series of notes that sound uncannily like a human voice, wandering and crying, unable even to formulate a question, let alone find an answer. (No facile “It Must Be!” comforts here.) Of all the violinists of all the quartets, Lindsay’s Peter Cropper best brings out a feeling of anguished incomprehension. He somehow can make a single note sound bereft. Then the opening song returns, and though it’s mainly a song of mourning, toward the end it rises to the hopeful major third above the tonic, first in the violin, then the cello. The piece dies slowly into silence on this same major third.
The Cavatina is the last piece of music on the Golden Record that went into space with the two Voyager probes. (It occurs to Vernon that Mark might not know this, since he was only a teenager when the Voyagers lifted off. That might be a good reason to call . . .) The record was nothing but a public relations stunt by Carl Sagan, as there’s essentially no chance that an intelligent extraterrestrial, even if the galaxy were crawling with them, would stumble across this microscopic mote in the vastness of space. But Sagan’s a genius. Even Vernon, against his better judgment, kind of loves the idea of the Golden Record. That lonely, frightened voice of Beethoven’s cavatina, deciding at the last moment to choose hope, sailing out of the solar system at 17 kilometers per second, having to wait 40,000 years before encountering another star system, Gliese 445—where maybe the unfathomable aliens are playing the Grosse Fuge.
Speak of the devil, here it comes, starting on that same hopeful G that ended the Cavatina, but twisting it immediately—up a half step, then jumping up a sixth and down a half step, repeating—into something serpentine and sinister. (Word through the grapevine is that Sagan is dying.) Vernon will never understand the Grosse Fuge. Sixteen minutes of cacophony. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe here, only here, Beethoven deliberately stepped beyond the edge of the comprehensible. (He’s only sixty-two. Some kind of cancer, they say. Maybe it was electromagnetic signals from outer space, kissing him back.)
Fugues are probably the most orderly form of composition that exists. Beethoven grew up playing Bach fugues. He wrote more and more of his own as he turned old and deaf, and failed in all his loves, and discovered his life was shit. So maybe this piece is about life’s chaos, and the attempt of the mind—never succeeding, but forever trying—to grasp it. Look, the most chaotic part is the first 158 measures. They play like a gradual breakdown of order, beginning in unison, then launching into a double fugue that’s jarring and complicated to begin with, then introducing polyrhythms with triplets, then adding a layer of sixteenths, and finally going completely off the rails with hammering triplets fighting against the fugue subject now racing along at four times its original speed and accented off the beat.
Then what happens? The four shouting voices come to a sudden halt, and starting in measure 159 they proceed, pianissimo, to play steady, soothing sixteenths, with much simpler harmonies, and it sounds—doesn’t it?—like the voices are weaving together something, trying to patch up the hole in the space-time fabric. The fugue subject returns, but quiet, tamed, and now plays against itself with a one-measure delay, and suddenly it seems tuneful, the two voices cooperating. Then the four instruments slip into unison and die down into repeated notes murmuring and rocking, getting simpler and simpler. There, there. Everything makes sense.
Then—boom! The fugue returns, still strange, and as it did in the beginning of the movement, it insists on getting stranger. But—and here’s the point—it never gets as strange. It sounds like a version of the fugue that’s trying to accommodate, at least a little, the plea for order that preceded it. More weaving happens, and there’s a dance-like bit that comes in a couple of times, but the basic idea is the same: unruliness contained, just barely, by order. And when the serpentine theme comes back fortissimo unison for the final time, something wonderful happens (listen!): it’s the same chromatic tune, seemingly unmoored from any key, but it sails past its previous ending and somehow, still sounding like itself, it lands clearly in B-flat major, the key of trumpet fanfares, the home key of the whole quartet. And the coda takes the B-flat ball and runs for the end zone, dodging and weaving past weird arabesques and trills and ending on an exuberant succession of dominant and tonic chords like any normal nineteenth-century piece. Voilà!
Vernon leans back, eyes on the ceiling, exalted.
The tone arm swings, the turntable shuts off.
Silence.
He contemplates the ceiling for a long while.
And then Beethoven died.
And the Cavatina passed Neptune seven yea
rs ago.
Vernon levers himself up, aching in his lower back. Puts the record away, turns out the light. Climbs up from the underworld. “Vargas? Oh, there you are.” He lets the cat brush past him, closes the basement door.
Past eleven, and no sign of Imogen. He hovers for a minute in the hallway off the kitchen. Then goes and opens the front door. Stands inside the screen door, listening. (Oops. He forgot to put on the storm door here.) The wind has died down. He hears water dripping from the gutters, the eaves, the silver maple tree. He hears the granular hiss of a passing car’s tires on the wet pavement. He hears the hum of the transformer on the telephone pole across the street. He isolates the sound of one drip from the eaves and another drip from a tree branch and listens to their interference pattern. Six to five. If they were sound waves, they would make a minor third.