They sat in a pub in Holborn the night before Paul’s return home, drinking viscid beer and eating gravy-doused pastries. Paul shared some insights into the Challenger explosion and its relation to the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan. Peter gazed upon his brother’s still-woolly head, now flecked with gray, and he regretted all the years they’d been out of touch. Paul had met his niece only twice. It took death to bring the brothers together.
Why is this, Paul? Peter asked.
Why is what?
Loners should stick together, shouldn’t they?
The idea baffled the giant man. They wouldn’t be loners then, would they?
Across the oaky pub, people at pushed-together tables sang club football songs, swaying to more communal pleasure in three minutes than Peter’s music had created in thirty years. Another sing-along poured from a television above the bar. Paul examined the bottom of his dinner plate for any revealing fragments of text.
Peter said, Remember how angry you got, that I didn’t understand rock and roll?
His brother stopped investigating and frowned. What are you talking about?
You tied me up and forced me to listen.
Did I? Sheesh.
You threatened to wash my ears out with soap.
No, no. That must have been your other brother.
You were right, Paulie. I was deaf.
Paul waved him off. Just as well you never got into that stuff. A lot of those songs use subliminal persuasion techniques.
Serious?
Paul nodded. The whole industry employs a fair amount of thought control, these days.
Paul had never heard a note of Peter’s adult compositions. He put Peter’s vocation on par with their sister Susan’s esoteric vision quests. It would have been fun to sit with Paul and some Boulez or Berio, to learn whatever secret messages he might hear.
What do you listen to now? Peter asked.
Paul set down the dinner plate, shook his head, and shot his little brother a quizzical smile. I’m an adult, Petey. I listen to talk radio.
THAT NIGHT, AS they went to bed in their shared room in a Bloomsbury B and B, Paul asked, So how have you been making ends meet?
I’m not, really, Peter confessed.
Well, you’re all set now.
Peter stretched out on his lumpy twin bed. What do you mean?
Mom was sitting on a lot. Ridiculously overinsured, too. Even split three ways, you’ve got enough to keep on writing any weirdness you want for a good long while.
Peter sat up against the headboard, his hands cupping his ears, listening to the music of chance. His actuary brother lay in a bed three feet away, annotating newsweeklies in tiny, all-caps letters. A tune materialized in Peter’s head from across a great distance. Placing it wasn’t a problem. He could name that tune in one note.
’Kay, Paul announced, when his scribbling hand got sore. Lights out.
Peter lay in the dark, listening to the sounds of a Hammond chord organ as his parents sang. There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s Stream. His voice shocked the muted room.
What was Mom listening to these days?
From Paul’s bed there came a muzzy, puzzled grunt. I don’t have the foggiest. A snort of embarrassment turned into the simplest sob. Then nothing. Then a steady, pitched snore that kept Peter company long into the night.
Insecurity will always be a growth industry. The economy now depends on fear.
The evening had turned icy when he entered Illinois. Now he sat in the motel parking lot with the engine off, sealed in a cocoon of fogged glass. Starving, woozy, and saddle sore, he wiped a portal in the windshield and looked outside. Six feet above the car, against the wall of the faux-folksy chain motel, was a thing that looked like something NASA might send to the outer planets. Security camera. In another life, Els had read that the average city resident appeared on video a few hundred times a day. The fact hadn’t bothered him, then.
Els flipped his collar up around his face, calling even more attention to himself, and stepped into the cold. Cars thrummed from the interstate and frontage road to the south. To the north, towering halogen streetlights illuminated a fairyland of chain stores. Down a car-choked gauntlet of stoplights there spread a copy of the same preassembled strip that seeped northward from Naxkohoman, emblazoned with logos that every toddler in the country learned along with her ABC’s.
A street sign shone in the distance: Town Center Boulevard. When Els lived in this town, there’d been nothing here but the richest topsoil in the world, all the way to the horizon.
The lobby of the motel was a cartoon Southwest: quarry tile, muted earth tones, and above the reception desk, pastel paintings of Pueblos. He’d somehow wormholed through into Arizona. A circus-colored popcorn machine stood between the reception desk and a small breakfast area. The room stank of synthetic butter. A bowl of apples so perfect they might have been props for a musical about Eden sat on the reception desk. On the wall above, a flat-screen newscast split into three simultaneous video feeds with two text crawls and a title box beneath.
A twenty-five-year-old in T-shirt and blue blazer looked up from his computer and smiled. Els braced, but the clerk kept grinning.
Hey, there! What can I do you for tonight?
Els glanced over his shoulder, gauging the distance to the lobby door. Would you have a single free?
You might be in luck, the clerk said. He punched some keys and bugled victory. Smoking or non?
The clerk produced a sheet for Els to fill out. Name, address, phone, contact info, driver’s license, make and model of car, plate number . . .
Els took the form and held it in front of him. I’m paying cash.
No problem! the clerk assured him.
Els stood, pen in hand, regarding the form. The clerk looked up from the computer and swiped the air.
Not to worry. It’s just for the files.
Els filled in the form, inventing freely.
