He pecked terms into Kohlmann’s phone—Els, Serratia, Naxkohoman—until it dawned on him, late again, that his every keystroke was settling forever into multiple server logs that the FBI would comb through on no more grounds than they’d used to raid his house. Somewhere out East—Maryland or Virginia—and elsewhere out West—in the Bay Area, near Sara—there were buildings, white and boxy, multistory, concrete, and windowless, where people at workstations in fluorescent cubicles eavesdropped on all the world’s suspicious searches, watching for patterns in the flow of hot words, a list that now included Els, Serratia, and Naxkohoman. The logs would record the machine that sent the queries. And the querying machine had GPS tracking. If Klaudia’s device could lead Els to this cabin, it could lead the FBI to her device.
Els powered down the smartphone and pushed it across the breakfast nook. When he shut his eyes, he could see a cadre of hazmat suits dismantling the Kohlmanns’ little house in the woods.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
The books on Els’s shelves did tell a secret history, but one beyond any government’s ability to control. Once he discovered the suppressed evidence, all the standard accounts of human affairs turned comical and self-serving. Trade, technology, nations, migrations, industry: the whole drama was really being orchestrated by Earth’s five nonillion mutating microbes.
A year of reading, and the scales fell from Els’s eyes. Bacteria decided wars, spurred development, and killed off empires. They determined who ate and who starved, who got rich and who sank into disease-ridden squalor. The mouth of any ten-year-old child housed twice as many bugs as there were people on the planet. Every human body depended on ten times more bacterial cells than human cells, and one hundred times more bacterial genes than human ones. Microbes orchestrated the expression of human DNA and regulated human metabolism. They were the ecosystem that we just lived in. We might go dancing, but they called the tune.
A short course in life at its true scale, and Els saw: Humanity would lose its war of purity against infection. The race now bunkered down behind the barricades, surrounded by illegals and sleeper cells of every imaginable strain. For two centuries, humans had dreamed of a germ-free world, and for a few years, people even deluded themselves into thinking that science had beaten the invaders. Now contagion was at the gates, the return of the repressed. Multiple resistant toxic strains were rising up like angry colonial subjects to swamp the imperial outposts. And in a way that Els could not quite dope out, the two nightmares infecting the panicked present—germs and jihadists—had somehow found their overlap in him.
None of the sites reporting on Peter Els’s raided library mentioned those other books in his possession—battle manuals that agitated for all-out assault on the general public over the last hundred years. Boulez’s Orientations. Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre. Messiaen’s Technique de mon langage musical. That war had ended long ago, and its struggles were of no consequence to any but the dead. When the body was under attack by invisible agents from every direction, why worry about a thing as vaporous as the soul?
Does it hurt to know that any piece of music, however sublime, can be turned into a unique large number?
A knock on the door and there’s Richard Bonner, on the threshold of the Brookline apartment, which all at once feels like a bourgeois doll’s house.
What’s for dinner?
Peter can only stand and gape. At last his arms grapple at the ghost. Jesus God, Richard! What are you doing here?
If you don’t love me anymore, I can leave.
But faster than Els can stand aside, the choreographer breezes in. With the briefest upbeat, Bonner is seducing the wife, pulling the daughter’s pigtails and getting her to bark like a seal, criticizing the art on the walls, and rearranging the secondhand furniture to better effect.
At the sight of his old friend, arcs of color and readiness well up in Els. Summer camp tumbles down from out of the sky, and a thousand urgent projects enlist him. Years too late, the new decade comes to town. Richard is here; and with Richard near, a man might make anything.
Maddy is cross, behind her woozy smiles. You might have given us a little warning. I’d have cooked you a real meal.
Bonner leans his forehead against hers. Zig when they think you’ll zag. Creation’s Rule Number Two.
What’s Number One? Els asks, willing to be this bent soul’s straight man.
Zag when they think you’ll zig.
