And on the first day of winter, Els meets his burping, giggling, raging, laughing, squalling daughter, her tiny foot between his fingers an astonishment he can’t take in. This perfect, working creature, self-assembling, self-delighting, the brightest whim that could ever exist, and he’ll never make anything to compare to her for pure wonder.
What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what has become of the women?
Els followed the Voice. He did as She instructed, down to the pointless twenty-minute detour through Clarion. The gadget found its trio of geosynchronous satellite beacons twenty-two thousand miles high, and triangulated from them the one spot on Earth where Els could be. From there, it skimmed through a digitized database of eight million miles of road and took Els to the one place on Earth he wanted to go. Giving in to machine navigation was an infantile luxury. And the Voice came through in the end, dropping him off on the stoop of the Kohlmann summer cottage just before dark.
The abandoned wasp’s nest hung right where Klaudia said. Els extracted the key and let himself into a room reeking of nature and vacation. The lodge was lined in cedar-paneled nostalgia and furnished in cushioned pine from the fifties. The whole house showed signs of hasty evacuation. Football jerseys and high-tech sneakers lay scattered about. Stray lights had been left on, which Els went about turning off before he sat down to collect himself.
He found nuts and cereal in the pantry, and a dozen apples in the refrigerator crisper. He helped himself to a glass of Finger Lakes Chardonnay and some frozen pound cake. The washing machine stood in a utility room off the back of the kitchen. He stripped off his painter pants, waffle shirt, and stale underwear. Then he stood under the shower in the rustic bathroom, naked, sagging, and scalded, waiting for explanation.
Fed and clean, he had no need of anything but sleep. But sleep wouldn’t come. He rooted around the possessions of his unknown benefactors, scavenging for diversion. Magazines abounded—old Smithsonians and Outdoors, as well as scattered issues from more specialized offerings. It seemed possible to append the word magazine to any string of words—Not Your Grandfather’s Clock Magazine; Power Balance Holographic Wrist Channeler Magazine—and still come up with a product that needed only the right focus group to find its way into circulation.
Reading wasn’t possible. All Els was good for was music. Shelves in the front room held three dozen jewel boxes—road trip listening, left here in the vacation home alongside battered Parcheesi sets and moldy quiz books. Ripped copies of Ella Fitzgerald’s Verve Songbooks, They Might Be Giants, Sonic Youth, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a smattering of emo, albums by Wilco, Jay-Z, the Dirt Bombs, the Strokes, and Rage Against the Machine. There was a time when the proliferation of so many musical genres left Els cowering in a corner, holding up the Missa Solemnis as a shield. Now he wanted alarm and angry dream, style and distraction, as much ruthless novelty as the aging youth industry could still deliver.
He found a disc by a group called Anthrax, as if some real bioterrorist had planted it there to frame him. He looked around the cottage for something to play it on. In the kitchen he found a nineties-style boom box. He slipped the disc into the slot and with a single rim shot was surrounded by an air raid announcing the end of the world. A driving motor rhythm in the drums propelled virtuosic parallel passages in the guitars and bass. The song came on like a felon released from multiple life sentences. The melodic machete went straight through Els’s skin. It took no imagination to see a stadium of sixty thousand people waving lighters and basking in a frenzy of shared power. The music said you had one chance to blow through life, and the only crime was wasting it on fear.
Many years ago Els had made a vow to run from no art but let every track play through to its end. He looked out the window, past the gravel drive, through the stand of birches, remnants of the vast, vanished northern hardwood forest, listening to this droll Armageddon. The band had been around for half of Els’s life, servicing the need for anarchy written into people’s cells. He wondered which of this middle-class, outdoorsy family was responsible for the disc. Probably not Mom, although the thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone’s desire.