You have a loyalty card? the clerk asked. Triple-A? Anything?
Els blinked.
AARP? Maybe you left your card at home? No problemo. Ten percent off, for the man with the honest face.
Els traded his money for a key card. On the molding behind the desk, another little webcam glared at him with a cyclops eye.
The room was like the afterlife in a French existentialist novel. Bed, chair, bedside table, clock-radio, wall-mount TV. You could sail to the next galaxy in it, or serve out a life sentence in its minimum-security oblivion. Els showered, almost scalding himself. He lay in a towel on the bed and flipped on the television. He found the news channel, cowering between fourth-generation reality shows. The day’s events unfolded in twenty-second clips. The screen filled with shaky footage from Cairo. Tens of thousands of people fanned out across Liberation Square, clapping, chanting, and marching. As in every large production Els had ever worked on, chaos called the tune. The demonstrators, after dwindling to a trickle, were back in force, in numbers beyond anything the nascent Arab Spring had yet seen. The military were changing sides; the protesters sensed triumph, and all because of one infectious melody.
With a quick crosscut, the scene turned into a Bollywood musical. A singer drifted his way across the square, singing an upbeat tune that could have been the theme song to a sitcom about young cosmopolitans enjoying their star-crossed lives. People held up hand-lettered signs. Vendors proffered food while lip-synching along. Old men in knit caps and women in headscarves mouthed the hopeful, defiant words, which scrolled across the bottom of the screen. The anthem had gone viral over the weekend, saving the revolution.
One more government brought down by a catchy hook. Another crosscut, and the song morphed back to reality. The crowd of euphoric protesters probed each other for clues to what would happen next. Els saw why Socrates wanted to ban all those modes.
But for now, the Cairo correspondent said, this revolution seems to have turned around . . . on a song.
Els stood, shut off the television, and
found Kohlmann’s phone. Merely powering it up created more traceable data. He didn’t care. The phone played a little tune and reported eight missed calls and a dozen texts. He dialed.
Where are you? Klaudia said, before he heard a ring. Are you all right?
That had all the earmarks of a trick question. I’m fine. I’m alive.
Have you heard the latest?
Probably not, Els said.
All the IV bags from the Alabama deaths came from the same pharmacy.
Of course, Els said. But let me guess: somehow that story isn’t getting as much coverage as the first.
They still haven’t ruled out malicious tampering at the pharmacy site itself.
Oh, for God’s sake.
The authorities are advising increased vigilance at similar facilities.
Giving the all clear, while asking everyone to stay terrified.
Your man from the FBI dropped by to talk. Somebody here must have alerted them about the class.
Oh, Christ.
He asked if we knew your whereabouts. He wanted to know if you were preaching anything crazy.
What did you tell him?
We told him it doesn’t get crazier than Messiaen. Lisa Keane had some pretty good notes, which she shared with the man. Turns out he had someplace he needed to get to. You’d think we Q-tips terrified young people.
Did they ask about your phone?
Don’t worry. If they do, I’ll tell them you stole it.
I, too, had nothing to say, and I tried to say it as well as I could. What harm could so small a thing as saying nothing do to anyone?
Els stayed on in England after Paul flew home. Expense no longer mattered. He could stay for years now, without any sacrifice.
He saw the poster on a notice board in the back of St. Paul’s. He might have created it by imagining. A concert: prestigious Baroque chamber ensemble playing works by unknown composers at St. Martin-in-the-Fields that Saturday. The music had no interest whatsoever for Els. But in the middle of the photo—a dozen musicians in concert dress—holding a cello, was the mother of Clara Reston.
Then the mother turned into the child. The girl had cut her four-foot fall of hair. She wore a tight perm now, silver-blond. Els rejected the evidence, until the evidence rejected every explanation except Clara.
He went to the concert. The two hours of formulaic music were shot through with fleeting, wild phrases and startling harmonies that wouldn’t occur again until the twentieth century. Els couldn’t decide what was clumsiness and what was neglected genius. It didn’t matter: the night held out a string of misshapen pearls that might have gone forgotten forever.
All he could hear was the Firebird. Els couldn’t take his eyes off the cellist. She stroked her instrument as she had at twenty, her graceful neck nuzzling the fingerboard. Something was different about her, aside from the hair and weight and middle age. It took Els many measures of Sweelinck to name it: she had turned mortal.
She was bolting from the church with her packed instrument when he found her. He stepped in front of her. She stopped, annoyed, and then, with a cry, she wrapped him in a bear hug without letting go of her cello. She stepped back, girlish, flushed, palm to her forehead, taking her own temperature. I can’t believe it. It’s you! Her accent had drifted British. Els wondered if she’d forgotten his name.
She pulled him down into a pew. What are you doing in England? The timbre of her voice said: You found me.
Els felt the strangest impulse to lie. To say he’d sought her out, that she was the reason for this, his first ever trip abroad. But he told her of his mother. She cupped her mouth in pain, although Clara and Carrie Els had never been more than wary rivals.
But how did you know about the concert? she asked, when Els was done.
Pure chance.