Soon enough, over impromptu gin fizzes, the impresario gets everybody dressed up—a hobo tux for Peter, a feather boa for Maddy, and a crocodile tutu for the girl. He makes Sara fetch her long-outgrown toy piano. Ready? The Twinkle Variations. Like there’s no tomorrow. I’ll sing! What the duet lacks in grace they make up for in decibels. Sara slaps the plastic ivories, laughing like a banshee.
They sit down to leftovers. Richard never stops chattering, even to breathe. He brings the New England hicks up to date on every fad that has fluttered through Manhattan in the last few years. Stunned Sara can’t even eat. She sits with fork halfway to open mouth, gazing at this trumpet-lipped, tangled-hair messenger who fills their dowdy apartment with news of a world so much wilder than hers.
Maddy suggests an after-dinner walk, but Richard waves her off. He produces a backpack full of other seductions—reel tapes, half-finished scripts, sketches, notations like secret code. He pulls Els to the corner desk and commences the composer’s reeducation.
He plays the spawn of Terry Riley’s bit of West Coast craziness, In C. Gibson, Glass, Reich, Young: a whole school has formed while Els wasn’t looking. Sara spins around giggling with her eyes closed in the middle of the living room, trancing out to the trippy hypnosis. Maddy, cleaning the dishes, stops long enough to cock an eyebrow at the proceedings: Relentless, no? Her look is schoolmarmish. But schoolmarming is what she does for a living. The former soprano, once game for any tune, now grins and shakes her head.
Richard lies back on the sofa, shifting in ecstasies. You hear what this is, don’t you?
Boring? Els ventures. Banal arpeggios of little harmonic interest, looping over and over. Czerny on acid.
The first real revolution in music for fifty years.
Els tips his head and shrugs. But he keeps listening. If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If four, try eight. Music was never what he thought it was. Why should it start behaving now?
They listen as if the world is lost. They’re back in school again, with all life’s root discoveries still before them. The music makes time wax and wane like a fickle moon.
Maddy sweeps through the room, scooping up her daughter from her listening post on the rug. Sorry, gentlemen, we need to sleep.
No, gentlemen, Sara shouts. We need more!
Go ahead, Richard tells the ladies. His hand traces obeisant rococo curls. Sleep away! You won’t bother us a bit.
Maddy kicks his shins, and the men kill the music. Mother whisks her daughter off to her bedroom and the night’s last story. But the men don’t budge from their improvised atelier. The scores come out, and the two old collaborators go on murmuring by lamplight, long after both girls are safely asleep.
Bonner says: There’s something going on in New York. The city is headed to hell. Homeless everywhere. Basic social fabric, unraveling. But the downtown performance scene has never been stronger. It’s sprouting like toadstools on a grave.
Richard’s sales pitch unfolds like one of those minimalist glaciers. The director has found a fairy godmother, appearing from an aerie in the upper altitudes of Central Park West to throw him some cash. She was waylaid by a piece of Bonner street theater involving one hundred volunteer dancers dressed in ordinary work clothes, planted throughout a square-block area of Midtown, who, at synchronized intervals during rush hour, turned to stone, as in a child’s game of statue maker. The guerrilla ballet played for three straight days and ended without explanations just as word of the performance began to spread around town.
From the tenth-story window of her foundation’s office on West Fifty-seventh, the fairy godmother chanced to glance down on dozens of sudden fossils. They gave her that gooseflesh feel of shared doom she looked for in art. She was moved, not so much by the freeze-ups themselves, but by the logistics that had gone into assembling so anonymous, ephemeral, and near-invisible a work. It took her three dozen phone calls to trace the insurgent dance back to its demented maker.
Now she’s throwing money at me to turn it into a film!
Els shakes his head. A film? Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose?
But Bonner has no purpose. Bonner is pure energy, a taste for prankish novelty, and a sense of bottomless despair when he isn’t, as he still insists on calling it, working.