The song was one long, joyous jackhammer assertion of tonic. Surprise was not its goal, and the pattern laid down in the first four measures drove the tune on in a storm surge. But after two minutes, it sprouted a hallucination in the relative minor floating above the thrash, and for several notes Els thought the band, in a fit of real anarchy, had thrown Chopin’s E Minor Prelude—the “Vision”—into the cement mixer, like Lady Gaga quoting The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Els paused the disc, but the Chopin persisted. Four measures, with a little altered voice-leading at the end, turned back on themselves in an endless, lamenting loop—one of those tuneful fragments that signaled the onset of a temporal lobe seizure. But the sound came from somewhere in the house. He wandered through three different rooms before finding it: Klaudia’s smartphone. The one that had guided him here.
Words hovered on the screen: “Incoming Call, Kohlmann, K.” He pressed the answer icon, and held the world’s portal up to his ear.
You’re all over the news, Kohlmann said, trying for sardonic but landing on scared.
Yes, Els said. I saw the camera trucks this morning.
This morning. It wasn’t possible.
Klaudia said, Google yourself. The clips are up already.
Of course they were. Retired professor of music flees scene of terrorism raid. Verrata College officials express dismay.
What else? Els asked. You sound . . .
Your bacteria. You said they were harmless.
Something slurred in his brain. I said the species wasn’t dangerous in ordinary situations.
Storm troopers were assaulting the cabin, from the direction of the kitchen. Els set the phone down and headed toward the invasion. He’d pressed the pause button on the boom box, and the pause had chosen that moment to time out. He looked for eject, and in the onslaught of sound couldn’t find it. He yanked the cord from the wall, then walked back to the bedroom and retrieved the phone.
Back. Sorry.
What the hell was that?
Your grandsons’ music.
Ach. We’re finished, aren’t we?
What about my bacteria? Els asked.
Nineteen people in hospitals across Alabama have been infected with your strain. The CDC says nine people dead.
A long caesura, the sound of what terror would be, when it grew up.
My strain? In Alabama?
Kohlmann read from another screen: Serratia marcescens. That’s the one, right?
There was nothing to say, and Els said it.
The FBI wants to talk to you.
This . . . none of this makes sense. The FBI told the press what bacteria I was culturing?
But he didn’t need reminding: Everybody was the press now. Everyone knew everything, as it happened.
The journalists think I . . . ? They can’t be that stupid. Were all these patients on IV drips, by any chance?
Google it, Klaudia told him. That’s what the FBI is doing, I’m sure.
Jesus, Els said.
And call me. They can’t trace you to my phone, can they?
About your phone, he said. Chopin?
What can I say? It does something to me. Play that at my funeral, please?
He promised. But he wasn’t sure an audience with chronic focal disorder would sit through it.
A friend says: “I just heard the strangest song ever.” Do you run away or toward?
He sat out back behind the cottage on the edge of a maple grove, his head bowed over the device. In the dark, with that lone beam of white splashed across his face, he read the accounts. Nineteen Alabamans sick and nine dead. Nine people out of a hundred thousand annual American deaths by hospital infection—more than car wrecks and murders combined. The public, drowning in data, might never have registered the story. But he had turned accident into something
panicworthy.
All the infected patients had indeed been on a catheter. All six hospitals were in greater Birmingham. All got their IV bags from the same supplier. Either someone had accidentally contaminated a batch, or America was under siege again. In normal times, most people could figure the odds. But the times would never be normal again.
Els’s eyes adjusted to the screen, the lone bright spot in the surrounding dark. He searched his name and found student ratings of his teaching, a recent Brussels performance of his forgotten chamber symphony, and old chatter about the 1993 premiere of The Fowler’s Snare. Searches on the Alabama outbreak led to a gigantic methane dome under the thawing tundra that was belching into the atmosphere massive amounts of greenhouse gas that would speed the process that released them.
Reporters speculated about why a retired adjunct professor of music had been manipulating human pathogens in his den. Neighbors attested to his quiet politeness, although one described him as standoffish and another mentioned the atonal sounds emanating from his house at odd hours. The Joint Security Task Force could not comment on ongoing investigations, but they were interested in any information concerning the whereabouts of Peter Els.