Her eyes went wide, as if adulthood had taught her, too, that chance was an order no one could yet see.
They sat in the pew, racing through the last quarter century. Clara had lived three years for each of Els’s one. She’d taken a First at Oxford. A year after their final disastrous phone call, she married a Rhodes Scholar, whom she divorced soon after, when he returned to the States to enter politics. Two years of graduate research at Cambridge; then something happened that she couldn’t talk about, and she took off for the Continent. After a stint in the pit of the Zurich Opera, she bounced around Germany for a decade, playing with various broadcast orchestras. She auditioned for the Baroque ensemble, which had been her family for the last four years. She remarried, a British conductor six years younger than she was, with a growing reputation.
We’re more good friends than . . . man and wife, anymore.
Els thrust his juddering hands into his pockets. No children?
She smiled. When was that going to happen? You?
A daughter, he told her. Very bright. Angry at me. Studying computer science at Stanford.
Not chemistry? Clara fixed her eyes on Els’s shoulders.
No. It’s machines, for her. At least they’re predictable.
He looked away, into the cavernous space emptying of people. Up in the galleries and behind the choir, the wide window lancets were sheets of black. Buzz from the departing audience floated up into the flattened barrel vault and echoed off the clouds, shells, and cupids. Els gazed around the frowsty barn—half meeting house, half wedding cake. And he told her of his life.
Twenty-four years, and almost nothing to say. He’d studied composition, taken on the fierce cravings of the avant-garde. He’d worked a dozen jobs of no significance. He’d married, had a family, and abandoned it for a pile of mostly unplayed creations now almost four feet high.
All your fault, he said, warmed by a strange joy. I would have been so much better off playing chamber music with my chemist colleagues on Saturday nights.
Her bow hand found her neck. I shipwrecked you!
For years, all I wanted was to write music that would twist your gut.
You’re doing pretty good now, she said.
But then . . . I got caught. You know: a certain rhythm, a sequence of intervals. And something would spring open, like the tumblers of a lock . . .
It was, he suddenly felt, as good a life as any. Spin the wheel, roll the twelve-sided dice, push them around, hoping to find the future. Even a three-minute piece could run to more permutations than there were atoms in the universe. And you got three-score years and ten, to find one that was sublime.
He heard himself bungling this, the explanation he thought he’d never get a chance to give. But Clara nodded; she’d always had a good ear. She stared off into the bare, paneled aisles. A laugh tore out of her, and she stood. She took him in one arm and her cello in the other, and hustled them from the church through the admiring thank-yous of the thinning crowd.
They wound up in a subterranean restaurant in St. Martin’s Lane. It was dark, noisy, and indifferent, with candles and a tiny Persian carpet on the table. Clara managed to be both measured and giddy. She ordered an expensive Bordeaux and offered a toast: To unearned forgiveness. I was a monster, Peter. One confused little shit of a girl. Forgive me?
Nothing to forgive, he said, but clinked her glass anyway.
They tried to talk music, but their worlds were separated by three centuries. They had no more common cause now than cannibals and missionaries. It stunned him; he’d misread her love of music from the start. Not revolutionary: recuperative. He’d gotten the whole game wrong. Still, her eyes were soft over the rim of her glass as he spoke of their old discoveries. Her mouth curled up with happy embarrassment.
What are you thinking? he demanded. Where are you?
At my house. Summer before college. Two babies! Listening to those Strauss songs.
He cringed in the dark, but corrected nothing. I remember.
Tell me about your music. I want to hear everything.
There wasn’t a single score or recording on this island he could show her. At best, he could whistle her bits of tune—like sel
ling your car by scratching off a few flecks of paint to show prospective buyers.
Funny, he said. Right before I made this trip? I was just beginning to learn how music really worked.
Clara’s eyes widened. She pressed two fingers against her lips. You have to come home with me! Oh, not . . . There’s something I need to show you.
She wouldn’t tell him. They settled up and left the restaurant like runaways. Els sat on the wrong side of her Ford, driving with no steering wheel. He leaned back in the tunnel of London lights. Soon enough, she pulled up in front of a row of Georgian terraced houses. The inside felt like one of those London pocket museums. Old engravings covered the walls and the heavy furniture sprouted festoons. Even the foyer was a wonder cabinet. She’d stepped from their shared Levittown childhood into the highborn eighteenth century.
She nudged him into the sitting room and sat him in stuffed leather. Then she addressed a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The thing she sought lay on an upper ledge, in a system of labeled cardboard coffers. She had to climb up a trolley ladder to reach it. The sight of her legs from under her concert black, ascending the rungs, threatened to kill him.
At last she waved something aloft, singing the first few notes of Bach’s Et Resurrexit. She descended triumphant, crossed the room, and put the prize in his hands.
The sheets were a letter he’d posted to himself, into a distant future. His adolescent musical penmanship ambushed him. What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere. But somewhere was an awfully big place.
He followed the staves of his first apprentice piece, laughing at all the car wrecks and crazy inspirations. Every choice seemed tender green and bumbling. But how much life the music had! How much hunger to give and excite. All his adult sophistication would never get it back.
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