The two men take the crackpot notion out onto Beacon Street. They walk inbound, back toward the Fens. Bonner maps out a plan involving video cameras with long-focus lenses dangled out of forty-story windows, zooming in and out on the street below. He needs a musical score that can also zoom in and out on demand. He wants cycles within cycles, intricate, interlocking instrumental figurations, each recorded on separate tracks so the whole piece can materialize and dematerialize at will, the parts fading and surging, splitting off, then swelling again into a churning whole.
Sounds brilliant, Els says. But why not get one of those New York minimalist guys to write it for you?
Bonner freezes on the bridge over the MassPike, a sudden statue.
Well, fuck you, too.
Els recoils, stunned. It has taken him years to grasp the obvious: Richard Bonner is as thin-skinned as a child. The critics are powerless to harm him; he thrives on their attacks—the more vicious, the better. But a friend might scar the man for life without even knowing he’d drawn blood.
I happen to have, Els says, improvising, several beautiful ideas that might work.
Bonner starts up the parade again. We don’t need beauty, Maestro. We need music.
Package deal. Just to be safe.
Safety will kill you, you know.
I’m aware. Creation’s Rule Number Three.
They make their way home an hour before dawn. Els fashions a little nest for Richard on the sofa. The impresario sleeps through the family’s morning rituals and the departure for school. And he’s gone, on a train back to the city, by the time Maddy returns home.
Does it help to know that any large number, however random, hides a masterpiece? All you need is the right player.
What can Els remember about that night’s duet?
It’s a real commission, he tells his wife, over the remains of a curt ratatouille. They sit at that rickety green-painted table with the Dover Thrift Edition of Emerson’s Nature shimming up the short leg. A thousand bucks. Can you believe it?
She looks at him over her drained wine glass, a nick in its cheap rim. The look says: Really? The look says: Don’t bullshit me.
Of course, I’ll have to spend a little time down there. Rehearsing and recording.
Peter, she says. The word is ancient. Weary.
Peter turns to his daughter. Hey, Bear? Want to play something? Maybe your new Mikrokosmos piece? Sara pokes off to the other room and its little upright piano, in that slurry of bliss and caginess, the prelude to youth.
Maddy holds his gaze. We can’t live like this. You need to find a job.
A job? I’ve had six jobs in four years. I’ve been earning . . .
Something full-time, Peter. A career.
He looks through the window on the twilight neighborhood, as if the threat emanated from outside. I have a career.
Maddy inspects her hands. You have a daughter.
The words enrage him. I am a good father.
Her fingers go up into her hair, rooting. She doesn’t want to do this, either. It strikes Els then, or somewhere near then, that he hasn’t heard her hum for more than a year.
She goes to the sink and fills it with pots and pans scavenged from a trio of thrift shops.
Look, Els says. It’s real money. A high-profile project in New York.
Maddy sighs in the rising steam. You could make more per hour by tuning pianos.
He tries to remember when he last saw her quilting. A Romanian folk tune, harmonized in modal contrary motion, issues from the other room. The tune sounds to Peter like the final word on longing. Maybe he should make a living tuning pianos.
It’s a step, he tells his wife, more gentle than defensive. If the film runs . . . it might lead to . . .
Woman washing dishes. Not softly.
Maddy, he’s paying me . . .
Really, Peter? She turns to face him. A thousand dollars? Minus commutes to New York? Train tickets, restaurants, hotel rooms . . . ?
WHAT’S THE TIMBRE of this piece? Two slight instruments, say oboe and horn, their intervals trickling out through the open window into the vacant autumn courtyard. Two parents, keeping their voices low to keep from disturbing the rustic song their little girl plinks out in the adjoining room.
Peter’s words are flinty. He tastes them as they leave his mouth, the tang of things to come. You never liked him, did you?
He feels himself serpentine. Creation’s Rule Number One: Zag when they think you’ll zig. But Maddy’s surprise is honest, flushed out in the open.
Who—Richard? Richard’s a perfectly charming poseur. He’ll have all the fame he wants, soon.
I can’t believe I’m hearing this. The man’s our closest friend.