Opera buffa had turned seria. He had no choice. He had to return home and explain, if only to keep a jumpy country from going off the rails again. But he’d already explained everything to Coldberg and Mendoza, and still they’d raided him. Now the Alabama infections vindicated them. Threat once again kept the precarious democracy intact. Els would have to be punished, in proportion to the thrill he’d given the collective imagination.
A hundred yards off, through the dense maples, the windows of the neighbors’ cabin threw off an amber glow. The undergrowth on all sides boomed with calls and alarms, an animal Visions Fugitives. His frantic flight caught up with him, and Els fell asleep in the deck chair under the trees. The smart screen dimmed, then timed out, then slipped from his hands. Sometime in the night he woke, and, realizing where he was, blundered into the house to a soft bed. Toward dawn, from a sleep filled with epidemics, he heard the E Minor Prelude pulsing again. But not until the next morning—a brilliant, balmy, and innocent thing, like the first day of creation—did he find the phone again, lying on the grass as if it had fallen out of the sky.
There is no safety. There is only forgetfulness.
Even in dried-out memory, those years in Boston are fresh and green. Els and Maddy drive a seventeen-foot U-Haul trailer filled with their combined worldly belongings across Ohio and Pennsylvania to the doorstep of their one-bedroom apartment in the Fens. They port a queen-sized mattress up the stairs on their heads. Els fusses over his gravid wife, making her stop and rest every few steps. She laughs off his anxieties. I’m pregnant, Peter. Not crippled. In fact, the thrill of nesting gives her energy for three.
For Maddy, it’s an easy commute by T to Brookline and New Morning, the private freedom school modeled on Neill’s Summerhill. The starry-eyed school board hired her after she declared in her interview that a rich musical exposure could turn any child into a creator. By the time Labor Day rolls around, she’s showing. Her progressive employers pretend to be thrilled.
While swelling Maddy teaches junior high kids how to barrel through dissonant choruses and mallet their way to freedom on Orff instruments, Els picks up odd jobs. He gives private clarinet lessons. He hires himself out as a music copyist. He writes concert reviews for the Globe, at fifty dollars a pop.
At night, they watch classic thirties Hollywood films on the oldies station, on a tiny black-and-white set with tinfoil attached to the rabbit ears. Maddy quilts and Peter glances through scores while Barrymore tells Trilby, “Ah, you are beautiful, my manufactured love! But it is only Svengali, talking to himself . . .”
A week after Halloween, he lands a job beyond his boldest fantasies: gallery guard at Mrs. Gardner’s fake Venetian palazzo, half a mile down the Fenway. He can walk there in minutes. They pay him to stand motionless all day in the Spanish Cloister or the Gothic Room or the Chinese Loggia, guarding paintings and writing music in his head. Days of silent meditation contribute as much to his musical development as all his years in graduate school. For a decade, he has busied himself with intricate, ingenious forms. Now he begins to hear a stream—simple, broad, and adamant—purling beneath his feet.
He lingers for entire afternoons in front of Vermeer’s The Concert, listening to that still trio’s silent harmonies. The bowed head, the wave of the singer’s curved fingers conduct the strains of frozen music for no audience but him, in this distant future. Soon enough, those players, too, will go missing forever.
Richard Bonner writes letters now and then, from his illegal loft in SoHo. A few times he even calls, despite the ruinous expense of long distance. He’s always either euphoric with new projects or ready to press the button that will vaporize humanity. Once, he sends a small commission Els’s way—a request for a two-minute piece to accompany a gallery installation. The job pays nothing, but it’s Els’s first contribution to the downtown scene.
December comes, and with it, a snow that paralyzes Boston. Maddy is huge; she waddles about toting a globe on her outthrust pelvis. When her time comes, their car-owning next-door neighbor is nowhere to be found. Peter must run out in the street and flag down a passing Buick, to hitch a ride to the hospital.
Then infant Sara is there, in all her blotchy astonishment. They huddle in their snowbound cocoon: twin parents bowed over a minuscule wailer, who changes by the hour. Els writes no music for two months; he’s nothing but diapers and basinet and back-patting, getting that living tube to burp. His daughter mewls and cackles, and that’s all the concert he needs. Maddy lies around the apartment languorous, hypnotized, enslaved by this parasite that turns her into a brainless host. They all three do nothing but live. Even yanked awake in the dead of night, Els finds this life finer than any art. These six weeks—the fullest he’ll ever live. But the prelude is over in a few brief bars. Maddy’s back conducting the chorus at New Morning by Washington’s birthday.
Peter takes a leave from the museum to stay home and raise his infant girl. When Maddy returns from work each night to swallow up Sara, Els fusses. Careful; you’re scaring her. Wash your hands first!
The sea slug learns to locomote, shoving herself across the floor on four floppy limbs. Her lips burble and whir, like her mother’s humming in embryo. Peter takes his girl everywhere, in a papoose strapped across his chest. He sings to her all day long. He sings her to sleep each night, as she chants along and reaches for the pitches where they float in the air. “Hot Cross Buns” and “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider”: What more music could a person ever need?
From the start, she’s her own creature. Everything goes in her mouth. What can’t be eaten is there only to test her will. And Sara won’t be thwarted. She’s born a conductor, and the world is her orchestra. She cues the giant adults with her index finger: You: get over here! Me: over there! Life is a puzzle to shift and slide until the solution, so clear already in this infant’s mind, comes free.
Her parents find the bossy Von Karajan game hilarious, the first few hundred times. Then exhausting. Then a little scary. One tough night, after a two-hour epic bedtime war of attrition, Peter and Maddy lie slumped against each other, wasted zombies. The air is stained with baby reek—spit-up and talcum. Peter gazes up at the plaster-cracked ceiling, an alternate notation system he can’t read.
She has a will.
Maddy flops backward on the bed. And she always finds a way.
Plays me like a Strad.
Me, too. How’d she learn that so fast?
Look at us. Remember when the hardest thing in the world was writing a grant?
Maddy breathes out, her soubrette long gone. Not the life you were hoping for, is it?
No, Peter agrees, a little surprised. It’s far more.
”But my lamps were blown out in every little wind. And lighting them, I forget all else again.” (Tagore)
He starts to write
again. A scribbled gesture one day, then a theme, then a few measures. Over several months, he sketches a short scherzo for small ensemble. In the wilds of stay-at-home fatherhood, music changes. His little tricks and signatures soften and expand. He’ll sit working at the electric piano in the corner of the bedroom while his daughter plays on the other side of the wall, rapping at her tiny xylophone, imitating him, chanting the pitchless pitches of infancy.
He crosses over into her room, and she blooms. She slaps the mallet on the shiny metal keys in ecstasy.
What are you saying, Sary-bear?
The name makes her rap faster, gladder. The keys ring out—red, purple, sea-green.
What’s that? Say it again!
She shrieks and strikes at all the keys in the rainbow.
Wait. I know! You’re saying . . .
He helps her hold the mallet. They touch the keys together in the magic order. He sings.
There once was a girl named Sar-a!
She laughs and grabs her hand free, hits the keys that she’s already hearing.
She comes from the present er-a!
She hums hard, whacking as many keys as she can reach.
The future had better beware-a!
Yes, she screeches: That’s it. That’s exactly what I’m saying.
He goes back into his bedroom, to his own keyboard, where he steals from her, those scattered fa-do-sol-la fragments of deep origin. She toddles in, tries to help, pushes keys for him. No, darling, he says. This is daddy’s piece. But it isn’t, really. Everything is hers.
By day’s end, he has the start of a new berceuse, which he tests on her at bedtime. She’s the only hearer the piece may ever have. Who else would listen to such a thing? It’s too wild for the billion lovers of radio tunes, too blissful for the handful who need their music recherché.
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