This isn’t about Richard. You’ve had . . . you’ve been at this how long? And you’ve written half a dozen short pieces that have been played a total of five times.
His hands marimba. He reaches across the table for hers, then stops. For two measures, nothing.
And now I have a commission for something substantial. This is what we’ve been sacrificing for. A chance to break out.
Break out? She laughs a single, sharp high A. Peter: It’s experimental music. The game’s over. Nobody’s listening. They never will.
So what are you saying? You want me to pitch it all?
Her head takes two full swings before he sees she’s shaking it. Her lips form a stillborn smile. Adulthood, Peter.
The provable world holds her hostage, and she can’t cross back over to him. Raising a child has brought her to this brute pragmatism. Any one of her needs make his look like puerile fantasy.
The girl wanders in, her body hunched and furtive. She takes his hands. Dad? Can we make something?
Make what? he’s supposed to say. Instead, he says, Soon, sweetie. She goes back to the living room and pounds on the keys.
From the sink, Maddy says, You could do what every other living composer has to do. Get a university job. And on your summer breaks . . . She turns and holds her hands up, dripping dishwater. Write whatever music floats your boat.
The folk song from the other room breaks off in midphrase. Els cups his ears, then his nose. He breathes into the mask he’s made. Then his fingers push up and over his forehead.
I could, he concedes. But I’d need more pieces on my résumé. More performances. This film score would make me more competitive.
Competitive! You’ve never even tried. How many positions have you applied for, in the last six years?
He feels no need to answer. He has fallen into a place equal parts panic and peace. He searches for a line of Cage: “Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight.” But the line won’t save him.
What are you afraid of, Peter?
Failure. Success. The wisdom of crowds. Knowledge of what his notes must sound like, to everyone who isn’t him.
Calamity from the living room: Sara slamming her patty-cake mitts across four octaves. In one smooth ball-change, Maddy turns back into supermom, gliding into the living room. Hey, hey, hey. What are you doing, lady?
I’m playing something and nobody’s even hearing it!
That’s as good as it gets, Peter Els wants to tell
his daughter. Creation’s Rule Number Four. Little girl, anywhere, without an audience: so long as no one listens, you’re better than safe. You’re free.
There is another world, the world in full. But it’s folded up inside this one.
He couldn’t stay in the cottage. If the Joint Task Force tracked him here, they’d trash the place without hesitation. Kohlmann would be drawn into the middle of his nightmare. She, too, might be held until cleared—an accessory to terror, the hidden half of the Naxkohoman sleeper cell.
For one more night, Els slept in the bed of his unmet benefactors. He kept off the Web and ducked all calls from Klaudia. No more data hostages. The next morning, he scavenged a last breakfast and took stock. He had half a tank of gas, the clothes on his back, and Klaudia’s smartphone, which he was now afraid to touch. In his wallet was the two hundred dollars he’d taken from the cash machine the morning of the raid.
The moment he used his credit card or withdrew more cash from an ATM, they had his coordinates. His every transaction went straight to searchable media—part of an electronic composition too sprawling for any audience to hear.
He got in the Fiat and took the interstate back toward Naxkohoman. On the outskirts of town, he followed the familiar state highway spur until he was twenty miles northeast of his house. And there, at the drive-through of a bank branch he often used, he took out another five hundred dollars, the most the machine allowed. From behind a window of smoky glass, a video camera turned him into a short film with no soundtrack aside from the Fiat’s furtive engine.
The thousands of moving parts of the digital passacaglia, the packets of proliferating information, circulated in a way that he couldn’t hope to understand. His plan was crudeness itself: keep moving, and leave as few footprints as possible. He pocketed the ejected stack of cash, glanced sideways into the dark lens, and rolled the Fiat back onto the road.
Two blocks from the bank, he stopped and gassed. He paid with his card, since his bread-crumb trail already led to this block. Do you need a printed receipt? No, thank you. Then he got back on I-80 west. The shallow meanders of highway focused him. He drove for a long time, emptied of thought, as marked as an endangered creature wearing a tracking tag.
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